Weekly Sneakily Peeking

Dad, whose monthly Environmental Stewardship column should be showing up in my inbox any day, asked yesterday about my habit in this blog of giving Donald Trump the middle name "Berzelius." He was puzzled that I would make reference to some Eighteenth Century Swedish chemist.

Well, chemistry is Dad's field. I'd never heard of the guy.

But since it's been a good long while since I've explained where I got the name, I might as well do it again.

Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is a character in Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, a fascist who gets elected President of the United States on a populist platform in 1936. He's part Hitler, part Huey Long, and is eventually overthrown by even more horrible members of his administration who end up declaring an unjustifiable war on Mexico.

A lot of people have not read It Can't Happen Here, so I sometimes give Trump the middle name "Joffrey" instead, after the spoiled rotten boy king in George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Joffrey is a vain, egotistical, cruel, cowardly bully; his name shares the same initial as Trump's middle name; and he's a more contemporary cultural reference than Sinclair Lewis's villain. But, as hard as this may be to believe, there are people who won't get Game of Thrones references, either.

I'm married to one.

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Meanwhile, I'm still in the process of replacing all this blog's embedded links to the old editorialcartoonists.com site, just because dead links are annoying. I came across one post that had now dead links to several North Carolina cartoonists' caricatures of then-Governor Pat McGrory on the AAEC site; it could be a real challenge re-linking them all.

Kavanaughna Hot Tin Roof

I told you this wouldn't be a hip cultural reference. I don't watch all those fresh new TV shows the kids are into, like Murphy Brown, Will & Grace, Hawaii 5-0, Magnum P.I., The Odd Couple, and The Connors.

There once was a time when not knowing the characters, plot and dialogue from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was grounds for forfeiting one's Gay Card. But time swishes on, and it's perfectly acceptable not to be conversant in Technicolorᵀᴹ culture any more. Hell, you probably don't even have to know who Madonna is.

But I've gone ahead and based this week's cartoon on the Tennessee Williams play; and to complicate matters even further, I haven't added labels to identify the people on stage. (I'll give you Jeff Flake as Gooper Pollit, since I got his hair color wrong.)

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P.S.: There are times when I think that maybe it's time to hang up the business of drawing Donald Berzelius Trump with a pig's snout. Then he goes and gratuitously insults the intelligence of a reporter at a press conference before she even has a chance to ask her question, and then riffs on and on mocking a sexual assault victim before a cheering crowd of — yes, I'm going there — deplorables.

And at times like this, I worry that I'm being unfair to swine.