Tell Us Something We Don't Know

From Piers Morgan's interview with Donald Joffrey Trump yesterday:

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's sneak peek comes from my sketchbook and will give you absolutely no clue what the topic of this week's cartoon is.

The last time I included a handcart in a cartoon, I completely bollixed up the perspective, mistakenly figuring that the bottom of the cart would be visible when the cart was held at an angle. What can I say? It has been decades since I worked in a warehouse, and while I do have a handcart I can use as a reference, I can't load it with boxes and hold it off the vertical at the same time that I'm drawing it.

That bottom box still has some problems with perspective. Tune in later this week to find out whether I figured it out in time.

Sick of War

2018 is turning out to be a bad year for influenza, but it's still not as bad as 1918 was. Chalk that up to so many people failing to get their flu shots in those days. At any rate, editorial cartoonist John "Ding" Darling took advantage of the situation to make a comment about foreign affairs.

"Might Be the Neighbors' Children Have Been Having It" by Jay N. "Ding" Darling, January, 1918

American and Allied media excitedly reported that Austria was having a rough time of it in January, 1918. Emperor Karl's cabinet resigned, foodstuffs were in short supply, and laborers were going on strike.

"Doing His Bit!" by Sidney Joseph Greene in New York Evening Telegram, January, 1918

Even though Austria-Hungary's had been the nation to trigger World War I with its declaration of war against Serbia, Germany was the more dominant of the Central Powers from the earliest weeks of the conflict. As food shortages took hold in the industrialized Austria, leftist labor leaders teamed up with pacifists in protest against their Teutonic overlords to the North.

"Getting Tired of the Mess" by Harry Keys in Columbus Citizen, January, 1918

Yet there were notes of caution. The Pittsburgh Sun ventured that "Reports of labor uprising in the dual monarchy are to be taken with the same quantity of salt that are to go with similar reports of internal disorders in Germany. ... This latest tale of unrest bears the earmarks of truth. Taken in connection with the rigid sealing of the border, which was presumed to have been to clothe in secrecy the movement of the troops, there is a strong presumption that in Vienna and even in Budapest there have been riots and that at this time thousands of workmen are on strike in the capital and in the industrial cities of the south."

"The Weakest Link" by Harry Murphy in Chicago Examiner, January 31, 1918

From Berlin, statements of a left-of-center political leader gained wide circulation in England and America. "Suppose the army conquered France and England; would that mean peace?" thundered Philip Scheidemann, leader of the Social Democrats in Berliner Vorwaerts after Field Marshall Paul Von Hindenburg predicted the German army would be in Paris by April 1. "I say no, for we would still have to conquer America."

"Sleepless Nights!" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, January 25, 1918

German officials and media hastened to reassure the public that Entente depictions of dissent and disarray in the German government were greatly exaggerated.

"Durch die Reuterbrille" by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, November 27, 1917

However, one does begin to see cartoons laying the blame for Germany's and Austria's ills on the selfishness and greed of the moneyed class, portraying them as the ones making a fortune off of the conflict. This Swiss cartoon promises that the war, and those capitalists' gravy train, were soon to come to a stop.

"A Cause for Alarm" by "F.B." in Nebelspalter, Zurich, January, 1918

Yes, some mainstream American cartoonists (not only the socialists) also occasionally leveled criticism at the nation's rich for not sacrificing as much as others in the war effort, but in these Germanic cartoons lies the seeds of resentment against bankers that would grow into Kristallnacht and the Holocaust.

"Die Neue Polonaise" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, January 22, 1918

Meanwhile, negotiations between the Central Powers and Russia toward the Brest-Litovsk treaty continued, despite Entente entreaties to Russia to resist. Here Olaf Gulbransson depicts a Russian negotiator (Nikolai Bukharin, perhaps?) as a Russian hound passively listening to Western talk of humanity, protection of the little people, correctness, and democracy.

"Die Stimme Seines Herrn" by Olaf Gulbransson in Simplicissimus, Munich,. January 22, 1918

And as regarded its western adversaries, Germany responded to President Wilson's Fourteen Point peace proposal with interest and a counter-proposal of its own. A Kingdom of Poland, with borders well east of where they are today, would be joined in a personal union with Austria-Hungary. A Duchy of Courland (western Latvia) and a Principality of Lithuania would be established as vassal states of the Prussian monarchy. Germany would agree to withdraw from Belgium, but the industrial region of Alsace-Lorraine would remain part of Germany.

"You May Have Belgium!" by John H. Cassel in New York Evening World, January, 1918

On this, Kaiser Wilhelm had the support of Social Democrat Scheidemann, continuing in the Berliner Vorwaerts that "Alsace is Germany's and will remain so. If one clear word is spoken regarding Belgium, England's war-mongering will end. An honorable, complete reinstatement of Belgium is our duty."

Stacking the Triskaidekaitis

I first drew about the appointment of Roger Severino to the civil rights office of Health and Human Services last March. Severino, previously a lobbyist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, has been an agitator against marriage equality and the treating transgender persons with any humanity or respect.

“On the basis of religious teachings, moral reasoning, scientific evidence, and medical experience, many have strong grounds to hold that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic,” Severino and a co-author wrote in a Heritage Foundation report in January 2016. “Many involved in providing medical care and those enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to participating in or paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions.”

Last week, Severino announced the creation of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within his office

to ensure that health care providers are allowing workers to opt out of procedures when they have religious or moral objections. The new division would be a third, co-equal branch with the office's existing two divisions that focus on federal civil rights laws and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Severino and his Conscience and Religious Freedom ("Condom" for short) Division will come to the defense of America's beleaguered and persecuted Christian minority, ensuring that Christian health care workers will no longer be forced to violate their fundamental religious beliefs. No more will Baptist podiatrists be transferred to the Abortion Unit. Catholic pharmacists will no longer have to fill morning-after pill prescriptions for divorcees. Pentecostal dishwashers in the hospital cafeteria need not live in fear of transgender visitors asking them for directions to the ladies' room — wait, you say that's not the problem?

But longtime HHS officials say that the existing civil rights office was more than capable of handling these issues and that creating an entire division to focus on religious liberty sends the wrong message.
"This is a classic solution in search of a problem," said one official who's handled civil rights issues at HHS. "And it’s a problem that doesn’t really exist, because hospitals tend to be really compliant on this kind of stuff."
During the Obama administration, evangelical groups had even hailed HHS for its efforts to enforce religious freedom, such as intervening in a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion nurse against Mount Sinai Health System in New York.

But if you thought my examples were silly, go back and read that excerpt from Severino's Heritage Foundation report again.

"[T]hose enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to ... paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions"?

If you think about what Severino is saying there, it's that anyone paying for health insurance ought to have the right to object to somebody else's health care.

Just because your faith leads you to abstain from pork doesn't mean you have a right to stop your health insurance company from covering someone else's hospital visit for trichinosis.

You may have a religious commitment to pacifism, but you don't get to sue to get your premiums back if your insurance company pays for a veteran's PTSD treatment.

And if your god tells you to be vigilant against transgender cooties but your insurance company pays for the estrogen treatments of someone on the other side of town, tough. It's none of your damned business.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I barely saw yesterday's football games on account of having to think up and draw a cartoon. Gosh, I hope I didn't miss anything important.

Environmental Stewardship: Romans 6:1

Here's Dad's Environmental Stewardship column for February:

Not too long ago, a member of my congregation complimented me on my Environmental Stewardship articles on climate change and global warming. (Like most males, I am a glutton for compliments.) But then this person essentially said that we need not change the way we live significantly; we should just trust in the Lord because God, after the flood, promised never again to destroy the world.

True, but He said nothing about what we might destroy.

Also, I should remind the reader that even with the worst case scenario, the earth will still be here and so will the cockroaches, carp and lots of other living creatures; we will just have made the earth close to unlivable for many or most human beings.

Joseph Sittler: Photo from josephsittler.org

That member’s statement sounded an awful lot like what my favorite theologian, Joseph Sittler, had written about years ago. What follows is a direct quote from his writing in the Center for the Study of Campus Ministry Yearbook, 1977-78 as reprinted in “Joseph A. Sittler: Grace Notes and Other Fragments.”

“I meet it [soggy piety], for example, in people who, following a talk about the Christian responsibility for the care of the earth, will remark, ‘I hear what you say, it is very serious and we must do something about it; but I really trust in  the Lord. The Lord will not permit us to do this to his world. This is our Father’s world and he will see to it that we do not destroy it.’ The first person who said this to me took me rather aback because I had not met that one before. But neither, of course, had I met before the kind of jovial God who lets you romp all over his garden and will clean up the garbage after you have messed it up. I was hard put for a moment – but by providential help, for only a moment.
“I remembered a wonderful passage in the prophets – you remember – where God is talking to a prophet who has worked very hard at a certain vocation and has become quite discouraged. The prophet is taking the matter up with God and says, ‘I seem to be working hard at it, but I’m not getting anywhere.’ And God says, ‘I will send my servant Nebuchadnezzar.’ And the prophet says, ‘How’s that again? That guy? You really mean you are going to let Nebuchadnezzar serve your purposes?’ God says, ‘You heard me! I will send my servant Nebuchadnezzar.’
“So not all the purposes of God are realized in the hands of the church, but God is a God of judgement as well as of grace; you cannot get away endlessly with rapacity toward his creation.”

Watson a Name?

The cartoon I drew for the syndicate this week starred a fictional Hollywood character named "Brock Stoder." The name doesn't have any hidden meaning; it was merely something that sounded like a film star's name without actually sounding like a particular film star's name.

When I originally described the idea to my editors, he had the name "Brock Slater," but it occurred to me that I had better Google that name in case it happened to be someone's real moniker. As it turned out,  there's a business management consultant in Chicago by that name. Just in case I'm ever in Chicago needing a consultation on managing my business, I decided I might as well change it.

I had already inked "Brock S" by then, so I tried "Brock" plus a couple other butch-sounding surnames (one of which turned out to belong to a transgender soldier who might actually have a chance of having the cartoon brought to his attention) before cooking up "Stoder," which doesn't seem to be anybody's last name.

Coming up with names for cartoon characters can be a tricky business. Most of the generic characters in editorial cartoons don't need names, except when the cartoonist wants to have a recurring character, or if it would be weird for someone else in the cartoon not to call him/her by name. I'll often use a pun as a name to signal to the reader that the character doesn't represent an actual individual, and in hopes that no parent would have been so careless or mean as to inflict such an easily mocked name on their child. A page in one of my sketch books is devoted to names that I might find a use for later: LiBrarion Buchman, Juan Thieu III, Purmia Bruschi, Oliver Sudden.

For a few years, I drew a generic congressman, Luke Warmish, who was a kind of middle-of-the-road career politician:

I quickly determined that Congressman Warmish was a Democrat, but in 1993 and '94, I portrayed him shying away from overt support of President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposals. He lost his reelection bid in the Republican sweep of 1994, but his name showed up in one later cartoon about Political Action Committee ads on TV, without indicating what office he might be running for.

Meanwhile, I had given Warmish a Republican counterpart in Charles Snollygoster IV, whose surname comes from a word meaning a person, "especially a politician, who is guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles."

Congressman Snollygoster had no problem taking his stand on the bedrock Republican issues of the day — against flag burning, in favor of The Family, against taxes — so he lasted longer than Mr. Warmish did. I imagined him representing a safe suburban district somewhere in Illinois; I suspect, however, that he would have been primaried sometime since 2010.

I haven't found it necessary to invent fictional right-wingers, Tea Partisans, or Trump Loyalists; there is plenty to criticize in the real ones without making fake ones up.

Sometimes one's editor doesn't want to single out any particular legislator. It would have been irresponsible, for example, to have used a real politician in the cartoon at the top of this post, which was intended to highlight the underhanded tactics used in issue ads against politicians.

Sometimes the cartoonist wants the character to say something no politician in his right mind would say (at least in the Time Before Trump). I gave this state legislator, who appeared a few times in my NorthCountry Journal cartoons (and at least once later in the UW-Milwaukee Post), a name unlikely to belong to any elected politician anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Not all my fictional named characters have been politicians, or have appeared multiple times. These two simply needed nameplates in the first panel.

This daytime talk show host's name had been sitting in my notebook for years, and it's a good thing I've never been a drag performer.

(And yes, I've been informed that "transgender" is the preferred term nowadays. Sadly, nobody on Ms. Drewledge's staff had been so enlightened.)

You may have noticed this meteorologist's name on your shampoo bottle. I therefore hasten to stipulate that I have the utmost respect for the professionalism and dedication of America's weathermen and weatherwomen; even though I often wish that the news department spent the same amount of time, say, forecasting the chances of the bills making their way through the state legislature that the meteorologist gets every night to tell us what the jet stream is up to.

Ms. Sulfate, however, is not a professionally accredited meteorologist. But at least she wasn't saddled with the name Phil Kiesterlich.