This Week's Sneak Peek

As you can probably tell, I was not one of those boys who sat in the back of the class doodling cars on the cover of my notebooks.

No, I mostly doodled calligraphy, the Off™ bugs, and President Nixon.

There But For The Grace

The church from which I retired last year and the pastor with whom I served there have made national news — again — this past week. You can read coverage by the New York Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Kenosha News (subscriptions required) or Chicago Sun-Times. Or continue below for my own two cents worth.

New York Times, page 19A, August 20, 2025

I had taken the job as Grace Lutheran Church's parish secretary in 2017 against the advice of a former employee, who warned me of a toxic environment there. Grace Lutheran was founded in 1901 when English-speaking Lutheran Churches were somewhat of a novelty, located in what was once the city's fashionable uptown, but now in what is euphemistically described as "a changing neighborhood."

Your humble scribe answering the door to reporters after a 5-year-old child had been fatally shot in the house next door to the church

In its heyday, as with most mainline Christian churches the post-World War II baby boom era, it had hundreds of members on the rolls, including several faculty and administrators of Lutheran-founded Carthage College. There is a tension between folks with advanced degrees and people whose forebears are memorialized in the stained glass windows.

The following anecdote has nothing to do with this window.

I once came across a decades-old, five-page, hand-written letter to Grace's then pastor by the daughter of a founding family arguing strongly against the church's decision back then to participate in the INNS program, opening its doors as a homeless shelter one night per week. Her parents, she wrote, would be horrified to see their church abused in such a manner; the role of her church was to praise God, not to feed and house the poor.

If I know anything about Lutheran pastors of the 1990's, her pastor could hardly wait to preach on Matthew 25:41-46. And the lady who wrote that letter had probably left to join a nearby Wisconsin Synod or Missouri Synod congregation more in line with her idea of Christianity.

By the 2010's, Grace was an aging congregation, but one that wanted to be socially relevant, both to live the Gospel and also to attract younger members (while still clinging to century-old hymns every Sunday — a new music team switched to contemporary music in 2023). So they issued a call to a young firebrand pastor out of California, passionate about environmental issues and social justice.

They got more than they bargained for.

Rev. Barker speaking at a WisPIRG rally in front of Grace Lutheran Church

When I came along, the congregation was getting along financially thanks to a dozen or so of its wealthier members and outside grants to benefit its free diaper programs and its housing of a free breakfast and food bank service (the homeless shelter having moved out to its own permanent location years earlier). Then came COVID-19; as with many other mainline congregations, when the doors re-opened for in-person worship months later, attendance was way down.

In the middle of all that came the police shooting of Jacob Blake during a domestic disturbance call. Grace Lutheran Church was caught between the centers of riots, looting, and fires that followed. (See my post here.) The building was undamaged, but the inside reeked of smoke when I came to work the following Tuesday.

Rev. Jonathan Barker was on vacation at the time, but returned home to help lead Black Lives Matter protests (and, behind the scenes, to house water and first aid materials for protesters while the National Guard enforced a curfew). When the Greater Milwaukee Synod and churchwide office wanted to rally in support of the community, the front lawn of Grace Lutheran Church was its choice of venue.

Unbeknownst to nearly everyone at the rally, Grace had been recommended to the staff of Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden as the location for a listening session between the candidate and select representatives of the community the very next day. (See my account here.) First United Methodist was even closer to the rioting, but for whatever reason, Biden's people opted for Grace, and Pastor Barker was happy to oblige.

It was never intended to be a campaign event, but Pastor Barker's role in bringing Biden to Grace and his vocal advocacy of Black Lives Matter protesters drove away some church members, including some vital congregational leaders. Most Kenoshans did not appreciate their town being trashed and burned so that protesters could make a point about police violence.

Pastor Barker nevertheless devoted a lot of time to being a protester. He held weekly protests at one of Kenosha's busy intersections calling on Wisconsin's Republican Senator Ron Johnson to vote for President Biden's Green New Deal bill — a lost cause, since Johnson has always been firmly committed to despoiling the environment, slashing social services, and excusing the rich and powerful from paying their fair share to keep government running.

When the Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee, Pastor Barker superglued his shoes (while wearing them) to the entrance of the convention's parking garage. He also tried disrupting a Trump campaign event, getting forcibly removed while Trump made fun of him.

I have to note that this was all on Pastor Barker's personal time, despite his choice of collar. Grace could not afford a full-time pastor, so he was only on the clock Saturdays through Tuesdays (plus Christmas Eve). Naturally, however, people expect their pastor to be available 24/7, regardless what they're paying him or her. Especially those members who spent a lifetime serving pot luck dinners and funeral luncheons, singing in the choir, volunteering at Vacation Bible School, or just putting $5.00 in the offering plate every week.

Grace is a congregation in crisis. Since my retirement, one member of the already short-handed church council quit after other members of the council had the leaders of the free breakfast and food pantry programs forcibly removed by police (the matter is the subject of continuing litigation; Grace tried and failed to keep the programs going on its own). Another council member quit the church over Pastor Barker's political activity. Yet another council member died suddenly.

With all this going on, Pastor Barker decided to respond to a new IRS ruling, allowing clergy to endorse political candidates from the pulpit without endangering their 401(c) charitable entity status, by announcing to the New York Times that he planned to endorse Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for President in his August 17 sermon.

Greater Milwaukee Synod Bishop Paul Erickson found out about Pastor Barker's plan when the Times contacted him for comment. The churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) had just ratified an official "social statement" opposing political endorsements from the pulpit, so Bishop Erickson warned Pastor Barker that his sermon was contrary to that social statement and would likely result in the ELCA revoking Grace Lutheran Church's coverage under the national church's group tax exempt status.

Rather than change his sermon, Barker posted a terse video message to the congregation, resigning as Grace's pastor and from the ELCA clergy roster. He delivered his sermon at some venue festooned with papel picado, and promises to continue preaching on his personal YouTube channel.

As for Grace Lutheran, Bishop Erickson was there this past Sunday, and issued a pastoral letter to the synod:

I also ask for your prayers for Grace Lutheran Church. I was present with them on Sunday, preaching and meeting with them as they consider whether they have a viable future. Many of you are aware of the recent challenges and controversies surrounding the congregation and their relationship with the former Grace Welcome Center. Please know that I have been and will continue to walk with the congregation and others in Kenosha and the surrounding communities as we work to discern God’s will for the future of ministry in that neighborhood.

What remains of the council has been disbanded, and my successor as office secretary has quit effective Monday. The synod office in Milwaukee will take over management of the church. Pastor Sheila Rawn, already planning to serve as interim pastor at Grace during what was to be Pastor Barker's upcoming family leave, has agreed to begin her service there right away. By ELCA practice, she would not be considered for a permanent position there, if in fact the congregation somehow becomes viable again.

I grieve with, and pray for, my sisters and brothers at Grace. I cannot offer much hope that all will turn out well in the end; but what hope there is will only come about after finding new paths through that old building. God's place is with the "changing neighborhoods" in which Grace stands, its people living up to the message of Matthew 25:35-40 as best they can.

Happy Threesgiving!

For this week's Graphical History Tour, I rummaged through my own stuff through the decades, and dug up a few that I still like for one reason or another.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Nov. 3, 1983

I kicked off last month's panoply of my old cartoons with one about the deadly bombing of the U.S. Marines' barracks in Beirut in 1983, so I'll start today's with Ronald Reagan's military incursion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada weeks later.

Grenada's Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, a communist who took power in a 1979 coup, was resisting pressure to share power with his Deputy Prime Minister, resulting in protests in the streets by followers of one and the other. Bishop was put under house arrest, escaped, and ended up executed by a firing squad; his body has never been found.

Citing danger to 600 U.S. citizens attending medical school on the island, Reagan sent a force of 7,600 Army Rangers, Marines, and Navy SEALs. The U.S. students were whisked away to safety, the new government was overthrown, and several political prisoners were freed. The invasion was condemned by several foreign governments, but its anniversary remains a national holiday on Grenada.

But does anyone in this country ever pause to honor the veterans of Operation Urgent Fury? Nosiree, mon!

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Nov. 18, 1993

Now, let's face it. Nobody likes some outsider coming in to their workplace telling them how to do their job.

Especially cops.

I had to scour the internets to refresh my memory of the news story behind this cartoon. Milwaukee's Police Chief Phillip Arreola had just reinstated a police officer to the force. The officer had been suspended after a Sept. 29 incident in which he was videotaped kicking the groin of a 17-year-old suspect who was pinned to the ground by other officers.

Now that you have that image in your head, I am not going to tell you the race of the officer or the suspect, save to bet that many of you have some part of it wrong.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Nov. 28, 2003

I don't remember what the editorial this cartoon accompanied was about, and I'm sure I've rerun it before; but a Thanksgiving cartoon is de rigueur this week, so here mine from 2003.

Besides, like the Ed's Donut Hole cartoon, I like the characters I created for the cartoon. 

The Business Journal editorials were almost exclusively about state and local issues, so I suppose this one had something to do with a disagreement over where a Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, or Winnebago casino should be built or expanded. That's just a guess, but I'm sticking with it for now.

for Q Syndicate, November, 2013

Well, it's already too late to draw any Thanksgiving cartoon for syndication this year, so I'll sign off with this 2013 cartoon, and wish you any happy holidays of your choice.

May the Force Bewitch You

To start this week's Graphical History Tour, here's an illustration I drew for a local church thirty years ago this month. 

"One in the Spirit," May, 1992

The Gospel for the seventh Sunday of Easter is always Jesus' prayer that his followers may always be as one. My idea for this illustration was a collage of faces representing a variety of ages and ethnicities.

The old woman in upper center was modeled after my grandmother. There aren't many photographs of her smiling, but she was meeting her great-grandson for the first (and only) time in the one I used.

The other people in the drawing were based on photos in magazines; two of them were from news photos taken during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

I was never quite satisfied with the young man at the lower left, having made some changes to his appearance from the real person. I would make a few changes to him over the years as the drawing got re-used; this is the original version.

"Assume the Position" in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., May 7, 1992

As for drawing editorial cartoons about the riots, I only drew one. The uprising began on April 29, 1992, after I had drawn the cartoon for the April 30 edition of the UW-M Post. The Post of May 4 didn't have an editorial page, and the May 7 issue was the last of the school year.

"The Line We Bought..." in Journal Times, May 26, 1992

The Journal Times preferred my cartoons to concentrate on state and local issues, or at least local angles on wider issues. But the editor did let me get away with this one about H. Ross Perot's coy responses about how he intended to achieve his #1 policy position of balancing the federal budget  (at a $290 billion deficit, or 4.5% of GDP in 1992).

Since it turns out that I don't have a lot of cartoons to show from May of 1992, and I'd rather not close this post out with a discussion of the ups and downs of the federal deficit, here's one I've always liked from ten Mays later, as power company Wisconsin Electric was trotting out its new moniker:

"You Used to Know We Energies as Wisconsin Electric" in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, May 31, 2002

Q Toon: Out of the Closet, Into Reprise

Pride festivals and parades are back in 2021, after last year's forced hiatus in many communities. With them has come the insistence by various organizations of People of Color that law enforcement be banned, either as security or participants.

New York's Pride organizing committee, Heritage of Pride, has told that city's Gay Officers Action League that they are not welcome to participate in this year's events, or to come within a city block of the event perimeter.

NYC Pride seeks to create safer spaces for the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities at a time when violence against marginalized groups, specifically BIPOC and trans communities, has continued to escalate. The sense of safety that law enforcement is meant to provide can instead be threatening, and at times dangerous, to those in our community who are most often targeted with excessive force and/or without reason. NYC Pride is unwilling to contribute in any way to creating an atmosphere of fear or harm for members of the community. The steps being taken by the organization challenge law enforcement to acknowledge their harm and to correct course moving forward, in hopes of making an impactful change.

Effective immediately, NYC Pride will ban corrections and law enforcement exhibitors at NYC Pride events until 2025. At that time their participation will be reviewed by the Community Relations and Diversity, Accessibility, and Inclusion committees, as well as the Executive Board. In the meantime, NYC Pride will transition to providing increased community-based security and first responders, while simultaneously taking steps to reduce NYPD presence at events.

Heritage of Pride members soon reversed that decision, only to have the reversal re-reversed by HoP's executive board.

Jonathan Capehart in Washington Post quotes Richie Jackson, activist and author of Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son, who agrees with Capehart that HoP made a bad call:

“For one thing I hate seeing us use a tactic so often used against us. Our community has no litmus test for entry and we shouldn’t start now. All are welcome — proud, shameful, closeted — all,” Jackson told me via text message. “But now we are also taking away something from LGBTQ kids. They won’t be able to see the cops marching, to see that occupation as a place for them. We’re robbing them of possibility.”

(Capehart is a Person of Color; Jackson is not.)

New York Times also called it “a poke in the eye at law enforcement more than a meaningful action to address police violence or foster a dialogue about law enforcement reform.”

It's difficult to know whom to side with in this debate. As Capehart acknowledges, "The decision came in response to understandable, long-brewing anger at the NYPD among many LGBTQ people — including growing outrage over the heavy police presence at the pride parade and concern about people of color bearing the brunt of police action. Last June in Lower Manhattan, for instance, officers pepper-sprayed participants in the Queer Liberation March for Black lives and against police brutality."

Yet it also puts spokespersons for the LGBTQ+ community in the position of having to advocate for tolerance and inclusion from society at large while imposing a policy of intolerance and exclusion within our own. Although some, such as J. Brian Lowder at Slate, pooh-pooh cops' complaints, saying that they "can still participate as an individual, just without [their] uniform." That comes off sounding uncomfortably like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" to me. 

This issue is not unique to New York by any means, nor is it new. Twin Cities Pride banned police uniforms three years ago, as did Washington D.C. Capital Pride Alliance. Pride committees in some larger Canadian cities banned uniformed police in 2017.

I know people on both sides of the cop/PoC divide, and I think police departments ought to be commended when they reach out both to the LGBTQ+ community and to People of Color communities.

Side note: a neighbor was recently appointed as her police department's official LGBTQ+ liaison. Comments in the department's Facebook announcement were riddled with such snark as this: "Spending taxpayer dollars on a pointless exercise in virtue signaling to the wokesters is embarrassing." The role adds a title to her workload, but no more "taxpayer dollars" than she had been earning in her role as a police lieutenant the week beforehand. But it just goes to show that there are plenty of Persons of No Color Or Sexual Persuasion who object to law enforcement outreach of any kind.

That same police department is actively engaging with the PoC community in weekly meetings right where I work, with the active involvement of the current Acting Police Chief. They do a lot of personal self-defense training, but they also sit down to address specific incidents and concerns. (Faithful readers will recall that I work in a neighborhood directly affected by rioting last summer.)

As a Person of No Color myself, I probably don't get to decide when specific police departments have done enough to satisfy PoCs. Nor can I expect that change will take place quickly, without resistance, or uniformly around the country.

So let's just hope that relations have improved by 2025.

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

Toon: Wisconsin Burning

 

Sunday afternoon, police responding to a domestic violence complaint in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times at point-blank range as he ignored their orders and started to get into the driver's seat of the SUV his children were in. Blake, 29, has been left paralyzed from the waist down, according to his family. Blake is Black; the police officers at the scene are White.

A video filmed from inside a house across the street doesn't show what, if any, danger Blake posed to the officers or the public. A police source tells me that Blake had a knife; but at this point, I have to treat that as one of the many rumors swirling about here. This was not Blake's first encounter with police, yet nobody has claimed that he had no right to have a knife on his person. Second Amendment, you know.

Officially, Kenosha Police Department has been extremely tight-lipped about the incident. They haven't even said what role, if any, Blake played in the initial complaint. Citizens at the scene claim he was breaking up a fight. The officers have not been publicly identified. Kenosha Police are not equipped with body cameras.

Kenosha officials declared a curfew Sunday night, but protests were perverted into violence anyway. Dozens of downtown businesses were vandalized, and half of the inventory of a used car lot was completely burned.

Monday evening, hoodlums from Milwaukee drove to Kenosha in a caravan of cars for the express purpose of looting and rioting. The rest of the vehicles at Car Source were burned. A business owner was beaten trying to defend his shop. At least three uptown businesses were still on fire well into Tuesday and completely destroyed. The smell of smoke filled the nearby church where I work.

Last night, rumors flew that wherever you were, the rioters were coming to your block. As law enforcement and the National Guard continued to concentrate on protecting government facilities, self-styled militias joined the rioters roaming the streets, and property owners took up arms. Three people were shot, two fatally.

(Update: 17-year-old white vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse from Antioch, Illinois has since been arrested and charged with murder in the first degree.)

We expect things to get worse before they get better. 

Pray for justice.

Work for peace.

To Serve and Protect

I've been hearing a lot from my Minneapolis friends about the stubborn resistance of the Minneapolis Police Officers Federation to any sort of reform after the torture and death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more accurately, the knees) of one of their officers.

Union president Bob Kroll has vowed to fight to reinstate the four officers fired and now charged in the homicide, and has repeatedly insinuated that Floyd deserved his fate.

There is a long history of racism in the Minneapolis Police Department. The union is still fighting to force the city to reinstate two officers fired for festooning the fourth precinct's Christmas tree with racist items in 2018.

Serving and protecting the bad apples is not limited to Minneapolis by any means.

Two years ago, the Milwaukee Police Department tweeted out congratulations to two of its retiring officers, John Balcerzak and Dennis Wallich, having served a combined 61 years on the Milwaukee Police force.

If you are about my age and live anywhere near Milwaukee, the name John Balcerzak should ring a bell.

In the wee hours of May 27, 1991, Balcerzak and his squad partner, Joseph Gabrish, responded to a 911 call from three women who found a 14-year-old boy naked and bleeding; the boy had a fresh hole drilled in his head. The boy was Konerak Sinthasomphone, who had managed to leave the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer while the serial killer and convicted child molester was out getting alcohol from a bar.

Dahmer (white) arrived on the scene before Balcerzak (white) and Gabrish (white). Sinthasomphone (Hmong) was unable to speak English for himself, so Dahmer told the officers that the boy was his 19-year-old boyfriend. The women (black) pointed out that Sinthasomphone was bleeding, but the officers told them to "butt out," wrapped Sinthasomphone in a towel and took him back to Dahmer's apartment. Where, by the way, the body of Tony Hughes lay rotting in the bedroom from three days earlier.

Failing to check either Dahmer's or Sinthasomphone's IDs, Balcerzak and Gabrish left the boy with his murderer and drove off, joking with the police dispatcher about those silly faggots. Dahmer would go on to kill Sinthasomphone and four more young men before a fifth intended victim managed to escape and flagged down two police officers (who were not Balcerzak and Gabrish).

Balcerzak and Gabrish were fired over their professional malpractice, but their union got them reinstated to MPD on appeal. Balcerzak was even elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association in 2005.

This has been a very difficult time for unions around the country, but not for police unions. When Scott Walker and his Republican army swept to power in Wisconsin ten years ago, they targeted every state employees union with the exception of their supporters in the police and firefighters unions. Lest you think this was purely a law and order issue, you should note that the prison workers union was not safe from Republicans' full-bore assault.

In light of this year's sustained Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, Democrats may not be as loath to follow Republicans' playbook on union-busting as you might think.

Q Toon: Mayor, Pietà

Presidential candidate and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg interrupted his campaign to deal with a police shooting at home:

Eric Jack Logan, 54, was killed in South Bend after someone called police to report a suspicious person going through cars, according to the St. Joseph County Prosecutor's Office.
A police officer confronted a man in a vehicle at an apartment building parking lot. The man, later identified as Logan, got out of the vehicle and allegedly approached the officer with a knife raised, and the officer opened fire, the prosecutor's office said. Logan died at a hospital.

The officer, Sgt. Ryan O'Neil, was equipped with a body camera, but didn't turn it on, so we are left to trust his word over that of the deceased.

Because police Sgt. O'Neil is White and Mr. Logan was Black, the incident has inflamed racial tensions between the African-American community and the South Bend Police Department. Police-community relationships have been a sore point since very early in the Buttigieg administration. Three months after Buttigieg took office, a scandal broke over racist language police officers used in wiretapped phone calls, and Mayor Pete responded by firing three police officers and demoting South Bend Police Department Chief Darryl Boykins, who is Black.

In the years since, Black citizens have complained about abusive treatment by SBPD officers; a Latina mother was killed when an officer, without lights or siren on, was chasing a reckless driver and crashed into her car; and officers shot and killed another knife-wielding person of color in April of last year. Another SBPD Chief failed to come to the aid of an officer breaking up a fight at the city's Martin Luther King Center in 2013, even though the Chief was present at the Center.

In all these incidents, members of the community felt that the police individuals involved got off scot-free or with no more than a slap on the wrist. And when, after this latest incident, Buttigieg met with members of the Black community, the crowd let him know whom they held responsible.

Shirley Newbill, Eric’s mother, asked Buttigieg and the city to act on her son’s death.
“I have been here all my life, and you have not done a damn thing about me or my son or none of these people out here,” she said. “It’s time for you to do something.”
At one point, a woman at the rally told Buttigieg," You're running for president and you want black people to vote for you? That's not going to happen."

Following that rally, Buttigieg and the current Chief of Police, Scott Ruszkowski, tried to hold a formal Q&A with city residents. That didn't go smoothly, either.

Many made sure their voices were heard, often shouting over the mayor’s answers, calling him a liar or demanding that Ruszkowski be fired. When the crowd was asked to hold its anger, Komaneach Wheeler stood up and shouted “A mother of injustice cannot hold her anger!”
Some of the questions were pointed squarely at Buttigieg, whose run for president has put the Logan shooting and ensuing reaction in the national spotlight.
“How can we trust this process?” Blu Casey, a local activist, asked the mayor. “How are we supposed to trust you?”
Buttigieg at one point admitted that he had failed to bring greater diversity to the Police Department, where 5% of the officers are African-American, though he said it wasn’t for a lack of effort as he mentioned some initiatives the city undertook or is exploring.
“I promise you, we have tried everything we can think of,” he said.

For the small city mayor who thinks he's ready to be President of the United States, this will be the test that either substantiates or disproves that belief.

Because this is not just a South Bend, Indiana issue. Elsewhere this week, the mainstream media took note of exposure by the Plain View Project of racist and hateful remarks law enforcement officers in eight major cities have made on social media. We saw video of Phoenix, Arizona police pulling guns on a young Black family of four and screaming obscenities at them as if it were a case of the family shooting up a school instead of shoplifting a doll and a t-shirt from a Dollar Store. "Shooting Bias," the greater tendency of police to fire at Black civilians than at White ones, rates its own Wikipedia page.

Expect this topic to come up at tonight's Democratic Candidate Cattle Call.

Don't expect many African-Americans to be satisfied with what is said on the stage.

Q Toon: June 28, 1969

This June marks the 50-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, generally regarded as one of the key turning points in the gay liberation movement (as it was called before we became an unpronounceable acronym).

For anyone needing to catch up, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, at 1:20 a.m. on June 28, 1969. Typically, these raids netted a dozen or so humiliated gays, lesbians, transsexuals or transvestites ("transgender" not yet being in common parlance) hoping against hope to keep their names and photos out of the newspaper.

But whether it was the weather, or the death of Judy Garland, or Canada having just decriminalized homosexuality, or Freddy Mercury in retrograde, the customers of the Stonewall decided not to go quietly. They refused to cooperate with the police, who then announced that they would arrest everyone in the bar. A crowd gathered as the police waited for additional paddy wagons to arrive; police escalated their use of force, and the riot began. And lasted through the weekend, flaring up anew on Wednesday in response to insulting reportage in The Village Voice.

Today's cartoon would have taken place in a relatively quiet moment.

So, then, how far have we come in the half century thence?

LGBTQ actors are much freer to be out and open about their sexuality than their counterparts fifty years ago; and films about us do not consistently portray us as doomed social misfits who die unloved and unmourned by the final reel.

Marriage equality was hardly on anybody's radar in 1969. Keeping one's job and staying out of jail were more pressing issues. The burden is now on the religious right as they fight to restore for themselves the privilege of being able to discriminate against us in employment, housing, and health and public services.

With the war in Vietnam becoming increasingly unpopular, military service wasn't a hot issue for the gay liberation movement, either. But there were nevertheless those at the time whose career calling was in the military; and in spite of failed half-measures such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," sexual orientation is no longer an automatic bar to military service and advancement. Whether the Corrupt Trump Administration's current regressive policies prove to be a temporary setback or not remains to be seen.

I'd still rate Pete Buttigieg as a long shot to be inaugurated president on January 20, 2020, but taking his candidacy seriously at all would have been inconceivable in 1969. Still, our prescient perp overlooks the fact that other countries have or have had openly LGBTQ heads of state in the 21st Century. And none of them have been consumed by fire or brimstone.

The tendency toward finding community in urban centers has concentrated our political power there and in the one political party left with concern for urban issues. It has, unfortunately, contributed to the acreage advantage the other political party has to diminish our influence on a state and national scale by the gerrymander, and to disregard the Log Cabineers, GOProudsters, and Caitlyn Jenners along its fringe.

Flexing its legislative, financial and current executive muscle, that political party has spent the past fifty years stacking the courts with reactionary activists, so this is no time to trust that progress made will be progress kept.

This Week's Sneak Peek

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen

Another Police Cartoon, Another Editor

There haven't been any new developments in the dispute between editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and the Los Angeles Times-Police Newsletter, but meanwhile, there has been a police union protest against a syndicated cartoon by Milt Priggee in the Florida Times-Union.

And a very different response from the editors of the paper.

A spokesperson for the Jacksonville chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police has criticized the Florida Times-Union for an editorial cartoon that he said is offensive and puts local police officers in danger.
The cartoon by nationally renowned cartoonist Milt Priggee was published last Wednesday, and it compares the arrest of Dylann Roof, who shot nine black church members in a Charleston, South Carolina, sanctuary, to the shooting of a black man who was pulled over for a minor traffic infraction.

The first panel of the cartoon, captioned "To Serve and Protect," portrays a police officer asking Roof if he "would like fries with that'; the second shows two smiling officers, one with a smoking gun, behind a car with a bullet hole in the rear window as the officer with the gun explains, "Mr. Blackie tried to get away, so I had to shoot him."

FOP president Steve Amos is quoted as saying, “It infuriates me. It offends me. There is no truth in the nature of the cartoon at all.” That police officers did indeed bring fast food to Dylann Roof, and other officers did indeed shoot a black man who was driving without a license plate must be a truth invisible to the Jacksonville Fraternal Order of Police.

Without getting into any of the other merits of anybody's arguments, what I appreciate most is the final paragraph of the News4Jax.com article:

[Times Union editor Frank] Denton said editors at the paper would not be issuing an apology to the FOP, because if they did so, they would be apologizing to someone every time they publish an editorial cartoon.

Postwar Traffic Cop

A propos of nothing, here's another cartoon from A Bird's-Eye View of the Postwar World (R. M. Barrows & Margaret Foster, eds., Consolidated Book Publishers, Chicago, 1945), continuing the theme of that well before now, we'd all be flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

Well, not this guy, particularly. Perhaps he had been caught speeding, or changing lanes without signaling.

Or perhaps it was a case of rotor rage.

The cartoonist here is identified only as "Robinson," even in the back page credits, so either he was phenomenally famous, or even his editors at the Saturday Evening Post (or Collier's or Parade or whatever) had no idea who he was.

Da Do Ron Ron

One of the most difficult questions I ever have to answer is "How long does it take you to do a cartoon?"

A cartoon such as last week's syndicated one, showing from a fair height two buses and an ambulance stranded in a vast wilderness alongside a lonely road, took fairly little time to draw. It was just a matter of getting the vehicles drawn in the same perspective as each other and adding a few faces that were too small to allow for any actual detail. I probably spent more time on the lettering of the balloon than on the rest of the drawing. Maybe an hour for the whole thing.

But that doesn't count the hard part of the cartoon: coming up with the idea in the first place.

I had decided early on that I wanted to do a cartoon about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's line item budget veto slashing the state Office of AIDS budget. The obvious idea for the topic would have been to depict him as the Terminator. That idea has been done before -- hundreds of times in one fashion or another since he first declared his candidacy for the office -- so I quickly rejected it. But what else to do?

I thought long and hard about it. During some of that time, any bystander might have mistakenly concluded that I wasn't doing anything. Or that I was mindlessly surfing the internet. Or napping.

Sitting around appearing to do nothing, surfing the internet, or napping for hours on end does not do much toward maintaining domestic tranquility at home, so I tried thinking up the cartoon idea while doing other things that needed to get done, such as housecleaning and mowing the lawn. Somehow, actually accomplishing something seems always to be thoroughly detrimental to germinating a cartoon idea.

I noticed about halfway through mowing the lawn that I had spent 20 minutes or so thinking of nothing but the lyrics to a nonsense song from the musical Hair. It's a pleasant enough tune, but there was no way it was going to be helpful in coming up with a cartoon about slashing funds to budget California's Office of AIDS.

That's when it hit me how much easier song writing must be than political cartooning.

A song writer can get away with writing "Glippety glub gloopy nibby nabby noopy La la la lo lo Sabba sibby sabba nooby abba nabba le le lo lo tooby ooby walla nooby abba naba" and still have a hit on his hands forty years later. "Oh wah diddy, diddy dum diddy doo" remains in the top 100 hits of all time. All the Police wanted to say to you was "De do do do, de da da da," and fans ate it up.

If I tried to get away with that sort of thing, 90% of my readers would respond, "I don't get it." (The other 10% would assume I was ripping off Zippy the Pinhead.) Editors would drop my feature faster than a flaming porcupine.

Considering how the job prospects for editorial cartooning get worse and worse with every passing day, how much harder do you suppose it really is to be a song writer? How much time does it take to write one stupid song, anyway?

All the doo dah day.

This Week's Cartoon

On the 40th anniversary of the bar raid at the Stonewall Inn, Fort Worth Police investigated the week-old Rainbow Lounge and reportedly found that patrons were drinking in the establishment. In the course of the police making arrests for disorderly conduct, one patron had to be hospitalized for a serious head injury.

Since then, the chief of Fort Worth Police Department, also pretty new to the job, has been in full damage control and apology mode, so at least that counts for some progress since 1969.