There But For The Grace

The church from which I retired last year and the pastor with whom I served there have made national news — again — this past week. You can read coverage by the New York Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Kenosha News (subscriptions required) or Chicago Sun-Times. Or continue below for my own two cents worth.

New York Times, page 19A, August 20, 2025

I had taken the job as Grace Lutheran Church's parish secretary in 2017 against the advice of a former employee, who warned me of a toxic environment there. Grace Lutheran was founded in 1901 when English-speaking Lutheran Churches were somewhat of a novelty, located in what was once the city's fashionable uptown, but now in what is euphemistically described as "a changing neighborhood."

Your humble scribe answering the door to reporters after a 5-year-old child had been fatally shot in the house next door to the church

In its heyday, as with most mainline Christian churches the post-World War II baby boom era, it had hundreds of members on the rolls, including several faculty and administrators of Lutheran-founded Carthage College. There is a tension between folks with advanced degrees and people whose forebears are memorialized in the stained glass windows.

The following anecdote has nothing to do with this window.

I once came across a decades-old, five-page, hand-written letter to Grace's then pastor by the daughter of a founding family arguing strongly against the church's decision back then to participate in the INNS program, opening its doors as a homeless shelter one night per week. Her parents, she wrote, would be horrified to see their church abused in such a manner; the role of her church was to praise God, not to feed and house the poor.

If I know anything about Lutheran pastors of the 1990's, her pastor could hardly wait to preach on Matthew 25:41-46. And the lady who wrote that letter had probably left to join a nearby Wisconsin Synod or Missouri Synod congregation more in line with her idea of Christianity.

By the 2010's, Grace was an aging congregation, but one that wanted to be socially relevant, both to live the Gospel and also to attract younger members (while still clinging to century-old hymns every Sunday — a new music team switched to contemporary music in 2023). So they issued a call to a young firebrand pastor out of California, passionate about environmental issues and social justice.

They got more than they bargained for.

Rev. Barker speaking at a WisPIRG rally in front of Grace Lutheran Church

When I came along, the congregation was getting along financially thanks to a dozen or so of its wealthier members and outside grants to benefit its free diaper programs and its housing of a free breakfast and food bank service (the homeless shelter having moved out to its own permanent location years earlier). Then came COVID-19; as with many other mainline congregations, when the doors re-opened for in-person worship months later, attendance was way down.

In the middle of all that came the police shooting of Jacob Blake during a domestic disturbance call. Grace Lutheran Church was caught between the centers of riots, looting, and fires that followed. (See my post here.) The building was undamaged, but the inside reeked of smoke when I came to work the following Tuesday.

Rev. Jonathan Barker was on vacation at the time, but returned home to help lead Black Lives Matter protests (and, behind the scenes, to house water and first aid materials for protesters while the National Guard enforced a curfew). When the Greater Milwaukee Synod and churchwide office wanted to rally in support of the community, the front lawn of Grace Lutheran Church was its choice of venue.

Unbeknownst to nearly everyone at the rally, Grace had been recommended to the staff of Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden as the location for a listening session between the candidate and select representatives of the community the very next day. (See my account here.) First United Methodist was even closer to the rioting, but for whatever reason, Biden's people opted for Grace, and Pastor Barker was happy to oblige.

It was never intended to be a campaign event, but Pastor Barker's role in bringing Biden to Grace and his vocal advocacy of Black Lives Matter protesters drove away some church members, including some vital congregational leaders. Most Kenoshans did not appreciate their town being trashed and burned so that protesters could make a point about police violence.

Pastor Barker nevertheless devoted a lot of time to being a protester. He held weekly protests at one of Kenosha's busy intersections calling on Wisconsin's Republican Senator Ron Johnson to vote for President Biden's Green New Deal bill — a lost cause, since Johnson has always been firmly committed to despoiling the environment, slashing social services, and excusing the rich and powerful from paying their fair share to keep government running.

When the Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee, Pastor Barker superglued his shoes (while wearing them) to the entrance of the convention's parking garage. He also tried disrupting a Trump campaign event, getting forcibly removed while Trump made fun of him.

I have to note that this was all on Pastor Barker's personal time, despite his choice of collar. Grace could not afford a full-time pastor, so he was only on the clock Saturdays through Tuesdays (plus Christmas Eve). Naturally, however, people expect their pastor to be available 24/7, regardless what they're paying him or her. Especially those members who spent a lifetime serving pot luck dinners and funeral luncheons, singing in the choir, volunteering at Vacation Bible School, or just putting $5.00 in the offering plate every week.

Grace is a congregation in crisis. Since my retirement, one member of the already short-handed church council quit after other members of the council had the leaders of the free breakfast and food pantry programs forcibly removed by police (the matter is the subject of continuing litigation; Grace tried and failed to keep the programs going on its own). Another council member quit the church over Pastor Barker's political activity. Yet another council member died suddenly.

With all this going on, Pastor Barker decided to respond to a new IRS ruling, allowing clergy to endorse political candidates from the pulpit without endangering their 401(c) charitable entity status, by announcing to the New York Times that he planned to endorse Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for President in his August 17 sermon.

Greater Milwaukee Synod Bishop Paul Erickson found out about Pastor Barker's plan when the Times contacted him for comment. The churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) had just ratified an official "social statement" opposing political endorsements from the pulpit, so Bishop Erickson warned Pastor Barker that his sermon was contrary to that social statement and would likely result in the ELCA revoking Grace Lutheran Church's coverage under the national church's group tax exempt status.

Rather than change his sermon, Barker posted a terse video message to the congregation, resigning as Grace's pastor and from the ELCA clergy roster. He delivered his sermon at some venue festooned with papel picado, and promises to continue preaching on his personal YouTube channel.

As for Grace Lutheran, Bishop Erickson was there this past Sunday, and issued a pastoral letter to the synod:

I also ask for your prayers for Grace Lutheran Church. I was present with them on Sunday, preaching and meeting with them as they consider whether they have a viable future. Many of you are aware of the recent challenges and controversies surrounding the congregation and their relationship with the former Grace Welcome Center. Please know that I have been and will continue to walk with the congregation and others in Kenosha and the surrounding communities as we work to discern God’s will for the future of ministry in that neighborhood.

What remains of the council has been disbanded, and my successor as office secretary has quit effective Monday. The synod office in Milwaukee will take over management of the church. Pastor Sheila Rawn, already planning to serve as interim pastor at Grace during what was to be Pastor Barker's upcoming family leave, has agreed to begin her service there right away. By ELCA practice, she would not be considered for a permanent position there, if in fact the congregation somehow becomes viable again.

I grieve with, and pray for, my sisters and brothers at Grace. I cannot offer much hope that all will turn out well in the end; but what hope there is will only come about after finding new paths through that old building. God's place is with the "changing neighborhoods" in which Grace stands, its people living up to the message of Matthew 25:35-40 as best they can.

A Stroll Down Malarkey Lane

Today's Graphical History Tour was supposed to be about some century-old stuff, but it can wait. It waited this long, after all, so what's a couple more weeks?

In light of Joe Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 presidential contest, here's a look back at some of the cartoons I've drawn (and not drawn) of his political career.

He came to speak at my college while I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. I didn't happen to sit in on the first-term Senator's lecture, or, as the Manitou Messenger's editorial page cartoonist, to draw a cartoon about it. Since Biden's appearance came after the last Messenger before first-semester finals was published, it wasn't reported in the next issue, which didn't come out until February.

I didn't see him then, but I did get to see him in person in 2020, after the Kenosha rioting, when he came to the church where I work to hold an invitation-only conversation with local church and community leaders. While I did not get to meet him up close, I did deal with his campaign staff and gave his Secret Service detail a thorough tour of the building.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., September 24, 1987

The first cartoon of mine featuring Joe Biden came after his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination foundered on revelations that he had plagiarized the life story of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock as his own in campaign speeches. Biden was justifiably raked over the coals for this rather stupid move.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Oct. 1, 1987

The gaffe, since it was the one thing most people knew about him, dogged his career well after the 1988 campaign was over and done with. He next came into the national spotlight as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. I thought I might have included him in one of my cartoons about that, but it seems I didn't.

for Q Syndicate, October 2008

Other than including him as one of many congresspersons in a cartoon about a Ronald Reagan State of the Union speech, the next time I saw fit to draw Biden was after his vice presidential candidates debate with Sarah Palin in 2008.

By then, I was drawing primarily for LGBTQ+ publications, so my focus was on the candidates' response to a question about marriage equality. Moderator Gwen Ifill asked Biden (at minute 35 here), "Do you support, as they do in Alaska, granting same-sex benefits to couples?"

BIDEN: Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.
The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted — same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.
It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.

Palin, in her rebuttal, reframed the question as an opportunity to voice her and John McCain's opposition to same-sex marriage, although "I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue." The "some of my best friends are..." weasel.

Ifill then asked Biden for his ticket's stance on same-sex marriage, to which Biden demurred, "Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that."

for Q Syndicate, December, 2010

Vice Presidents, and candidates for that office, are expected to echo the position of the guy (or gal) at the top of the ticket. Candidate Obama was officially opposed to same-sex marriage, in spite of having told LGBTQ organizations in Illinois that he was open to marriage equality when he had run for the Senate in 2006.

So, many of us wondered whether Biden was floating a trial balloon or exercising his reputation for verbal gaffetude when, as Vice President in 2010, Joe Biden publicly averred that popular opinion in the United States was "evolving" toward acceptance of same-sex marriage.

At that time, marriage equality was the law in Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia. 41 other states had legislation or constitutional amendments forbidding same-sex couples from marrying.

for Q Syndicate, May, 2012

In 2012, President Obama's position "evolved"; he stated that he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marital rights. The Democratic Party included an endorsement of marriage equality in the party platform for the first time. The Republican platform, of course, was officially opposed to it, calling instead for an opposite-sex marriage exclusivity amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Oct. 2012

There were no bombshell announcements in Biden's 2012 debate appearance with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Congressman Paul Ryan. Republicans groused afterward about the 69-year-old Biden supposedly smirking while the 42-year-old Ryan was speaking.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2020

Biden sat out the 2016 election, campaign season coming as it did just after the death of his son Beau. But he entered the ring again in 2020, the oldest presidential nominee in history up to that point. I suppose that historians will decide that in the midst of an epidemic the likes of which only centenarians had ever seen, and after four years of a chaotic, mercurial presidency, the United States was ready for a steady, experienced leader who promised stability and reason.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2020

The Democratic Party Convention, thanks to COVID-19, proved a disappointment to host city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The city had tried to convince Republicans in Madison to allow bars to stay open past the legal 2:00 a.m. closing time, only to have the candidates and most delegates attending by Zoom rather than in person.

Republicans thought they could show up the Democrats this year by having their 2024 convention in the Brew City. Madison Republicans this time around happily extended Milwaukee bar time to 4:00 a.m. for the week. But with the security zones around the convention center practically forbidden to local residents, and the Republican Party largely made up of people who regard urban areas with fear and loathing, many of the restaurants and bars ended up with their extra staff scheduled to work the wee hours of convention mornings finding nothing to do but polish tables and sweep floors.

October, 2020

Over the years, my caricature of Joe Biden has been as elastic as his hairline. The one thing that came to the fore more and more was his 300-watt smile. How his choppers have remained so day-glo white is beyond me. Does he never drink coffee? Tea? I've heard that some Catholic priests refuse to offer him communion wine.

Maybe it's the ice cream.

for Q Syndicate, 2021

I may have drawn fewer cartoons about Biden as President than I drew about any other president during any given four years. That's largely because I draw for the LGBTQ press, and Biden has a great record on LGBTQ issues, in stark contrast to the leaders in the Republican Party.

The Dad Jokes thing didn't pan out as a running gag, whereas the Republicans' full-bore, sustained persecution of transgender persons has called for a lot of ink and colored pixels over the past four years.

But who knows? I have to come up with a couple cartoons for Q Syndicate to release during weeks when I'm away for the drawing board. If you see any more Dad Jokes here over the next six months, you'll know why.

The Summer of Kenosha Tribune

For today's wallow in history, let me take you back forty Augusts ago, when I was editorial cartoonist for a little start-up newspaper, the Kenosha Tribune. The Tribune was edited by Ken Meyer, my editor at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside Ranger in the 1981-82 school year. Initially offered for sale for 25 cents, by August, the paper was free.

in Kenosha Tribune, August 5, 1982

Most of my initial cartoons for the Tribune dealt with national topics, but by August, I was making a concentrated effort to focus on state and local issues. Thus the above cartoon concerned the problem of drunk driving, exacerbated by Wisconsin having, at the time, a lower legal drinking age than just over the state line in Illinois.

in Kenosha Tribune, August 19, 1982

Another cross-border issue was Commonwealth Edison's nuclear power plant in Zion, Illinois, and concern that communication to Wisconsin communities in the event of an accident at the plant was lacking. This was three years after the meltdown at Three Mile Island, and four years before that at Chernobyl, Ukraine.

A less severe accident at the Zion plant led to its being retired in 1998. A year earlier, someone incorrectly inserted and then removed some control rods in a reactor while it was shut down; ComEd ultimately decided that the reactor was no longer economically feasible, and it has been inactive ever since. It is scheduled for complete closure in December, 2026.

For the above cartoon, I sat outside the Kenosha Municipal Building in the heat of summer to sketch the place. Kenosha city government just moved out of the building this year.

for Madison Independent, July, 1982

I'm not sure whether this cartoon belongs in this blog post. For one thing, it's dated in July. For another, I'm having difficulty remembering what the Madison Independent was, and how I came to draw one and only one cartoon for it. I haven't found any record of the Independent on line, either.

But I vaguely recall that the Tribune's publisher, Al Holzman, had dreams of establishing a publishing empire in the area. Whether he had hoped to entice the management of Madison Independent into a deal with cartoons as part of the package, or whether the newspaper ever existed in the first place, I have no idea — except that I do remember that I mimicked the font of its flag for the credit line next to my signature.

for Kenosha Tribune, July/Aug. 1982

In addition to editorial cartooning, I drew illustrations for a number of news and feature stories, such as the above one for a article about drunk driving...

in Kenosha Tribune, July 8, 1982

...this one for a front-page article about competition for the cable TV monopoly in Kenosha...

in Kenosha Tribune, August 19, 1982

... and this one to accompany Ken's obituary for Henry Fonda. The editorial board also asked me to draw sketches of the regular columnists, on account of one who didn't photograph well; we were pleased with the resulting portraits. And I wrote a way-too-long-even-after-brutal-editing feature article about GenCon XV. (It's just as well that I wrote it under a pseudonym.)

Meanwhile, all was not running smoothly at the Trib. The publisher, owner of 51% of the paper, was at odds with the other seven members of the board, who owned equal shares of the remaining 49%. Somewhere along the line, Holzman's name was removed from the masthead, but he remained in control as majority owner.

One thing the seven other members of the board were able to do without Holzman's approval was to secure a lease on a second-story office suite in downtown Kenosha. They moved necessary equipment out of the shabby little storefront on 43rd Street, and didn't give the publisher keys to the new office.

Needless to say, this didn't sit well with Mr. Holzman. Lawsuits and injunctions were threatened and filed, advertisers withdrew their support, and the first issue published out of the Haugaard-Isermann building would be the Tribune's last.

in Kenosha Tribune, August 26, 1982

Good thing the economy was picking up. This was my editorial cartoon in that final issue, mocking one of the Republican candidates for Wisconsin's Governor — Wisconsin's fall primary being held in September in those days.

To wrap this all up, I have gotten back in touch with a few Tribune people through Facebook as we've gone our separate ways — and run into one or two around town whose ways have brought them back or didn't take them very far. Ken drowned in a swimming accident in Marble Falls, Texas in 1985. Al Holzman never became the Charles Foster Kane of the Midwest; I have no clue what ultimately became of him.

And Lowell Jackson didn't get the GOP gubernatorial nomination, but did serve as Transportation Secretary in Tony Earl's administration.

I Was Told There Would Be No Arccosecants

Our Graphical History Tour today steps back 40 years (for the benefit of you who may be products of Ron DeSantis's Floridian educational system, that's 1982). 

"Brisben..." in Mathematics Magazine, Washington, D.C., Nov., 1982

This cartoon wasn't published until the fall, but the original is filed in with stuff I drew in April of 1982, so in light of Florida Republicans' war on math, it gets to lead off today's post. 

I don't recall how I came to draw a cartoon for the then quarterly magazine of the Mathematical Association of America (it now publishes monthly); perhaps it was through my father, a chemist, but I'm pretty sure that we didn't get Mathematics Magazine at our house. (They were nice enough to send me this issue, and I believe that they paid for the cartoon. If only I had been able to keep coming up with cartoons about math, but alas...)

"New Music" in UW-Parkside Ranger, various days, 1981-82

Balancing that April cartoon unpublished until November with one drawn well before the Feast Day of St. Misbehavin, here's one I drew to accompany the music review column, titled "New Music," in the student newspaper at University of Wisconsin at Parkside. The column, written by various members of the arts and entertainment staff, was intended to be eclectic, covering new and decidedly not-new music, so the references in my illustration ran the gamut from medieval to rock.

"Save the Library" in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 29, 1982

The Ranger, along with several other student organizations, planned a "Save the Library Day" to protest cuts to Wisconsin's university system in Governor Sherman Dreyfus's state budget. Raffles, a dunk tank, and other fund-raising activities hoped to counter proposed cuts in staffing and periodical subscriptions.

To publicize the event, I was asked to draw Gov. Dreyfus strangling a book. From the vertical format, the boldness of the lines and the minimal crosshatching — and my initials hidden in the governor's hair in lieu of my signature — I believe that this caricature was intended to go onto t-shirts, but I can't recall that for certain.

At the time, Lee Dreyfus was considered a moderate-to-conservative Republican; if he were still in politics, today's Republicans would no doubt denounce him as a RINO, a dreaded liberal, or even a socialist commie. 

Nota bene: while the Grand Old Party has lurched to the extreme right nowadays, rest assured, gentle reader, that the party still had bona fide fascists back then:

"PAB Brazenly Presents," in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 15, 1982

Case in point: G. Gordon Liddy, one of the chief "plumbers" from the Nixon administration, whom the Parkside Activity Board paid $4,500 to speak in the Student Union cafeteria on April 19, 1982. Touring the country to promote his book, Will, Liddy forbade recording of his three-hour appearance, in which the convicted felon called Judge John Sirica "born stupid," claimed that the Watergate break-in was legal because laws do not apply to a president or those acting on his behalf, and made light of his having planned to kill investigative journalist Jack Anderson and White House Counsel John Dean.

To the end, Liddy, who died a little over a year ago, was proud of his role in the Watergate burglary, and I'm sure he was happy to have lived long enough to see fascists return to the White House in 2017. How he must have regretted that he wasn't able to participate in the January 6 insurrection with the others of his ilk. 

Yet his theory of the Divine Right of Presidents was indispensable to Republicans' defense of Donald Berzelius Trump in the impeachment trials of 2020 and 2021.

✍

Well, I can't end this post on that note, so here's a bit of trivia for the locals:

UW-Parkside Ranger, April 8, 1982

The young fella elected Parkside Student Government President 40 years ago survived this recall attempt and went on to a career in politics. This past Monday, he handed over the reins as Kenosha County Executive after 14 years in the post.

Toon: The Verdict

I've been hesitant to weigh in on this story. I feel too close to it.

I work just up the street from the used car lot Kyle Rittenhouse was supposedly trying to defend, and just around the corner from Kenosha's Uptown district, which was almost completely destroyed as a result of the riot. The Kenosha Fire Department was still trying to put out the flames when I arrived at work the next morning. While our building was untouched by fire, the air inside reeked of smoke.

I know people who no longer speak to each other because of the Jacob Blake shooting, the riot, and the deaths that came from it all.

And yes, I call it a riot, not a protest.

There were protests that night. People may riot in protest.

But to call what happened a protest is like calling a hurricane "a weather event."

That said, a riot is no place for a 17-year-old boy to be gallivanting around with an AK-15. I really don't care if he had a father who lived in Kenosha once upon a time, or that he wanted practice being an Emergency Medical Technician. This was not the movies. It was not a video game.

Real people were bound to get hurt or killed.

Young Master Rittenhouse could just as easily have been one of them.

And his killer would have claimed self-defense.

Let's See Whether the Old Folks Notice

Leafing through the Sunday comic pages of the Kenosha-Racine News-Journal-Times today, I noticed that "Macanudo" by Liniers had been replaced by Brad Anderson's "Marmaduke."

I hadn't seen any notice that the combined newspapers, printed way off in Indiana, were dropping "Macanudo," so I dug last Sunday's comic page out of Dad's recycling box to check whether Linier's comic was in it. It was...

...but the odd thing in the October 17 edition was that Stephan Pastis's "Pearls Before Swine" was included twice.

Are they just getting careless at Lee Enterprise's print factory in Munster, or are they intentionally trying to find out what changes they can get away with without their aging readership raising a fuss?

The "Pearls" on the left page above took the place of the late Charles Schulz's "Peanuts"; I'm guessing that even in reruns, "Peanuts" still appeals to more of the over-80 crowd than Stephan Pastis's elaborate, boomer-centric puns.

As for "Macanudo," it's a cartoon that often puzzles Dad, and my mother never liked at all. The Journal Times ran "Marmaduke" for years before Lee started publishing one comics page for both the Racine and Kenosha newspapers, so most older readers were quite used to it. (I don't remember whether "Marmaduke" had previously been in the Kenosha News.) 

Dad hadn't noticed the switch today; he's much more aware of when the crossword puzzle has been a repeat.

Is anyone complaining? I don't know, and I'm not going to check.

I've been to the Journal Times comments section before, and man, you really do not want to get caught in that cesspool.

Together in One Photo

• Dr. Jill Biden
• Half of Time magazine's Person of the Year, PRESIDENT-ELECT Joe Biden
• Time Guardian of the Year, Porsche Bennett-Bey

 

Q Toon: Throwing Shade

Anyone expecting the "blue wave" pollsters were predicting before November 3 is by now profoundly underwhelmed. Suburban housewives, we were told, were repelled by Trump's misogyny and the bad example he continually sets for the nation's children. People of color were motivated against him by his racist, fascist policies. Voters inclined to give him a try four years ago were dismayed by his feckless response to COVID-19 and empty promises on health care reform. Republican candidates were starting to distance themselves from him.

Even Texas was supposed to be in play!

Then came November 3, 2020, and it looked like Election Night 2016 all over again.

It has taken days for the massive numbers of early and absentee votes to be counted; they each have to be removed from envelopes, unfolded, checked for witness signatures and so forth, and that takes time. But they have turned the tide for Joe Biden. Hooray for that.

It was not, however, the sort of tide we had been promised.

"The fact is we are, perhaps more than any time since the late 1850s, a divided country—divided not only by ideology and policy preferences (that’s normal; it’s what elections are supposed to decide) but also by the way we see the world. The two sides seem to occupy different universes. One universe observes facts, respects science, and values at least the goals of democracy and civility; the other universe does not. And the two view each other with seething contempt. Trump may wind up defeated, but Trumpism very much endures."

Looking back, Dear Misleader found support in the polls from that hard-core base of his: the people who took time from their busy day to swarm the freeways in their Trump-flag-waving pick-ups and SUVs, to sink their pleasure boats in Trump flotillas, or, like one home we passed on our way home from vacation this week, to festoon its yard with upwards of fifty Trump Pence signs.

His poll numbers should have included all the people for whom criminalizing abortion is the one and only issue at all times. In September, when Biden came to the church where I work, for a community discussion of race and policing after the Jacob Blake shooting, comments from the anti-abortion zealots flooded the church's Facebook page and website, and the phone rang off the hook with their calls. Not all, but many of their irate messages were about abortion and nothing else.

To the hard-core Trumpsters and the anti-abortion zealots were added on Election Day a great many voters who told pollsters that they were "undecided." They may not have been Trumpsters loud and proud, but they saw him as a protector against the scary-looking rioters setting cities on fire, marauding through residential neighborhoods, and shooting police officers.

I know these people. The church where I work filled with the smell of smoke from the surrounding business district in the days after Jacob Blake was shot. Opportunistic thugs speeding through a suburban neighborhood the first night of the riots wrecked their car right outside the house of my in-laws. The Trump and America First ads on radio and television linking Biden, Kamala Harris, and every possible down-ballot Democrat to the burning and looting proved more effective around here than those clever ads from the Lincoln Project.

Sure, Biden eked out a victory in Wisconsin, but our well-gerrymandered Republicans in the legislature and Congress fared better in this general election year than they did in 2018.

Besides, as far as down-ballot races were concerned, did you really think those dismayed Republican housewives, even if they broke for Biden, were going to vote a straight ticket?

I predict that the Lincoln Projectors will turn against Biden in a heartbeat come January 20. But they may not be exactly welcomed back into the Grand Old Party they forsook. Trumpsters are in charge there now, they ain't leaving, and they ain't the forgiving type.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Here's a square inch or so from this week's cartoon, and a little clarification of one of the details regarding Joe Biden's visit to the church where I work.

The Grace Lutheran church council saw fit to meet in emergency last Thursday, and produced a letter of explanation to the congregation in which they noted that Grace had wanted Biden's dialogue meeting to take place in the narthex. The narthex is a good-sized open space just outside the sanctuary, with an open stairway leading up to the choir room and organ balcony and down to the courtyard entrance and basement level.

The Secret Service, however, decided that the event had to be held in the sanctuary, which could be closed off at all entrances. In the event of an emergency, the candidate and his wife could be quickly removed from the room and away from danger; whereas the danger could easily follow them out of the narthex.

For what it's worth, Mr. Biden at no point stepped into the chancel, even though, being raised up two steps from the rest of the nave, it would have made him more visible to the gathered participants.

The Daily Caller and other Trumpletons have asked sarcastically whether Mr. Trump would be welcome to use the church for a campaign event. Well, he hasn't asked. Grace would probably give such a request due consideration, as long as he promised not to have troops tear gas everybody on his way in.

Behind the Scenes of Biden's Visit

During the week, I work at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It's an old church on a main thoroughfare in the city's uptown, located between that used car lot you saw burning on TV two weeks ago Monday and the uptown business district where fires continued well into the next day. The stench of the smoke was strong inside our building all that Tuesday.

The presidential limo speeds by on September 1

A week after that, Donald Trump's motorcade passed in front of the church on its way to the burnt down shops of uptown so he could walk around the rubble in his granny heels and talk to the guy who sold Rode's Camera Shop eight years ago to the guy who didn't want to be part of Trump's campaign video.

Wednesday morning, I was told that Joe Biden was coming to Grace the next day to have a dialogue with a select group of religious and community leaders, an event closed to the public. 

I don't know how the event was arranged. I imagine that Biden's office called the local Democratic Party and asked where they could set up a meeting; the local people know Grace's pastor, who is passionately active on social justice issues and a committed Green New Dealer (you can buy his book on amazon), a young pastor still burning the candle at both ends. He had just returned from two weeks in California on Tuesday, so he had been away for all the turmoil since Jacob Blake's shooting.

I was sworn to secrecy about Biden's visit, which was kind of awkward. Just that morning, I had posted a graphic here and on Facebook chiding Biden and his running mate for not coming to Wisconsin despite having the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee and despite Trump and Pence chalking up frequent flyer miles to the Dairy State lately. 

I felt I couldn't delete my posts without possibly letting the cat out of the bag (although by afternoon, that Biden was coming to Kenosha on Thursday was all over the media. Just not the specifics of his visit).

Complicating matters, the church had already scheduled a major prayer vigil and rally for Wednesday afternoon, involving the local and national bishops of the ELCA and other clergy from around town.

While about 100 people were participating in the prayer vigil outside, the Secret Service, local police and sheriff deputies, and advance members of the Biden campaign were busy inside: determining which entrance Biden would use and which room he and his wife would wait in; what room the event would be held in and what path he would use to get from one room to another; where the pool reporter and media cameras could be set up; and who would be allowed to be in the building after 10:00 a.m. Thursday.

That latter bit meant that Grace could have its free breakfast program on Thursday morning as usual, but that we would have to cancel the free diaper program for the second week in a row. The diaper program volunteers had not felt safe to open up the previous Thursday afternoon. Having confirmed with the volunteers and having assured some mothers that the program would be open on September 2, I had to get back in touch with them to tell them it couldn't.

For the Bidens' waiting room, the campaign laid claim to a room used for Sunday School by a Latino congregation that shares Grace's building. The food pantry coordinator and I had to clear all the Sunday School equipment out of the room, trying to make sure we would know where to put everything back in its proper place. I called Amistad Cristiana's pastor to let him know we had messed with his stuff — although I couldn't tell him why.

Thursday morning, I arrived at work to find that a Milwaukee television crew was already parked across the street. One of the invited clergy had posted about the event to Facebook, so the secret was out. I began fielding calls from Chicago TV stations and other media asking whether Grace was hosting the former Vice President. I told them I had no comment, which was as good as saying yes. (What was I supposed to do? Lie?)

More TV crews gathered across the street, and so did a crowd. A congressional candidate from Indiana showed up at the front door; Biden's staff were out of the building for the moment, but instructed me via email to turn her away. She wasn't on the guest list. (Some good came from her trip to Kenosha, however. At the same time, there was a woman in the office seeking financial assistance — Grace gets a lot more requests for help with rent, utilities, prescriptions, car payments, etc., than it could hope to handle in its wildest dreams — and the Indiana candidate was able to connect the woman with someone willing and able to help.)

The local Democratic Party delivered a bunch of Biden-Harris lawn signs for the neighbors to put up in their yards. This, even though the Biden entourage would not be coming down 60th Street at all, but would arrive by side streets at a back service door that leads down to the basement kitchen.

I followed the Secret Service's bomb-sniffing dog around the church, locking rooms up after his handler declared them cleared. After that, I stood outside ready to direct the invited guests to the entrance where they would have their body temperature checked and be issued a mask if they didn't have one already. COVID-19 protocols were strictly enforced; security procedures included issuing a clip-on pin to those of us allowed to be on the premises, then swapping them out at a set time for a different pin, each of which had to be returned and accounted for at the end of the event.

Outside, the crowd outside kept growing. Residents and reporters freely passed back and forth across 60th street. There were cars and pick-ups festooned with political signs driving up and to the street. By contrast, while waiting for Trump to pass by on Tuesday, the street was closed for hours, and everyone was required to stay off not just the street but the sidewalks as well. 

Early in the afternoon, a crowd of local Black Lives Matter activists — the newly formed group is Black Lives Activists of Kenosha, or BLAK — came parading down the middle of 60th Street, blocking traffic, as police with bullhorns ordered them to get off the roadway. A portion of the BLAK group gathered in the courtyard outside the window of my office and seemed to be dealing respectfully with the woman there who was the first level of security for the entrance behind her.

One press photog knew to wait out back.

All the invited guests had arrived, and, unknown to the people out front, so had the Bidens. Since I didn't have clearance to go into the sanctuary where Biden's meeting was, I went into my office to continue writing up the previous day's prayer vigil and rally for Grace's weekly newsletter. Then, starting right at 2:00 sharp, the phone started ringing off the hook. An organized harassment campaign accused the church of harboring a baby-killer, of defending a rapist, and of not being real Lutherans. (Grace is a member congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; there is a separate, much more conservative Wisconsin Synod Lutheran sect that considers every other Lutheran church apostate.)

After answering calls from the first three harangutans, I just let the phone ring. When I checked the answering service for the church's message the next day, I found that not one of the calls left there before the service filled up was from our 262 area code. I realize that with cell phones, area codes don't necessarily equal geography, but none? Calls came from Colorado Springs; Buffalo; Seattle; north central New Jersey; Macon, Georgia; and several widespread area codes in California.

Connolly, one of the people from the regional Biden campaign office, took pity on me for my incessantly ringing phone and invited me to come sit in the back of the sanctuary with the press pool and the directors of our food pantry and breakfast program. I did not get to meet the Bidens, but I did get a few good photos thanks to my telephoto lens.

The woman in the orange headdress was a representative from the BLAK group; I don't believe she was on the original guest list, so I guess someone must have offered to let one BLAK protester in. When I came in, she was telling her story from the microphone set up on the side of the room for guest questions. Biden gave a sympathetic if lengthy answer; I missed some of it when his voice lowered to a near-whisper, the pews under the balcony not being acoustically optimal. As the event ended, Joe and Jill Biden came into the pews for an off-microphone minute with this woman.

And then they were off. The press pool, Secret Service, and campaign people gathered up their gear and headed for a meeting with a teacher in a Milwaukee suburb. Connolly stayed behind with us; we still had a few Biden-Harris yard signs in my office, so she took one for her mother, who lives in Illinois where the Biden-Harris campaign is less active.

Meanwhile, someone had hacked or spoofed the breakfast program/food pantry's email and sent out some bizarre diatribe to its entire contact list. Including, of course, its many donors.

On the other hand, Friday morning, one of the phone callers to whom I had actually talked to (or rather, listened to) live Thursday afternoon called back to apologize for his tone of voice. One of the Wisconsin Synod callers, he didn't take back what he said; indeed, he repeated a lot of it. Just how he said it. 

I'll can be satisfied with that.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This has nothing to do with This Week's Sneak Peek, but have you noticed how time and time again, Trumpsters say that a primary reason that they support Donald Trump is because "he sticks it to the liberals"?

GREENE: What draws you to him? Like, if you were to talk about why you were going to cast a vote...

MARY JEAN: Well, he's a New Yorker. And he pisses people off, like, to no end. And...

GREENE: And you like that?

MARY JEAN: Yeah. I find him hysterical. My husband and I would sit here and laugh at him. They don't get his jokes. And people, like, go, oh, he said this. No. He was joking. It's like he kind of goes - he has a crassness about him that I kind of like, being a New Jersey girl (laughter). So I kind of like that.

In eight years of the Obama presidency, did you ever once hear anyone talk about how great it was to have a president who "sticks it to" conservatives? No. Barack Obama actually tried to get along with them. He came to office in a time of national crisis and named three Republicans to his cabinet (only to have Republicans decide that bipartisan cooperation was bad for the party).

You can buy "Make Liberals Cry Again" bumper stickers for your car, and a wide variety of "Fuck Liberals" t-shirts. You can even ruin the family Christmas with "Trump-Pence Snowflake Gift Wrap." And in case you want to argue that it's all harmless fun, the kid accused of murdering protesters in Kenosha is said to enjoy "Triggering the Libs." This time, he used an AR-15.

Trump l'oeilists drove through a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Oregon last night, spewing pepper spray at peaceful protesters. Can you imagine the uproar if liberals had driven through the "Reopen" rallies doing that back in May? 

I suppose it might have gotten them to wear masks, though.

This "stick it to liberals" is by no means unique to Donald Trump. Here in Wisconsin, we remember back in the 1990's when Republican Governor Tommy Thompson campaigned for the five-county stadium surtax by telling folks outside the southeast corner of the state that the surtax was an opportunity to "stick it to 'em" in Milwaukee.

And the folks in Red Wisconsin ate it up.

But at least Thompson later apologized for his "poor choice of words."

Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue ― by mistake ― and he still would never apologize for it.

And now he's bringing his crass ass here to Kenosha tomorrow to see how his pissing people off can boost his presidential campaign. God help us.

Toon: Wisconsin Burning

 

Sunday afternoon, police responding to a domestic violence complaint in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times at point-blank range as he ignored their orders and started to get into the driver's seat of the SUV his children were in. Blake, 29, has been left paralyzed from the waist down, according to his family. Blake is Black; the police officers at the scene are White.

A video filmed from inside a house across the street doesn't show what, if any, danger Blake posed to the officers or the public. A police source tells me that Blake had a knife; but at this point, I have to treat that as one of the many rumors swirling about here. This was not Blake's first encounter with police, yet nobody has claimed that he had no right to have a knife on his person. Second Amendment, you know.

Officially, Kenosha Police Department has been extremely tight-lipped about the incident. They haven't even said what role, if any, Blake played in the initial complaint. Citizens at the scene claim he was breaking up a fight. The officers have not been publicly identified. Kenosha Police are not equipped with body cameras.

Kenosha officials declared a curfew Sunday night, but protests were perverted into violence anyway. Dozens of downtown businesses were vandalized, and half of the inventory of a used car lot was completely burned.

Monday evening, hoodlums from Milwaukee drove to Kenosha in a caravan of cars for the express purpose of looting and rioting. The rest of the vehicles at Car Source were burned. A business owner was beaten trying to defend his shop. At least three uptown businesses were still on fire well into Tuesday and completely destroyed. The smell of smoke filled the nearby church where I work.

Last night, rumors flew that wherever you were, the rioters were coming to your block. As law enforcement and the National Guard continued to concentrate on protecting government facilities, self-styled militias joined the rioters roaming the streets, and property owners took up arms. Three people were shot, two fatally.

(Update: 17-year-old white vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse from Antioch, Illinois has since been arrested and charged with murder in the first degree.)

We expect things to get worse before they get better. 

Pray for justice.

Work for peace.

Remembering Alpha Communications

It has been a harrowing week, so Scrunchieback Saturday is going to hide out in the basement and leaf through old papers with no political, sociological, or sexual significance whatsoever.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a folder of stuff from a job I had in the mid-1980s. Alpha Communications was a little start-up that didn't last long at all. We had a goal of handling radio dispatch, desktop publishing, and film production. We operated in tandem with a security firm, enabling us to meet the first of those goals; but the other two were always just beyond our grasp.

For a time, we operated out of a drab little building on Sheridan Road a mile south of Racine. The copier on which we produced this mock newsletter didn't print photographs particularly well, so I was asked to make a pen and ink sketch of the building instead.

Our copier did have two-color capability, as an either-or function; the default was black-and-white, but one could define an section of the print area as being red-and-white (or blue-and-white, or brown-and-white, although we never splurged on having the other color toners on hand).

The above first and only edition of The Alpha Communicator was my project. I drew the word "Alpha" in the flag by hand since we had no Greek-style fonts available; the rest of the flag and the headlines and cutlines were Letraset transfers. The body of the articles, unfortunately, was made on a dot matrix printer and was just not attractive at all.

This collage of Racine and Kenosha landmarks with the flags of the then separate Milwaukee Sentinel and Journal was drawn and printed ledger size — too large for my present-day scanner — and I haven't been able to stitch this graphic together as seamlessly as I would like. It took up pages 2 and 5 of the six-page newsletter; articles by the president and vice president of the company about, respectively, in-house corporate newsletters and the Spanish Civil War took up most of the rest of the Alpha Communicator.

The Alpha Communicator was just one of many one-off projects I was given as the Creative Director, or whatever my title was. But it was one of a half dozen or so times I was tasked with drawing buildings to accompany service proposals. I'll save those drawings for some other day.

As for the Sentinel and Journal flags, I have no recollection why they had to be part of the collage rather than, say, the Racine Journal Times and Kenosha News. Nothing in the rest of the drawing has anything to do with Milwaukee, and I can't recall pursuit of any service arrangement with the Journal-Sentinel Company.

My cover for the 1987 annual report of the company was another one-off; I don't believe we ever produced a second annual report, either. Other than the C-Thru Graphics sheet, everything else is hand-drawn and was meant to showcase the creative end of the business.

An issue of the local Sierra Club chapter newsletter is included in the drawing, but I don't have any copies of it that we produced. Perhaps my parents do, since they have been active in chapter leadership for a long time, and still handle mailing of their newsletter.

I wouldn't be surprised if Alpha's production of their newsletter was another one-time deal. For one thing, the accent color for that newsletter has always been green, and Alpha never had any green toner. I know we weren't still involved with it when the company hit the skids.

I drew this map for one of the company brochures. It's a very optimistic depiction of Alpha's service area. We did have a radio antenna capable of reaching from Milwaukee to Cook Counties, and I vaguely recall that the security company had an account somewhere in Oak Creek.

The only Illinois client I remember was a company that provided corporate computer systems. Owned by a friend of our vice president, they contracted with us to produce an instructional video for the companies that bought their computer systems. An English professor from Northwestern University was supposed to narrate the video on how to set up and network the computers, which was brand new stuff for many firms in those days. I had some input on the project, but it was our vice president's baby.

To my horror, our veep produced an introductory montage that was half an hour long. It pirated footage of the Chicago skyline and the "L" from various Hollywood films, plus about every second of video of a sunrise over Lake Michigan two of our employees had gotten up very early to film. It chopped up and spliced together copyrighted recordings of classical and ambient music and movie sound tracks as if three people were fighting for control of a car radio.

When the computer networking company canceled the project, I was told that that it was because the instructions the English professor gave would have caused their clients' computers to crash. I never believed that for a second. Whether our veep's friend was being kind, or our veep was trying to save face, I'll never know.

In the end, Alpha Communications was quietly merged into the security company, which was, after all, the field from which most of leadership had come before founding the company. I was asked to come up with a bear mascot for one of the advertising brochures. He needed to be cartoon-y, but not cute, strong, but not threatening, so this is what I came up with.

The company was in dire financial straits when I left, which was after an extended period of temporary lay-offs, no creative work whatsoever, and the knowledge that the shares of stock making up a good fraction of my salary were never going to be worth a cent. They were bankrupt and out of business within a year, and I've completely lost touch with everyone involved.