Hold My Hand And I'll Take You There

Welcome aboard today's Graphical History Tour, offering a self-serving selection of my own cartoons from Mays in years ending in -five.

Since Grifter-in-Chief Donald Frequent Flyer Trump has just returned from the Arabian peninsula with his very own private pleasure dome in the sky, our first stop is deep in the heart of Texas, twenty years ago:

for Q Syndicate, May, 2005

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Crawford Ranch (in April, actually), and Americans were taken aback seeing our president holding the crown prince's hand as they walked to Casa de Dubya.

This was less than four years after 9/11, and it was well known that several of the terrorists who took over the planes were Saudi nationals. But the Bush administration had committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and needed acquiescence of the other powers in the region.

It Abdullah, who reigned as the Saudi King from August, 2005 until his death in January of 2015, is an uncle of the present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., May 2, 1985

Skipping back another twenty years: West Wing staffers regard meetings with foreign heads of state as an opportunity to burnish a president's stature as a world leader. But even carefully planned events can misfire.

President Ronald Reagan had come under criticism after a meeting of the G-7 in West Germany. To mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl persuaded Reagan aides to schedule a side trip to a cemetery in Bitburg where some 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff made a preliminary visit to the cemetery in February, where he failed to notice 49 grave markers for members of the Waffen-SS.

Politicians and Jewish leaders in Europe and the U.S. urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg trip; instead the White House added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Reagan's itinerary. A spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke for those not mollified: “By entering Bitburg, [Reagan and Kohl] desecrate the memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at Belsen.”

By the way, the "584" marker by my signature was my mistake. May is kind of late to still be writing the previous year on cartoons, checks, and other documents — especially since I didn't have old age as an excuse forty years ago.

Let's come forward to 1995 and some domestic issues:

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, May 4, 1995

Politicians have been telling us for more than thirty years that Medicare and Social Security are heading to hell in a handbasket. The Republican plan has been to get rid of them entirely without getting rid of them at all — basically by making the benefits from them smaller and smaller and more difficult to get.

At the same time, they stoke seniors' resentment of paying taxes for schools well after their own children have walked away with diplomas funded by senior citizens of earlier generations.

for bergetoons.blogspot.com, the internet, May, 2015

Jumping ahead to May of 2015, we return to the Lone Star State, where conspiracy fabulists were all hot and bothered about a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" — which apparently enlisted Walmart basements in a secret government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor and report the nefarious activities of them darn Yankees.

At the same time, the Texas legislature passed a law preventing localities from regulating fracking, but what is really at issue here is this: Governor Abbott has had ten fracking years to get to the bottom of this "Jade Helm" conspiracy, most of them with the full backing and support of Republicans and Qanoncompoops in charge of the federal government.

And somehow he has failed to reveal anything about the Jade Helm Conspiracy.

Which can only mean one thing: Texas Governor Greg Abbott is himself part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Texas!

More on this story as it continues failing to develop.

Q Toon: The Eternal Sunshine of the Smoochless Screen

Because the director of the Marvel superheroes flick Eternals would not cut a scene of Phastos kissing his husband, authorities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have banned the movie from being shown.

Apparently Director Chloe Zhao wasn't able to stop that scene — and others depicting heterosexual intimacy as well — from being cut from versions shown in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. The film had been scheduled for release in the Middle East today.

Phastos is played by Brian Tyree Henry; his husband, Ben, is played by Haaz Sleiman, a Lebanese immigrant to the U.S. who came out as gay in 2017.

At the “Eternals” world premiere last month, Sleiman spoke passionately about how much representation and visibility matter. “Beyond a dream come true, it’s lifesaving,” he told me. “I wish I had that when I was a kid, to see this. My god. I wish! Can you imagine how many lives this is going to be saving — kids, young queer folk, who are being bullied, committing suicide and not seeing themselves being represented? And now they get to see this — it’s above and beyond.”

Henry has apparently been less involved in the promotion of the film, at least as far as discussing his character is concerned, but he did offer this during a press conference last month:

“I remember when I was coming to this project that I, Brian, had kind of lost faith in humanity, just looking at all the things that we’ve been through and just what the images of Black men were and how we’re being portrayed and how the power was taken from us, the lack of power or feeling powerful,” Henry said. “What I really loved the most about Phastos is that through all of that — him being eternal, him never being able to die — he still chose love. He still decided to have a family, even though he may have to watch them perish. He still tried to find a way to bring heart and love to everything he did, even though his genius was used against him. It just really resonated a lot with how I felt my place in society was. How we can be kings and queens, and at the same time, they’ll take our pedestal and take our superpowers from us like that. So what I love the most about ‘Eternals’ is that Chloe and [producer] Nate [Moore] just re-instilled that power back in me again.”

The film has received tepid reviews from professional critics, and was "review-bombed" by garden-variety trolls on imdb.com so heavily prior to its release that site had to deactivate its reviews section. I haven't been watching the Marvel superhero films (or the recent DC Comics ones either, for that matter), so I'm afraid I wouldn't know whether this is a worthy addition to the franchise or not.

All I know is, we've been seeing heterosexual superheroes, even the ones from distant planets, locking lips with earthlings of the opposite sex for decades now, and nobody seems to have complained that it was a distraction from the plot.

Except, I guess, the Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Emiratis. 

Q Toon: Phoning It In

In a surprise move last week, the Corrupt Trump Administration announced a campaign to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.

The announcement was particularly curious, given Trump's cozy relationship with some especially bad actors on LGBTQ rights around the world (the U.S. voted with them last year against a U.N. resolution against capital punishment for consensual same-sex activity), and with the antigay right in this country.

True, he did promise at the 2016 Republican National Convention to "do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens" — he even included the Q in the acronym. But he also included the T, yet has singled out transgender Americans for sustained hostility and discrimination.

Trump's promise then was a swipe at Islam, and, according to former Trump flack Sean Spicer, a bone thrown to persuade one convention delegate to withdraw his name from a "Never Trump" petition:

The final name that needed to be scrubbed from the petition, Spicer writes [in The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President], was that of Washington, D.C., delegate Robert Sinners. The book describes an alleged deal between Sinners, who Spicer says told the Manafort team “he wanted Donald Trump to support gay rights,” and senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller.
“Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes....
Sinners then reportedly signed “a form that officially removed his name from the petition,” and the deal was done.

The new campaign appears to be the pet project of Richard Grenell, Trump's Ambassador to Germany (who is also in the running to be named Ambassador to the United Nations). Grenell is a disciple of National Security Adviser John Bolton; his name showed up in my blog in 2012 when Mitt Romney dropped him as a foreign policy adviser as a sop to religious right-wingers alarmed that Grenell is openly gay.

Grenell cites the recent execution in Iran of a man accused of being gay as the impetus for the campaign:

Grenell called the hanging “a wake-up call for anyone who supports basic human rights,” in Bild, a leading German newspaper, this month.

“This is not the first time the Iranian regime has put a gay man to death with the usual outrageous claims of prostitution, kidnapping, or even pedophilia. And it sadly won’t be the last time,” Grenell wrote. “Barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalized and punishable by flogging and death.”

As much as it is heartening to see our government standing up for LGBTQ rights in Iran, it is hard to imagine the Corrupt Trump Administration doing the same for LGBTQ rights in Saudi Arabia, where LGBTQ relationships are also "criminalized and punishable by flogging and death." After all, Trump could barely scrape up any trace of disappoval of the Saudis' murder of openly heterosexual journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Nor have we heard much from him about antigay repression in Russia, especially the disappearance, torture and murder of hundreds of LGBTQ Chechens.

As with virtually everything else about life in North Korea, we know precious little about the plight of its LGBTQ citizens; a gay defector last year painted a picture of oppression and forced denial. Homosexuality isn't technically illegal there; but as in any totalitarian country, the government can label anything "contrary to a socialist lifestyle," "obscene," or "decadent" as an excuse to prosecute whomever it wants.

It's a safe bet that safeguarding the rights of LGBTQ Koreans did not come up in conversations between Kim and Trump in Vietnam this week. Rather, the Corrupt Trump Administration's sole concern in LGBTQ rights anywhere is their usefulness as a wedge between western European liberalism and the Iranian theocracy.

Trump has not been able to persuade other signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to join him in abrogating the agreement, in which Iran promised to limit its nuclear activities and to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their compliance, in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Without European cooperation, Trump has no leverage to force some presumably more punitive deal on Iran.

So is he just being clever, calculating that liberal western politicians would rather go back to Square One on Iran's nuclear ambitions (even as nuclear powers India and Pakistan have begun shooting at each other) than to appear antigay? Maybe.

Or maybe not.

News reports this week suggest that, contrary to my cartoon, Vice President Mike Pence is more aware of the administration's brand new policy than President Trump himself is.

A reporter asked Trump about the global initiative, which is being spearheaded by U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest ranking openly gay person in the Trump administration.
At first, Trump seemed not to understand the question, asking the reporter to repeat it.
“Say it?” Trump said.
When the reporter referenced the push to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe, Trump professed unawareness and said something about reports in his administration.
“I don’t know which report you’re talking about,” Trump said. “We have many reports.”

Seven and Seven

In belated honor of yesterday having been 7/7/17, Septback Saturday brings you a sampling of stuff I drew in July of 1987, 1997 and 2007.

In July of 1987, Congress was investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. In case that's ancient history to you, the Reagan administration was caught having sold arms to Iran, in violation of an embargo against that country since the hostage affair of 1979-81, and using the money from those sales to surreptitiously fund the right-wing militias fighting the government of Nicaragua.

This was America's introduction to Lt. Col. Oliver North, then an aide to the National Security Council, who was the guy who proposed the Iran-Contra link, and destroyed vital documents as the affair became exposed. Adopting an air of indignant moral impeccability, the future Fox News commentator insisted upon wearing his army uniform and medals when testifying before Congress, and pretty much whenever he appeared in public.

I was freelancing cartoons on local topics for the Racine Journal Times in those days. Cartoons involving court cases are usually unwelcome, but this one skirted the issue of prematurely convicting the accused. The particulars of the case hardly matter for the understanding of the cartoon thirty years later; in fact, I have no recollection whatsoever of how the case was adjudicated.

Ten years later, I was drawing for two Milwaukee newspapers. I illustrated the editorials of The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee; here's one on one of the few topics that needs no explanation — although it might be useful to recall that in Bill Clinton's first term, he had put Vice President Al Gore in charge of a commission to review and streamline government regulation of business. You can pretty accurately imagine the Beej editorial on your own.

The other paper I drew for back then was a now-defunct biweekly, In Step, serving Wisconsin's LGBTQ community. Again, I doubt that this cartoon from July, 1997 requires any explanation.

Twenty years later, we're still waiting for Mickey Mouse to suffer an almighty smite.

Now, had I drawn this cartoon for the Journal Times, there would no doubt have been reader complaints that I was attacking religion. (Had I drawn it for the Business Journal, there would have been editor complaints that this wasn't what his editorial was about.) But at In Step, I was preaching to the choir — if you'll pardon the expression.

Finally, I'll circle back to another Fox News personality with this cartoon from July of 2007 featuring one Mr. Bill O'Reilly. We derisively called it Faux News back then — the precursor of Trumplestiltskin's "Fake News" epithet for all the other channels, newspapers and magazines.

Which brings up a topic having very little to do with this cartoon, but which has been bothering me lately. For all the media outrage at the .gif Mr. Trump tweeted showing him beating up a guy whose face is covered by a CNN logo, American media have been largely and curiously silent about the hamfisted efforts of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to force Qatar to shut down the Al Jazeera news network.

While not all complaints against Al Jazeera are baseless (concerning an allegation that an Egyptian president was an Israeli agent, for example), freedom of the press has got to be respected. It's one thing to call the integrity of Fox's Bill O'Reilly on the one hand, or CBS's Dan Rather on the other; it's quite another for any government to insist that someone else's government shut down the entire network.

Here's a Saudi Do

Donald Joffrey Trump's first foreign trip abroad, surprisingly, was not to Russia. Can you believe it?

No, his first stop was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he somehow managed to go the entire trip without tweeting that his hosts were fostering Radical Islamic Terrorism. Trump did advise the Saudis and an auditorium full of leaders of Islamic nations that they needed to drive the terrorists out of their countries. (Just don't drive them into ours.)

It is hard to see how these Islamic countries are to make any headway in stopping terrorism if their rulers do not lead by example. Their state-sponsored terrorism includes the persecution of their own LGBTQ citizens. Arrest, public whipping, torture, and execution -- whether by the state itself or the state encouraging family members to handle it -- is meant to terrorize the LGBTQ out of existence.

We know that Egyptian President Sisi was in the audience, since he was in that bizarre photo with Trump, King Salman touching the Glowing Orb. I don't know if Indonesian president Widodo, or Afghanistan's President Ghani, or Pakistani President Hussain, or Chechen President Kadyrov were there. We do know that newly reelected Iranian President Rouhani was not present.

It's not just a Muslim thing, of course. Antigay state-sponsored terrorism is practiced and in Nigeria and several other African countries. And, it has to be noted, Trump's BFF Putin was persecuting LGBTQs in Russia well before Mr. Kadyrov took up the cudgel.

This Week's Sneak Peek

A reader commented on yesterday's cartoon of Sheriff Clarke, asking whether I were "Planning on a follow-up, celebrating Clarke's 'masterful' plagiarism."

CNN reported that Clarke plagiarized portions of his 2013 masters thesis on US security, but the charge itself is rather wonky.

Clarke lifts language from sources and credits them with a footnote, but does not indicate with quotation marks that he is taking the words verbatim.
According to guidelines on plagiarism posted on the Naval Postgraduate School's website, "If a passage is quoted verbatim, it must be set off with quotation marks (or, if it is a longer passage, presented as indented text), and followed by a properly formulated citation. The length of the phrase does not matter. If someone else's words are sufficiently significant to be worth quoting, then accurate quotation followed by a correct citation is essential, even if only a few words are involved."

So in answer to the question, I'll keep this in mind, but failure to use quotation marks isn't likely to make me rush to the drawing board. There are plenty of worse things in Clarke's record.

Q Toon: Q Wait

Kuwait has announced that it and other gulf emirates will institute medical test procedures to stop gays from entering their countries.

"Health centers conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries; however, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states." -- Yousouf Mindkar, Director of Public Health at the Kuwaiti Health Ministry

Aside from Kuwait, the GCC member states are Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and 2022 World Cup host Qatar. There is already pressure to move the World Cup over this issue.

Meanwhile, how exactly the Kuwaitis intend to screen for The Gay has yet to be revealed. Those intrepid animators at Taiwanese News depict these medical test procedures as being even more invasive than I dared to.