Too Much Knowledge Can Be Dangerous

R.I.P. Sean Connery

 From my days with the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee:

in Business Journal, February 28, 2003

For Whom the Toon Toles

by Tom Toles in Buffalo News, September 27, 1984

Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles is closing up shop after tomorrow, so today's Sankaback Saturday is devoted largely to my personal favorites of his cartoons from before he was hired by the Post. And I have to give the Post credit for hiring a cartoonist who was so very different from his predecessor there, a Washington institution in his own right, the undisputed dean of the profession, Herbert Block.

I was instantly taken with his simplistic style and craftily pointed humor when he burst onto the scene in the early 1980's. It would be interesting to see his pre-syndication cartoons for the Buffalo Courier-Express, which folded in 1982, to get some idea of how his artistic style — so unlike the Oliphant and MacNelly clones of the day — evolved.* I assume that his style of humor, which often comes at you from unexpected directions, was evident from the beginning.

in Buffalo News, June 21, 1984

His colleagues were equally impressed. The late Jeff MacNelly wrote that he was crazy about Toles's "masterful timing and comic staging" and "graphic goofiness." Mike Peters admired his "satire in the Jonathan Swift tradition of satire." Jules Feiffer blurbed, "There exists a school of thought, led by me, that wonders why Tom Toles has not yet wan a Pulitzer Prize"; so in 1990, to nobody's surprise, he won one.

in Buffalo News, March, 1983

If I can wax pedantic for a moment, "Hunting the Hazardous Substances" illustrates the Toles approach to an idea. Many cartoonists, if they came up with this idea for the Reagan administration's attitude toward environmental protection, would have drawn the third panel as a stand-alone cartoon. The pacing established by the four-panel format sells the idea so much better than the third panel alone would. (The reference in the lower right corner to burnt EPA documents is a bonus.)

in Washington Post, November 14, 2002

Sticking with the topic of the environment, I include this one Washington Post cartoon to demonstrate how masterfully Toles tied together two separate news stories in a way that made readers wonder why they hadn't connected the two items themselves.

in Buffalo News, July, 1990

I would be remiss if I didn't include a couple cartoons about American presidents. This one about George H.W. Bush's nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court is an excellent example of Toles carefully setting up a pay-off that comes from a completely unexpected direction. It plays off the unfair characterization of Bush being a wimp without playing into it, while still using it to make the cartoon's point.

in Buffalo News, May 14, 1993

Toles's minimalist caricatures have been instantly recognizable even when they diverge wildly from portraiture. His George W. Bush, for example, had ears sticking way up from the top of the man's head like no animal you have ever seen; but Toles drew him that way consistently and readers always knew who that figure was. He drew Obama with big ears, too, but then, so did everybody else. His Trump is appropriately grotesque.

in Buffalo News, ca. June, 1986

Since this here blog skews gay, here's Toles being gay-friendly back in 1986, when the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's anti-sodomy laws were constitutional in Bowers v. Hardwick, a case involving the arrest of one Michael Hardwick for having consensual homosexual sex in the privacy of his own bedroom. Other cartoonists may well have had the same idea in this cartoon, I suppose, but if so, probably only drew the police officer intruding in the couple's bed. Or the judge. Or a legislator character. Toles takes the idea and keeps spinning it out well past absurdum, and the result is worthy of standing next to Justices Blackmun's and Stevens's dissents.

Finally, a Tom Toles "I Told You So" from the early days of the technology enabling you and me to have this conversation, and others to share their insights about liberals drinking children's blood in a network of tunnels linking pizza parlors around the country:

in Buffalo News, September 8, 1994

________________

* Update: D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist has dug up one of Toles's Courier-Express cartoons, and even some juvenalia.

Q Toon: Match Game

There were a lot of plaudits from religious liberals for Pope Francis last week after he gave his blessing for civil unions for same-sex couples.

Subtitles in the documentary "Francesco," premiered at the Rome Film Festival, translate the Pope's comments as: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. What we have to have is a civil union law—that way they are legally covered. I supported that.”

This is a reiteration of his previously offered opinion on the topic, although some conservatives quibble that "civil union" is an inaccurate translation of his phrase, "convivencia civil"; they claim he merely referred to "civil cohabitation," whatever difference that makes in the context of having a law about it.

Here in the United States, marriage equality has been the law of the land since the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, but two, perhaps now three, of the Justices are eager to overturn that ruling. The others in the Court's right-wing majority might have been less inclined to annul over half a million marriages overnight, but they might be amenable to taking Pope Francis's cue by floating the possibility of foisting something less than marriage upon us as a consolation prize. 

My husband and I got married shortly after the ruling in Obergefell came down, having gotten a civil union six years earlier. The two are not the same thing: there is no federal law recognizing civil unions; the IRS has no provision for couples civilly unioned filing jointly. (See, there isn't even a verb for it!) Hospitals, especially those with a faith-based affiliation, are free to interpret HIPAA laws to exclude non-married couples. 

It's no just a question of having to deal with bakers and florists who believe in being assholes for the Lord.

Well, anyway, kudos to Pope Francis for being more enlightened than your immediate predecessor.

I just wish we didn't have Supreme Court justices heading us back to the Dark Ages.

Read All About It

 Something fishy here...

P.S.: Here are a couple words in English that look like they should be opposites but aren't:

Shameless and Shameful

This Week's Sneak Peek

 You were, perhaps, expecting something spooky?

Let It Only Be Four Years

Last week, I rehashed a bunch of my cartoons about the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration, so here are some from 2019 and 2020.

February, 2019

The nature of this here blog is to emphasize LGBTQ issues, so I ought to start today's post by acknowledging the one positive move the Corrupt Trump Administration has made in that regard. Log Cabineer Ric Grenell successfully pushed Trump to call for an end to persecution of LGBTQ citizens by other countries. That might seem out of character for Mr. Trump, until you realize that the policy comes at no real cost to him personally.

March, 2019

Former FBI Director Mueller's investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russian meddling wrapped up early last year with Mueller's report laying out the evidence but refusing to state any conclusions. Lickspittle Attorney General William Barr released a disingenuously bowdlerized summary of the Mueller report that gave the false impression that the investigation had exonerated his boss.

October, 2019

By the time the full Mueller report came to light, American media had bought the Corrupt Trump Administration's spin.

September, 2019

For four years, Trump Inc. has been hard at work grifting off the presidency: finagling business deals with China for daughter Ivanka, charging the Secret Service to protect Mr. Trump at his own properties, and happily leaning back while foreign governments and corporate lobbyists curry favor with the Corrupt Trump Administration by checking into Trump Inc. hotels to do so. Add in the moolah Junior and Eric raked in from their supposed charities, and you get a clear picture of the Trump family's moral compass.
 

I can't even let little Tiffany Trump slide here: her omission of the "T" at an LGBTQ event recently is seen as a sign that she has inherited her father's animus toward transgender persons.

August, 2019

His animus is not limited to the military. Mr. Trump and his lackeys want to drive them out of the military, out of a job, and out of housing, out of sight, out of mind, and out of existence.

December, 2019

The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Barr in the employment case above, but that is likely to become a short-lived victory. Senate Republicans refused to consider one Supreme Court nomination and 110 lower court nominations during Barack Obama's presidency so that they could pack the courts with doctrinaire, activists right-wingers during Mr. Trump's. Trump has thus been privileged to add three such Justices to the three put on the Supreme Court by the Bushes.

In case you have somehow not made up your mind about how to vote this year, I will point out one more time that Justice Stephen Breyer is 82 years old.

January, 2020

The House of Representatives impeached Trump over his efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meddle in U.S. presidential politics. Mr. Zelenskyy ignored Trump's request to "do us a favor, though," and Senate Republicans ignored the House.

March, 2020

As coronavirus swept the world this year, Trump began holding daily press briefings, breaking an absence from the press room that had lasted over a year. He boasted of the high viewership ratings these press briefings were getting – better than Monday Night Football!

April, 2020

Not that you could rely on anything coming out of Mr. Trump's mouth in this crisis being any more truthful than anything he had said before. 

Or since.

Unfortunately, by limiting these two Saturday posts to my own cartoons, I've given short shrift to some really important issues: he has put kids in cages, found "very fine people" among racist mobs, treated women and minorities with contempt, attacked the media for fair reporting, and both behaved and governed like an overgrown spoiled brat.

It's time to send him to his room without any supper.