Lambada Rising

Congresscretin Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was on Fox's Sunday Talking Points program this week. She was in high dudgeon, as all her fellow Requblicans are, that President Joe Biden had the temerity at a Democratic Party fundraiser to criticize the "semi-fascists" who have dominated the Requblican Party under Donald Trump, plotted to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, and attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government and hang the Vice President. An ideology that idolizes Hungary's dictator Viktor Orban. And as Requblican legislatures ban ideas they don't like and, by the way, have decided that if they don't like the election outcome of the people's votes, the Requblican legislatures can just declare Requblican candidates the winners no matter what.

Somehow, Boebert's word salad diatribe about Biden's remark included lambasting his student loan forgiveness program on the grounds that it will facilitate collegiate scholars majoring in "Lesbian Dance Theory."

It's a non sequitur, of course. But it's not as if Boebert can afford to disavow semi-fascism and offend her semi-fascist base.

To the best of my knowledge, no college, not even Barnard or Berkeley, offers a degree in Lesbian Dance Theory. I must note, however, that while I was an undergrad, my alma mater offered a "paracollege" program which allowed its students to fashion their own majors; so I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that someone between 1969 and 2000 developed a Lesbian Dance Theory major.

Although that really sounds more like a Ph.D. thesis to me, and St. Olaf offers only Bachelors degrees.

Now, originally, Boebert (who did in fact get her G.E.D. the same year she won election to Congress) said that hard-working Americans were being robbed so that "Karen's daughter" could get a B.A. in L.D.T. I'm not sure why Boebert chose to drag "Karens" into this.

"911? Some Black people are studying Lesbian Dance Theory in the park!"

I'm pretty sure that their demographic is solidly Requblican.

Hamm's Hands

Expanding a bit on yesterday's talk of drawing hands, here's an excerpt from Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm.

There are five pages entirely devoted to drawing hands; this is only one of them.

I don't know who, outside of Sci Fi toonists, or the polydactyly community perhaps, would be interested in drawing hands with extra fingers (figures 2.27, 2.29 and 2.30). It's more tempting, and common, to draw fewer fingers, not more.

Live long and prosper.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Um, well, no. 

To be honest and up front, this ain't from this week's syndicate cartoon. I swiped this from The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok ("Triffic" — I. Nastase). But it does illustrate my frustration trying to draw one of the hands in this week's oeuvre.

I was up drawing very late last night; the topic I originally intended to draw about hadn't gelled into any original cartoon, so I gave up and started thinking about a completely different topic sometime around 9:00 p.m. or so. It took at least another hour before I had anything worth putting pencil to bristol board, and another half hour fine tuning the faces of the two persons in the cartoon (one of whom had to appear in three separate panels).

A four-panel cartoon doesn't leave much space for drawing bodies, but including hands in the frame goes a long way toward depicting someone's expressions. Most people, not just Italians, talk with their hands as much as their mouths. So I drew five hands in the cartoon.

But one of them just wouldn't come out right.

So this morning, I spread white-out over the offending hand, looked for something helpful in Cartooning the Head & Figure, went back and forth between mirror and drawing board, penciled something better in the margin of the cartoon, and did my best to copy it in ink on top of the white-out.

And ended up photoshopping it out of the finished cartoon anyway.

Not a Post About Monkey Pox

Having reviewed labor strikes with "Ding" Darling and the Texas run-off with John Knott, let's catch up on some of the other issues catching cartoonists' attention in August, 1922:

"Just When We Need Amusement, Too" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Ledger, Aug. 23, 1922

Election season wasn't limited to Texas, of course. In addition to the strikes by railroad workers and coal miners, a top issue in Washington was congressional wrangling over a tariff bill. Manufacturing interests pushed for raising tariffs on imported goods, while agricultural concerns worried that high tariffs would be answered in kind on their exports.

"More Callers" by Wm. Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug./Sept. 1922

There were plenty of other pressing issues, besides.

"Behind the Political Scenes" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Aug. 28, 1922

Nor had beer and wine interests given up on salvaging a domestic market for their goods in spite of Prohibition. Some proposed legalizing the sale of "light wine" and "near beer" (2.75% alcohol content).

"It Looks As If It's Gonna Be Kinda Crowded" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Aug. 19, 1922

Dorman Smith's "Aunty Prohibition" looks suspiciously like "Miss Democracy," whose origin and fate we attempted to discern two years ago. The "Drys" and "Wets" did not, however, divide neatly along party lines.

The same was true of several other issues, including the tariff situation, and a proposal to issue bonus payments to veterans of World War I.

"For Political Purposes" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 31, 1922

The Senate passed a bonus bill in August, authorizing payment of a dollar per day spent in the military, plus an additional quarter per day spent overseas. The argument in favor of the bonus was that the nation owed its veterans a debt of more than just gratitude, particularly in light of the debilitating injuries suffered by some of them.

The argument against it, naturally, was that the country could not afford its $4 billion price tag. I suppose there may have been people who felt it was unfair to the veterans of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, but I haven't run across any editorial cartoonists saying so.

"He Gets His Bonus" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, ca. Aug. 26, 1922

The Hearst newspaper empire was a vocal proponent of the bonus, presenting a truckload of petitions for it to Senators Hiram Johnson (R-CA) and Lester Volk (R-NY) on the capitol steps.

Given the opposition by Hearst and his newspapers to American entry into the War, his showy support of the bonus was unwelcome, even by its proponents.

"On the Outside" by Orville P. Williams in New York Evening Journal, ca. Aug. 30, 2022

Perhaps Mr. Hearst found more support in the political prisoner community.

Q Toon: Definition of Character

Yes, folks: even the dictionary is suspect in Florida schools.

A school district in Florida could not accept a donation of dictionaries amid a new state law aimed at combating "wokeness" in classrooms.

The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club was prepared to give its annual donation of dictionaries to the Sarasota County Schools ahead of the new school year. But the district stopped all donations and purchases of books for school libraries until at least next year.

This came after HB 1467 took effect in July. The law requires school districts to have all reading and instructional materials reviewed by a district employee with a "valid educational media specialist certificate." ...

The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that they have donated about 300 dictionaries a year. After donating a total of 4,000 dictionaries to date, this is the first time they were denied.

I'm sure that Gubbner DeSantis will call this an overreaction; but since this anti-wokeness purge is an overreaction in the first place, surely an abundance of caution is called for.

After all, Florida and Texas have rejected math textbooks for not adhering to right-wing orthodoxy. If Johnny has seven apples and gives Susie two, that sounds too much like socialism.

Meanwhile, North Carolina's ignoramus Lieutenant Governor thinks that teaching history and science in elementary schools is dangerous, so they're verboten, too. 

(Don't even let's get started on foreign language education...)

And in Oklahoma, an English teacher was disciplined for displaying a QR code for the Brooklyn Library to their class – not assigning any subversive literature or putting actual books on the shelf, just letting their class know how to find books for themselves. Initial reports said they were fired, although the school district later said it was expecting them to return to class the next day pending a review of the incident. Instead, they quit.

For all the right-wing blather about leftist thought police demanding "political correctness" and coddling liberal snowflakes, it turns out that it's those right-wing thought police imposing their own political correctness by force of law.

Who's the snowflakes now?

✍

Although my original intention had always been to draw the stars of this week's cartoon in puritan outfits, I toyed with the idea of continuing a reference from a couple weeks ago by drawing Ron DeSantis in Spanish Inquisition garb.

I rejected that idea for two reasons. First, I didn't think that a cardinal's hat and cassock would be recognizable in grayscale. There is only one newspaper that I know of that still prints my cartoons that way, but it's worth taking it into account.

Second, it would mean having to clothe the third speaker in the uniform of a third rigidly intolerant stereotype. The most obvious would be an Iranian mullah or Afghan Taliban; but as Patrick Chappatte and others have found, some people interpret such depictions as a slam against Islam as a whole.

As a gay man and a feminist, I find antigay, misogynist Islamic fundamentalism reprehensible. And certainly, the targets of my cartoon would be more annoyed by being compared to the Taliban than to the Pilgrims. Yet anti-Asian hate is a real thing, and one does have to take care not to feed into that. 

Editorial cartooning often involves drawing how This is like That, even though This and That are completely separate things. In the end, however, I decided that there was no need to draw our home-grown christofascisti as non-Christians. I may well revisit the DeSantis Inquisition someday. But for now, I think I'll stick to drawing imams and the Taliban when I'm actually criticizing imams and the Taliban.

✍

Oh, by the way, dear reader, since you've read this far, I won't make you look it up:

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's a good thing I don't have to draw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson together in a cartoon. 

John Knott on the Horrible 1922 Run-off Race in Texas

This week's Graphical History Tour again focuses on one month, one issue, and one cartoonist: John Knott and the Texas's August 26, 1922 run-off election for the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. Senator. The election would be won by the Ku Klux Klan's candidate, Earle Mayfield.

I have to start off by admitting that I probably don't have all the cartoons that Knott drew for the anti-Klan Dallas Morning News. My contemporary source for Knott's cartoons I posted in July had identified his work as having been originally published in the Galveston Daily News, which did indeed run Knott's cartoons on its front pages. But according to a Dallas Morning News article last October, Knott was their cartoonist from 1906 to 1957, save for his three semesters studying at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, Germany (1910-11).  

"A Sad Case" by John F. Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 19, 1922

So it's a pity that, as Knott himself perhaps argues here, these cartoons all hail from the Galveston paper rather than the Dallas one. (I'm dating them according to when they appeared in the Galveston Daily News.) If the Dallas Morning News campaigned against the Klan, there doesn't appear to be any such advocacy on the cartoons by Knott in the Galveston Daily News. 

"A Sad Case" should, however, be appreciated by every editorial cartoonist who has had to deal with editors, publishers, and readers who think that editorial cartoons are supposed to be, first and foremost, funny. And fair and impartial. And appeal to everybody.

"Who's Going to Win" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 20, 1922

As far as I've been able to determine, Knott was the only editorial cartoonist in the employ of any newspaper in Texas at the time, and was printed exclusively in the Dallas and Galveston Newses. A few papers ran the syndicated cartoons of William C. Morris, Elmer Bushnell, Terry Gilkison, and the occasionally political Magnus Kettner; many newspapers around the state printed those of the NEA's Dorman H. Smith. Meanwhile, the Houston Post wasn't publishing editorial cartoons at all.

None of those syndicated cartoonists had anything to say that summer about Klan-supported candidates running for office in Texas or anywhere else, so Knott had the topic all to himself. By all accounts, the run-off contest between Mayfield and impeached former Gov. James "Pa" Ferguson was a lively one, with brawls breaking out in the crowds as the candidates accused each other of perjury, drunkenness, and sexual impropriety.

Now, to be fair, Dallas Morning News editor Will Pry assures us that John Knott's cartoons were not all as milquetoast as the ones on this page:

He also had considerable influence over his audience, a byproduct of being the illustrative voice of the paper of record in the era before TV, let alone Twitter. James Ferguson, former governor of Texas, once said that a Knott cartoon cost him an election. Another, drawn when the Ku Klux Klan was making headlines in Dallas, was said to have swung a school board election.

"Relief Promised for Today" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 26, 1922

Knott and his "Old Man Texas" (uncharacteristically hatless in this cartoon) could count themselves lucky that the Mayfield-Ferguson run-off wasn't conducted in an age of independent attack ads punctuating every television program. One had to go out of one's way to be subjected to the candidates' heated oratory; in the newspaper, one could easily turn the page and read the baseball scores.

"Thank Heaven, I'm Out of It" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 27, 1922

In an ordinary election campaign of those days, Mayfield's victory in the August 26 run-off election for the Democratic nomination would have meant Old Man Texas was effectively "out of it." The Texas Republican Party was not a factor to be reckoned with at this point in history.

But Republicans and anti-Klan "Independent Democrats" would make one last effort to stop Mayfield by mounting a write-in campaign for George Peddy, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, in November. Would John Knott have anything to say about it?

Stay tuned, but don't get your hopes up.