Q Toon: The New Kid

When I was a wee lad, September was all about going back to school. Nowadays, that's what August is all about, I guess. I'm never going to get used to that, but then, I don't have to. Except for planning my driving to avoid getting stopped by school buses every block or two.

Something else that's new these days is having to accommodate transgender students. If a kid felt his or her sex and gender didn't match, there was very little he or she could do about it if he or she wanted to make it to high school graduation in one piece. One couldn't expect any understanding from parents, teachers, administrators, or fellow students.

There are now some parents who are willing to understand and accommodate their transgender children. It's kind of a trend these days, perhaps going hand in hand with the trend of giving girls historically masculine names like Dylan, Ashley, and Addison. (There's no corresponding trend of giving boys historically feminine names; instead, boys are named for obsolete professions like Fletcher, Cooper, and Editorial Cartoonist.)

With more parents now being supportive of their transgender children, the onus then passes on to the teachers, administrators and fellow students to follow suit. Or risk ending up on the TV news — or worse: late-night TV and internet memedom.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Happy Labor Day to all my American readers!

And to everybody else, Happy May Day four months late.

Remembering John McCain

Sedonaback Saturday had intended to bring you a Back-to-School edition, but that will have to wait for another day. Instead, I've selected a handful of cartoons I've drawn about Arizona Republican John S. McCain III over the years. 

Due to the nature of political cartooning, these are not all flattering. The form does not lend itself well to flattery, and McCain was a complex, sometimes contradictory character. In these first two, however, he joined with freshman Senator from Wisconsin, Democrat Russ Feingold, in a valiant effort to combat the overbearing influence of corporate and Political Action Committee "soft money" in politics.

McCain came to the issue having been singed in the Keating Five scandal, involving favors for a Savings and Loan which ultimately failed during the S&L crisis of the late 1980's. A Senate Ethics Committee investigation cleared McCain of any criminal wrong-doing, but he would admit, "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain-Feingold was a tough sell on Capitol Hill. A version of the bill eventually passed in 2002, but was overturned by the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United ruling in 2010. But it is only one example of how John McCain, holding true to his conservative principles, would reach across the aisle to even the most liberal of Democrats to achieve a common goal.

In 1999, with McCain-Feingold yet to become law, McCain announced his first run for the presidency. Differentiating himself from the rest of the Republican field, he was receptive to interests of the LGBT Log Cabin Republicans, securing their endorsement early on.

Indeed, he was willing to speak up on behalf of LGBT members of his party, notably former Congressman Jim Kolbe. But on issues of interest to LGBT voters generally, there was little difference between him and the other front runners.

He hadn't changed his position on gays in the military by the time he announced his second run for the White House eight years later. If anything, he tacked even more closely to religious right orthodoxy on LGBT issues.

But McCain was not a follower of the scorched earth policy that has come into vogue with Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and the Corrupt Trump Administration. In addition to leading the fight for campaign finance reform with Russ Feingold, he worked with John Kerry on normalizing relations with Vietnam, and with Ted Kennedy and later the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" in a vain attempt to reform our immigration system. He seriously considered naming Independent Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2008.

The clip of him correcting a woman at one of his campaign rallies who said she would never trust Barack Obama because "he's an Arab" — McCain called him a "decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues" — has been viewed and debated on TV and social media many times this week. He also defended 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry against the scurrilous "Swift Boat" attack ads.

“I deplore this kind of politics,” McCain said. “I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is, none of these individuals served on the boat [Kerry] commanded. Many of his crew have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. I think George Bush served honorably in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.”

But anyone who claims he was anything other than a loyal Republican is full of crap. He voted for every GOP tax cut, for Dubya's war in Iraq, to remove Bill Clinton from office, and for 83% of the Trump Agenda. His 2010 campaign ads even called for posting the U.S. military along the Mexican border and "build[ing] the damn fence."

McCain had lost the 2000 nomination to George W. Bush in part due to a Karl Rove push-poll asking South Carolina voters "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (He hadn't.) He was deeply offended by the libelous attack. His literal embrace of Bush at the 2008 convention may have dented his reputation for being a "maverick," but it is indicative of the brand of loyalty, surpassing personal grievance, he believed in.

Perhaps it takes being a maverick to display that kind of loyalty any more. His fellow Republicans seemed to be more thrilled with his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate than they were with having him at the head of the ticket. The gravitational pull within the GOP then and now has been toward the doggedly anti-intellectual, semi-literate, vituperative and even fact-free style she epitomized.

You hadn't heard him once say a critical word of Mrs. Palin in the ten years since (although in his final memoir, he regretted not having stuck with the idea of running with Lieberman). The style of Republicanism currently in vogue is not the future he saw for this country in his farewell message:

"We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change that they have always been.
"We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do. ...
"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history.
"We make history."

Q Toon: #Metousiosis

Transsubstantiation: according to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, the change of substance or essence by which the bread and wine offered in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist during the Mass, become, in reality, the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In Greek, metousiosis.

For centuries, theologians have debated Jesus Christ's sermon in John 6 and at the Last Supper that bread and wine somehow become his own body and blood. Is it another one of those metaphors you find all over the Bible, or are we supposed to take it literally? In Catholic dogma, the bread and wine are no longer bread or wine; Lutherans believe that the bread and wine are simultaneously bread and body, and wine and blood. Baptists believe that grape juice miraculously becomes what Jesus meant to say.

Some people believe we're supposed to take every word of the Bible literally.

The New Testament calls Christ the “bridegroom” and the church his “bride.” Catholic priests are supposed to consider themselves "married" to the church, forswearing all others. That's not in the Bible, really; it's one of those reforms brought in because priests were making the church a family business handed down from Father to son.

The Catholic Church solved that problem, but was left with a dogma that seems to have attracted more than a few men with unsavory ideas about how to consummate their marriage to the church.

Literally.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I'll be playing catch-up on some of the news stories of the month. There are times when publishing once a week is frustrating.

Yes, the kid is doing it wrong.

R.I.P. John McCain

Simplicissimus's All-American Edition

Last week, we looked at several American cartoons celebrating allied victories in the mid-summer of 1918. By way of equal time, Simpleback Saturday presents each and every one of the cartoons in the August 27, 1918 edition of Simplicissimus, the German satirical weekly out of Munich.

"Amerika" by Wilhelm Schultz in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

Every single cartoon but one* is critical of the United States. Wilhelm Schultz's cover cartoon, showing a buffalo driven by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt to charge the personification of Peace, pairs the incumbent president with one of the U.S.A.'s leading advocates of war prior to April, 1917. It mattered little to the staff of Simplicissimus that Roosevelt's youngest son, Quentin, had recently been killed in action over over the Marne River on July 14, 1918.

"Im Senat zu Washington" by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

If you've been following this series for a while, you may remember that there certainly were U.S. Senators and Congressmen who advocated against their country entering World War I, even after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Wilson himself ran for reelection under the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War."

But has always happened since the days of President Polk, whenever a President decides it's time to go to war, any argument to the contrary is branded unpatriotic or worse.

"Das Land der Freiheit" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

Persecution of German-American citizens is a common theme in several of the August 27 cartoons. None of them, as far as I can tell, describe any actual incidents, any more than Sidney Joseph Greene's imagined tennis camp for saboteurs did. Interment camps in Fort Douglas, Utah and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia housed some 2,048 German emigrants swept up under provisions of the Alien Enemies Act Presidential Proclamations issued shortly after the U.S. entry into the war. Many would not be released until June of 1919; some not until May of 1920.

"Deutschenverfolgung" by Eduard Thöny in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

Even after some spectacular cases of espionage and sabotage by German agents in the U.S., only one German spy was ever sentenced to death in this country; and his sentence was commuted after the war. Nor is there any record of Germans being lynched in this country, although Eduard Thöny's cartoon demonstrates that our habit of race lynching was well-known beyond our borders.

"Der Sieg der Demokratie" by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

Which is not to say that it was all tee and krullers for German-Americans. And while I know of no examples of tarring and feathering, there was a sharp rise in police reports against anything perceived as suspicious activity of Deutschsprachige citizens. If Gretchen and Hilda were gossiping over the back fence, they had better be doing it loudly and in English.

"Kinderhilfsdienst im America" by Carl Olav Petersen in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

"Honest, Your Honor, it was to me as 'Freedom Cabbage' being sold!"

"Es Lebe die Freiheit!" by Erich Schiller in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

Two panels by Erich Schilling appear one atop the other as if they were meant to be two frames comprising one cartoon; but they each have their own title and there's no continuity between them, so I've put in my own little commentary between them just for the hell of it. In the top panel, what the U.S. called Liberty Loans he calls "Liberty Bonds." (Is "Freiheitsanleihe" an oxymoron in German as "Liberty Bond" is in English?) The U.S. government was about to authorize a fourth series of bonds of 1918, and a fifth bond would be necessary in April after the war was over.

Banks and other financial institutions took out Liberty Loans as an investment opportunity, but participation by private citizens was minimal. The first three bonds matured during the 1920s, but the government would default on the fourth bond in 1932.

"Schutz der Kleinen Völker" by Erich Schilling, still in Simplicissimus, still in Munich, still August 27, 1918

Schilling even casts some libel Thomas Edison's way, yet somehow without incorporating electricity into his imagined invention. I mean, seriously now, there's nothing to distinguish this Streckbank from its medieval forebears, and Mr. Edison was more imaginative than that.

He would have stolen the idea from Nikola Tesla instead.

"Wilsonismus" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, August 27, 1918

Finally we reach the back page, where another cartoon by Thomas Theodor Heine seems to pair with a satirical story below it set in my home state:

The Adventure of Wisconsin

Several madmen made a tumultuous escape from an insane asylum in the state of Wisconsin. From the patriotic demeanor of their guards and caretakers, a number of the sick drew the curious conclusion that they were healthy, and demanded the immediate release to American freedom.
Only the time-tested absent-mindedness of Reverend Abraham O'Connor was to be thanked for avoiding severe outbursts. The venerable gentleman came to the escapees and exclaimed, "We strive for reason and morality! Be good idiots! Make your mistake good again! Buy Liberty Bonds!" — whereupon the rebels fled in terror into their cells and thanked God that they could stay in comfortable-idiotic bondage.

_________
* The sole exception is this single-column cartoon by R. Grieß tucked in among the advertisements on page six:

In heavily accented German (Google Translate wanted to know if I meant to translate from Luxembourgish), one of these vagabonds tells the other that one dog year equals seven human years. The other replies, "That may well be, but in war, one human year equals seven dog years."

The accent probably sells the joke.

Thankfully, World War I fell short of lasting seven human years. Meanwhile, returning to the present: today's incoming college freshmen — and, of course, fresh military recruits — have lived their entire lives with the United States at war in Afghanistan.