Q Toon: Sic Transit Veritas

I figured it was time to put out a back-to-school cartoon this week.

With the new semester, the ham-fisted drive to impose the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime's fascist agenda on academia will certainly resume. Some of our most respected universities, fearful of losing government research grants and tuition assistance, have already bent the knee to the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini, whose demands will only increase and get worse.

Has your board or regents shuttered your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness office? Good. Now scuttle your environmental studies program, drop your epidemiology research, and cancel your unAmerican foreign language courses. Clear your history and literature curricula with the Ministry of Truth Social, and while you're at it, His Excellency Donald The First Of His Name would appreciate an honorary degree. One or two of those Distinguished Chair Things in his name would be nice, too. Gilded, naturally.

I suspect, however, that college students being young and idealistic will not knuckle under to Trump's brand of authoritarianism as readily as their elders. Last year's protests against genocide of Palestinians are likely to resume — or perhaps the spark will be ICE abduction of the cafeteria ladies, or the arrest of a tenured professor who had the temerity to suggest that slavery was racist, or a transgender athlete being whisked off to reeducation camp.

My fear is that sooner or later, as red-state National Guard troops are called in to restore rightthink and order, some campus will witness a repeat of Kent State.

I'm referring, my matriculating friends, not to the university, but to a tragedy your professors may be too young to remember. Look it up before your library and the internet get expurgated: it can happen here.

Jagged Little April

Today's Graphical History Tour continues rummaging through the dusty files of cartoons from my salad, appetizer, and cheese course days.

Last week's GHT left off with a cartoon marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so let's start off with this cartoon marking the twentieth.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 20, 1995

My cartoon was an homage to the famous one by David Levine of LBJ showing off his appendicitis scar. I was  commenting that we were still arguing over what the lessons of Vietnam were. Did we need to stop getting involved in domestic disputes overseas? Or was the problem that we failed to commit to overwhelming force?

It was a debate the U.S. was having in the absence of an International Communist Threat. The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald the End of History, whatever that meant; yet our supposed Peace Dividend had already been partly spent in the the former Yugoslavia and in Haiti.

One of my highly respected colleagues cast some shade last week on editorial cartoons that pay homage to classic editorial cartoons. I'm as guilty of that as anyone (I'll note that he and I have both ripped off Bill Mauldin's Weeping Lincoln cartoon). I guess if there is a rule about such things, it is to avoid copying someone else's idea that is already an overexposed meme on the internets.

I say that as someone who once cartooned Bill Clinton as a bunch of dancing screensaver babies.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 13, 1995

Sticking with April of 1995 for a moment but turning to a local issue: Milwaukee Aldermen Dan Schramm and Tom Nardelli objected to the Common Council settling a lawsuit by the family of Konerak Sinthasomphone to the tune of $850,000. Sinthasomphone was the 14-year-old Laotian-American boy returned to Jeffrey Dahmer's clutches by police officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak on May 27, 1991.

Schramm blamed Dahmer's victim for having put himself in danger, and Nardelli cast aspersions on his parents. We'll never know why Konerak didn't keep his distance from the man still on parole for drugging and sexually assaulting Konerak’s older brother; we do know why Gabrish and Balcerzak chose to believe the white serial killer rather than the Asian boy with a hole drilled through his skull or the Black women who called the police for help.

Can't we talk about something more pleasant?

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 8, 2005

Jumping ahead to April of 2005, here's another local issue cartoon. Sort of. 

Before getting into the topic of the cartoon, I just want to point out that I spent a lot of time and effort drawing in black around all that verbiage on the chalkboard. The verbiage isn't white-out, or white ink, or gesso, it's all absence of black ink. Oh, sure, I could have simply filled the space with black in Photoshop and superimposed the repeated sentence in Comic Sans. But we here at Bergetoons honor our commitment to bring you only the highest quality, hand-crafted cartoonistry.

I drew this cartoon before our present government made white supremacy official policy and DEI a dirty word. The editorial page of the Business Journal (at least twenty years ago), like Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton, was quite in favor of promoting diversity on corporate boards, and this character appeared in several of my cartoons accompanying those editorials. 

Here's an earlier cartoon featuring the the fictional board of Gibson, Gibsen, Ibsen and Gibbs:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 13, 2003

No Photoshop cut-and-paste in that cartoon, either.

Moving on to April, 2015:

for Q Syndicate, April, 2015

About all that stuff I said about handcrafted artisanal cartoonistry and being above filling drawings in Photoshop, um, just forget that.

Once I decided that I needed to start sending out cartoons in living color, there was no way I was going to draw two versions of every cartoon: one in color and one in grayscale. Nope, nuh-uh! All the colorizing for one and halftones in the other is done in Photoshop to one black-and-white scan of one drawing.

This cartoon followed an early morning incident in March in which an unidentified man dressed in a construction suit tried to enter the White House grounds through the gate at Pennsylvania Avenue, but was stopped by Uniformed Division officers and taken into custody. Also that April, a man who had jumped the north fence onto the White House lawn in July pleaded guilty to trespassing on restricted grounds.

More seriously, the previous September, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez had made it all the way into the White House through the North Portico doors, where he overpowered a Secret Service officer. He ran through most of the main floor before getting tackled by a counter-assault agent. He was later sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

That’s it for another Graphical History Tour. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position, and remain seated until history comes to a complete stop.

Q Toon: DEI ex Mockery

I told my editors I was looking for a cartoon topic this week that wouldn't be about the GOP.

But if you've been paying any attention to the news over the past couple of years, you know which party has decided that DEI — i.e., Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — is academia's latest threat to their homogenous worldview. Inspired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas's Greg Abbott, it's Republicans who can't abide diversity, detest equity, and loathe inclusion.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox even called them "bordering on evil."

Last year, Republicans in Madison in my home state held up funding for the University of Wisconsin until the school knuckled under to their demands to stifle DEI: 

Shortly after the Universities of Wisconsin accepted a GOP offer to approve UW raises and building projects in exchange for new limits on campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos [R-Burlington] had a message. The move, he said, was just a first step in the GOP’s efforts to eliminate DEI. ...

“We finally have turned the corner and gotten real reforms enacted,” Vos said. “Republicans know this is just the first step in what will be our continuing efforts to eliminate these cancerous DEI practices on UW campuses.”

Instead, University regents had to promise to raise funds to establish a new campus leadership position to promote "conservative political thought."

Elsewhere, Republicans this year have proposed 50 bills in 20 states to limit or eliminate DEI programs at agencies that receive state funding. 

This is the second year Republican-led state governments have targeted DEI. This year’s bills, as well as executive orders and internal agency directives, again focus heavily on higher education. But the legislation also would limit DEI in K-12 schools, state government, contracting and pension investments. Some bills would bar financial institutions from discriminating against those who refuse to participate in DEI programs.

When Republicans in Congress opened a hearing titled "Divisive, Excessive, Ineffective: The Real Impact of DEI on College Campuses," Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) countered, "DEI offices exist to address student needs, to give strategic support to faculty [and] institutional leaders, to identify hurdles and assist faculty and staff in serving, educating and meeting the needs of increasingly diverse populations, many of whom are first-generation college students."

That hearing was chaired by Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), who called DEI "a cancer that resides in the hearts of American academic institutions."

Bonamici questioned why Republicans felt a hearing on DEI was more important than forums on pressing topics like campus hunger or students’ civil rights. She also criticized as offensive Owens’s decision to compare DEI to cancer—though Owens was quick to point out that he, in fact, had survived prostate cancer.

Robin Vos, as far as I know, does not have that excuse. He just adheres to the same talking points memo.