Saturday Selfies

It's time once again for the Graphical History Tour  to venture down into the deep recesses of your friendly tour guide's basement to rummage through some April cartoons decades old.

Starting with—

1986

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., April 28, 1986

Just five years after a mentally deranged person attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Congress, with the full support of that assassination target, decided it was time to relax gun controls. 

The so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to redefine "gun dealer," excluding those making occasional sales or repairs, and legalized interstate sales of firearms provided that seller and buyer meet in person.

Another provision of the Act prohibited "the establishment of any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions."

On the other hand, it did add penalties for the use of armor-piercing bullets during the commission of a crime involving illegal drugs.

1996

Gun rights in this country depend to some extent on one's socio-economic status.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 18, 1996

Nowadays, the Citizen's Militia types even get presidential pardons and Justice Department pressure on judges to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions for trying to overthrow the U.S. government.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 22, 1996

Speaking of eternal constants, consider the plight of poor, cursed Lebanon. Once considered the Paris of the Middle East, capital Beirut was ripped apart by a sectarian religious war in the 1970's and pummeling by its neighbor to the south, Israel.

The main difference between then and now is that Shimon Peres appeared to have genuine regret at the death and destruction, whereas the Netanyahu government seems to revel in it. Targeting ambulances, schools, journalists, and hospitals all seems entirely intentional now.

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where this cartoon was printed, has long had Islamic and Jewish student groups very vocal about matters involving Israel, Palestine, and their neighbors. I might have expected some blowback over this cartoon, but the next issue's letter to the editor from the Israel Activist Center defending Israel's actions made no mention of my cartoon. 

Nor did the counter-response from the President of the Collective Union of Arab Students a week later. And with that, the school year ended, and any further salvos in the conversation went up on some long forgotten BBS.

2006

for Q Syndicate, April, 2006

Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, and Tony Gonzales most certainly did not invent sex scandals. One such scandal, quickly forgotten among the parade, involved sexting of underage girls by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle.

55-year-old Doyle, believing he was sexting with a girl of 14, was caught in an on-line sting by the Polk County, Florida, Sheriffs Department. Charged with sending the fictitious girl sexually explicit photos and movie clips, Doyle had even given her his name, that he worked for DHS, and his office and governmental cell phone numbers.

This embarrassment came on top of the department's woefully inadequate response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and the revelation that someone at DHS had disposed of an envelope of suspicious white powder out an office window. (There had been a few incidents of envelopes being mailed to news anchors and Democratic politicians made to appear as though they contained a toxic chemical.)

Going for a Three Stooges reference here was complicated by the fact that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff bore no resemblance to Larry, Moe, or Curly. I do think that I got his caricature down in this, the one and only time I ever put him (or Brian Doyle, for that matter) in a cartoon.

2016

for Q Syndicate, April, 2016

I haven't set a cartoon in a diner in a long time, which is too bad. I like the setting, with its possibilities for slightly altering the point of view. 

In the years before I started colorizing my cartoons, the second or third panel would have probably shown this couple in silhouette. It keeps the cartoon from being too static, since the characters aren't actually moving around doing things.

The situation also allows for this sort of twist ending in a way that, say, talking heads on Fox Noise might not.

Toon: Circle Joke

If you spend a lot of time watching cable TV news, first of all, do yourself a favor and stop; and second of all, you will have heard a variety of pundits, academics, and people of the mistaken belief that they should run for president someday, who are weighing in on Why Kamala Harris Lost The Election.

One of the leading theories is that President Joe Biden and those closest to him handicapped her by running for reelection in spite of mounting evidence that his mental acuity had begun to decline. Many of us, myself included, had voted for him in 2020 on the presumption that at 77, he planned to serve one term to repair the damage left behind by The Corrupt Trump administration, then hand leadership of the party over to someone younger.

Instead, he decided to run for reelection, as he put it, "to finish the job."

Which is ridiculous.

The presidency is not a job you're supposed to "finish." Each president does what he or (someday) she can, and turns it over to the next person. The job is never finished until the Republic is.

Donald Berzelius Trump, I fear, may "finish the job."

Anyway, my worry back when Biden announced his 2024 candidacy was that he didn't have confidence that Vice President Kamala Harris was up to taking over the job from him. Or that a Democratic Party primary battle would leave its victor hobbled by constituencies feeling that they were denied their due, or ignored, or unwelcome. Or, in the absence of a primary battle, ditto.

As things have turned out, plenty of Democratic constituencies are complaining about being denied their due, ignored, or unwelcome anyway. The Left complains that Harris tacked to the center instead of wholeheartedly campaigning on their agenda. The Centrists complain that Harris embraced "wokism" and transgender rights and people who say "Latinx."

I saw a scholar on The Daily Show this week promoting his election post-mortem book, arguing to Jon Stewart that Democrats were doomed by their embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). He wasn't saying that Democrats should join Republicans in promoting Uniformity, Inequity, and Exclusion; just that they should call DEI something else — as if the right-wing propaganda machine wouldn't devote itself to turning the new name into a dirty word.

Now, I suppose that had Harris listened to the Palestinian rights crowd and condemned Netanyahu's genocidal war in Gaza, it might have been enough to get her over the finish line in Michigan. But it wouldn't have made the difference in any of the other "blue wall" swing states. Vowing to send undocumented alien drug dealers to Guantanamo might have gained her Arizona.

On the other hand, those moves might have helped about as much as affecting a southern drawl helped her in Georgia and North Carolina.

Something Old, Something New

Today's Graphical History Tour returns to some of my own cartoons celebrating their decennaries this month, but I'm going to shake things up a bit this time and not take them in chronological order.

I'll start with this cartoon drawn for one of the more liberal of the student newspapers at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.*

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 3, 1994

UWM has long had two vocal student groups advocating against each other for Palestine and Israel. The pro-Palestine group posted an inflamatory poster in the student union atrium in response to the Cave of the Patriarch's Massacre, in which American-Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinians worshiping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125.

The Palestinian Human Rights Campaign's poster depicted a sequential cartoon of a Star of David morphing into a swastika. The Jewish student group complained to the chancellor of UWM, John Schroeder, that the poster was antisemitic and should be taken down.

It's an argument reflected in graphic discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large, and never moreso than today.

If I were to draw a cartoon like this today, I would add a rule that any reference to blood is also out of bounds. You can draw Vladimir Putin as a bloodthirsty monster in Ukraine, or George W. Bush spilling blood in Iraq, or Slobodan Milošević dripping blood in Bosnia. But the moment you try any of that with Bibi Netanyahu, you're trafficking in Blood Libel against all Jews everywhere.

Cartoons by Dwayne "Mr. Fish" Booth and Serge Chapleau

A number of cartoonists have stumbled into the Blood Libel trap since the Netanyahu government's scorched earth campaign to push Palestinians in Gaza into the sea — most recently Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de plume "Mr. Fish," and Serge Chapleau of La Presse in Montréal, Québec. Chapleau's cartoon of Netanyahu as "Nosferatu en route to Rafah" was yanked off-line by La Presse this month after howls of protest from the Usual Quarters. The Association of Canadian Cartoonists issued a statement in support of M. Chapleau; he stands behind his cartoon, and La Presse stands behind dumping it.

Mr. Fish's cartoon from last November was singled out as anti-semitic by the right-wing Washington Free Beacon and then criticized by the Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Jameson. Mr. Fish has not been fired from teaching his course on cartooning at U-Penn, and no journal that posted "Who Invited That Lousy Anti-Semite" on line has 404ed it with apologies; so I haven't heard any push for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists to leap to his defense.

for Q Syndicate, March 2004

Moving on: This was a cartoon I drew as a reserve for Q Syndicate, to be released at some later date when I might be on vacation, laid up, or for some other reason fail to get a cartoon in on time. For that reason, the cartoon did not deal with any actual news story; it's not about any particular cartoon syndicate rejecting the work of any particular lesbian cartoonist.

I bring it up today because within cartooning circles here in 2024, some of us are more concerned with the decision by the major newspaper publishing conglomerates to standardize their newspapers' comic pages, because of which decision just about every comic strip currently drawn by a woman has disappeared from print.

Lynn Johnston’s “For Better Or Worse" has survived the purge, but it has been in reruns since 2008. Two other sort-of exceptions are "Luann" by Greg Evans with his daughter Karen as co-author, and "Shoe" currently drawn by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly, widow of the strip's original creator.

As Georgia Dunn noted in her strip "Breaking Cat News," "There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages."

Well, it's Holy Week in the Western Christian calendar, so let us open now our hymnals to page ax².

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 22, 1984

Back in the 1980's, conservatives upset by the separation of church and school and encouraged by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, were eager to impose prayer on public school students. Not mandatory, of course, but voluntary. 

Fair enough, I suppose. Turnabout, however, is fair play.

Who could have foreseen that forty years later, some tawdry huckster would be hawking Bibles with the Constitution as Apocrypha?

I wonder how many Corinthians it has.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2014

Speaking of turnabout as fair play, it's been ten years since Mr. Fred Phelps shuffled off his fetid coil. Since he based his entire career on speaking ill of the dead — loudly, through a bullhorn, at funerals — it was only fitting to dyslogize him in like manner.

He is risible indeed.

_____________________

* The other main newspapers were the right-wing Times and the Black American Invictus.

The February of Our Discontent

Today's Graphical History Tour reminisces about my own cartoons — mostly — from Februaries ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. First stop: the Windy City! Remember when Rupert Murdoch bought the morning tabloid?

in UW Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., February 16, 1984

Under Murdoch, the previously Democrat-leaning Sun-Times editorial stance veered sharply to the right, and the news hole became infested with lurid, and not necessarily factual, sensationalism. Sun-Times columnist Roger Ebert complained about the paper featuring photos of bikini-clad "Wingo Girls," and deeply flawed "news" stories such as one accusing a North Shore rabbi of keeping a sex slave. Nor did he like the rather ugly headline font, which I aped in my cartoon.

Rupert Murdoch's ownership of the Chicago Sun-Times turned out to be short-lived; he sold the paper in 1986 in order to buy its sister television station, WFLD channel 32, upon which he built his Fox television network.

The consequences of Murdoch's media empire in the U.S. have proven to be more serious than grinding out his brand of tabloid sensationalism. By pushing an ever farther right-wing agenda in print and on television, and pretending that it is "fair and balanced," Murdoch has devoted his life to fanning the flames of insurrection and bringing the U.S. to the brink of fascism.

"There Goes Jesse to Syria" by Jack Higgins in Chicago Sun-Times, January 3, 1984

Since I've brought up the Sun-Times, I have to take note of the passing this week of its editorial cartoonist Jack Higgins at the age of 69. 

Higgins had started drawing for the Sun-Times a few years before Murdoch bought the paper, so you can't blame the Aussie for his later turn to the right. Drawing about Chicago politicians for two decades is bound to do that to a cartoonist. Chicago liberals, however, grew discouraged that only Higgins remained as leftist stalwarts Jacob Burck, John Fischetti (a legacy from the Daily News) and Bill Mauldin disappeared from the Sun-Times editorial page. 

Higgins's work eventually disappeared, too; until running a cartoon on the front page to announce his death, the Sun-Times hadn't printed an editorial cartoon for years.

Still, during the '80's, Higgins remained an equal opportunity critic. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Higgins drew a cartoon of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Dan Quayle "playing through" Vietnamese children fleeing a napalm attack (a parody of a famous photograph). The paper caught some local flack for printing that cartoon...

"Mind If I Play Through" originally in Chicago Sun-Times August 24, 1988

... but it won him and the Sun-Times the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., February 28, 1994

Returning to my own scribblings, but sticking with the topic of offensive cartoons, I drew this cartoon after an Israeli-American doctor, Baruch Goldstein, shot and killed 29 Palestinian worshipers, wounding 125 more, at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. This terrorist act took place during Purim and the holy month of Ramadan on February 25, 1994.

Goldstein was a member of the extremist Kach Movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. The movement agitated for the forced removal of all Palestinians from their homeland, and creation of a theocratic Jewish state in which only Jews would be citizens with the right to vote. Kach leaders issued statements in support of Goldstein's actions, and Kach was banned as a political party by the Knesset as a result.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a touchy issue at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, which has vocal Jewish and Islamic student organizations. My crude ethnic caricatures were overshadowed by controversy over pro-Palestinian students posting in the student union a banner which included the Star of David to represent Israel.

Published on my old GeoCities page, February 2004

Jumping ahead to February of 2004: Vietnam War veteran John Kerry was the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. His campaign touted Kerry's military service, which stood in contrast to President George W. Bush's wartime service in the Texas National Guard.

Where Jack Higgins referenced the "Napalm Girl" photo to twit Dan Quayle's wartime service in the Indiana National Guard, I referenced "Operation Dewey Canyon III," in which a group of Vietnam veterans, including Mr. Kerry, tossed their service medals and ribbons at the U.S. Capitol to protest our army's incursions into Laos.

The Bush campaign succeeded in neutralizing the war service disparity thanks to scurrilous allegations against Kerry by a group of so-called "Swift Boat Veterans" — allegations played up and magnified by Rupert Murdoch's media empire. As a result, Kerry has the distinction of being the only Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 to receive fewer popular votes than his Republican opponent.

Can't we discuss something more pleasant?

for Q Syndicate, February 2014

I love watching the Olympics. Even the Parade of Nations, which runs so long that whichever network is broadcasting the games usually takes a dozen commercial breaks between parade leader Greece and the host nation bringing up the rear.

Part of the fun is checking out the flashy, occasionally garish, outfits the athletes are wearing. And how many nations will follow Tonga's lead in wearing body oil instead of a shirt.

You can also make a game out of figuring out which nation is going to come next. Most of the nations enter in alphabetical order, but that's dependent on the alphabet of the host nation. When Tokyo hosted the 2022 Olympics, Iceland and Ireland came in ahead of Azerbaijan and Afghanistan; Germany was between Denmark and Togo; and Peru entered between Belize and Belgium.

This summer in Paris, the U.S. would enter somewhere among Eswatini, Micronesia, and Fiji, except that by virtue of hosting the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, we'll come in near the end instead.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The best college professor I had back in my salad days was a tough grader.

The course was on medieval European history, and the first paper he assigned was to critique a particular scholarly book on the topic. What we students did not know ahead of time was that the professor thought the book was poorly researched, drew incorrect conclusions, and was a complete hack job.

None of us who simply regurgitated the content of the book got an A on that paper. A wishy-washy synopsis that might have gotten an A in high school was lucky to get a C+ in this course.

Throughout the semester, he assigned contemporaneous accounts of medieval European history and demanded that we reach conclusions that were not explicitly contained in them, which involved determining facts that their authors assumed as common knowledge or sense. Only the essays which spotted the hidden clues and reached the same conclusions as our professor — or, as never happened, convinced him he was mistaken — deserved the top grade.

There has been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking of the wishy-washy responses three university presidents gave in response to the gotcha questioning of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) last week. Everybody who was not being grilled in front of her congressional committee knows that when asked whether advocating genocide of Jews was against university policy, the correct answer was "yes, of course."

I would go further.

The university presidents ought to have asked Stefanik to point out examples of students or faculty calling for genocide of Jews. If the congresswoman had seen people demanding genocide that the academics had not, it is absolutely necessary that she let these presidents know who they are.

The news media I have seen may have decided not to lend their airwaves, newsprint, and pixels to proponents of genocide, but I'm sure that Ms. Stefanik has seen on right-wing media exactly what genocidal speech there was. 

"Death to Jews" is genocidal speech.

"Freedom for Palestine" is not.

Defending the October 7 terrorist attack is genocidal speech.

Pointing out that recent policies in Israel, the U.S., and the Arab World ignoring Palestinians' situation made Palestinian violence inevitable is not.

If "From the river to the sea" is genocidal speech, then so is "Eretz Yisrael."

Context indeed matters. So does subtext. And, of course, text.

Even if they don't fit in a protest chant or on a picket sign.

Hey, hey, ho, ho.

Try to Get Over the Toons of October

"And Now for the Latest Stunning Development" by Tom Darcy in Newsday, Long Island NY, October 1973

I've been seeing a lot of cartoons this week echoing the sentiment of this one by Tom Darcy half a century ago.

October of 1973 was a momentous month, and not in a particularly good way. Last Saturday's deadly surprise attack by Hamas targeting Israeli civilians as they celebrated Sukkot called to mind the Yom Kippur War almost exactly 50 years ago, when the Israeli military was caught similarly unprepared.

"Hello? Mr. Nixon? Mr. Brezhnev?" by Pat Oliphant in Denver News, October, 1973

After the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel had pre-emptively anticipated attacks from its neighbors on all sides and ended up seizing the Golan Heights from Syria, the Western Bank from Jordan, and the entire Sinai peninsula from Egypt, the Israeli military was seemingly invincible. But the Yom Kippur War would be, in the words of a Newsweek headline, "a war that broke the myths."

The UAR in Pat Oliphant's cartoon refers to the United Arab Republic, at the time a proposed union of Syria and Egypt that never actually came about. The two nations attacked Israel simultaneously, taking many Israeli soldiers captive. Egypt recaptured much of the Sinai; Syria, despite backing from Iraq, was soon driven back out of the Golan.

"An Eye for an Eye" by Corky Trinidad in Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October (?) 1973

There was an Arab-language cartoon at the time that mocked Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who had lost an eye during World War II, wondering whether the outlook for Israel would be worse with two eyes, but I've been unable to find what book or scrapbook I have it in. Suffice it to say that Corky Trinidad's cartoon here riffs on an oft-cited biblical saying in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by referencing both Dayan's eyepatch and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat's signature sunglasses.

Trinidad's cartoon expresses a view that both sides in the conflict are to blame for the cycle of violence that seems as never-ending now as it did half a century ago.

"You Guys Are Breaking My Back" by Ralph Yoes in San Diego Tribune, Oct. 1973

Ralph Yoes was not alone in suggesting, however, that there was plenty of blame to go around beyond the immediate belligerents. The United States was selling weapons and fighter planes to Israel, and the Soviet Union was arming the Arabs.

"Latter-Day Israelites Wandering 40 Years in the Wilderness" by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, Oct. 21, 1973

Wherever one has chosen to allot the blame, there has been one party who has consistently been, and remains, the victim. For way, way over that 40 years now. 

"Hell No, I Won't Go" by Wayne Stayskal in Chicago Today, October, 1973

Meanwhile, a U.S. District Attorney's investigation of corruption of Baltimore, Maryland officials discovered evidence linking Vice President Spiro Agnew to kickbacks from state contractors while he had been governor, and continuing after he was elected Richard Nixon's Vice President. Citing as precedent an 1826 House of Representatives investigation of Andrew Jackson's Vice President John C. Calhoun, Agnew argued that a vice president was immune from indictment by the criminal court system.

Deferring to the charges filed by the D.A., Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-OK and third in line for the presidency) declined to open congressional investigation of the charges. As you may already know, both the House Judiciary Committee and the Nixon administration were quite occupied with other important matters in October of 1973.

"Yes, Thank You for Your Support, Mr. President" by Hugh Haynie in Louisville Courier-Journal, October, 1973

Agnew pleaded no contest to felony charges of tax evasion and resigned on October 10. Mike Peters's cartoon the next morning referenced a novelty watch and Agnew's dashed presidential hopes.

No caption, by Mike Peters in Dayton Daily News, Oct. 11, 1973

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, passed after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, authorized the president to nominate a new Vice President, in this case Congressman Gerald R. Ford, subject to confirmation by the Senate.

"I Hate to Criticize the Framers of the Constitution" by Phil Interlandi in Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23, 1973

Thus the nation turned its eyes back to Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, and just in time for the "Saturday Night Massacre."

"Sure I Did It" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 22, 1973

Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, working for the Department of Justice, convinced Federal Judge John Sirica to subpoena nine White House tape recordings, the existence of which had been made public in Senate testimony that summer. In a bold attempt to quash Cox's investigation, Nixon demanded that Attorney General Elliot Richardson fire him.

Instead, Richardson resigned, followed by his Deputy, William Ruckelshaus. The next in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork did Nixon's bidding.

"Simple" by Tom Darcy in Newsday, Long Island NY, October, 1973

Blowback was swift. Time magazine and newspapers across the country called for Nixon to resign. At last, Nixon relented, promising to allow Judge Sirica to listen to the tapes...

"Well, First Let Me Emphasize My Complete Faith in Judge Sirica" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, Oct., 1973

... then announced that two of the subpoenaed tapes were missing. And it only got worse from there.

✍

I had originally intended to post today a report of last week's joint convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and our Canadian counterpart, but others have said just about anything I had in mind, and said it better than I would have.

I will say that it was a pleasure to meet with others in my beleaguered profession. That includes some, such as Al Goodwyn, whom I met for the first time at this convention. I know his work mainly because GoComics places him alphabetically first on its page (until Aaron Abelard comes along), and his views there are invariably opposed to mine. 

The AAEC had seen an exodus of conservative editorial cartoonists in recent years — perhaps because liberals like me keep getting elected to the governing board. But the purpose of the AAEC is not now, nor has it ever been, to push an ideological agenda. It exists first and foremost to promote editorial cartooning — right, center, or left — and to stand for professionalism and honest debate.

Nowadays, vulture capitalists are bleeding newspapers dry, reducing them to withered husks of what they used to be. The bean-counters at McClatchy summarily dismissed three Pulitzer-prize-winning editorial cartoonists in the months leading up to our convention; another was fired from a prominent position less than a week before our gathering. 

So discussion always turns to: if not newspapers, what? Patreon? Books? Television? Movies? Bar coasters? (Seriously. Bar coasters.)

In our element at the Cartoon Art Museum

One final note: I was excited to find a book of Vaughn Shoemaker's editorial cartoons in this room of the Cartoon Art Museum during our opening reception. I hoped that it would include the cartoon featuring my father when he was 5 years old. Unfortunately, the cartoons in the book dated from the 1950's, two decades too late. Aw, shucks.

Be That As It May

Today's Saturday rummage through the archives should perhaps belong before last Saturday's, since I'm starting off here with the last cartoon I drew for the Parkside Ranger before the 1983 summer break; but I'll move on to later years when summer breaks were not an issue.

I've got no unifying theme to the cartoons this week, so join me on a hopscotch tour taking us hither, yon, and points unknown.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 5, 1983

I don't believe that I got the original of this cartoon back from the Ranger, so I've lifted this from their on-line archives. I notice that I had not written the Ranger's name on the cartoon, so perhaps I drew the cartoon I led off with last week in case the editors wanted to run it in the May 12 edition. (They ran a post-graduate cartoon I had drawn in April instead.)

At issue in the cartoon is Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The imp in the corner (possibly the last time I used him in a cartoon) is referring to Lebanon's various ethnic and religious camps fighting to control other sectors of the country: Druze, Christian, and Palestinian, and within them, splinter groups. The Syrian government of Assad carved off a sector twice as large as the one taken by Israel.

Seated at the table is Lebanon's President Amine Gemayel, who had came to office in place of his assassinated elder brother Bachir in September of 1982. Leaning in through the window is Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin — a caricature I wouldn't be able to get away with today. But seriously: the man looked like an antisemitic cartoon come to life.

May, 1993

This local issue cartoon from May, 1993, speaks to me now because we happen to be going through yet another hospital merger where my Better Half works. These mergers are advertised as improving cost efficiencies, and we've noticed how it works: if Acceptional Health Corp. offers its employees more paid days off than Adepture Medical Inc. does, and Adepture contributes more to its employees' 401-Ks than Acceptional does, Acceptional-Adepture employees will end up with the lesser number of paid days off and the lower 401-K contribution. 

The front page of the May 20, 1993 Racine Journal-Times headlined reports of a move by All Saints Medical Center (itself a then-recent merger of St. Luke's and St. Mary's Hospitals) intention to buy up Racine Medical Clinic and Kurten Medical Clinic. The proposed merger would result in a practical health care monopoly in Racine, which had some doctors concerned, according to a sidebar article. 

Another sidebar, and a subsequent editorial, complained that the legally required public notice had appeared not in the local paper, but in the Milwaukee Sentinel. A spokesperson for All Saints explained that "Our customers aren't all from Racine." The paper further alleged that a rash of hospital merger activity in Wisconsin was timed to beat a state law set to take effect on July 1 submitting mergers and major equipment purchases to review by a public panel.

The Journal Times didn't run my cartoon this time. The All Saints monopoly issue would eventually become moot anyway when Aurora Health Care moved into town. Both have been involved in mergers since then, albeit not with each other. Yet.

And Racine still has hospital facilities in and around town, unlike some communities where absentee vulture capitalists shut down the hospitals they've bought in order to finance further mergers and acquisitions elsewhere.

May, 2003

Speaking of cartoons that didn't get published: I've scanned this one in grayscale to show how close I was to finishing it before I gave up on it.

Why did I stop drawing? Because just about every political cartoonist and late night comedian was doing some variation on the same joke about Saddam Hussein's belligerently grandiose spokesman, whom we called "Baghdad Bob." Al-Sahhaf confidently predicted the crushing defeat of U.S.-led invading forces all the while that they advanced with only nominal opposition toward the Iraq capital.

Of course, we already had Beltway Bobs of our own. Our troops weren't exactly greeted as liberators. Nor did the war pay for itself.

Q Syndicate, May, 2003

If you weren't bothered by cartoon stereotypes in my caricature of an Israeli Prime Minister, perhaps you will also enjoy some mafia stereotypes, too. 

What can I say? In our household, we watch "Some Like It Hot" and "Key Largo" whenever they show up on Turner Classic Movies.

I have since learned that "youse" is plural. My bad.

Q Syndicate, May, 2013

Taking some time off to travel to a family wedding in May of 2013, I drew only three cartoons that month.

Since immigration reform is again (or rather, still) in the news these days, I'll choose this one drawn for Q Syndicate. LGBTQ+ activists had hopes of convincing the Senate to include a provision in that year's immigration reform bill to grant citizenship to same-sex foreign spouses of U.S. citizens — just like different-sex couples, including a recent First Lady, enjoy.

Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) supported such a provision, but couldn't get it through his committee. Democrats, even those sympathetic to LGBTQ+ couples' rights, realized that there was zero chance of the Republican House accepting the provision.

They might as well have included citizenship for Grindr hook-ups. The Senate passed the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" in June, but Republicans in the House never took up the measure at all, once again preventing the government from solving our immigration problems.

Instead, Republicans kept immigration as an issue they have continued to bitch and whine about ever since. 

Flying a planeload of migrants to Martha's Vineyard is so much easier than responsible governance, you know.

See If I Care

 You can shut down his twitter account, but you can't take away his stationery!

Toon: One Masterpiece After Another

Trump has tapped son-in-law Jared Kushner to be in charge of whatever part of the federal COVID-19 response Vice President Mike Pence is not supposed to be in charge of.

Throughout the coronacrisis, Jared has demonstrated his complete and utter incompetence dealing with it. Back in January, he advised his father-in-law that the media were exaggerating the danger of the virus. When the danger became undeniable to all but the most ignorant right-wingers, he helped write his father-in-law's widely criticized March 11 address to the nation that falsely stated that the U.S. was cutting off all travel and imports from Europe.

Two days later, he was behind his father-in-law's Rose Garden promise that Google was on the verge of launching a website where anyone could test themselves for coronavirus, which was news to Google. By some extraordinary coincidence, a company Jared's brother founded was working on such a website, but that project has since been abandoned.

Last week, Jared showed his face at one of the daily White House coronabriefings, and responded testily to a question about data showing states' need for masks, ventilators and other emergency equipment, "The notion of the federal stockpile is that it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use." Instead, he called on states and localities to rely on states' medical stockpiles.

By the end of the day, somebody from Trump's Ministry of Truth altered the Strategic National Stockpile page on the Public Health Emergency website so that it would no longer contradict what Jared had just said.

But the website read on April 2: “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”
Shortly after Kushner’s remarks, however, the text of this website was changed.
On April 3, the website read instead: “The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.”

Jared's latest duty adds to a long and scattershot list of things his father-in-law has assigned to the 39-year-old real estate heir. He had some success in getting a package of prison reforms through Congress; it's no wonder this would be a priority for an administration which has seen 14 prominent advisers, donors and aides indicted or convicted of criminal activity (as of January).

But the rest of Jared's portfolio is bullish on ambition and bearish on results. He started negotiations for peace between Israel and Palestine by taking off the table everything Palestinians have ever wanted. He was then shocked and offended that no Palestinian official was willing to agree to the terms of surrender Jared and Bibi Netanyahu demanded of them.

All we have to show for Jared's mastery of immigration reform are children in cages and a ugly, easily breached wall tearing through nature preserves and private property. Ironically enough, the coronacrisis has forced the government to designate migrant farm laborers as officially "essential workers."

That ugly wall may be the only thing Jared has to show for the Infrastructure Weeks announced by his Office of American Innovation from time to time. As for management of trade talks with China, most of that has been kept Top Secret. But his wife got China to grant her five trademark deals, so that's at least one thing Jared has accomplished there.

There are, thankfully, some cases where Jared has been able to get COVID-19 supplies where they are desperately needed. But Jared and his father-in-law's modus operandi is that it matters less what you need and more on who you know — and what you can do for la loro cosa.

Tripping Over Tropes

There's not much of a theme to today's Scatterback Saturday post, other than to pick up on the threads of disparate conversations about recent cartoons, both mine and others'.

Sean Martin (cartoonist of Doc and Raider) confessed on a post earlier this week to being puzzled by the furor over the Portuguese cartoon that proved to be the final straw in the New York Times's decision never to run editorial cartoons again. Others can and have explained the issue better than I can; the argument boils down to the insistence that because of historic antisemitism, some images and criticisms that might be perfectly acceptable about any other country ought to be out of bounds if the topic is Israel.

This brings us to Howard Wasserman's recent post on PrawfsBlawg, in which he suggests that the cartoon of Netanyahu is no more offensive than would be a similar cartoon of Vladimir Putin leading a blind Trump. ... [T]he cartoon in question engaged an ancient anti-Jewish trope — the tricky Jew who secretly controls the government of unwitting Gentiles — which differentiated it from any similar cartoon about other world leaders. The Putin analogy would have meaning only if there had ever been such a thing as the Protocols of the Elders of the Kremlin. It does not take much effort to imagine images of other world leaders that would be readily acknowledged as racist or sexist, but would be okay if applied to Putin.

Imagine a cartoon of Putin-as-Dracula, sucking blood the people of Ukraine. That would be gory, but not racist. Now imagine a cartoon of Netanyahu doing the same thing. Is there any question that the image of a Jewish bloodsucker, preying on a Gentile body (during Passover, no less) would evoke classic anti-Semitism?

The question of what is permissible in visual criticisms of the Israeli state reminds me of a controversy that arose back when I was drawing for the UW-Milwaukee Post in the '80's. UW-Milwaukee has long had politically active Jewish and Palestinian student groups that were ever at odds.

In 1988, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) posted a large banner over the lobby of the student union, depicting a prone Palestinian child impaled in the back by a large blue Star of David. The pro-Zionist student group TAGAR protested that the banner was antisemitic and demanded it be taken down. GUPS's response was that the Star of David is the one identifiable emblem on the Israeli flag and thus represented the Israeli state rather than the Jewish religion.

It does both, of course. I waded toe-deep into the controversy with this cartoon:

In UWM Post, December 13, 1988

Toward the end of my service at the Post, GUPS posted an intentionally offensive banner in response to a cartoon I'd drawn mourning the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzakh Rabin as a "martyr for peace." I think that TAGAR may have blown the cartoon up to banner size to hang in the union, but I'm not positive about that.

In UWM Post, November 6, 1995

In any case, GUPS made a banner out of the cartoon, but added a military helmet and replaced "martyr" with "murderer." TAGAR, naturally, called for GUPS to remove its poster. I drew a reply of my own.

In UWM Post, November 16, 1995

No doubt, the children and grandchildren of those GUPS and TAGAR students continue to antagonize each other from the rafters of the student union.

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Moving on to another topic entirely: a fan wrote me about my recent cartoon of Trump proposing a tariff against transgender people. The fan particularly liked the portrait of Warren G. Harding in the background and asked, "Is this a reference to the most corrupt Presidential Administration 'before Trump' and a recognition that the realization of the corruption came out after Harding had died which implies there is so much more to worry about with Trump."

Of course it was. And it isn't the first time I've hung Harding's portrait in the Oval Office.

Presidents can hang portraits of Andrew Jackson or whatever dead president they like in the Oval Office; I will still feel free to choose a more appropriate wall hanging in my cartoons. I haven't picked out the decor for any of the 386 candidates seeking to unseat the Corrupt Trump Administration, however.

In UW-Parkside Ranger, March 5, 1987

Not just yet.

Q Toon: Drawing the Line

Trigger warning: there's some mature subject matter in today's post.

After Donald Joffrey Trump's disgraceful press conference alongside his Russian handler a couple weeks ago, there was a flurry of editorial cartoons, Twitter memes, late-night comedian gags, and picket signs depicting or at least implying homosexual relations between the two. Kissing. Spooning in bed. Trump, er, servicing Putin one way or the other.

Complaints quickly followed that the metaphor is homophobic.

These signs and these “jokes” don’t hurt Trump and Putin. They do hurt people, especially young people, who are actually gay or queer. Because you cannot deride homosexuality without deriding gay people, even if the jokes are meant to be at the expense of someone’s ego. They still reinforce the idea that there is something funny about same-sex attraction.

Despite my reflex tendency to err on the side of free speech, I have to agree.

I had initially disagreed with the charge of homophobia against somebody's tweet to the effect of "The same people who impeached Bill Clinton for a blow job in private are defending Trump for giving a blow job in public." The same sexual relation (sorry, Bill, it is) whether straight or gay, right? But after some consideration, I had to ask whether a cartoonist, comedian, memer, or picketer who bought into Trump's criticism at the G-7 summit of Germany's oil pipeline out of Russia could then make the same sort of fellatio remark about Angela Merkel and Putin. Would that be sexist?

Yes, it definitely would. 

On the other hand, the cliché that shows up in cartoons a lot, "Politics makes strange bedfellows," did not originally imply copulative behavior. (If you doubt that, try calling your romantic partner a "bedfellow" to his/her face sometime.) Once upon a time, there might be any number of reasons why two people might be obliged to spend the night in the same bed; it did require mutual trust, and it did keep both people warm. Sometimes, a bed is just for sleep.

For example, I was not implying an orgy in this 1986 cartoon.

As a faithful follower of this blog, you are aware that I have already drawn my cartoon on the topic of the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki, and there was no homophobic, bdsmphobic, or furryphobic subtext implied in it.

That particular idea came to me without the sort of anguished brainstorming depicted in today's cartoon. Also, my drawing board has never been that uncluttered since the day I took it out of the box. (But as anyone who knows me can tell you, talking to myself is an indispensable part of my creative process. And just about every other cogitative process.)

I guess I've obliged myself to "draw about something else" next week, which will please at least one of my Facebook friends. If only Mr. Trump could refrain from outrageous behavior that long.

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P.S.: In a similar vein, Jerusalem Report has severed its ties with Avi Katz, an Israeli cartoonist who drew a cartoon depicting Likud politicians as pigs with a quotation from Orwell's Animal Farm. The cartoon, posted on Facebook, was in response to the religious nation-state law passed this month. Report publishers decided that the swine imagery was anti-Semitic.

Q Toon: Spirit of St. Louis

The government of Israel has decided to deport some LGBT asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda, where they face likely persecution.

In Uganda, it’s illegal – “against the law of nature” – to be LGBT, and this may put the deported migrants in harm’s way.

In Rwanda, the legal situation is murkier but there are recorded instances of harassment, physical abuse and arbitrary arrests, said Shira Kupfer, adjunct professor and head of a program for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers coordinator by The Aguda – LGBT Task Force. 

“If you deport LGBT refugees to one of these countries, you’re putting them at danger to them, to their lives,” Kupfer told the Jerusalem Post. ...

 In an asylum application from 2016, an LGBT migrant said he was raped and assaulted in his country of origin because of his sexual orientation, Haaretz reported. 

In that case, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recommended asylum, however, the Interior Ministry refused to grant refugee status.

This is not a case of antigay bias on Israel's part. Indeed, Israel's record on LGBT rights is head and shoulders above any of its neighbors. Moreover, Israel rejects 99% of asylum requests overall. In these cases, which actually involve refugees from Eritrea and Sudan rather than the countries to which Israel is sending them, the Israeli government claims that the asylum seekers are fleeing poverty and war, not antigay persecution.

Which just makes shipping them to countries where they will face antigay persecution all the more reprehensible.

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Drawing this week's cartoon, I wrestled with the problem of how much explanation of the MS St. Louis I needed to include. I can't include links to reference material in my cartoons (well, I could do that here on line, but hyperlinks don't work as well in print).

In some quarters, the story of the ship on which 900 German Jews attempted to flee Nazi persecution in 1939, only to be turned away from Havana, then Miami, forcing their return to Europe, is well known. But most Americans have never seen "Voyage of the Damned," let alone been taught about one of the darkest stains on U.S. immigration policy, pre-Trump.

Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department and the White House had decided not to take extraordinary measures to permit the refugees to enter the United States. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States." ... 

Roosevelt was not alone in his reluctance to challenge the mood of the nation on the immigration issue. Three months before the St. Louis sailed, Congressional leaders in both US houses allowed to die in committee a bill sponsored by Senator Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-Mass.). This bill would have admitted 20,000 Jewish children from Germany above the existing quota.

Happily, most of the St. Louis's passengers were able to disembark in England, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, but World War II would soon envelop most of the continent. Of the 532 passengers trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe, 254 would not survive the war.

The Goal Is Won, Jerusalem

In light of near-unto-global ostracization of the U.S. for the Corrupt Trump Administration's plans to recognize Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of the state of Israel, Seventeenback Saturday takes one more look back at editorial cartoons from December, 1917. The issue this time is the British conquest during World War I of Jerusalem, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

"Again at the Gates of Palestine" by William Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, December, 1917

The Sinai and Palestinian Campaign of the war had begun for the most tactical of reasons: the Ottoman Empire, in league with Germany, attacked the Suez Canal in January of 1915 in an unsuccessful attempt to cut Great Britain off from its colonies in India and eastern Africa. Over the next two years, Britain retook the Sinai peninsula and advanced into Ottoman territory. The Battle of Jerusalem began on November 17, and American cartoonists, to a man, made the now unfortunate decision to depict the battle as the Fourth Crusade. ("Crusade" being the Christian word for "jihad.")

"Fourth and Last Crusade" by Kenneth R. Chamberlain in Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, December, 1917

Even Kenneth Chamberlain, an antiwar socialist whose work had appeared in The Masses (until it was shut down after the November-December, 1917 edition), succumbed to the temptation to draw the British conquest of Jerusalem as a triumph of Christendom over the Heathen Foe. "I just went along after we were in the war," Chamberlain said in a 1966 interview. "I wanted to hold my job as a cartoonist although I wasn't for the war."

The British populace, on the other hand, considered the conquest of Palestine as a minor operation, a distraction of soldiers and materiel which would be more useful fighting on the Western Front. Harper's Weekly agreed, writing, "The capture of Jerusalem by the British forces has almost eclipsed the more important military operations in Europe."

Contrast this whimsical cartoon from Punch, of Sultan Mehmet V reading a telegram from Kaiser Wilhelm, with most of the American cartoons in this post.

"A Great Incentive" by Leonard Raven-Hill in Punch, London, November, 1917.

Jerusalem surrendered to British forces on December 9, and as far as American cartoonists were concerned, it was time to break into "Good Christian Men Rejoice."

"After Seven Centuries" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December, 1917

If Lord Balfour believed that "His Majesty's government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people," American cartoonists were not celebrating this victory as one for Zionism. (There must have been at least one cartoon drawn for an American Jewish publication on this topic, but I'm afraid I have not been able to find it.)

"Christianity's Christmas Gift" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, December, 1917

Not every cartoonist went all "Onward Christian Soldiers" on this topic. Ted Brown clearly labeled the character in this cartoon "Turkey" and clothed him to match, although the face has the upturned mustache of Kaiser Wilhelm.

"Ending the Pipe Dream" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, December, 1917

I have qualms about including this next cartoon. There is a lot of blatant racism in cartoons of this era, and I have avoided posting some otherwise interesting cartoons — not all by Dixieland cartoonists — because of stereotypes that are now offensive (and casual use of the N-word). In this case, was "Papa Mohammed" the only Muslim name Harry Keys knew, or was he actually trying to depict the Prophet? Why not draw the Ottoman Sultan (whose name, of course, is a Turkish variant on the Prophet's)?

"Papa Mohammed Hasn't Been the Same" by Harry Keys in Columbus Citizen, December, 1917

It's not as if Mehmet V's visage was totally unknown in the states; John McCutcheon had it handy for a cartoon depicting Allied forces closing in on Turkey on its Palestine, Baghdad, Persian and Persian Gulf fronts.

"The Bagdad Corridor" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, December, 1917

McCutcheon correctly does not depict Entente forces threatening Mehmet on his Balkan front. As noted last week, Romania signed an armistice with the Central Powers; Greece was busy fighting Bulgaria; and Italy was counting on Serbian help fending off Austrian and German forces in the Alps. And although Turkish and native forces made further attempts to wrest Jerusalem back from the Allies, the end result of the campaign would be the British Mandate for Palestine and the French Mandates for Lebanon and Syria.

Germany had been directly involved in the fighting in Palestine; but German cartoonists, if they commented on the British victory at all, did so in the snarkiest of terms.

"Die Gralshüter" by Wilhelm Schulz in Simplicissimus, January 15, 1918