Q Toon: Pinklining

Neither Donald Trump nor Roseanne Barr have anything to do with this week's cartoon, so most of you may require a bit of explanation.

On May 16, fifteen-term Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher told a delegation from the Orange County Association of Realtors that “Every homeowner should be able to make a decision not to sell their home to someone [if] they don’t agree with their lifestyle.”

The delegation had come to him to ask him to support HR 1447, which would expand the 1968 Fair Housing Act to add anti-discrimination protections based on a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. The existing law already forbids home sellers, landlords and lenders from discrimination based on a person’s race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

The National Association of Realtors' lobbying and campaign arm has been a strong backer of Rohrabacher in the past, but once his remarks were made public by a former Orange County Realtor president, the NAR announced withdrawal of their support.

“It was determined that Rep. Rohrabacher will no longer receive support from National Association of Realtors’s President’s Circle,” an association statement said, referring to its list of recommended candidates. Rohrabacher’s stance, the 1.3-million-member trade group said, is contrary to NAR’s code of ethics, which bans discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Previously Rohrabacher had been designated as a “Realtor Champion,” eligible for support from top Realtor donors.

Rohrabacher has a long anti-LGBTQ record. He voted to keep the military Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, and consistently against workplace protections for LGBTQ citizens. He repeatedly voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution to exclude same-sex couples from the right to marry. Having lost that fight, he has advocated not having federal recognition of any marriages whatsoever.

Six Republicans, four Democrats, a Libertarian and an independent are running against Rohrabacher this fall. (Four other candidates will appear on the primary ballot, although they have unofficially withdrawn from the race.) It's a strongly Republican district, but given California's electoral system in which the top two vote-getters in a general primary, regardless of their party affiliation, face off against each other in the general election, anything could happen.

Still, I strongly suspect that the shtick Mr. Rohrabacher has been selling in southern California since the 1980's will meet growing skepticism from the voters born since then.

The Bloom Is Off Roseanne

It may be heresy to say so, but I think it's a shame that Roseanne Barr's reboot got the axe.

Don't get me wrong: her tweet about Valerie Jarrett was inexcusable. It was racist, uncalled for, and you can't even defend it as being even the teeny tiniest bit funny.

I had only seen the pilot episode of the reboot; I watched the original show occasionally, but I thought it lost its appeal when Roseanne decided to change it from a show about a working class family to a show about a business manager and her quirky sidekicks. Then the show came back, and suddenly all my liberal friends who still watch TV were up in high dudgeon because Roseanne was portraying a Trump l'oeilist as something other than a knuckle-dragging buffoon.

Was it Sinclair TV with a laugh track? No. It's hard to believe that Melissa Gilbert, Wanda Sykes, or Laurie Metcalf would have agreed to participate in a show which incessantly bashed liberals and queers and feminists and Black Lives Mattersists.

A couple of months ago, conservative Indianapolis cartoonist Gary Varvel wrote a column departing from the conventional wisdom that the MAGA reiteration of Roseanne's show was a poke in the eye to the Librul A-yleet:

Many conservatives were giddy that it depicts a version of “Trump’s America.” The main character, Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), is a supporter of President Trump in the show. Barr also is a friend of the president in real life.

Critics said that the reboot shows the diversity of politics in America today. In reality, the show is still about a socially liberal blue-collar family in Illinois. It's cleverly written to appeal to both Trump supporters and never-Trumpers. But conservative values are left out.

Roseanne Conner, he noted, may be pro-Trump, but her family includes a gender-queer grandson and a middle-aged daughter trying to become a surrogate mother for another couple. (Personally, I thought that plot line was a clever way to include both Beckies in the show.) I'd argue that was a good thing.

Real families, including those in deepest red states, have LGBTQ relatives; some may even know someone in an unconventional parenting situation. I give Ms. Barr kudos for showing those families that it's possible to accept them and love them — at the very least, that it's possible to get along.

We're all getting far too comfortable shouting past each other from inside our steel-reinforced cultural bubbles, and is seemed to be that this show had the capacity for nuance and empathy. If she was trying for something both sides of the political divide might enjoy, this country still has a need for that.

I saw it on the internet, so it must be true.

So, take it easy on the Ambien, everybody.  There's still Tim Allen and Patricia Heaton.

Memorial Day Sneak Peek

Oh, good. No Trump in this week's toon.

By the way, if you were disappointed that Saturday's post didn't include any cartoons from 1918 that were specifically about Memorial Day (the only Memorial Day during U.S. participation in the Great War), check out today's Comic Strip of the Day.

Hält die Klappe und Geh Raus!

Sprechenback Saturday continues last week's discussion of the push in the U.S. to repress all things German during World War I. I got somewhat distracted toward the end of last Saturday's post, so I'm going to get the distraction out of the way right off the bat today with a cartoon about Prohibition.

"Not a Drum Was Heard" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, May, 1918

Indiana approved state-wide prohibition of alcohol on April 2, 1918, followed by Michigan on April 30. While Burt Thomas's cartoon features ward heelers lamenting the loss of their occupation and restaurateurs fretting that they must now provide quality food, what I want to point out is that John Barleycorn's casket is adorned with a beer stein and pretzel. And I suppose that's a bottle of liebfraumilch.

Before the war, cartoonists tended to portray the evils of liquor using Demon Rum or Wicked Whisky. Associating booze with the hated Hun, however, would soon facilitate passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Increasing voting rights for women and shifting revenues from alcohol excise taxes to federal income taxes were also significant, but our topic today is animus toward German-Americans.)

"No Compromise" by Archibald Chapin in St. Louis Republic, ca. May, 1918

Even in German enclaves such as St. Louis and Cincinnati, there were drives to force German language out of the public sphere. Streets, hospitals and entire cities changed their names: Germantown, Nebraska, for example, being renamed Garland, for a local soldier killed in the war. There were contests to find a more Amurikin word for sauerkraut, although the name "liberty cabbage" didn't last as long as actual sauerkraut does. A Massachusetts doctor tried to get German measles renamed "liberty measles" ... but it didn't catch on.

Detail of "Saluting 'Cincy, the Queen City of the West'" by Manuel Rosenberg in Cartoons Magazine, July, 1918

It is a shame that neither the Milwaukee Journal nor Milwaukee Sentinel employed editorial cartoonists of their own at this point in history, because I would have liked to see the sort of reaction they would have drawn to all this Germanophobia. The Journal played up Teddy Roosevelt's May 29 visit on Page 1, at which the former president called for an end to "all societies, social, political, or any other" based on European heritage. That included ethnic churches (the norm for American Lutherans, Catholics, and some smaller denominations) and, of course, newspapers.

"I wish we could provide by law so that within a reasonable space of time, a space of time that will avoid unnecessary hardship, there shall be no newspaper published in the land except in English. ... If... treasonable or semi-treasonable matter is published in a newspaper in another tongue, people do not know that the poison is being instilled at all."

"Beware the Snake" by J.E. Murphy in San Francisco Call-Post, May 13, 1918

Of course, if Milwaukee had paid any heed to Mr. Roosevelt's "campaign against the hyphen," its summers would not be anywhere near as fun.

Roosevelt's advice appealed to Sidney Greene, possibly one of the most strident Germanophobes to sling ink; his cartoon drawn after Roosevelt delivered much the same speech in New York appeared here last week.

"Marooned" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Evening Telegram, June 2, 1918

Suspicion of foreigners from whatever country one is at war with has always been fairly commonplace, and the Great War was no exception. And certain spectacular acts of German espionage had gotten cartoonists' attention, so you can't categorize all the anti-German immigrant cartoons as entirely baseless. Yet Greene seems to have been particularly anxious for the censorship of German-language media, returning to the topic again and again.

"How Long Must We Stand for This?" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June, 1918

On May 16, 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act as an amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act, criminalizing "insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military" by speech or publication. (Since I discussed Teddy Roosevelt above, I should mention that he opposed passage of the Sedition Act.) Although the government used the law to go after International Workers of the World union leaders and a few German-American businessmen, it never used the law to prosecute any German-language American publication for collusion with the enemy.

"Drop It Now" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June, 1918

But what, you may ask (go ahead, I'll wait), about the other side of the coin?

"Time to Abolish Everything That Is Foreign" by C.F. Naughton in Duluth Evening Herald, May 25, 1918

I have not been able to locate Kaiser Wilhelm's speech about abolishing everything foreign, although I did find a satiric poem about it in the American Punch magazine. Whether the quotation is accurate or not, I have no doubt that it was reported in the American press (along with the reports of German soldiers tossing Belgian babies into ovens and infecting Red Cross blankets with pathogens), and it does seem to reflect the Kaiser's policy throughout his reign of promoting German cultural identity in his empire.

"Una Colazione Andata a Male" by Sirti in Il 420, Florence, May 12, 1918

"No other language permitted except German" proclaims the sign on the wall in this Italian cartoon. France, Italy, England and the U.S. present gold to the German at the table, whose feet rest on "International Law" and a "Directory of Mankind"; neutrals, Serbia, Montenegro and Belgium hunt for scraps in the foreground amid torn-up treaties and the skulls of Justice and Liberty.

★

Monday is Memorial Day, which did not escape cartoonists' notice in 1918, and it won't escape mine now. At roughly this time, Cartoons Magazine noted the death in action of Boston cartoonist Herbert Wolf, known for his cartoons of military camp life, and that of pilot Gordon Levy, son of cartoonist Bert Levy.

"When a Feller Needs a Friend" by Clare Briggs for Red Cross, May, 1918

American newspapers observed a week of emphasis on the Red Cross in late May, and the Committee on Public Education's Bureau of Cartoons must have promoted the image of a soldier tangled in barbed wire, because a number of cartoonists used it. "When a Feller Needs a Friend" was a regular feature of Clare Briggs's usually light-hearted, folksy cartoons for the New York Tribune.

(A bit of cartoonist-military trivia: Briggs's math professor at the University of Nebraska was John J. Pershing, later U.S. commander of the Western Front in the war. "I believe he will testify that it was easier to conquer Germany than to teach me math," Briggs said later. "One day he ordered me to the blackboard to demonstrate a theorem, and while I was giving the problem a hard but losing battle, he remarked: 'Briggs, sit down, you don't know anything.' Right then and there, I decided to become a newspaper man.")

The Chicago Tribune's John McCutcheon was inspired to draw the cartoon below upon the death of  Major Gervais Raoul Lufbery, 33, a famous French-American flying ace in the Lafayette Flying Corps with a reputation for coolness and daring. "Luff," as he was known throughout the U.S. Army and French Air Service, was a recipient of the Croix de Guerre, Legion of Honor, Ten Palms, and Médaille Militaire, plus four British medals and one from Montenegro.  He was shot down over France on May 19, 1918.

"The Fallen Ace" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1918

According to newspaper reports,

"It was after six American aviators had attacked in vain yesterday that Maj. Raoul Lufbery took the air back of the American sector north of Toul against an enormous enemy biplane, a few seconds later to leap from his machine as it burst into flame and drop to the Earth.
"This type of  'flying tank,' it became known here today, is practically invulnerable to the bullets and machine guns now used by American flyers.
"So it was in a hopeless struggle that America's foremost ace lost his life, after his bullets had rattled harmlessly off the armored German machine."

Lufbery was buried with full military honors with high-ranking French and American officers in attendance. After the war, Lufbery's remains were moved to the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial near Versailles as a permanent monument to the 68 American pilots and their French officers who lost their lives during the war.

Q Toon: PSA, Not PDA, for Trump

The more you know...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates revealed last week that on two separate occasions, Donald Joffrey Trump asked him whether there was a difference between HIV and HPV.

As a public service, on the off chance that Mr. Trump happens to read my blog, this week's cartoon includes a few basic distinctions between the two viruses (viri?). There are more, which you can read about on the Department of Health and Human Services web site, Don, at least until you and Secretary Azar decide to scrub fact-based information from the site in favor of abstinence-only sermons or faith healing or whatever snake oil your Faith Initiative Board is selling you that day.

Wait — you'd better bookmark some other government's web page instead.

Then, next time you run into Mr. Gates, you can stick to topics that genuinely interest you. Like how hot you think his daughter is.

Or perhaps you can ask him what it's like to become a billionaire by producing innovative and creative new products instead of just slapping your name on crap.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Your humble blogger got a nice link from The Daily Cartoonist over the weekend (thank you kindly, D.D. Degg) to Saturday's post here. It prompted me to go back and add a link to a facsimile of the Frederick Boyd Stevenson column which I had quoted extensively.

Then I couldn't stop myself from adding another anti-German language cartoon.

I've blogged here in relative obscurity, but now I'm starting to worry that I might have given Hereby-Demander-in-Chief Donald Joffrey Trump ideas with this cartoon from the previous Saturday's cartoon from the archives:

Enviro-Stewardship: The Grass Is Always Greener

Once a month, I turn the blog over to my Dad's "Environmental Stewardship" column, which he writes for local church newsletters. John Berge is a retired physical chemist, a current member of the local Board of Health, and past president of the area chapter of the Sierra Club.

It has been said that you should never ask your barber whether you need a haircut. Likewise, you should never ask your lawn service whether you need more fertilizer and other chemicals.

Numerous studies have shown that urban and suburban lawns receive more fertilizer per acre than agricultural land, and more of it washes off and down the drains to our creeks, streams and rivers. From there, it ends up in Lake Michigan for most of us where I live, or going down the Mississippi River. The latter ends up in the Gulf of Mexico and its “dead zone” faster than Lake Michigan will drain it through the downstream Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. It takes about 100 years for a complete change of water in Lake Michigan, so what washes in will stay around for quite a while!

So where should you go for analysis of your lawn, garden and their fertilizer needs? The University of Wisconsin Soils Laboratory will do an unbiased analysis for $15. It can also check for elevated lead levels if you are adjacent to a major highway, in an older home that may have received lead paints, or otherwise concerned about lead contamination, especially in a garden of edibles. The Turfgrass Diagnostic Laboratory can also help with other turf problems probably better than a lawn service with its own agenda and products for sale. Another source for soil testing is the Milwaukee Health Department Laboratory. Their fee is also $15.

If you must add fertilizer to your lawn, take care so that as little as possible ends up on the sidewalk, driveway or street. A quick trip with a broom can send this wasted and polluting run-off back where you want it, not adding to the algae blooms.

Consider carefully whether you want to include pesticides of any kind with the fertilizer. I don’t use any weed killer since I want to save the spring beauties and other natural plants within our grassy areas and I don’t want any spraying or leaching into the garden beds. Insecticides will not only kill off what you are bothered by, but also butterflies, moths, bees, lady bugs and other beneficial insects. Broadcast spreading of pesticides does not appear to be good environmental stewardship.

🌎

In a whimsical extension of the “never ask” section of the first paragraph, may I suggest: Never ask an ex-senator from an oil producing state to establish automobile and truck efficiency standards (mpg). Never ask a lobbyist for a coal producers association to establish guide lines for power plant emissions. Never ask a climate change denier what our environmental policies and international accords should be. Possibly you have your own “never ask”; I ‘d like to hear them.