Thanksgiving Leftovers Already?

It's Saturday, so time to rummage through the archives and post a bunch of old cartoons; so let's get ready for Thanksgiving.

I thought I had posted a Thanksgiving retrospective of my own cartoons before this —as a matter of fact, I'm 99.44% sure I have— but I apparently didn't give the post a "Thanksgiving" tag. What the heck, then; Thanksgiving is a time for traditions, so let's just go ahead and thaw these turkeys again.

in The Chalice, Racine, Wis., 1977 or '78

This was an illustration I drew for the church newsletter sometime in the late 1970's. It might not even have been for Thanksgiving; the reference is clearly to the parable of Lazarus and Dives. But there is a turkey on the table, so, yeah, let's go with saying it's a Thanksgiving cartoon.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Nov. 2003

Here's a more traditional Thanksgiving cartoon, with pilgrims and Wampanoags and more food than you can legally shake a stick at. The story of the First Thanksgiving is acknowledged these days to be a heavily ornamented myth, but one that is firmly ingrained into American culture — and thus the setting of many a cartoon the product of cartoonists and editors needing to get over the river and through the woods with their whole family before the snow starts falling.

for Q Syndicate, Nov. 2006

I have occasionally found ways to make the traditional myths relevant to my readers of the LGBTQ+ press.

in InStep News, Milwaukee, Wis., Nov. 27-Dec. 12, 1996

 

Since Turkey Day follows so closely after Election Day, defeated candidates are an easy holiday target.

Dornan in this cartoon was flamboyantly antigay Bob Dornan (R-CA), a D-list actor elected to Congress in 1984. He publicly outed Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-WI) as gay on the floor of the House, accusing him of having "a revolving door on his closet." Dornan made a laughable stab at running for President in 1996, then lost reelection to his House seat that November. Setting the standard for a certain future presidential loser, Dornan claimed that Democrat Loretta Sanchez only won because of illegal votes cast by undocumented immigrants.

The other turkeys in the cartoon, by the way, are Republicans Mark Neumann, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Dick Armey.

for Q Syndicate, Nov. 1998

Two years later, when voters failed to reward congressional Republicans for pressing the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, I took advantage of his name to depict Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as something other than a turkey.

for Q Syndicate, Dec., 2000

Two years later, when an Arizona soup kitchen snubbed the district's Congressman, Republican Jim Kolbe because they objected to his being gay, their eventual apology opened up the opportunity to draw a Thanksgiving cartoon that departed from the usual pilgrims and turkeys.

In closing, whether you will spend your Thanksgiving celebrating with a houseful of family, or on your own over pizza or dim sum, may your holiday be healthy, happy and harmonious!

for Q Syndicate, Nov., 2018

All things being relative.

A Summer NIMBY-cue

I've been stuck in 1921 for over a month now, so lest my Saturdays turn into the Dead Cartoonists Society, allow me to catch up on the stuff I drew thirty years ago.

The UW-M Post published only two issues that summer, and there wasn't an editorial page in either of them; so I'm pretty sure that this cartoon, drawn when President George H.W. Bush replaced the Supreme Court's African-American civil rights lion with an African-American civil rights dog-in-the-manger, was never published. I did, however, get a few cartoons published in the Racine Journal Times over the summer of 1991.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., June 23, 1991

Wisconsin nearly lost a congressional seat in the 1990 census, threatening the end of the congressional career of one of the state's nine representatives: Les Aspin (D-WI1), Scott Klug (R-WI2), Steve Gunderson (R-WI3), Gerry Kleczka, (D-WI4), Jim Moody (D-WI5), Tom Petri (R-WI6), David Obey (D-WI7), Toby Roth (R-WI8), and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI9). 

Wisconsin narrowly escaped the cut in 1990, only to lose one of the the two Milwaukee seats after the 2000 census. Of these nine congressmen, only Kleczka, Petri, Obey, and Sensenbrenner were still in Congress by then. The last of the nine to leave Congress was Sensenbrenner, in January of this year.

There is nothing particularly original about my cartoon, although I do like how I incorporated the 1990 census's logo onto the record album.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., June 30, 1991

The rest of these cartoons were drawn about local issues and thus will require a bit of explaining. There was a proposal at the time to reroute and widen Wisconsin State Highway 38, a two-lane roadway between Racine and Milwaukee. For about three curvy miles, it dips in and out of creek valleys, so there are very few opportunities to pass if one should come up behind a slow driver. Joining up with County Trunk Highway G for an east-west mile, it passes through the unincorporated intersection of Husher, Wisconsin, notorious as little more than a speed trap. Tabor, on the other hand, doesn't even have a sign to mark where it is.

I put the distance to the 38-G exit in kilometers to indicate that the image was sometime in the future, but obviously I had no clue what cars of the future were going to look like...aside from that Smart Car at top center. (You may have noticed how far into the future they lasted.) No matter. Neither metric conversion nor the Highway 38 "Lake Arterial" have come to pass.

Yet.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., August 4, 1991

A proposed sludge drying site in Mount Pleasant also sparked a lot of opposition from its would-be neighbors, to nobody's surprise. It's a dirty job that has to be done; you can't just let sludge build up in the sewer system and wastewater treatment systems. After humankind discovered that just dumping the stuff in our rivers, lakes, and oceans was a terrible idea, we had to come up with something else. And no, shooting it all into outer space is not the solution.

Step one, apparently, is to rename sludge "biosolids."

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., August 12, 1991

When drawing cartoons critical of NIMBYism, I am mindful that one of the earlier Lake Arterial proposals had it running quite literally through my parents' back yard.

As illustrated by the Foxconn deal (their Potemkin factory now easily visible from my back yard), the lesson learned by the present leadership of Mount Pleasant has been to work in secret and only let the public know about a controversial project after it's too late to object to it.

Gonna Cartoon Like It's 1991

Our Saturday flashback will begin after this brief public service announcement.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 1, 1991

For today, I'm just going to dig up some of my old cartoons from 30 years ago this month. This selection of cartoons from a generation ago is more or less random. Here is probably the one and only cartoon I have ever drawn about Albania.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 4, 1991

Remember when we could ridicule foreign countries for their elections? Oh, what good times those were.

But there were serious issues back then, too. Crime was a big deal, and there was serious talk of Congress doing something about guns. The Brady Bill, named after the Press Secretary for President Ronald Reagan who was seriously wounded in the assassination attempt on the president ten years earlier, included a provision requiring a seven-day "cooling off" period for the purchase of a firearm, in part so that a serious background check could be run before the weapon changed hands. And the National Rifle Association was seriously alarmed that the bill might pass. I'm serious.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., April 11, 1991

The U.S. government started collecting data on hate crimes in 1991, although by the end of the decade, half of local authorities were not complying with the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990. Democrats proposed additional hate crimes legislation in the 102nd Congress, which failed to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

UW-M Post, April 16, 1991

I misdated the above cartoon and for years had a photocopy of it in the wrong folder in my files. (The original had disappeared from the Post offices by the time I delivered my cartoon for the April 18 issue.) Only after trying to find it in the UW-M Post on line archives when I was putting together another one of these retrospective posts last year did I discover my mistake. 

Maybe the original got sucked into a temporal anomaly.

Anyway, a letter writer to the Post had quoted then Congressman Thomas Petri as having answered question about gay-bashing by boasting, "I was one of the ones who voted against legalization of homosexuality. It's wrong. You know, you do have to set some standards." The other Wisconsin Congressman in the cartoon, Jim Sensenbrenner (who just retired Congress this January), was then and remained until retirement opposed to federal hate crimes legislation to protect LGBTQ citizens.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 25, 1991

A generation ago, the nation was bracing itself for a high-profile trial of Los Angeles police officers accused of brutality against a Black man. Sgt. Stacey Koon and officers Theodore Briseno, Laurence Powell and Timothy Wind were indicted on March 15 for beating and kicking Rodney King, who had attempted to flee a traffic stop and had led them on a high-speed chase, on March 3. The assault, which continued well after King was lying on the ground, was filmed by George Holliday, a resident of the apartment building where King had finally stopped his car.

 

A year later, a jury found all four officers innocent of almost all charges (the jury failed to reach an agreement on one excessive force charge against one of the officers), sparking five days of rioting in L.A.

We now have another high-profile chance to see whether things have changed at all a generation later.

I'll have some more cartoons to share from 1991, but for now, let's break for another word from our sponsors.

in UW-M Post, April 30, 1991