This Week's Sneak Peek

I drew a different cartoon last week, which led my better half to think that I didn't have to draw another one last night. The problem is, I can't tell you when — or if — the first cartoon will ever see the light of publication.

For some time now, I have wondered what my editorial cartoonist colleagues and I will draw when the day comes that the Grim Reaper comes for Donald TanTrump and doesn't take "You're crooked and stupid!" or his stomping away for an answer.

Well, the other night, my idea for that fateful day came to me, and I decided that I had better commit it to ink and bristol board before I forgot it. Besides, there's always the chance that the fateful day will come over some weekend when I'm far away from my drawing board. Or that the official announcement will come when my deadline is seconds away; my cartoon is really dialogue-heavy, with six panels, and inking all those letters takes time.

The dialogue isn't 100% inked. One line of the dialogue refers to Trump as having been impeached twice. He may well have been impeached four or five times before mortality finally catches up with him.

Who knows whether I'll even still be drawing cartoons by then? My hands shake a little these days, and I'm not getting any younger, either.

Memorial Day's Sneak Peek

I mentioned somewhere in Saturday's Graphical History Tour post what I intended to draw about this week; so instead of a snippet from my forthcoming editorial cartoon, here's one from 100 Memorial Days ago.

"Memorial Day" by Guy R. Spencer in Omaha World-Herald, May 30, 1926

Sadly, 100 years later, its encomium that "none was sacrificed for national greed or aggression" no longer applies.

Q Toon: Will He Be Greeted with Flowers?

Looking over my shoulder as I was sending this cartoon to my syndicate editors over the weekend, my husband asked the immortal question: "Too soon?"

If anything, my publication schedule rendered this cartoon too late. The news cycle keeps on rollin', and all the other editorial cartoonists have moved on to other topics.

Frankly, mine is perhaps the mildest cartoon about the passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney that I've seen. Quite a few of my colleagues chose to chastise him one last time for leading the country into Iraq War II under false pretenses and with unrealistic expectations. 

Those weapons of mass destruction were never found, and we were greeted not with flowers but with IEDs. Then there was the true cost of the war: not the $728 billion spent by the U.S. government on hostilities, but 4,492 U.S. soldiers killed and 32,292 wounded, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Iraqis killed.

Looking back from an LGBTQ+ perspective (as your humble scribbler did this past Saturday), one can muster up a demimodicum of sympathy for a man who has been rated the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history who had to hold his tongue is deference to the homophobic policies of his President that worked to the detriment of his own daughter. George W. Bush campaigned for reelection pushing a constitutional amendment denigrating people like Mary Cheney, in a committed but legally unrecognized relationship with a woman with whom she would raise a family.

Democrats exploited that conflict in 2004, earning the Cheneys' everlasting resentment; but he was after all the loyal Republican from his days as Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff onward. But then, Republicans turned on Dick and Lynne's other daughter after Donald Trump's thwarted coup attempt in January, 2021. Liz Cheney joined Adam Kinzlinger on the House impeachment panel, the only two House Republicans brave enough to stand up for country over party.

Even the Wyoming Republican Party turned against the Cheneys; Liz was trounced in her 2022 reelection bid for not pledging allegiance to Trump, who has complained ever since that she ought to be prosecuted for treason. 

For the first time in his long life, Dick Cheney endorsed a Democrat for President in 2024. Publicly and strongly.

Not that it helped Kamala Harris a whole hell of a lot. But it's the thought that counts.

Is Cheney's unjust war outweighed by turning away from the Dark Side in his twilight years? You, dear reader, get to decide which direction the celestial elevator in today's cartoon is headed.

Heavy responsibility, ain't it?

In Lieu of This Week's Sneak Peek

There were an unusually high number of hits on last Saturday's blog post for some reason. I can't tell whether I've suddenly gained a lot of fans of my work for University of Wisconsin student newspapers decades ago, or if conspiracy fabulists are still interested in Jade Helm.

Or perhaps there were a lot of wedding musicians searching for the music and lyrics to "Somewhere/There's A Place for Us."

I provide music at weddings from time to time, and I once had to accompany a singer on "Somewhere" and some popular song from the 1960's (I forget which — "Wedding Song/There Is Love" or something like that), and my mother had happened to give me a book of wedding tunes which she had found at a resale shop or rummage sale.

The two songs needed for this wedding — and only those two songs — had been torn out of the book.

Well, anyway.

This week's cartoon is a strictly visual one, and I don't see a corner of the cartoon I can clip here without giving the whole idea away. So, since I wasn't inspired by most of the Memorial Day cartoons I found in 1925 to come up with a Graphical History Tour post on the topic on Saturday, here's one that is worth bringing back, given the present regime's cuts to veterans' services.

"Why Not Flowers for the Living" by Winsor McCay, May 30, 1925

In Memory of Dianne Feinstein

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) passed away last weekend at the age of 90.

Hillary Rodham Clinton began her remembrance of Feinstein with this anecdote:

One day, on the floor of the Senate in 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig condescended to Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic sponsor of a proposed ban on assault weapons. “The gentle lady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics,” he said. Craig, a board member of the National Rifle Association, had picked the wrong target.

“I am quite familiar with firearms,” Dianne responded, with fire in her eyes. “I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”

Feinstein's bill would be passed by Congress and signed into law by Hillary's husband — unfortunately, with a sunset provision that allowed it to expire during the George W. Bush administration, facilitating horrible nationwide carnage in the decades since.

Feinstein was never quite as liberal as some people wanted her to be. Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On recounts early in her tenure as Mayor of San Francisco, she alienated many in the LGBTQ+ community (we only used half of that acronym back then) by not supporting municipal employee benefits for same-sex couples. In return, as AIDS began spreading like wildfire among gay men, that factored in the fierce resistance she faced against shutting down the city's bathhouses to address the crisis.

More recently, liberal Democrats excoriated her for not asking Brett Kavanaugh about allegations of  against him that she knew about when he appeared before the Senate confirmation panel to be elevated to the Supreme Court. So did Republicans, for completely different reasons, once those allegations were made public.

And of course, there were all the calls from her fellow Democrats for her to step down from her seat this year, given her health and perceptions of mental deterioration. Clearly, however, she had every intention of serving out the remaining months of her sixth term in the Senate. Well, old age ain't for sissies.

(On the topic of age: It would have been easier to have caricatured Feinstein as she appeared recently. I intentionally chose to make a caricature of her as she appeared decades ago.)

Whatever anyone thinks about her mayoral record, she has been an ally on LGBTQ+ and women's issues ever since being elected to the Senate in the "Year of the Woman" 31 years ago. On "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the "Defense of Marriage Act," women's reproductive health rights, and trans rights, her record has been virtually impeccable.

And now she has been succeeded by an out lesbian woman, Laphonza Butler, President of Emily's List and formerly an advisor to Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign.

Q Toon: Pat's Just In Time!

The passing of antigay televangelist Pat Robertson this week immediately occasioned a flurry of cartoons of him alternately at the Pearly Gates or inside the Gates of Hell.

In spite of my Christian faith, I'm not so sure I fully believe in an afterlife. Eternal life is a formidable concept to grasp. 

We sing in Amazing Grace that even after an eternity, "we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we'd first begun"; still going to choir practice day after day after day umpteen decillion millennia after the sun has gone nova, Andromeda has crashed into our galaxy, the whole universe has dissolved, and the last subatomic particle has completely decayed, will be awfully depressing to the many Christians who don't care to join their church choir today.

Nevertheless, I do believe that if one believes in the Bible at all, one ought to take John 20:23 seriously; so I give you the Celestial Elevator.

You may decide for yourself which direction it is headed.

Memorial Day's Look Back

A century ago, there was already talk about folks forgetting the reason for the holiday today. Saving my sneak peek for another day, here's Ceperley's take on the topic.

"If It Wasn't for Grandpa..." by William A. Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, May 30, 1923

 

All God's Children Got a Robe

In memory of Archbishop and Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Mpile Tutu, who entered into life eternal on December 26, 2021:

Most Rev. Tutu is most identified, of course, with the struggle in South Africa against apartheid, but he also has had plenty to say, as far back as the 1970's, in support of homosexual rights. This passage from God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations continues:

It is also a matter of love. Every human being is precious. We are all — all of us — part of God's family. We all must be allowed to love each other with honor. Yet all over the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are persecuted. We treat them as pariahs and push them outside our communities. We make them doubt that they too are children of God. This must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy. We blame them for what they are. ....

To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as apartheid ever was.

The Archbishop spoke out against persecution of gays and lesbians by political and religious leaders, including those in other nations of Africa:

“[A] wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal…In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic…because the clerics wanted gay men excluded. Uganda's parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi. These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.” (in Washington Post, March 12, 2010)

It is largely to Most Rev. Tutu's credit that the 1996 South African constitution is the first in the world to guarantee the rights of that nation's LGBTQ+ citizens. There certainly was no popular clamor to have LGBTQ+ rights enshrined in the constitution; South Africa was not Castro on the Cape, on either side of the color line. But Tutu actively lobbied for it, and had the moral force to get it done.

The issue was no doubt personal for him as well as political. He gave his blessing to the wedding of his daughter, Rev. Mpho Andrea Tutu to Marceline van Furth, a marriage that got her defrocked by the Anglican Diocese of Saldanha Bay. Tutu van Furth has said of her family, "I had the extreme good fortune of growing up in a household with parents who were very clear about their faith and very clear about full inclusion of all people... regardless of gender and gender identity and regardless of sexual orientation."

✍

Why, yes, that name on the shingle outside shop in my cartoon is that of the actual patron saint of tailors, seamstresses, clothworkers and cobblers. I hadn't known that when I decided to look up their patron saint to be the proprietor of the heavenly haberdashery.

That his name happened to be homo-friendly was, shall we say, bonus.

R.I.P. Sean Connery

 From my days with the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee:

in Business Journal, February 28, 2003

Q Toon: John Lewis

So many cartoons eulogizing Congressman John Lewis have focused on his work to advance the cause of civil rights for Black Americans. He was also in the vanguard of the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, so I hope you will excuse yet one more drawing of him and that bridge.

Today's cartoon quotes from a column Congressman Lewis wrote in the October 25, 2003 edition of  the Boston Globe, "At a Crossroads on Gay Unions."

The column itself cribs extensively from a floor speech Lewis gave in the House of Representatives against the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, way back in 1996:

"Marriage is a basic human right. You cannot tell people they cannot fall in love. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, of people talking about interracial marriages, I quote: 'Races do not fall in love and get married. Individuals fall in love and get married.' Why don't you want your fellow men and women, your fellow Americans, to be happy? Why do you attack them? Why do you want to destroy the love they hold in their hearts? Why do you want to crush their hopes, their dreams, their loves, their aspirations? ...
I fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color [not] to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation. I've known racism. I've known bigotry. This bill stinks to the same fear, hatred and intolerance."

This is the kind of thing that earned him the sobriquet "The Conscience of the House." LGBTQ+ rights have come a long way since 1996: in spite of Lewis's speech, 118 Democrats joined 224 Republicans in voting for that odious bill. Only 65 Democrats and one Republican voted against it. (Two Democrats voted "present"; 22 Democrats and nine Republicans missed the vote.)

Many state legislators showed the same willingness to knuckle under to antigay bigotry as one state after another passed its own version of DOMA. And that included many legislators who claimed to be straight allies of the LGBTQ+ community.

Lewis ended his column in the Boston Globe on much the same note as his 1996 floor speech:

"Rather than divide and discriminate, let us come together and create one nation. We are all one people. We all live in the American house. We are all the American family."  

Remembering Fritz Hollings

Retired Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-SC) died Saturday at the age of 97.

To my generation at least, he will chiefly be remembered as the Democrat who signed onto the Republicans' Gramm-Rudman bill in 1986: an attempt to cut the federal deficit by blindly cutting all government expenditures by a uniform percentage.

Oh, and he tried running for president once. But that didn't last long, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody outside of his immediate family who remembers when that was.

Stayskalback Saturday

I learned through Daily Cartoonist this week that editorial cartoonist Wayne Stayskal died on Tuesday at the age of 86.

The Daily Cartoonist, in turn, had learned of Mr. Stayskal's passing from arch-conservative newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, who had collaborated with Stayskal on their book Liberals for Lunch in 1985 and had written the forward to Till Euthanasia Do You Part in 1993. As an obituary, Thomas's column has that bitchy bathos of how conservatives are so persecuted and that must be why Stayskal didn't achieve the exalted status of the giants of the editorial cartoonist pantheon.

I'm afraid there are plenty of editorial cartoonists from all across the ideological spectrum who have not achieved that status. Most of us don't and never will; heck, I don't even have a Wikipedia entry. But count me as a longtime fan of Mr. Stayskal from back when he drew for the Chicago Today.

Stayskal's cartoon for the final edition of Chicago Today, September 13, 1974

When I was a kid, I used to have a collection of Stayskal's cartoons pinned to the bulletin board in my bedroom. That was no way to preserve newspaper clippings for posterity, and they haven't been; I can still see in my mind's eye, however, his seemingly casual caricatures of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Richard J. Daley. (And, for some reason, a particular three-panel cartoon that parodied Crest's "Look, Ma, no cavities!" ads, with the punch line "Sugar's so darned high we stopped buying it!") He had a rough drawing style that suggested spontaneity, even hastiness, and brought to mind the scratchings of Ronald Searle or Gerald Scarfe.

Or perhaps Gahan Wilson, along with whose opera the above cartoon would comfortably sit cheek by jowl.

Stayskal was a protégé of cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, coming in 1962 to work with and eventually succeed him at the Chicago American (later Chicago Today). As the Chicago Tribune swallowed up the afternoon paper over the course of 1974, he joined Daniel Holland, Dick Locher, and Jeff MacNelly on the Trib's editorial pages. Before long, the Tribune scaled back its cartooning staff, and Stayskal moved to the Tampa Tribune in 1984 but continued national syndication through Tribune Media Services. Even after retiring in 2005 and returning from Florida to Illinois (now there's a contrarian for you), he contributed cartoons to townhall.com until 2010 or so.

He also drew for the comics pages: he wasn't able to make a success of Balderdash or Ralph; but his Trim's Arena, drawn under a pseudonym, appeared in several newspapers' sports pages in the 1970's and 80's.

To Mr. Thomas's complaint, it is true that Wayne Stayskal is absent from such cartooning reference books as Syd Hoff's Editorial and Political Cartooning (1976) and Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons (1980), and his Wikipedia entry is all of four sentences long. [Update: the entry has been expanded considerably since I wrote this post.]

But if my blog is dedicated to anything, it is to the proposition that the work of editorial cartoonists should be appreciated beyond the daily deadline, whether the artists reach the pinnacle with Thomas Nast, rub shoulders with the vast majority of quotidian scribblers, or toil in unwikipediated obscurity.

So here's to you, Wayne Stayskal. Rest in peace, and may you bring a daily chuckle to the readers of the Celestial Tribune.

Q Toon: Tears in a Bucket

Brenda Dale Knox, an actress, singer and celebrity of Savannah, Georgia better known as The Lady Chablis, died last week at the age of 59. The transgender icon came to national attention in John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (from which the quotation in this week's cartoon comes) and the Clint Eastwood movie adapted from it. As CNN put it, "She wasn't the book's main character, but she may have been its most memorable."

Berendt wrote of her, in the forward to her own book, Hiding My Candy, "She is a gifted comedienne whose humor is instinctive and whose power to amuse comes from exquisite timing, a flair for the outrageous, and — I trust she'll forgive me for saying so — balls."

Remember

Korean War Memorial, Washington D.C.

Remembering 9/11

Memorial to 9/11 in Stresa, Italy