Zurück zum Zeichenbrett

When our Graphical History Tour last visited July, 1924, the Democratic National Convention had just struggled for two weeks to settle on its presidential nominee, rejecting its leading suitor, William McAdoo, in favor of John W. Davis.

"Americanische Wahlqualen" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, July 27, 1924

The debacle made the front page of Berlin's satirical weekly Kladderadatsch, where cartoonist Arthur Johnson was happy to enjoy the schadenfreude of the misfortunes of politicians of any other country.

"Die Schnüffel-Kommission" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, July 13, 1924

Especially since the alternative was to cartoon about the humiliation of his own country. (Johnson's father was American; but Arthur was German-born and grew up there raised by his German mother.) 

The title of this cartoon derives from a word that can mean either "snoop" or "sniff"; I've chosen the former, since Marianne, John Bull, Uncle Sam, and the Italian (King Vittorio Emanuele III, probably), representing the Reparations Commission, are using a magnifying glass rather than their olfactory senses to examine Michel's gesäß.

"Morgens.. in der Berliner Kunstuastellung" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, July 13, 1924

Johnson, renowned for his monstrously distorted caricatures of Germany's foes, was certainly capable of more flattering depictions of the human form, as shown in "Die Schnüffel-Kommission." I may not know much about modern art, but I know what Johnson liked.

"Der Dolchstoss von Hinten" by Oskar Theuer in Ulk, Berlin, July 18, 1924

Only months after the failed Beerhall Putsch, the Never Hitlerer cartoonists warned that the danger had not truly passed. Oskar Theuer's cartoon on the front page of Ulk depicted industrialists and royalists behind the bushes on the left and Nazis on the right, both waiting to ambush the young lad labeled Peace. Little Boy Peace's backpacks are labeled "reconstruction" and "reconciliation."

Theuer ironically took the blame-laying phrase used by those right-wingers, turning it back against them as the title of the cartoon.

"Der Fall Willstätter" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, July 28, 1924

Publishing his magazine in the heart of Nazi country, Theodore Heine's play on words recalls the horrors of World War I's chemical warfare for his cartoon. Yellow Cross gas, or Gelbkreuzgas, was Germany's variant of mustard gas with an antifreeze agent for use in winter; Hakenkreuz is another word for "swastika."

Richard Willstätter was a Nobel Prize winning German chemist who determined the composition of chlorophyll in plants. Asked in 1915 to help develop poison weapons for the German government, he refused to work on anything beyond protective measures. He received the Iron Cross for his work on gas mask filtering systems.

In protest of increasing anti-Semitism, Willstätter, a Jew, announced his retirement as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in 1924, and subsequently refused all offers of employment. He eventually fled Munich for Switzerland in 1938, where he died four years later, ten days shy of his 70th birthday.

"Faschismus" by Arnold Lindloff in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, July 6, 1924

Looking beyond Germany's borders again, Arnold Lindloff has Italy's Benito Mussolini quoting The Sorcerer's Apprentice, although Il Duce (at right) appears to enjoy the work of the monsters he has set loose. 

Only the industrialist seems perturbed; wouldn't it have made more sense to have him the one who summoned the two spirits? Indeed, the fellow with a dagger appears to be a German brownshirt; and whereas Mussolini has a club, the industrialist is armed only with a baton. 

A magic wand, even.

"Die Ältesten und die Jüngsten von U.S.A." by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, July 7, 1924

Here's another cartoon in which the wrong person seems to be speaking. Karl Arnold's comment on the U.S.'s Japanese Exclusion Act is one of many cartoons through history that have proposed that Native Americans erred in ever allowing Europeans to settle the new continent.

It appears that the tribal elder in the foreground should be the one talking, but the caption makes more sense said by the Japanese gentleman. I wonder why the speaker wasn't identified as McAdoo and Mussolini were in the above cartoons, or if an editor changed the caption.

I don't always get German humor, largely because I don't speak the language. Relying on an on-line translation of "Die Yankees machen sich jetzt mausig" gave me "The Yankees are making a mess of things now." But from what I've been able to tell, the word "mausig" doesn't translate neatly into English. It combines senses of being unruly, obstinate, and deliberately combative. (One translator also gave me "mousy.")

"Ihr" can mean "you," "her," or "their." Only one of those pronouns makes any grammatical sense in the caption, so I stuck with "you."

✍

Well, that's our review for today of German cartoons from July of 1924. Hope you enjoyed the grammar lesson and the Jugenstil. Come back next week, and I promise to go back to having stuff in English.

This Week's Sneak Peek

There has been a lot of LGBTQ+related news this week, not least of which was the alarming arrest of 31 neo-nazis on their way to attack an LGBTQ+ Pride celebration in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

I could have drawn about that last night, but I'm opting to wait until more of the facts come to light. Somewhere there is a hero who saw a bunch of masked, uniformed, armed fascists cramming into a U-Haul and decided to alert the authorities. There were authorities who took that report seriously and intercepted the U-Haul with sufficient force to apprehend these domestic terrorists.

Somewhere, there may also be someone who sent his minions on this mission while remaining safely in the shadows himself. Somewhere, there may well be more to come.

Meanwhile, there are people in elected office whose actions, because they are in positions of power, are equally reprehensible.

Tune in here again on Thursday.

Q Toon: Go Ask Joe

As risky as it is to predict what might happen during tonight's Presidential So-Called Debate, I decided at the drawing board Sunday night that a moment like this was more likely than not. It might not be about antifa; Donald Joffrey Trump already tried the "Why Don't You Ask Joe" tack during last week's dueling Town Halls, only to have Savannah Guthrie answer "Because you're here before me."

It might not be whatabout antifa this week; it could be whatabout Hunter Biden, or whatabout something Joe Biden said about busing in 1972, or whatabout Jeffrey Toobin jerking off on Zoom. Or whatabout all three.

Shortly after I sent this cartoon off to Q Syndicate, the debate sponsors announced that each candidate would get two minutes to answer the moderator's questions with the other candidate's microphone muted. Trump's campaign people promise that they're training him to be more polite, calm, and personable this time.

I'm not afraid of any of this getting in the way of Trump's insistence upon being the only person on stage who gets to talk. Expect him to shout, swipe Biden's mic off his podium, pull out an air horn, and maybe shoot spitballs. Certainly do not expect him to stop talking when his own two minutes are up.

 Unless he storms offstage early to go sulk on Twitter.

Q Toon: For the Record

When I'm up late on Sunday night cussing at a blank sheet of bristol board that stubbornly resists becoming the editorial cartoon that I have to send to my editor by Monday morning, it would be really, really nice if I had some inside source on the Supreme Court who would leak to me that the justices were going to issue a ruling of particular interest to the LGBTQ community the next day.

Which is to say that this week's syndicated cartoon is not about the First Fondantmentalist Church of the Sacred Wedding Cake.

So instead, Buzz and Killer have noticed something remarkable about 2018 off-year elections. According to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, there are nearly 400 openly gay, lesbian, bi, transgender and queer candidates for local, state and national office — over 50 in Texas alone.

Former Dallas sheriff Lupe Valdez, another Texas-based candidate, already shattered a ceiling last month when she became the first Latina and openly gay nominee for governor in the state. ...
Valdez, 70, is no stranger to breaking barriers. Despite her family’s fear that her running for public office would ignite a homophobic backlash in Texas — where it is still legal to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity — Valdez was not deterred. In 2005, she became the only Latina sheriff in the U.S. and one of the country’s few out LGBTQ public officials.

Elsewhere, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin has been targeted by right-wing PACs for defeat as she runs for a third term this year. Her TV ads focus on keeping American manufacturing plants open, but she has also opened up about her childhood with a mother who struggled with drug addiction. Colorado Congressman Jared Polis is giving up his seat to run for Governor, taking the risk of appearing in his TV ads with his husband and son by his side — standard practice for heterosexual candidates, but something most LGBTQ candidates have been counseled to avoid.

Consider the example of Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democratic nominee for Texas's 23rd Congressional District. The former Air Force intelligence officer is an out lesbian, but only to a degree.

“My girlfriend teases me sometimes for not sharing enough about myself on social media, particularly as I endeavor into an arena where people need to know the person before they want to hear the policies,” Jones wrote in October, referring to a partner she did not name. “I can’t help but think that some of that is still related to the precautionary steps I took as a cadet and officer. All this to say, there are effects to not coming out, or feeling as though you’re not able to come out.”

But if some candidates now feel confident running as openly LGBTorQ, other candidates have decided that it's safe to run as an open Nazi.

In Illinois’ 17th Congressional District, in the state’s northwestern corner, Democratic incumbent Cheri Bustos will face a GOP nominee named Bill Fawell, who believes, according to CNN research posted Friday, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job, and that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are stumping for the Illuminati, a worldwide domination sect that some conspiracists insist exists.
In the same state’s 3rd district, comprising southwest Chicago and its suburbs, Arthur Jones, a Nazi — not a sobriquet, his preferred affiliation — became the GOP candidate despite being rejected by national Republicans and the state party for denying the Holocaust.
Party leaders have also gone out of their way to denounce Paul Nehlen, who is seeking the soon-to-be-vacated seat of House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st, and Patrick Little, who is running for the U.S. Senate in California. Nehlen proudly attacks his enemies as Jews and Little is a white supremacist.

Mr. Little finished twelfth in Tuesday's "jungle primary," and Nehlen is unlikely to win in my home district (he's got carpetbagging Green Beret Nick Polce to split the pro-fascist vote with him).

Happily, there are hundreds of LGBTQ candidates and only eight seven Nazis running for office this year. If it's unlikely that any card-carrying Nazis will be sworn into office next year, however, there are plenty of Republicans running just to the right of Mussolini who will be. They may not call themselves Nazis — they may not see themselves as Nazis — but the Nazis recognize their fellow travelers.

As Patrick Little told MSNBC before the California primary, Donald Trump "dog whistled about globalists,” even if he "didn't understand he was talking about Jews until after the election.”

Radical right-wing candidates have had the wind at their back in 2010, 2014, and 2016. For all the talk of a "blue wave" this year, Trump has the bully pulpit (and his Twitter account) and a devoted following that believes any bullstool he, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, or their Facebook friends from Smolensk tell them.

Besides, I seem to recall all the experts predicting a Hillary Clinton landslide not very long ago.

Sundays in the Park with Adolf

Retiring Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has vowed to stay out of the Republican primary to succeed him.

So have the most prominent politicians who could have run.

Wisconsin State Assembly Majority Leader Robin Vos and former Republican Party National Chairman Reince Priebus were the only potential candidates with name recognition outside their own respective bailiwicks, but withdrew from consideration in the first couple days after Ryan announced his retirement. State Senators David Craig, Van Wangaard, and Steve Nass and Assembly members Amy Laudenbeck and Tyler August also took themselves out of the running.

So far, the only announced Republican candidate is Paul Nehlen*. Nehlen had announced his candidacy well before Ryan withdrew his; Nehlen had challenged Ryan in 2016, representing the Breitbart/Steve Bannon/Ann Coulter wing of the party. He was endorsed by Phyllis Schlaffly, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, and Gun Rights PAC that year. Donald Trump had toyed with the prospect of endorsing Nehlen in retaliation for Ryan's reluctance to support Trump's presidential campaign, but ultimately made nice with the Speaker of the House, who trounced Nehlen in the 2016 primary by a 6-to-1 margin.

Newspapers in Wisconsin's First CD were calling on Nehlen to quit the 2018 race because of his execrable racist views, even before Ryan pulled out. He was banned from Twitter in February after posting an image of Prince Harry's biracial fiancée Meghan Markle that was photoshopped to make her look like prehistoric Cheddar Man. A few days before that, he had posted a list of his critics, their phone numbers, e-mails and Twitter handles, adding, “Of those 81 people, 74 are Jews, while only 7 are non-Jews,” sparking a neo-Nazi flame war against them.

In another anti-Semitic tweet, Nehlen posted “Poop, incest, and pedophilia. Why are those common themes repeated so often with Jews?” But he's an equal opportunity bigot. He has told listeners of fellow Nazi David Duke's podcast that he'd like to see Trump's Ugly Wall equipped with “armed machine gun turrets every 300 yards. And you can automate those. Anyone who approaches that barrier will be treated as an enemy combatant. Man, woman or child.”

Rest assured, however, that Nehlen will not remain unchallenged for his party's nomination.

Bryan Steil, a former Ryan staffer currently serving on the board of regents of the University of Wisconsin, and State Rep. Samantha Kerkman are still weighing their options. Lack of name recognition at this date shouldn't hurt either one; very few residents had heard of Paul Ryan before he first ran for Congress in 1998, but he had the strong backing of the national GOP. Redistricting in 2000 and 2010 coupled with exurban sprawl out of Chicago has made the 1st CD increasingly Republican, so whoever wins the August primary may still have an advantage over the Democratic nominee even in this "blue wave" year.
_____
* Update: There's some guy named Nick Polce who also announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination last fall. All I know about him is that he's an Army Green Beret veteran (2002-2014) recently moved to Lake Geneva who checks all the far right-wing boxes and describes himself as part of the "freedom movement."

Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."

Q Toon: Loaded Response

I settled down in front of my drawing board last weekend after one of those weeks when LGBTQ issues just seemed insignificant relative to all the other news.

The week started with Donald Joffrey Trump responding to North Korean threats of nuclear attacks against the U.S. with overheated "fire and fury" rhetoric of his own. Nuclear war seemed so likely that even Wall Street suddenly snapped out of its giddy response to Trump's lazy faire economic policies.

Then fascists wielding semi-automatic rifles, swastikas, Ku Klux Klan banners and tiki torches marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, where one of their number ran over a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19. Trump blurted out that "many sides, many sides" were responsible, driving the Korea story right off the front page (to the relief of Wall Street).

After two days, Trump begrudgingly read a statement assigning blame to the Nazis and Klansmen, but then stunningly revoked that statement at an unhinged press conference the next day. Beggaring credulity, Trump insisted that some participants in the march organized by the website The Daily Stormer, the Neo-Confederate League of the South, the National Policy Institute, and the National Socialist Movement are actually "very fine people." Perhaps those people were only Nazi sympathizers.

Why would Trump leap to the defense of the indefensible?

With his approval ratings down to 33% of the electorate, Trump can't afford to piss off Nazis and the Klan. As the sane, reasonable portion of the minority of voters who elected him slowly develop buyer's remorse, Nazis, Klansmen and their ilk become an evermore significant part of Trump's remaining base.

He is losing support among previously sympathetic corporate and labor leaders. Led by Merck chief executive Ken Frazier,  eight members of Trump's Strategy & Policy Forum and his Manufacturing Council resigned from them over his inability to distinguish a moral difference between his fascist base and anti-fascist protesters; Trump then disbanded the councils before any more businessmen could defect.

At this point, however, not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. They have no problem associating themselves with a Nazi sympathizer sympathizer.

💩

As long as I've brought up Bathroom Bills, let's pause for a moment to celebrate one gleam in the sh¡tstorm: the Texas legislature adjourned its special session without passing Senate Bill 6. A legislative priority for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the theocratic right, the Texas Bathroom Bill was opposed by the Republican House Speaker Joe Straus, as well as by the Texas business community and the state's professional sports teams.

💩

On Monday, I invited you to guess who that was kibitzing over my shoulder in this week's cartoon. For the answer, look through the list of keywords at the end of this post.

And should you wish to share or link directly to this week's cartoon, throw some traffic to the news outlets which run my cartoon. Try here, here, or here.

Juxtaposition of the Day

From my Facebook feed yesterday:

The "GOP lawmaker" pictured, by the way, is Oklahoma's freshman Senator James Lankford, continuing this week's Oklahomatic theme.

The only edits I made to this screen shot were to crop this section of it and to blur the name of the person who Liked the story. We're left to wonder whether Facebook's algorithm thinks that Sen. Lankford's Master Faith politics are straight out of the Hitler Youth Handbook, or that he just looks like the guy who sang the song.

P.S.: If you're interested in reading what Sen. Lankford said, here's the story. If you don't know what "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" means, see the movie.

Q Toon: The Plane in Ukraine

Since the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 over eastern Ukraine, apparently by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile fired by pro-Russian separatists, the Russian government and media and their minions have been working hard to supply alternative theories for the tragedy.

One of the more outlandish stories circulating on the Russian side is that MH 370, the Malaysian jet that disappeared somewhere in the Indian Ocean, was actually captured by the United States, and all its passengers and crew killed and drained of their blood, so that the U.S. could secretly have the plane full of corpses and explosives take off from the Netherlands with a crew that parachuted to safety while the plane continued on autopilot to be detonated over Donetsk. (Reported by Julia Ioffe of the New Republic.) This apparently springs from the claims of a separatist leader, Igor Girkin, quoted by the website Russkaya Vesna.

So far, Putin has tried to deflect blame onto the Ukrainian government, not teh gayz. But it's not such a stretch to imagine that he could cast aspersions our way if it suited his purposes. He previously claimed that the protesters who brought down the previous Ukraine regime are "gay nazis," and his government has done much over that past few years to criminalize gays.

✒

On another point in this cartoon, the fog of war made it difficult to nail down a number of what I chose to call "health experts" who died on their way to the HIV/AIDS conference in Austrailia. I hoped that "health experts" was general enough to include medical professionals, activists, and reporters who may only have intended to observe the conference. The initial number I heard reported was 100-- over a third of MH 17's passengers.

Subsequent reports used the vague term "dozens"; after I had sent the cartoon to my editors, I saw a report that said there were six. So I apologize for my part in perpetuating what is almost certainly an example of hyperbole borne of the heat of the moment.

QToon: Don't Fence Me In

You've probably seen the video of Maiden, North Carolina Baptist preacher Charles Worley telling his flock about his final solution to the homosexual problem:

"Build a great big, large fence — 50 or 100 miles long - and put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals - and have that fence electrified so they can't get out. Feed 'em. And you know in a few years, they'll die out. You know why? They can't reproduce."

You may also have seen Anderson Cooper's interview with Providence Road churchgoer Stacey Pritchard defending that sermon, and news reports that Worley's congregation rose up and started singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" to him the following Sunday.

Okay, okay, they just applauded. But Godwin's Law notwithstanding, it's damn near impossible to avoid the sheer Naziness of the idea of putting people behind electrified fences and watching them die off.

You see, I would never deign to suggest any such treatment of the upstanding heterosexuals of Providence Road Baptist Church of Maiden, North Carolina.

They'd surely keep on reproducing until they ran out of room to stand and electrocuted the lot of themselves.

Employment Non-Discrimination Act

ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, will come before Congress in the next week or so; this week's Q Syndicate cartoon anticipates opponents' arguments. The current fad among conservatives is to play the Nazi Card (or the Socialist Card, or both), whatever the topic is.

Now that President Obama has sign the Nazi Health Care bill into law (Nazis being well-known health care advocates), it's only a matter of time before the next Big Issue receives the same Republican-Fox-News-Teabagger treatment. If not ENDA, they'll soon be calling Immigration Reform, Nuclear Arms Treaties, or the next Supreme Court nominee to be part of the Democrats' Nazi plot to impose socialism on us all. (Or a socialist plot to impose Nazism on us all. It's so hard to keep their arguments straight.)

I heard Glenn Beck claiming the other day that Net Neutrality was a socialist plot to shut him up. Because, of course, the socialists have been anticipating for the last several years that Glenn Beck would become a Fox network star and net neutrality would somehow shut him up. I used my TV remote to shut him up well before he ever got around to explaining how he requires Net Bias to keep talking.