Q Toon: Breaking Bad News to the Boss

The Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ was dealt a setback in its persecution campaign against transgender Americans last week. A federal judge in Oregon rejected in no uncertain terms Health & Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s new policy threatening to block Medicare and Medicaid funding from any hospital that offers gender reassignment therapy to transgender youth who want it.

At least 40 hospital systems across the country had halted gender therapy services after the Department of Health and Human Services issued the "Kennedy Declaration" on December 18, 2025; as a result, even families who had left transgender-hostile red states for transgender-friendly blue ones found that their children were still denied proper care.

“Unserious leaders are unsafe. There is nothing more serious than our leaders’ dedication to the rule of law so that we might maintain the integrity of our constitutional democracy,” [U.S. District Judge Mustafa T.] Kasubhai wrote.

“This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

Ruling in favor of the 21 states* and the District of Columbia who filed suit against the Kennedy Declaration, Judge Kasubhai found that it exceeded the administration’s authority, violated federal rulemaking requirements, and conflicted with existing law, "effectively banning by fiat an entire category of healthcare."

Judge Kasubhai's 49-page decision rejected as "absurd" the HHS contention that reversing the Kennedy Declaration would deny the Secretary his right to express his views on important public issues. 

"Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy — the freedom of speech — when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated. Rather, Plaintiffs' claims challenge Kennedy's authority to unilaterally, categorically, and without any process, supersede professional standards of care regarding gender-affirming care that apply in the Plaintiff states."

A higher Court (ahem) might have five or six more charitable opinions of an unserious leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law. But for now, let's enjoy our successes and liberties while we still have them.

_____________

* The 21 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai'i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.

 

The 1924 Olympics

Today's Graphical History Tour celebrates the Olympic Spirit by revisiting the Paris Olympics of July, 1924, the games best remembered as the setting for Chariots of Fire.

Basí (?), official program of 1924 Olympics

I haven't been able to identify the artist of the official program, so I'm doing my best to read the signature in the lower right corner. I also came up short in my hunt for work by the sports cartoonists of U.S. newspapers, which I had hoped to include today. 

But I did learn that competitions in the VIIIème Olympiade included art.  Luxembourg painter Jean Jacoby won a gold medal for his triptych Étude de Sport depicting young men competing in soccer, hurdles, and rugby. I've seen at least two of the paintings on line, but not how the three were meant to be displayed together.

There were also competitions in sculpture (Greek sculptor Konstantinos Dimitriadis won the gold for "Discobole Finlandais"), literature (France's Géo-Charles, a.k.a. Charles Louis Proper Guyot, won gold for his poem "Jeux Olympiques"), architecture, and music. The Olympic judges decided that none of the contestants merited medals for music, and awarded only silver and bronze medals for architecture.

"Mademoiselle Athène" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, August 17, 1924. Source: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ 

Arthur Johnson's cartoon on the cover of Kladderadatsch is certainly a parody of the Olympiade program cover. Marianne, the traditional characterization of France, is cast as the Greek goddess Athena, with the American financier J.P. Morgan, widely resented in Germany, directing her aim.

Suffice it to say that the Germans and the French had some serious issues, and we'll get back to them again some other time. 

Over here in the States, the Paris Olympics were a pleasant diversion, even without wall-to-wall TV coverage.

"Good News" by Milton R. Halladay in Providence Journal, July, 1924

American medalists at the games included Johnny Weismuller (the future Tarzan actor), who won three gold medals in swimming and a bronze in water polo; and long jumper William DeHart Hubbard, the first Black American to win an Olympic gold medal for an individual event. Hubbard was not allowed to compete in the 100 meter dash and high hurdles competitions in spite of qualifying for them; those events were restricted to whites only.

"The Victor" by O.P. Williams for Star Company, ca. July 25, 1924

The U.S. led the medals count, taking home 94 in all, largely in field events.

Another such track and field winner was Harold Osborn, whose high jump stood as the Olympic record for twelve years.

"Aux Jeux Olympiques" in Le Petit Journal Illustré, July 20, 1924. Source: Bibliothèque National de Paris

Text: "Le Stade de Columbes vient d'enregistrer d'admirables performaces. Parmi les plus sensationnelles, on compte le record olympique du saut en hauteur qui a été battu de 4 centimètres par l'Americain Osborn. Cet athléte, en effet, franchit 1 mètre 98 dans un style impeccable. Cependant, il ne faut pas dédaigner le bel effort de notre représentant, le Francais Lewden. Bien qu'handicapé par sa petite taille, il parvint à franchir 1 mètre 95."

"Columbes Stadium has just recorded some admirable performances. Among the most sensational, we can count the Olympic record for the high jump which was beaten by 4 centimeters by the American Osborn. This athlete, in fact, cleared 1.98 meters [6'6"] in impeccable style. However, we must not disdain the fine effort of our representative, the Frenchman [Pierre] Lewden. Although handicapped by his small size, he managed to clear 1.95 meters."

Osborn also set a record in the 1924 Decathlon, with a score of 7,710.775 points earning him the title of "World's Greatest Athlete." The Petit Journal cover illustration doesn't look much like him; he had a big shock of sandy blond hair in a photograph taken at the games (and I assume he would have removed his glasses for the jump). The artist may have drawn the black-haired Lewden, who won the bronze, instead.

"Once Again" by Douglas Rodger in San Francisco Bulletin, August 18, 1924

18-year-old tennis phenom Helen Wills won Olympic gold in women's singles (over French player Julie Vlasto) without once losing a set along the way. With her coach Hazel Wightman, she also took gold in women's doubles (over British players Phyllis Covell and Kitty McKane).

Tennis was dropped as an Olympic sport in the 1928 Amsterdam games, not to return as a medal sport until the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea. 

Douglas Rodger drew the above cartoon after Wills, a California native, won the U.S. Open Women's Tournament on August 16. She won 31 grand slam titles during her career, including 19 singles titles and a 180-match winning streak from 1927 to 1933, and remains among the greatest in her sport.

"The Olympiad" by A.G. Racey in Montreal Star, July 30, 1924

The games did not go off without controversy. The "Puliti Affair" centered on unsportsmanlike conduct by the Italian fencing team and provoked this cartoon by Arthur G. Racey. Mud drips from the laurel branch with the words "unsportsmanlike action" "vulgarity" "disorder" "jealousy" and "abuse." The cut line reads: "Why sacrifice the Olympic Games instead of regulating, or suppressing, the mud-throwing canaille who do not know what sportsmanship is?"

The namesake of the affair was the Italian fencer Oreste Puliti. The other fencers on the Italian team were accused of intentionally losing to him in order to inflate his score. Accounts differ: either Puliti physically attacked the Hungarian judge, György Kovács, who ruled that Puliti was disqualified from the finals match, or he merely threatened the judge. The rest of the Italian team withdrew in protest, singing the fascist Italian anthem as they left.

According to olympics.com, 

Two days later, when he saw Kovács again, Puliti punched him in the face and a formal duel was proposed. The two combatants met again four months later at Nagykanizsa in southwestern Hungary, near the current Serbian border. The duel lasted for an hour, at which time the two were stopped by spectators who were concerned about the many wounds the two had received. Puliti and Kovács then shook hands and honor was restored.

The gold in saber ultimately went to Hungarian Sándor Pósta; Hungarian fencers would dominate that Olympic category for decades to come. Roger Ducret of France took silver, and another Hungarian, János Garay (a Jew who would perish in a Nazi death camp), earned bronze. 

Rea C. Irvin, Life magazine cover, July 10, 1924

The 1924 Olympics closed on July 27, with ceremonies featuring the bugle corps of the French Republican Guard, and the awarding of all the medals won — including those from the Winter Games at Chamonix earlier in the year. 

"Less than half the nations which received awards for the performances of their athletes were personally represented," according to the reporter for the Washington Evening Star. "The ranks of the athletes and officials of all nations had been rapidly depleted last week, and it was a small band of survivors that marched into the stadium behind the flags of the victorious nations, most of which were borne, in the absence of their nationals, by French marines."

Q Toon: A Tucker Born Every Minute

I developed this week's cartoon in response to Tucker Carlson's fawning interview with Hungarian fascist homophobe President Orbán. Surely my "Any Day Now" scenario in which Mr. Carlson would be equally infatuated with the family, faith, and heritage clan's conquest of Afghanistan is utterly ridiculous.

Or maybe not so much.

It turns out that Carlson is already warming up to the Taliban proud boys' club in Afghanistan.

“Thanks to American-imposed gender quotas, dozens of women ultimately were installed as representatives in Afghan’s parliament,” Carlson complains. “How did that work? Well, the whole thing was a sham, as always.”

“It caused revolts, but officials kept doing it, they kept pushing radical gender politics anyway, because they could, because they were in charge of these Stone Age people they were going to educate. This is the face of the late American empire, gender studies seminars at gunpoint,” he claim[s]. ...

“It turns out that the people of Afghanistan don’t actually want gender studies symposia. They didn’t actually buy the idea that men can become pregnant. They thought that was ridiculous,” he continues. ...

He claims the Taliban rejects that because “They don’t hate their own masculinity. They don’t think it’s toxic, they like the patriarchy, some of their women like it too, so now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.”

Once upon a time, it was conservatives who were all in favor of cultural imperialism — onward Christian soldiers and all that —; but when it comes to equal rights for women and the LGBTQ+, the right-wingers have suddenly discovered the virtues of medievalism and the divine right of the biggest psychopath in the land. If the local warlords want to imprison women in their homes and force them to wear burlap tents, if they believe in crushing innocent LGBTQ+ people under stone walls, well, you just have to respect local customs.

And sigh that those were the days.

Q Toon: Hungary and Thirst for Rightwingness

This is one of those weeks when I wish I were one of those cartoonists who didn't care whether the subject of my cartoon bore the slightest resemblance to my caricature of them.

 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is an ultra-right-wing politician who came to power in 2010 whipping up fear and anger against Muslim refugees fleeing civil wars in Syria, Sudan, Libya and Afghanistan. His administration has been marked by an assault on press freedoms and dissent, and by unchecked kleptocracy.

Part and parcel of this right-wing package has been enforcement of a conservative brand of Christian "traditional values," primarily by attacking LGBTQ+ rights in every aspect of Hungarian life. The latest move has been a law prohibiting any positive mention of LGBTQ+ orientation or persons in the nation's education system.

Faced with outrage from Western members of the European Union, Orbán has proposed a national referendum to prove that his criminalization of LGBTQ+ discussion in schools enjoys popular support. Arriving at a meeting of his fellow EU leaders last month, Orbán claimed that there was nothing at all antigay about his antigay law.

He even portrayed himself as an LGBTQ+ rights hero:

"I am a fighter for their rights. I am a freedom fighter in the communist regime. Homosexuality was punished and I fought for their freedom and their rights. So I am defending the rights of the homosexual guys, but this law is not about that."

His anticommunist activities in 1989 notwithstanding, in the last two years, his agenda to defend the rights of the homosexual guys has involved rescinding recognition of transgender persons, and censoring LGBTQ+-positive content from television and film.

Orbán last appeared in this blog last December, when Hungarian representative to the European Union Parliament, József Szájer, a founder of Orbán's Fidesz Party, was caught at a gay sex party in Brussels that had too many participants according to Belgian COVID-19 restrictions then in effect. Orbán quickly accepted Szájer's resignation, telling the Hungarian press that "What our fellow member József Szájer has done does not fit into the values of our political community."

I doubt that Orbán's concern for the values of his political community was that there had been too many homosexual guys in that apartment.

Q Toon: The Hungary Games

You may have seen news reports about József Szájer, 59, Hungary's representative to the European Union Parliament in Brussels, getting himself arrested after police broke up a 25-man sex party above a gay bar. It wasn't the orgy per se that broke the law; the problem was that the number of men gathered exceeded COVID-19 restrictions.

I have no idea how many guys one is allowed to have at an orgy in Brussels. I suppose that's one of the things one is expected to check before traveling abroad.

The gay sex stuff is somewhat more at issue for Szájer back home in Budapest, however. Szajer is one of the founders of the ruling Fidesz Party, originally a liberal anti-communist organization, but which has veered hard to the right under the leadership of Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister since 2010. Criminalization of homosexuality is prominent among Orbán's policies. 

Szájer has resigned from the EU Parliament and from Fidesz. He doesn't deny being at the orgy, but does say that the ecstasy police found on him didn't belong to him. Expect him to revise and extend his remarks in order to join a long line of disgraced preachers and politicians from Ted Haggard to Andrew Gillum blaming drugs for their walk on the wild side.

Orbán wasted no time accepting Szájer's resignation, telling Magyar Nemzet, "What our fellow member József Szájer has done does not fit into the values of our political community. We will not forget and refuse his thirty years of work, but his actions are unacceptable and indefensible."

In addition to homophobia, Orbán has served up a right-wing stew of anti-immigrant legislation, obsessing over racial purity, outlawing homeless persons, stifling the press, and stacking the courts with compliant lackeys. Some of this should sound familiar to you even if you don't follow Hungarian politics.

Orbán's election in 2010 heralded a rising tide of fascism around the globe: Duda in Poland, Duterte in the Philippines, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Trump in the U.S., and the chronic threat of Le Penisme in France.

(Le Penisme refers to the right-wing politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen. Don't be a dick.)

And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

Sovietback Saturday puts aside the works of dead cartoonists this week to dredge up my own stuff from the momentous year 1989. That fall, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded in ousting three opponents of his glasnost and perestroika policies from the politburo, and even authorized a new degree of freedom for the state-run press.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., October 19, 1989

All the same, eyebrows were raised around the world when the Soviet news agency TASS reported, in all seriousness, that a three-eyed space alien clad in silver overalls and bronze boots landed in Voronezh and shot a 16-year-old boy with a device that made him disappear for a few minutes. Nor was it the only such story in Soviet media; Komsomolskaya Pravda reported finding a landing field for flying saucers near Perm, and printed a psychic interview with an extraterrestrial from the red star of the constellation of Libra.

Erich Honecker, head of state of East Germany since 1971, had been the communist official in charge of building the Berlin Wall in 1961. As protests in East Germany mounted and refugees from his regime found an escape route through Hungary and Czechoslovakia around his fortified East-West German border, Gorbachev rejected Honecker's pleas for Soviet help crushing dissidents. The 77-year-old Honecker was forced to resign on October 18.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., October 26, 1989

The George H.W. Bush administration faced challenges in its own hemisphere: an attempted coup with U.S. backing in Panama failed to overthrow Manuel Noriega, who had voided the results of a fraud-riddled presidential elections in May rather than admit that his candidate had lost.

Through his rise from the Panamanian army, and head of intelligence, to becoming the country's military leader, Noriega had been on the CIA payroll since 1971. He helped fund the right-wing Contras in their civil war against the Nicaraguan government; U.S. intelligence agencies were well aware that drug trafficking was key to Noriega's financial assistance. When U.S. funding of the Contras came to an end after Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, the Contra insurgency came to an end and so did Noriega's usefulness to the CIA. He was suspected, furthermore, of passing intelligence on to the communist government of Cuba, the Medellin drug cartel, and anyone else who greased his palms.

in UW-M Post, November 9, 1989

The seas would prove no calmer —literally — during the U.S.-U.S.S.R. cruise summit in December.

Earlier posts have dealt with on the Polish situation, but I've given short shrift to what was going on in Hungary, the first country to go communist after World War I and the first country to be invaded by Russia after World War II. Fast forward to 1989, and Hungarian acting President Matyas Szuros publicly described the 1956 uprising as a "national independence movement" and declared that his nation was no longer a "People's Republic," which would certainly have gotten him hauled off to Moscow in chains 33 years earlier. Crowds on the streets jeered at Russian soldiers to go home, yet cheered Moscow's new leader with shouts of "Gorby! Gorby!"

in UW-M Post,  November 14, 1989

Then, in late October, Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Edvard Schevardnadze announced the eventual dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Brezhnev doctrine — the U.S.S.R. policy that "when forces hostile to socialism seek to reverse the development of any socialist country whatsoever," the Soviet military would invade and impose the Kremlin's will. In the words of Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, "You know the Frank Sinatra song My Way? Hungary and Poland are doing it their way. We now have the Sinatra doctrine."

And on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, November 16, 1989

I grew up in a world that had the freedom-loving democratic countries of Anglo America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand on the one side; and the rigid authoritarian communist countries on the other; and a whole lot of other countries stuck in a tug-of-war between them. There was an eternal state of Cold War, a precarious balancing act which could tumble into instant global annihilation at the slightest misstep anywhere.

As of November 9, 1989, all that changed. We saw a new age of peace and cooperation forged from the remnants of the Iron Curtain. There was talk of the "end of history," whatever that meant. If people in Russia and Eastern Europe had the power to triumph over their oppressive governments, perhaps people everywhere could find that same power.

in UW-M Post, November 30, 1989

P.S.: Speaking of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tienanmen, and all that, there's a 1991 cartoon of mine on page 368 of this rather formidable tome hot off the presses at Harper Collins in London:

...and in the soon-to-be published German translation from Random House GmbH. (It has been in this blog before, and no doubt will show up again two years hence.)

When Liberal Democracy Was Ascendant

With the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11 this past week, we now have young men and women old enough to serve in the military — and to vote — who have never known a time when the U.S. was not at war. Sejmback Saturday therefore serves this reminder of a September just thirty years ago when it seemed that mankind might be making progress toward a kinder and gentler world.

in UWM Post, September 5, 1989

Eight years of repression against the Solidarność movement in Poland had not only failed to weaken it, but weakened the communist government of Wojciech Jaruzelski instead. Even Solidarność leaders were surprised by their successes in the elections in August, 1989, winning all but one of the Senate seats they were allowed to run for, and all of the contested seats in the Sejm.

Meanwhile, eight years of Reaganomics in the U.S. had left George H.W. Bush with an enormous budget deficit.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 7, 1989

China's quashing of the Tienanmen Square uprising in June notwithstanding, the stunning success of Solidarność quickly inspired independence movements in Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Hungary and East Germany.

This is the cartoon I mentioned a couple weeks ago that didn't get returned to me; so this is as well as I'm able to clean up the image from the Ranger's on-line archive. You can't see it from the above, but I had drawn Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev speaking through gritted teeth; my recollection is that you couldn't tell that from the printed copy, either.

in UWM Post, September 19, 1989

So to make up for that poor copy, here's a colorization of what was originally just a black and white cartoon, aping Soviet imagery to depict the sudden exodus of East Germans. Hungary had opened its border with Austria, whereupon several thousand East German refugees were able to escape to West Germany in a round-about route through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. In Berlin, there were signs that East German border patrols were no longer shooting to kill persons who tried to cross No Man's Land.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 14, 1989

Pressure for reform was not limited to the communist bloc. South African police initially responded to anti-apartheid protests that year with billy clubs, tear gas, and purple-dye water cannons; perhaps as many as 60 protesters were killed. In August, a new President took the reins from P.W. Botha, who had suffered a mild stroke in January. Claiming a mandate for reform in September's elections, F.W. de Klerk appeared to signal that his approach to dissent might be modeled after Gorbachev's rather than Deng Xiaoping's.

in UWM Post, September 21, 1989

Hungary for More

Pittsburg (sic) Press, March 25, 1919

As The Great War drew to a close, citizen revolts in the component parts of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire combined with Entente offensives to overthrow Emperor Karl Hapsburg and shatter the empire into pieces. In Hungary, the Aster Revolution led by Miháli Károlyi brought about the Hungarian People's Republic, whose leaders expected his country to include territories of the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary. When, on March 20, 1919, the Entente powers notified the them that Hungary would lose significant territories to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and what would later become Yugoslavia, the Hungarian Prime Minister was forced to resign.

"Why Wait for the Millennium?" by Jay "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, March 29, 1919

Károlyi called on the Social Democrats to form a new government, unaware that they had secretly entered into a coalition with the "Party of Communists from Hungary" (Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja). On March 21, the new government declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Before long, the Communists purged the Social Democrats from leadership positions; the communist government's de facto leader, Commissar of Foreign Affairs Béla Kun, coordinated policy directly with Vladimir Lenin.

"Turning the Dog Loose" by Cyrus Hungerford in Pittsburgh (sic) Sun, March, 1919

The establishment of a second communist government was cause for alarm in the U.S. and its European allies, but Cy Hungerford's cartoon misses the mark. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was closely allied with Soviet Russia, not with the German government, and hoped for its eastern neighbor to back Hungary's territorial aspirations. Issuing calls for workers of the world to unite against the powers that be, Béla Kun could hardly have cared less about German reparations one way or the other.

"German Measles (Bolshevism)" by John H. Cassel in New York Evening World, March 28, 1919

New York World cartoonist John Cassel blamed the Hungarian situation on the Germans...

"Menetekel beim Länderschmaus" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatch, Berlin, April 6, 1919

Meanwhile, in Germany, cartoonist Arthur Johnson blamed it on the Entente powers. In a cartoon mixing biblical references, the handwriting on the wall charges that "Hungary was driven to Bolshevism," while the caption quotes from Psalm 2:10: "So nehmet nun Verstand an, ihr Könige, und lasset euch warnen, ihr Richter der Erde!" (SCH1951; "Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth!" NRSV)

"Das Selbstbestimmungerecht der Völker" by Eduard Thöny in Simplicissimus, April 8, 1919

Bolshevik-inspired revolts rocking Berlin and Munich could only have been encouraged by the new government in Budapest, but establishment voices there were just as alarmed as those of the Entente. I've been trying to figure out whom Eduard Thöny caricatured in the above cartoon, but without success. It doesn't resemble any member of the Kun government; and certainly not Karl Hapsburg, who had been deposed as both Emperor and King. If the guy in the cartoon is supposed to represent 19th-Century Hungarian rebel leader Prince Francis II Rákócsy, he doesn't look much like the guy on the 500 forint bill.

"Dassent Spank Me Now!" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 28, 1919

"How Things Are Going" by Percy H. "Poy" Fearon in London Evening News, March, 1919

With the Paris Peace Accords still being hammered out and the League of Nations agreed to only in theory, the Hungarian Soviets' stated intention of reclaiming land the Entente powers had given to Hungary's neighbors, a resumption of war loomed as a likely possibility.

"The Wood-Shed-Switch Cure" by William Hanny in St. Joseph (MO) News-Press, April 1, 1919

"In the Manger" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, March, 1919

The saying "a dog in the manger" isn't as common these days as it was a century ago; referring to the fable about the dog hoarding the other animals' manger out of spite even though he had no use for the hay himself. I do like the drawing of the horse.

"The Red Peril" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1919

As I mentioned last week, there were a lot of cartoons like John McCutcheon's here. The Red Peril could be a spider, a snake, a back-alley cutthroat, smoke, shadow, or whatever other nightmarish image struck the cartoonist's fancy. I only see most of these cartoons in grayscale images, so I have to wonder whether McCutcheon convinced the Chicago Tribune publisher to run this cartoon in red.

"The Poison Gas Attack" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, March, 1919

But not everybody was alarmed by the Bolshevik takeover of Hungary. Ryan Walker, cartoonist for the socialist New York Call, was delighted.

"Henry Dubb No Longer" by Ryan Walker in New York Call, March 25, 1919

No Peeking

In lieu of This Week's Sneak Peek, I offer a cartoon I drew in September of 1989. The speaker in the cartoon is South African Prime Minister F. W. deKlerk, making an announcement after months of police beatings of anti-apartheid demonstrators.

As the world celebrates the life of Nelson Mandela, it's striking to read educators and others remarking that students and young adults today do not know anything about him. And yet, trying to think back for an analogous case for my generation, I suppose some of my high school classmates had heard of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, but very few would have been able to identify Imre Nagy.

I went to college during a time when there were loud calls for colleges and university to divest from South Africa over its apartheid policies -- a hot-button issue at the time. The Soweto riots made headlines around the world, as did the death in police custody of Stephen Biko. America joined a wave of nations imposing sanctions against South Africa in 1986 only after the U.S. Congress overrode Ronald Reagan's veto.

The first cartoon I ever drew about South Africa was inspired by the film "Last Grave at Dimbaza" in 1975 or so. I no longer have the cartoon, which showed an armed white South African in pith helmet and safari gear using a dug grave as a warfare trench. I later discovered that Milwaukee Journal cartoonist Bill Sanders had drawn pretty much the exact same cartoon a few months earlier.

In spite of that sketchbook caricature of Nelson Mandela that I posted the other day -- drawn somewhere around the time that he was released from prison after 27 years -- I don't appear to have drawn him in any cartoons for publication at the time.