Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.

Q Toon: An Aaron Judgment

In an episode of a podcast called "Look Into It" hosted by conspiracy fabulist Eddie Bravo, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in cahoots with the Center for Disease Control and the federal government, was responsible for exacerbating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980's and repeated their strategy with COVID-19.

I don't care to link to the February 23 podcast itself, which is behind a paywall anyway; but this little germ from the three-hour episode escaped the lab last week and went viral on Xitter:

"The blueprint was created in the '80's: create a pandemic, you know, with a virus that's goin' wild. Right? Only — he was given — Fauci was given, like, over $350 million dollars to research this, come up with drug that was new or repurposed to handle the AIDS pandemic, and all they came up with was AZT. And if you do any smidge of research — and I know, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an immunologist, whatever the fuck — I can read, though, right? — right — I can look things up and I can learn just like any normal person, you know, I can do my own research, which is so vilified, you know, to even question authority — but that was the game plan back then: create an environment where only one thing works. Back then, AZT. Now, rembisivir, remdesivir, until we get a vaccine. Which, by the way, Anthony Fauci had stake in rembirvi vaccine."

Rodgers was repeating false claims by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that the CDC suppressed all sorts of supposed cures in order that favored yet fatal medical treatments would hold a monopoly on the HIV/AIDS/COVID market. These claims have been debunked by PolitiFact (and if you're into doing your own research, there are dozens of sources cited at the end of that post).

Dan Wilson, senior associate scientist at Janssen and host of the YouTube show “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson,” said Kennedy’s retelling of the AZT history was “dead wrong.”

Kennedy and Rodgers were “repeating a form of HIV/AIDS denialism, where antiretroviral drugs are said to be ineffective against progression of the virus,” Wilson said. In reality, he said, AZT “was the first time that doctors could do something to help people who (were) wasting away and dying painful deaths.”

Now, I'm all in favor of doing one's own research. It's incumbent upon any responsible editorial cartoonist to check into the veracity of things before whipping off a cartoon about whatever one just heard from a talking head on TV or read in some piece of Xeet on Xitter.

But one must be aware that the internet is programmed to give you confirmation bias. If you google "aliens built pyramids," you will get hundreds of links to articles positing that aliens built the pyramids. (Well, of course they did. Having spent decades traveling light years to visit the only flat planet in the universe, what else were they to do?)

But returning to the topic at hand: As a devoted Green Bay Packers fan, I'm saddened to see Aaron Rodgers follow the Brett Favre playbook of going to the Jets only to becoming a huge embarrassment to everyone who ever rooted for him. The guy is, or at least has been, a bright, intelligent fellow; remember how he whipped Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary's and astronaut Mark Kelly's butts on Jeopardy! in spite of getting the Final Jeopardy clue about Harley Davidson wrong? You can't credit that to clicker reflexes alone!

That was nine years ago, however; and perhaps it's true that he has been knocked to the turf a couple times since then.

But over his years with the NFL, he has gotten pretty full of himself. In his last years with the Packers, he didn't deign to pre-season practice with the rest of the team, meaning that new receivers and running backs spent half a season getting used to his habits and rhythms. And it showed.

Please, Lord, let Jordan Love model himself after Bart Starr instead.

AYBOTYWFYA

Most of my Graphical History Tours of vintage cartoons take us back a hundred years, occasionally fifty. When I dig through my own work, we go back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years.

But the Big Question facing us today is this: Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?

In no presidential election year since FDR has the answer to that question been so stark.

Perhaps you remember March of 2020.

I have very personal reasons for continuing to be upset by the advent of COVID-19: after cancelling regular visits to my parents out of concern about potentially exposing them to the virus, I soon reversed that decision when Mom's cancer returned, and she chose to forgo further treatment.

Waiting in vain for the outside world's crisis to end, we had to postpone her funeral for month after month after she passed.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2020

There are a million other such stories out there, but now you know where I was coming from.

At first, Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the U.S. government response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Center for Disease Control's Dr.  Fauci, well-known in the LGBTQ+ community as one of the early responders to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980's, became familiar to millions of Americans as a leading authority on how "novel viruses" spread and what is involved in creating a vaccine.

for Q Syndicate, March 2020

By the time this cartoon appeared anywhere, hair salons were already shutting down. As were schools, houses of worship, movie theatres, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, late night talk shows, and — at the height of the presidential primaries — campaign rallies and polling places.

So too was Q Syndicate. Its client publications, dependent on advertising from businesses that were shutting down, suspended publishing, meaning there was nobody to whom to sell my cartoons. 

Turning now to the sports page:

March Madness (the NCAA basketball version) was cancelled five days before the games were scheduled to start. Major League Baseball cut the pre-season short and put the regular season on indefinite hold. (When the MLB season finally opened in July, games were played at first to empty stands and later to cardboard cut-outs.)

Daily newspapers had no news for the sports section other than speculating what teams might have won or lost if they hadn't sent everybody home. I don't know how ESPN, Fox Sports, and all the Tennis/Golf/Soccer/NASCAR/Poker channels managed to fill 24 hours of air time every day; even the ten minutes allotted to sports in every local TV news program seemed a lot to compose.

But they managed to do so anyway.

In spite of having no publisher, I kept drawing cartoons, if only to keep in practice.

And to vent. Venting was vital. It still is.

Gun nuts weren't the only people stockpiling.

Anticipating a breakdown of the nation's supply chain, Americans stocked up on whatever was rumored to be on the verge of short supply — a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started with toilet paper and quickly moved on to bottled water, hand sanitizer, PPE masks, flour, yeast, and even bicycles.

Vice President Pence more or less disappeared from view once Donald Trump started taking the podium at the nearly daily announcements to the media and the nation on the pandemic. The problem with that, of course, is that Trump seems to believe that anything he wants to be the truth can be true if he but says it aloud.

So he stated firmly that the pandemic would be over in time for Easter. "Like a miracle."

Reporters would then ask questions of the health experts standing beside him, who had to come up with ways of telling the nation that the President didn't know what he was talking about without saying that the President didn't know what he was talking about.

What mattered more to Donald Trump was that, while he was starved of the adulation of adoring crowds at campaign rallies, he could crow on Twitter that his press conferences were "a ratings hit" with "'Monday Night Football' numbers."

The pandemic was not under control by Easter. People who still had jobs were still working from home. People whose jobs disappeared couldn't go out in search of new employment. Assisted living facilities closed their doors to all visitors. Soon only hospital emergency rooms were busy. And morgues...

We all remember it, don't we?

Don't we?

This Week's Sneak Peek

I've finished Terry Mosher's Aislin's Favourite COVID Cartoons from Around the World, and while I continue to give it an enthusiastic thumbs up, I do have to caution that the Montreal cartoonist does not provide an English translation for the French language cartoons.

I rarely get to use my high school and college French — the one time that comes to mind was when our luggage was misdirected in a Nice hotel — so I didn't mind the lack of Québecois-to-English translation in Aislin's book. Your experience may vary.

The Knee Jerk Review of Books

Your humble scribbler couldn't go to this month's convention of the AAEC without coming home with a couple of books (what, only two this time?), so instead of the usual Graphical History Tour today, I herewith present my highly amateurish book review.

The cover

I spotted May It Amuse the Court: Editorial Cartoons of the Supreme Court (H.L. Pohlman and Michael A. Kahn, Hill Street Press) in the bookstore at the Cartoon Art Museum and knew right away that I would have to buy it. The fellow manning the register told me that one of the authors was supposed to have attended our opening reception but had been unable to make it.

I have editorial cartoon books that focus on presidents, on foreign policy, or on specific wars; this is the only one I've seen devoted to the Court and the Constitution. The text is generously illustrated with editorial cartoons dating back to the mid-19th Century. Thankfully, most of those early cartoons are well-reproduced, considering that many of the original drawings no longer exist.

From the book: "Waiting" by James Albert Wales in Puck, April 20, 1881

Each chapter focuses on a specific constitutional issue: for example, the Civil War constitutional amendments, labor law, women's suffrage, Prohibition, New Deal legislation, and mid-20th-Century civil rights. The chapters are presented chronologically, but the chronology of the cartoons overlap from one chapter to the next.

The book came out in 2005, so there are some chapters that deserve updating — particularly the one on abortion rights — and there is only passing mention of LGBTQ+ rights. Certainly Republicans' denying President Barack Obama his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court nearly a year before the 2016 election and then ramming Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett through barely over a month before the 2020 election in order to pack the court with a right-wing supermajority should merit a new chapter.

If an updated edition ever comes about, there are a few cartoonists from past eras whose names need correction: Winsor McCay is in the book as Winsor Mecay; John Cassel is misidentified as Ino Cassals. Other cartoonists whose signatures are difficult to read, such as Al Frueh and Edwin Marcus, aren't identified at all. Of course, many of the earliest cartoons are unsigned and essentially anonymous. Properly and consistently crediting the rest would be an improvement. An index listing of the cartoonists would also be helpful, as would an index of the several court cases referenced by name in the text.

The authors' habit of describing each cartoon within the text becomes a little grating over the course of the book. Useful when discussing some of the more difficult-to-read and obscure cartoons in the earliest chapters, it seems superfluous in the later ones. Perhaps not in the audio book, if there is one.

Those are minor complaints I have, which I mention at the risk of dissuading someone from seeking out the book — well, that's the trouble with quibbles. 

On balance, I can heartily recommend Pohlman and Kahn's work to anyone interested in cartooning, the Supreme Court, or constitutional law.

From the cover of Terry Mosher's book

The other book I brought home was Terry "Aislin" Mosher's Aislin's Favourite COVID Cartoons from Around the World. Mosher was giving away signed copies of his book, originally published to raise funds for Community Healthcare in his hometown of Montréal. The cartoonists in this 336-page collection all donated their work for the cause.

I would gladly have donated a cartoon or two if I had been asked. For that matter, I would gladly have paid for this book ($30CDN).

I've read less than a third of the book so far, but it's a wonderful sampling of cartoons about the pandemic representing Canada, the U.S., China, Israel, Iran, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Philippines, Mexico, Mosher's native Canada, and many more.

Uncaptioned, by Ilya Katz, Israel

What is not represented, quite intentionally as Mosher told us, are cartoonists who are COVID skeptics, antivaxxers, and conspiracy fabulists. Their opinions may eventually be of interest to future generations marveling at the hysteria of our own, but they have no place in a book dedicated to health care professionals who have been at the front lines throughout the crisis.

✍

Daily Cartoonist reported last night the death of British cartoonist Tony Husband, whose book America in Cartoons I reviewed here six years ago. (The link to his books at my 2017 posting is broken; Daily Cartoonist has a better one.)

My review of America in Cartoons lamented that there was nothing about Watergate or the impeachment of President Clinton in it; the Pohlman & Kahn book reviewed today has chapters on both.

Cheap Shots with a Ten-Foot Poll

In last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I shared a few cartoons and illustrations I drew 40 years ago in April of 1982. I had almost included one from April of 1992, but I decided to give that month a post of its own today.

I'll start out with one that drew a couple of complaints.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., April 8, 1992

Religious fundamentalists were upset that the Racine Health Department had begun offering free condoms in response to the AIDS crisis. For years, health advocates had been urgently recommending that men who had sex with men must use condoms every time. Although some in the gay community reacted with the same attitude we've seen in the past two years toward face masks, the absence of any treatment for HIV/AIDS in 1992 made a lot of sense to the rest.

Antigay puritans, however, argued that condoms are less than 100% effective — and that was without guys wearing their condoms down around their nuts instead of up where they're of any use. As far as the Just Keep Saying No crowd were concerned, total abstinence was the only prophylactic that was 100% effective and therefore the only one worth considering.

Just like how abstaining from breathing is 100% effective against transmission of COVID-19.

A frequent denizen of the Journal Times's Letters to the Editor section (he had just had another letter, "Condoms Cause AIDS," in the paper two days earlier) recognized my caricature of the gentleman leading the opposition to the health department program.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 17, 1992

There was another letter, very much like Mr. Brook's, sent in by parents of a friend of a friend. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 13, 1992

When I was a kid, I had occasionally subbed for their son delivering the Sunday morning Milwaukee Journal, with which there always seemed to be one supply problem or another. The worst was when the delivery truck had left 75 extra copies of the classified ad sections instead of 75 copies of the news sections. This was in the days when cell phones were the thing of science fiction, so I had to schlep a third of a mile back to my house to call the circulation department, which never answered their phone at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday.

At any rate, I don't owe the Pfeiffers any favors.

✍

Nationally, the major story for the month (prior to the Rodney King riots 30 years ago yesterday) was the presidential primary election season grinding to a close.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., April 6, 1992

On the Democratic side, the contest had come down to two former governors: Jerry Brown of California and Bill Clinton of Arkansas. President George Bush had clinched the Republican nomination and polled ahead of either Democrat, even though fascist-wing Pat Buchanan was doggedly refusing to do the Republican thing and fall in line behind him.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 9, 1992

By the time the Wisconsin primary was over — well, I hesitate to say Bill Clinton was the "favorite" for the nomination, because there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm around the former Arkansas governor. He had issues with marital infidelity (an issue that had dashed Gary Hart's presidential ambitions four years earlier) and collegiate marijuana use (still a disqualifying consideration for a sizeable chunk of the voting-age population). He had mighty lame excuses for both.

Furthermore, the central issue of his campaign, aside from personal ambition, was a mild repudiation of the Democratic Party liberal ideals. Its "third way" smörgåsbord of fiscal conservatism and social progressivism was meant to appeal to middle-of-the-road moderates — that ambiguous slice of the American electorate who famously don't really get enthusiastic about politics.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 27, 1992

Then, just as the news media began wondering what they were supposed to report on with the party conventions still a couple months away, along came billionaire H. Ross Perot, dropping loud hints that he might perhaps consider thinking about mulling whether to make himself available for a third-party run for the presidency.

Q Toon: Set in Boldface Hype

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), a leader in his party's fight against the fight against global pandemics, was on Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade's podcast on World AIDS Day last week. He acknowledged the occasion by accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, of exaggerating the danger from COVID-19 as well as from HIV/AIDS.

“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it,” Johnson told Kilmeade.

“He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population when it couldn’t,” Johnson said, without citing scientific evidence. “And he’s doing, he’s using the exact same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine.”

Update: And now, Johnson has told a "town-hall" phone call, “By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?” Do I really need to tell you that no medical professional or mouthwash company agrees with him?

Anti-vaxxer Johnson should, by all rights, be an embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin, except that there are vast expanses of the state where folks think that a background in business entitles one to spew bullshit at will. PolitiFact has no problem coming up with over a dozen "Mostly False" to "Pants On Fire" statements by him.

In March, he told radio host Joe "Pags" Pagliano that the Capitol rioters on January 6 "were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law. Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned."

And, yes, he doesn't think January 6 was an armed insurrection, but he does want Hunter Biden investigated.

✍

Johnson hasn't yet announced whether he'll run for a third term next year, although his full-throated endorsement of Trumpism, conspiracy nonsense, and COVID denial has convinced other Republicans to stay out of the race. On the other side of the primary ballot, twelve Democrats to date have launched campaigns to unseat him.

Democrats think Johnson's is the one Republican Senate seat they can flip in 2022, and a group called "Opportunity Wisconsin" has been advertising heavily here all year urging us to tell him to stop doing bad things. For much of the fall, its ads starred a former employee of Hufcor blaming Johnson for a tax break that rewarded Hufcor for moving overseas. The current TV ad features a navy submarine veteran accusing Johnson of voting for tax cuts that resulted in Johnson doubling his wealth.

The Opportunity Wisconsin ad blitz started last February by telling Johnson to stop blocking COVID-19 relief checks. No wonder he thinks the pandemic has been overhyped — relief checks only encourage people not to work. Tax cuts encourage employers to lay them off.

✍

Meanwhile, here are the facts about HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, just in case anyone out there actually thinks they have been overhyped:

New HIV infections have been reduced by 52% since the peak in 1997. 

• In 2020, around 1.5 million [1.0 million–2.0 million] people were newly infected with HIV, compared to 3.0 million [2.1 million–4.2 million] people in 1997.
• 37.7 million [30.2 million–45.1 million] people globally were living with HIV in 2020.
• 79.3 million [55.9 million–110 million] people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic.
• 36.3 million [27.2 million–47.8 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.
  

AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by 64% since the peak in 2004 and by 47% since 2010.

• In 2020, around 680,000 [480,000–1 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.9 million [1.3 million–2.7 million] people in 2004 and 1.3 million [910,000–1.9 million] people in 2010.

People living with HIV experience more severe outcomes and have higher comorbidities from COVID-19 than people not living with HIV. In mid-2021, most people living with HIV did not have access to COVID-19 vaccines.

• Studies from England and South Africa have found that the risk of dying from COVID-19 among people with HIV was double that of the general population.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is home to two thirds (67%) of people living with HIV. But the COVID-19 vaccines that can protect them are not arriving fast enough. In July 2021, less than 3% of people in Africa had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

And here is the death toll from COVID-19, as of last night:

5,294,887 deaths worldwide; 813,904 in the U.S.

In just two years. 

 

Relax!

 It may be roughing the quarterback to pile on when he's down, but....

I don't think there are too many people out there to whom I need to explain this news item: Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers was pulled from Sunday's football game after testing positive for COVID-19. This after teammates Davante Adams, Allen Lazard, and Malik Taylor were placed on the "reserve/COVID-19" list in October.

You can't keep 6' (2m) distance between players in American football, so the National Football League has devised supposedly strict protocols to keep COVID-19 from spreading like wildfire among them; and it now appears that Rodgers has been flouting those protocols. Asked at a press conference last summer whether he had been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Rodgers claimed "Yeah, I'm immunized" — a weasel word nobody caught at the time.

Rodgers now claims that he couldn't take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because his doctors told him he was allergic to some ingredient in them, and that he (like many others once a Michigan woman died from a rare complication after receiving the J&J vaccine last April) didn't trust the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Rodgers is within his rights under NFL protocols not to get vaccinated, for whatever reason he fancies, but those protocols require unvaccinated players to wear a mask at press conferences and on the sideline at games, to travel separately from the rest of the team, and not to mingle socially with more than three fellow NFL team members at a time.

Rodgers has violated just about every one of those rules.

Rodgers went on Pat McAfee's podcast to complain that he's the unfair victim of a cancel culture woke mob that refused to get vaccinated when Donald Trump was president. (I don't remember things that way, unless we're talking about Trump's recommendations to ingest bleach and shine light up our butts.) Rodgers explained that he is under the expert medical care of former Surgeon General Joe Rogan and has been declared completely free of horse worms.

Rodgers's robust popularity in Packerland has been sacked in its own end zone since all of this came out; a Madison medical clinic has dropped Rodgers as its commercial spokesjock, and, judging from the ads on Sunday's game, Jake from State Farm appears to be pivoting away from offering a Rodgers Rate, too.

I can't speak for the hit on Rodgers's popularity within the sizeable base of anti-vaxxer Trump l'oeilists in Packerland, of course.

I suspect that those people are convinced that the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs yesterday.

Bigly.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Happy Canadian Thankscoming Indigenous National Pope Columbus Out John Giving XXIII Day, Peoples! Here's a bit of the preliminary pencil roughs from my sketchbook over the weekend.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists held our annual convention by Zoom on Friday and Saturday, and I was able to take in a bit of it for a change. It was good to have exchange with others in the Opinionated Toon Biz.

In one forum I attended, "Cartooning in the Age of Doom," panelists shared their experiences of working amid coronavirus constraints and constrictions of the newspaper industry. As someone who has had very minimal conversation with fellow editorial staff for a decade and a half, I was interested to know how others are getting along with the new work-from-home standard.

For the free-lancers, the advent of COVID-19 didn't change their work habits greatly. Kevin Necessary had just moved into an office at the Cincinnati Enquirer when suddenly everyone had to work from home. Scott Stantis had already accepted a buy-out from the Chicago Tribune, but keeps in touch with select trusted colleagues as a sounding board. 

What everyone seemed to agree on was that the Ground Hog's Day nature of the coronavirus pandemic (and the intransigence of Republicans who aid and abet its spread) has been a real strain on finding anything new to say about it. (And when Stantis was seriously ill with the virus himself, he had an assistant who was able to keep Prickly City going for him.)

Well, happily, my cartoon this week is about something else.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon is a four-panel oeuvre, which involved figuring out how to draw that fellow in the far right of this panel in profile. In other panels, he is shown from the front.

The pencil rough looked okay to me, but he looked utterly wrong when I inked him; so I had to white him out completely and draw him over again. It is nearly impossible to erase pencil from white-out without pulling up some of the white-out or staining it with the graphite off the eraser. So I re-inked him without pencil, trying to copy the best drawing from my sketchbook.

It would have been easier if I had just drawn everybody wearing masks.

Q Toon: Usurp, Isurp, WeAllsurp

Republican state governors and legislators who very recently were busy passing mandates against transgender students using school lavatories have lately become convinced that mandates are bad things.

That is, as long as those mandates are protecting students from a real, unimagined threat that has actually killed 4.5 million people worldwide in less than two years.

For some unfathomable reason, they insist that requiring measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 and its variants is nothing at all like previously existing requirements to protect students from measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio, and the like.

It is not as if this were a novel question of whether the general welfare is outweighed by an individual's right to be Typhoid Mary. The Supreme Court ruled in 1905 (Jacobson v. Massachusetts) that local boards of health could be authorized to mandate vaccination of the general population against smallpox. That ruling left open the possibility of exempting children from the mandate; but seventeen years later, the Court (Zucht v. King) let stand a school board edict — in Texas, no less — barring unvaccinated kids from classrooms.

It remains to be seen whether the current right-wing Court will overturn these long-established cases — nothing is certain under its present partisan domination. What is inevitable is that Big Government Republicans like Governors Abbott and DeSantis will do everything within and beyond their power to deny local school boards the ability to protect the staff and students in their charge.

Q Toon: School Safety Drill

Faced with a fourth surge of the coronavirus sweeping the nation, Republican governors and legislators have been falling over each other to see which of them can do the best job of channeling Amity Island Mayor Larry Vaughn.

A number of them have acted to forbid school districts and state universities from taking the simplest measures to ensure the health and safety of students and staff. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to cut funding to any school district that requires students to wear masks in the classroom. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued his own executive order to the same effect. Republicans running the Wisconsin state legislature want the University of Wisconsin to beg for the politicians' permission before making any COVID-19-related decisions whatsoever.

Even Alabama Governor Kay "Start Blaming the Unvaccinated Folks" Ivey says there's no reason why a couple dozen children too young to be vaccinated should be required to mask up just because they are cooped up in a classroom together for hours at a time five days a week for months on end. It's Alabama. They can open a window.

I suppose Tennessee teachers and students should be grateful that Governor Bill Lee is willing to leave responding to the COVID-19 crisis up to individual school systems. Tennessee Republicans have their hands full trying to keep transgender students out of school bathrooms and locker rooms, and are too busy to play Doctor like the other legislatures.

And South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is probably preoccupied making sure that the Sturgis Bike Week Superspreader Rally goes off without a hitch. And maybe running for president, or at least to fill Sarah Palin's shoes. She's kind of tired of all this coronavirus stuff, and she thinks you are, too.

So let's all go swimming! Statistically, your chances of being attacked by a shark are actually very small. And most people who are attacked by sharks survive, don't they?

Holy Herd Immunity, Batman!

 

Toon: Cooler Heads Must Prevail

It is nearly impossible to satirize the level of desperation at Fox News.

This week, they got caught lying about President Biden's putting America on a vegan diet, and about every immigrant child receiving Vice President Harris's book as a welcome gift. 

Then, perpetually perplexed Tucker Carlson actually urged his viewers to report to the police any children wearing protective masks in public. Because, I guess, the police don't get in enough trouble responding to non-emergency calls.

No, it's because COVID-19 is safe and effective, and has been since Easter of last year, just like our Trump and Savior promised it would be. Or something like that. Anyway, as any parent knows, you can't catch diseases from children. 

It's masks that are dangerous. Them and vaccines.

✍

In my inked version of this cartoon, I had Larry Kudlow offering Tucker Carlson a "bacon-based beer," but I decided I had better change it in Photoshop.

I've watched enough episodes of "Chopped" to know that someone has undoubtedly produced and sold a beer made with bacon. 

And some Connor Sewer undoubtedly buys it.

2020 in Masochistic Review

As is my wont on Circumcision of Our Lord Day, I pause to reflect on the headlines and cartoons of the year gone by.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

Sounds like an attractive plan of action this time around.