The War on Drugs

For Sensimillaback Saturday today, I've rummaged through my cartoons from thirty years ago on the topic of the War on Drugs.

in the Racine Journal Times, September 24, 1989

The Woodstock generation had joined the over-30 establishment by this point, settling down, holding down steady jobs, buying "entertainment centers," and becoming parents. My own classmates were following quickly on the heels of those Children of the Sixties, laughing along with their risqué drug references on Saturday Night Live and Cheech and Chong albums.

Earlier this month, I posted this cartoon from September, 1989, when the Journal Times solicited reader feedback on the question of legalizing or decriminalizing drug use.

in the Racine Journal Times, September 3, 1989

Not surprisingly, the great majority of responses were in the negative.

The George H.W. Bush administration was committed to combatting recreational drugs in the U.S. Brandishing on television a plastic bag of crack cocaine he claimed was found being sold right across the street from the White House, Bush proposed spending $7.9 billion on the war on narcotics. In addition to dramatically hiking military aid to Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, Bush called for measures to clamp down on the demand side domestically. Casual drug users would lose their driving privileges under the proposal, and/or be sentenced to military-style boot camps.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, September 26, 1989

Bush claimed that this new war could be paid for without raising taxes; he recommended diverting $751 million (less than 10% of that $7.9 million) from juvenile justice, housing, immigration and economic development. Democrats, for their part, voiced few if any objections to the War on Drugs. Senate Judiciary Chair Joe Biden (D-You May Remember Him) sniffed that the budget for the war ought to be four times what Bush wanted.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, September 14, 1989

I scanned this one in color as a cautionary tale: never store newsprint next to your original drawings. The original of a cartoon I drew for the UW-Parkside Ranger somehow got lost in the newspaper office (it being the beginning of a new school year, I imagine some first-time staffer might have thrown it away), so I had stuck the newspaper in which the cartoon had run into my files instead. Before long, the newsprint had stained the front of the Angelo Grumley cartoon and the back of another.

And speaking of drugs and cartoon originals I never got back, I'll close with another cartoon missing from my files. Since the new-school-year thing doesn't apply at the daily newspaper, perhaps it got mislaid, discarded, or purloined by someone at the Journal Times who foolishly thought a Berge Original would be worth Big Money someday. After this, I started sticking return address labels on the back of my cartoons for a while.

in the Racine Journal Times, September 6, 1989

(A different sort of drug abuse.)

Bust a Move!

Q Toon: This Just In

In a Washington Post op-ed back on August 15, Robert Kabel and Jill Homan, Board and Vice Chairs, respectively, of the Log Cabin Republicans, published their endorsement of Donald Berzilius Trump for reelection in 2020. According to Kabel and Homan, Trump is responsible for leading the GOP away from its open hostility to LGBTQ humans:

This is the party that Trump has helped make possible by moving past the culture wars that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s, in particular by removing gay rights as a wedge issue from the old Republican playbook. And since taking office, President Trump has followed through on many of his commitments to the United States, including taking bold actions that benefit the LGBTQ community.

Kabel and Homan apparently missed that plank in their party's 2016 platform renewing its support for a Federal Marriage Amendment and sending kids off to quack conversion therapy chambers.

Since the LCR went public with its allegiance to their fearless leader, the Corrupt Trump Administration has now filed LGBTQ-hostile amicus briefs in three Supreme Court cases. I drew last week about the Trumpsters' filing that transgender employees are not covered under equal opportunity law because congressmen in 1964 didn't have transgender persons in mind at the time.

Now, the Corrupt Trump Administration wants the Supreme Court to rule that federal law allows private companies to fire workers based on sexual orientation, filing an amicus brief in the cases of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia and Altitude Express v. Zarda.

Remarkably, the department argued in its memorandum that the reason anti-gay discrimination is not unlawful under the ban on sex-based discrimination is because, in cases of adverse treatment by an employer, both gay men and gay women would be addressed equally poorly.
Upon experiencing discrimination from an employer, both men and women in same-sex relationships "would be similarly situated — and they would be treated the same," the department argued, negating a claim under Title VII's sex-based protections.

If the Trumpsters had not themselves put forward the argument that "both gay men and gay women would be addressed equally poorly," I probably would have made that the punch line of this week's cartoon. Damn, but it is hard to make jokes about the Corrupt Trump Administration's way of thinking when the CTA's way of thinking is a joke all by itself.

Meanwhile, a number of prominent Log Cabin members have quit the organization over Kabel and Homan's op-ed, most recently Executive Director Jerri Ann Henry. But according to those who were involved in the endorsement decision, it was approved by a majority of respondents from national chapters of the organization.

The endorsement cited Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell's public advocacy of pushing antigay foreign governments to come around on LGBTQ rights, but a more likely explanation for the endorsement is that Trump only listens to people who kiss his ring and his ass first.

[T]here’s a sense throughout the party that Trump expects loyalty and fealty before he’s earned it. President Trump does not feel that he should have to take action or stand on principle or express support for anyone else. He sees all that as being activity and behavior that should be directed toward him.

Maybe this buys Kabel or Homan a seat at the table when LGBTQ issues are discussed someday.

More likely, an appointment as Ambassador to Greenland.

Elizabeth Warren, Nevertheless

Here's the third in a series of caricatures of 2020 Presidential candidates.

Warren rose to national prominence as an advocate for consumer protection in the financial markets, the need for which was demonstrated by the crash of 2008, brought on by careless lending practices and over-easy credit. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created largely due to her advocacy

President Barack Obama nominated her to head the CFPB in 2010; but Republicans — whose idea of consumer protection is to force consumers to agree to a 4,000-word release form forfeiting all expectation of product safety, the right to a fair and public hearing should any harm befall them, and if they don't like it, a gag order for themselves and all future generations — blocked Warren's nomination and have rendered the CFPB toothless under Corrupt President Donald Trump. Nevertheless, she persisted, and in 2012, she unseated GOP Senator Ted Brown to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.

She may be the third oldest candidate in the Democratic presidential race (after Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders), but she is arguably the feistiest. If living up to her slogan of "Warren's Got a Plan for That" makes her come across as wonkish and schoolmarmy, it keeps her from being compared to Hilary Clinton, whose campaign relied too lightly on a plan for the next four years and too heavily on a sense that it was Her Turn.

But she can be compared to Clinton in the sense that Republicans already loathe her. Sticking up for consumers is anathema to the Chamber of Commerce set, and the very idea that government should be useful is heresy to Tea Partisans. Republican stooges are sure to draw her as a wannabe Injun, based on her having accepted some overstated family lore of Native American ancestry. Warren Derangement Syndrome will plague her campaign, and her administration should she win the presidency.

Well, it's not as if the right-wing media machine would be any less harsh to any other Democratic president, or Mitch McConnell wouldn't devote every millisecond of the next four years to making a one-term president of whatever Democrat takes office. It takes a World War to get our political parties to put aside partisanship even for a moment, and I for one will take partisanship over World War III any day.

But I hope Warren's got a plan for dealing with Republicans in Congress dead set against all of her other plans. Obama thought he could work with them, and he was wrong.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Didn't I just draw about R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week?

Well, yes.

But David Rowe has already drawn Bolsonaro fiddling while the Amazon burns (and threw in a couple genius touches I hadn't thought of), and I'm already tired of Greenland jokes. 

And I started drawing before Trump tried to sell the idea this morning that he wouldn't benefit financially by having the G7+Russian Empire confab at Mar-a-Lago next year.

In the Good Old Summer Time

As vacation season winds to a close, Summerback Saturday takes a break from wars and riots and bombings to remark on a phenomenon I noticed while searching for century-old cartoons about all that heavy stuff. See if you can figure it out.

"Sketches from Life" by Harry C. Temple in Cleveland Plain Dealer, summer, 1919

One more cartoon should do it.

"When They Were Making Their Vacation Plans" by Wm. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, summer, 1919

They called the phenomenon "The Summer Widower." It appears to have been a common enough thing to be the premise of plenty of cartoons, just like cartoons of young lads splashing in swimming holes and of the same lads woefully toting bundles of books to school in September.

"The Summer Widowers' Party" by Sid Chapin in St. Louis Republic, summer, 1919

I'm not sure whether Chapin's cartoon ran in June or July; if it was the latter, Henry must still have had some prohibited beverage there in the basement, which would explain why he's prudently staying outside the frame.

"When the Family's Away" by R.M. Brinkerhoff in New York Evening Mail, summer, 1919

Perhaps Dad staying home while the rest of the family goes merrily away on vacation seems perfectly normal to you, but growing up, I recall only one time when Mom took us kids off without Dad. We took the train up to see her parents once; I think Dad went separately to a churchwide assembly or somesuch. (Not most people's idea of summer fun.) Otherwise, Dad drove us in the car whenever we went traveling.

"Tragedy of the Summer Widower" by Kenneth Chamberlain in Cincinnati Press, summer, 1919

If summer widowerhood were all poker games and loafing around, it would have been called summer bachelorhood. Having the house all to oneself had its downside, however, especially in those days when Papa couldn't figure out how to operate a dishcloth.

"Portrait of the Man Who Told His Wife..." by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, summer, 1919

To get serious for a moment, the reason these summer widowers weren't joining their families on vacation is that they probably wouldn't have had a job when they got back. Even if they did happen to belong to a union, unions were still working to win their members an eight-hour day and a 40-hour week; guaranteed vacation time wasn't even under consideration.

Not that it was unheard of. President Taft had proposed in 1910 that workers should have two to three months of vacation time every year, only to have the proposal go nowhere. Not until the Great Depression did employers start to see the value in letting their workers take some time off to recharge their batteries: first white-collar workers, then eventually blue-collar workers as well. Unions began to see vacation time as a valuable bargaining chip, and by 1943, 60% of American workers were entitled to paid vacation.

But unlike much of the rest of the world, the U.S. has no law guaranteeing paid vacation time for anyone but members of Congress and state legislatures.

"A Midsummer Day's Dream" by H.H. Perry in Portland Oregonian, August, 1919

P.S.: We mustn't forget the working women of 1919 ... although I doubt their husbands were off with the kids to play with the Esquimaux.

Q Toon: Lost in Trans Litigation

The Corrupt Trump Administration has decided to file an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court's consideration of R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The case arises from the funeral homes' firing of Aimee Stephens, a Detroit funeral home director who informed her boss, Thomas Rost, that she planned to transition from male to female and to represent herself on the job as a woman.

In March 2018, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the funeral home had violated Title VII anti-discrimination laws ..., with the court ruling that “discrimination on the basis of transgender and transitioning status is necessarily discrimination on the basis of sex" and therefore protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, in their court filing submitted Friday, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco and Department of Justice attorneys argued that the specific Civil Rights Act provision “does not bar discrimination because of transgender status,” meaning the Michigan funeral home was within its right to fire Stephens.

“In 1964, the ordinary public meaning of ‘sex’ was biological sex. It did not encompass transgender status,” the brief reads. “In the particular context of Title VII — legislation originally designed to eliminate employment discrimination against racial and other minorities — it was especially clear that the prohibition on discrimination because of ‘sex’ referred to unequal treatment of men and women in the workplace.”

To me, this seems to be a perfect example of how, all things being absolutely equal, a woman can still be treated differently from a man in total disregard of anti-discrimination employment law. This isn't even a case of two people equally qualified for a job; this time, they're both the exact same person.

It's easy to figure out the Corrupt Trump Administration's interest in the case. Trump has demonstrated such a need to attack transgender persons at every opportunity that I'm pretty sure he must have had a "Lola" moment in his past that didn't go well.

Besides, he's got to keep those Bible-thumpin' Evan Jellicles happy if he is to have any chance at reelection. The Log Cabin Republicans can be bought off with a couple ambassador posts and the transgender community isn't going to vote for him, anyway. Not even Caitlyn Jenner. But the Falwells, Jeffresses, Grahams, Bakkers and the like expect to get some value for the souls they sold to Donald "Two Corinthians" Trump.

And it costs him nothing to serve them transgender rights on a platter.