Q Toon: Trump Comes a-Courting

With the announced retirement of Anthony Kennedy, Donald Joffrey Trump gets to name a second Supreme Court Justice in as many years. If anyone thought that America's foray into reactionary totalitarianism would be but a four-year fluke of history, anyone is about to be proven sadly mistaken.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, having bottled up President Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland for nearly a year, promises to grease the skids for whomever Trump names. I'm sure Mr. Kim will continue in his current job; Trump's nominee will probably be someone from that list of ideologues vetted by the Heritage Foundation.

But Mr. McConnell's record suggests that Trump could nominate Beelzebub himself and Mitch would shrug and go along with it.

Independence Week Sneak Peek

But her emails.

Or her pant suits.

Or her forced laugh.

Or something like that.

Gaze of Future Past

I'm only rewinding the calendar 25 years or so for this installment of Selfback Saturday. We're wrapping up LGBTQ Pride Month, which will serve to touch off this recollection of some cartoons I drew for the Minnesota LGBTQ press in 1993.

This is not one of them.

The previous summer, my dear friend Jeff Crump asked me to parody a syndicated editorial cartoon by Chris Britt that had appeared in the Fargo Forum July 25, 1992. The original had made fun of the LGBTQ community using various crude stereotypes; Jeff described to me the cartoon he wanted me to draw, replacing Britt's crude stereotypes with equally crude stereotypical features of Minnesota festival-goers.

My parody ran in Gaze Magazine, a predecessor to the current Lavender Magazine of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Running about 64 pages to the typical issue, it was printed on newsprint in black-and-white, save for some purple on the front and back cover.

I followed that cartoon up with a series of editorial cartoons. I didn't have a computer at the time, and I didn't have the relationship with Gaze's editors that I had had with other distant newspapers such as the NorthCountry Journal. Not being au courant with Minnesota LGBTQ news, my cartoons tended to deal with national topics.

The above cartoon from May of 1993 hints that maybe the country hasn't moved forward very much in the quarter century since. No, military brass were not being turned away from restaurants a la Sarah Huckabee Sanders; I concocted the scenario to spoof Pentagon worries that openly gay or lesbian personel in the military would be bad for troop morale.

Then as now, a five-to-four conservative majority on the Supreme Court caused no end of stress to liberals hoping to protect Civil Rights gains from the 1960s and 70s. What passed for the "liberal" wing of the Court were justices appointed by Nixon and Ford; the lone Justice to have been appointed by a Democratic president, "Whizzer" White, usually voted with the conservatives. He resigned on June 28, 1993, and would be replaced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the fall.

The above cartoon from July referred to a ruling that merely showing that a business or government had demonstrated a pattern of racial or gender discrimination was not enough to prove a specific instance of discrimination. No, said the Court, the aggrieved party must uncover a written policy or some other public confession that he or she was discriminated against.

What else is familiar from 1993? Well, we had a billionaire who told us he had all the answers...

...(just not necessarily with him right now)...

...And a sex offender as president.

Is it progress, then, that 25 years later, we've got the same guy fulfilling both roles?

Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for gays in the military sparked many of the cartoons that I drew for Gaze, and for In Step and Q Syndicate after that. For all the dire warnings of the danger gays and lesbians would pose to troop morale, it's amazing how little troop morale is in the news ever since President Obama ended the policy.

We may yet discover how troop morale is affected when Donald Trump gets around to reversing that Obama action.

In spite of having next to no interaction with Gaze's editors, I did manage to send them at least one cartoon touching on a Minnesota topic. The spring of 1993 brought spectacular flooding of the Mississippi River and its upper tributaries. Traveling from Minneapolis to St. Peter, a bus I was taking to a convention was forced to take several detours to avoid flooded bridges that were no longer over the Minnesota River but under it.

We've come almost full circle from offensive stereotypes to offensive puns, so that will wrap it up for another thrilling episode of Selfback Saturday. Tune in again next Saturday to see what else I can find to distract myself from the Eve of DisTrumption!

Q Toon: Selective Service

Members of the Corrupt Trump Administration are enjoying more home-cooked meals these days.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Policy Adviser Stephen Wormtongue Miller were hounded out of Mexican restaurants (¿Qué tan irónico es eso?) over the administration's internment camps for refugee children. The staff at a Virginia restaurant refused service to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the owner explaining that "the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation."

Next, Congressman Maxine Waters (D-CA) urged an audience to harass Trump cabinet members whenever they're seen at restaurants, department stores and gas stations. Called to task for that, she resorted to the same Whatabout tactic usually associated with Trump and his Trump l'oeilists.

I won't condone Rep. Waters's advocacy of shocking, shocking behavior, but at least she wasn't calling for people to commit physical assault, "Second Amendment solutions," or armed insurrection. Apparently that sort of thing is just fine with some people.

We are becoming the United States In Name Only. There are those who think it's okay to proclaim "F*¢k Trump" on live national broadcast television, while others are calling the cops to arrest Black Americans for the most innocuous activities. You boycott Chick Fil-A for being antigay, or Sara Lee for being antigun. Either you get all your news from MSNBC, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Now Next and Colbert, or you get it from Fox, Sinclair, Newsmax, Breitbart, and Russian internet trolls. And promptly repost, retweet, or otherwise regurgitate the juiciest stuff.

That crazy aunt who used to send all those unhinged fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd: emails? She's everyone now.

My husband and I have relatives and friends whom we love dearly, but with whom we just can't discuss anything remotely political any more. It's no problem in the Real World, but becomes trickier on social media. He recently shared a 1947 film that was made to combat the racism, bigotry and divisive rhetoric of the KKK, Jim Crow, and what would later be named McCarthyism; someone then promptly told him it's all the fault of liberal Democrats who refuse to compromise on immigration so they can win this year's midterm elections.

(Trump, McConnell, Ryan and the Tea Party are always willing to talk compromise, you know.)

It is certainly true that a growing number of liberal Democrats see less and less point in compromise. Looking back at eight years of the Barack Obama administration, which started with his naming more members of the opposition party to the cabinet than any administration since World War II, what did his willingness to compromise get us? A health care plan that lacks the comprehensiveness needed for it to fulfill its promise. More arrests of immigrants than any previous administration. A centrist Supreme Court nominee that Republicans refused the courtesy of consideration for nearly a year so that Donald Trump could fill the seat with a doctrinaire conservative instead (and a solid majority who just ruled that hostility to Christians is unconstitutional, but hostility to Muslims is meh.)

Given that Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, and Democratic Senate candidates totaled 6 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, and Republicans still won the presidency and Senate, some frustration was bound to appear. Republicans felt just as aggrieved over the 2008 and 2012 elections, and they had to resort to making up reasons out of thin air why they should have won. (And, by the way, they praised a baker who refused service to Vice President Joe Biden.)

Have we reached the point at which the center no longer holds? Have we been on this road for too long to turn back? Even people who want to blame Donald Trump for bludgeoning civility to death with his non-stop petulant churlishness can't really believe that civility will miraculously come back to life once he's out of office.

So our side will eat at the Red Hen. Your side can eat at Papa John's.

East Side, West Side

It was too nice to stay indoors yesterday afternoon, so I took a quick walk around the neighborhood.

To one side, a busload of migrant workers were toiling in the cabbage field. Two children were sheltering in the shade of the port-a-potty. On the side of the bus, an extensive schedule of work sites with instructions on where to be and so forth; the first several rows of the bus were filled with boxes of personal effects.

To the other side, a helicopter was flying back and forth for hours on end over the site where Trump is coming for a campaign rally on Thursday.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon has something for everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

Some exclusions may apply.

Tsar-Crossed Rulers

This week has marked another crucial centennial or two from World War I, so here we go with another installment of Slainback Saturday editorial cartoons.

"The New Czar" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 30, 1918

Nikolai II Romanov, his wife and children, their doctor and three servants were summarily executed by their Bolshevik captors in the basement of Ipatiev house, Yekaterinburg (present-day Sverdlovsk), 100 years ago July 17 shortly after 2:00 a.m. News of their deaths reached the rest of the world some ten days later.

"Overthown" by Sydney Joseph Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June 29, 1918

The reason given by the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet of the Workers' and Peasants' Government for the execution of the deposed tsar and his retinue was that White Guard forces were closing in on the Ipatiev house hoping to free the royal family. Indeed, the Bolshevik government was not yet firmly established against royalist and pro-Kerensky counterrevolutionary forces which were very much active in Moscow and elsewhere. But Sydney Greene's prediction of an overthrow of the Bolsheviks would prove to be 74 years premature.

"Where Are You Running" in La Victoire, Paris, ca. June, 1918

The Nelson Harding cartoon at the top of this post is the only one I've come across to address the death of the tsar at all directly. The execution of his entire family was no doubt profoundly shocking to his royal cousins on the Hohenzollern and Windsor (until recently Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) thrones. Otherwise, many in the Western World had had little sympathy for Nikolai personally; he had been an ineffective autocrat with a bloody history. The Central Powers had planned to replace him with a compliant monarch after stripping Russia of its antebellum western territories from Finland to Ukraine.

"Nothing Can Move Me, Comrade" by Ibarski (?) in Mucha (Polish), Moscow,  ca. June, 1918

Neither did any outside government have any sympathy for the Bolsheviks. True, the international socialist community had high hopes for this infant Russian government, but everyone else from the crowned and elected heads of state to the ink-stained wretches toiling at their drawing boards expected that popular unrest and weak foreign policy would quickly doom Lenin and his cohorts.

"The International Squirrel Cage" by Jay "Ding" Darling, June, 1918

Things would settle down before long. The importance of the massacre of the Romanov family was that, for Russia, there was now no going back.

"Wilson der Demokrat" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 13, 1918

Which didn't stop Thomas Heine at the relatively left-leaning Simplicissimus from encouraging Russian communists to vigilance against American imperialist meddling. The Phrygian cap worn by the Russian bear has been a symbol since Greek antiquity of liberty and republican government (Marianne, the embodiment of post-royal France, is always shown wearing one).

I have no explanation for the food-based idioms in this next cartoon. I've translated the German very literally; someone else will have to explain what Germans find so particularly distasteful about mushroom soup.

Detail of "Illustrierte Rückblicke vom 1. April bis zum 30. Juni 1918" by Gustav Brandt in Kladderadatch, Berlin, July 14, 1918

The above two panels from a two-page feature by Gustav Brandt will serve as a transition to the other major story at the end of June, 1918. You wouldn't know it from that lower panel, but the Italian army, with British, French and American materiel support, was finally making progress repulsing Austrian and German troops occupying much of Trentino, Veneto, and Friuli.

"L'Incubo di Carluccio" by Gabriele "Rata Langa" Galanta in L'Asino, Rome, July 7, 1918

Austro-Hungarian and German forces planned a full frontal attack at 3:00 a.m. on June 15; but the new Italian commander, Armando Diaz, learned of the enemy's plans and ordered the Italian artillery to open fire all along their front half an hour earlier. The Austrians suffered heavy casualties in their crowded trenches; some of their units retreated, but others managed to advance across the rising Piave River. This left them further exposed and unable to resupply themselves when Diaz renewed the Italian charge. Ultimately, Emperor Karl ordered a retreat on June 20; and by battle's end, Italy had recovered all lost territory south of the river.

"The Spirit of Garibaldi" by Sydney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, June 25, 1918

It was only natural for Sydney Greene, considering his newspaper's Italian-American readership, to cheer the Italian successes; but many other American cartoonists were happy to draw cartoons similar to the one above.

"Exceeded His Instructions" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 25, 1918