R.I.P. F.W. de K.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, WI, Feb. 8, 1990

Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last Apartheid Prime Minister of South Africa: March 18, 1936 - November 11, 2021

Q Toon: The Eternal Sunshine of the Smoochless Screen

Because the director of the Marvel superheroes flick Eternals would not cut a scene of Phastos kissing his husband, authorities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have banned the movie from being shown.

Apparently Director Chloe Zhao wasn't able to stop that scene — and others depicting heterosexual intimacy as well — from being cut from versions shown in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. The film had been scheduled for release in the Middle East today.

Phastos is played by Brian Tyree Henry; his husband, Ben, is played by Haaz Sleiman, a Lebanese immigrant to the U.S. who came out as gay in 2017.

At the “Eternals” world premiere last month, Sleiman spoke passionately about how much representation and visibility matter. “Beyond a dream come true, it’s lifesaving,” he told me. “I wish I had that when I was a kid, to see this. My god. I wish! Can you imagine how many lives this is going to be saving — kids, young queer folk, who are being bullied, committing suicide and not seeing themselves being represented? And now they get to see this — it’s above and beyond.”

Henry has apparently been less involved in the promotion of the film, at least as far as discussing his character is concerned, but he did offer this during a press conference last month:

“I remember when I was coming to this project that I, Brian, had kind of lost faith in humanity, just looking at all the things that we’ve been through and just what the images of Black men were and how we’re being portrayed and how the power was taken from us, the lack of power or feeling powerful,” Henry said. “What I really loved the most about Phastos is that through all of that — him being eternal, him never being able to die — he still chose love. He still decided to have a family, even though he may have to watch them perish. He still tried to find a way to bring heart and love to everything he did, even though his genius was used against him. It just really resonated a lot with how I felt my place in society was. How we can be kings and queens, and at the same time, they’ll take our pedestal and take our superpowers from us like that. So what I love the most about ‘Eternals’ is that Chloe and [producer] Nate [Moore] just re-instilled that power back in me again.”

The film has received tepid reviews from professional critics, and was "review-bombed" by garden-variety trolls on imdb.com so heavily prior to its release that site had to deactivate its reviews section. I haven't been watching the Marvel superhero films (or the recent DC Comics ones either, for that matter), so I'm afraid I wouldn't know whether this is a worthy addition to the franchise or not.

All I know is, we've been seeing heterosexual superheroes, even the ones from distant planets, locking lips with earthlings of the opposite sex for decades now, and nobody seems to have complained that it was a distraction from the plot.

Except, I guess, the Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Emiratis. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

It occurred to me after posting on Saturday those cartoons from November 11, 1921, that I might be adding to the tendency nowadays to confuse Veterans' Day and Memorial Day.

Memorial Day honors servicemembers who died in war; one is to lower the flag to half staff during the morning and raise it to full staff at noon. Veterans' Day honors those servicemembers who came home and are still alive; one is to display the flag at full staff all day.

We also have Armed Forces Day on the third Saturday in May to honor our military personnel still in uniform, but that keeps getting coopted by Peace Officers' Memorial Day on May 15, another half-staff occasion. I guess when May 15 falls on a Saturday, one is supposed to display the flag at three-quarters staff.

The cartoonists in 1921 were not being confused about whom the nation was honoring on November 11. The day was Armistice Day to them, its honors not restricted either to the living or the dead. The change to Veterans' Day was not made official until 1954, by which time the armistice of World War I had been demonstrated to be less than permanent.

Relax!

 It may be roughing the quarterback to pile on when he's down, but....

I don't think there are too many people out there to whom I need to explain this news item: Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers was pulled from Sunday's football game after testing positive for COVID-19. This after teammates Davante Adams, Allen Lazard, and Malik Taylor were placed on the "reserve/COVID-19" list in October.

You can't keep 6' (2m) distance between players in American football, so the National Football League has devised supposedly strict protocols to keep COVID-19 from spreading like wildfire among them; and it now appears that Rodgers has been flouting those protocols. Asked at a press conference last summer whether he had been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Rodgers claimed "Yeah, I'm immunized" — a weasel word nobody caught at the time.

Rodgers now claims that he couldn't take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because his doctors told him he was allergic to some ingredient in them, and that he (like many others once a Michigan woman died from a rare complication after receiving the J&J vaccine last April) didn't trust the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Rodgers is within his rights under NFL protocols not to get vaccinated, for whatever reason he fancies, but those protocols require unvaccinated players to wear a mask at press conferences and on the sideline at games, to travel separately from the rest of the team, and not to mingle socially with more than three fellow NFL team members at a time.

Rodgers has violated just about every one of those rules.

Rodgers went on Pat McAfee's podcast to complain that he's the unfair victim of a cancel culture woke mob that refused to get vaccinated when Donald Trump was president. (I don't remember things that way, unless we're talking about Trump's recommendations to ingest bleach and shine light up our butts.) Rodgers explained that he is under the expert medical care of former Surgeon General Joe Rogan and has been declared completely free of horse worms.

Rodgers's robust popularity in Packerland has been sacked in its own end zone since all of this came out; a Madison medical clinic has dropped Rodgers as its commercial spokesjock, and, judging from the ads on Sunday's game, Jake from State Farm appears to be pivoting away from offering a Rodgers Rate, too.

I can't speak for the hit on Rodgers's popularity within the sizeable base of anti-vaxxer Trump l'oeilists in Packerland, of course.

I suspect that those people are convinced that the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs yesterday.

Bigly.

Saturday Pot Pourri

I'm keeping this week's Saturday History Tour short and sweet and in search of any unifying theme today, so let's just get started.

Last week, I happened to see celebrity news about some actor or musician or social influencer or whoever he was posting photos of himself and his son because it was Father And Son Day. I had never heard of the celebrity or the Day before, so naturally, I looked up Father And Son Day. 

It turns out that Father And Son Day was founded seven years ago by cancer survivors Jack Dyson and Daniel Marks to raise awareness of and funds for cancer research. I'm still a little confused about when the day is, but it certainly seems that it's for a worthy cause.

"Father and Son Week" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., by Nov. 4, 1921

So imagine my surprise a day or so later to run across this 100-year-old cartoon about Father And Son Week!

Whenever this year's F&S Day might have been, Dorman Smith's F&S Week was definitely in the fall (note the tree). So, really, you can celebrate it whenever you want and for a day or a week or a fortnight if you want. Heck, celebrate it throughout Daylight Savings Time.

Nobody's going to argue with you about it.

And wasn't it nice to start out today's post with something nobody needs to argue about for a change?

"The Storm Centers" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, by Nov. 11, 1921

On the other hand, Magnus Kettner presents us with a cartoon that I find deceptively sweet, hiding an inner core of rural antipathy toward their urban compatriots — a hostility that has festered into today's Red-Blue divide.

Not that there was anything new about that in 1921; you can trace the attitude all the way back to Aesop's city mouse and country mouse.

But I have one more bone to pick with Mr. Kettner: one of the major news stories of November, 1921 was a big strike by coal miners, few of whom lived in "the city." You just don't find many coal miners living in New York City, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but rather in small towns like Hazard, Kentucky; Welch, West Virginia; or Diamondville, Wyoming.

"Pruning the Wrong End" by John Baer, by Nov. 2, 1921

Cartoonist and former Congressman John Baer was part of a self-named Nonpartisan movement that attempted to forge links between rural farmers and urban and small-town laborers. The 1920's would be tough on the Nonpartisan movement, and its non-partisan angle slowly closed. Labor interests became increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, and farmers have, a century later, become a reliably Republican voting bloc.

If there's nothing new about ginning up animus between country and city mice, there's nothing new about the top 1% pitting the bottom 99% against each other's interests, either.

"Slow, But So Is Congress" by Art Young, by Nov. 3, 1921

You know what else is not new? It's Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas blocking popular legislation because all they see is the price tag. 

If you asked the average man or woman on the street or in the field in 1921, you would have found overwhelming support for the idea that the United States owed a debt to its Great War veterans who lost health or limb making the world safe for democracy. Art Young here wonderfully satirizes how long it was taking for legislation to give these veterans "bonus" payments to get anywhere, even given that the Republican Party had control of the White House and both houses of Congress.

Lastly, this Veterans' Day marks the 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Virginia receiving its first occupant; so, without further comment, I close with a few examples of the nation's editorial cartoonists marking the event.

"Armistice Day" by Leo Bushnell for Central Press Assn., by Nov. 11, 1921

by Clifford Berryman in Washington DC Evening Star, Nov. 11, 1921

"The Unknown Mother" by John Cassell in New York Evening World, Nov. 11, 1921

"Lord God of Hosts..." by Cleon Larson, "a Salt Lake school boy," in Deseret News, Nov. 11, 1921

"My Boy" by Charles Dana Gibson in Life Magazine, Nov. 10, 1921

Q Toon: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

There is no deep socio-political message in this week's cartoon; I'm just trying to get ahead of at least one holiday this year for the sake of my newspapers that come out only once or twice a month.

I guess I'm becoming obsessed with food and diet, since I have apparently reached an age where everything I eat is trying to kill me.

I used to be a very finicky eater as a child; but once I grew up and moved out on my own, I quickly got bored with eating the same things day after day after week after month. There are still foods I don't care for, while on the other hand, I've discovered that maybe I shouldn't have judged so many vegetables by the canned or frozen ones.

So much of our holidays revolve around gathering the family around a dinner table or two (or five or eight). The more the merrier, because larger groups can eat cafeteria style, while it can be more of a challenge to accommodate the various preferences, practices and allergies of a dozen or so diners served from the head of the table.

The turkey has to be prepared kosher for Adam; it can't touch the stuffing because of Beth's celiac; Cooper will eat the succotash but only the corn; Delilah says she can't stand the smell of cooked animal flesh; and Eddie wants to know if we have anything for dessert without flour, sugars, or dairy in it?

Yikes! Can't we just talk politics?

This Week's Sneak Peek

To fact-check my history post for last Saturday, I referenced the Milwaukee LGBT History site's archive of In Step Newsmagazine, and noticed that their archive was missing a number of issues. I thought I might have some of them boxed in the basement, and sure enough, I found six of those missing issues.

I contacted Don Schwamb, the originator of the Wisconsin LGBT History Project, who was happy to take those issues and any others I had. That included one copy of Q·Voice that I had held onto because it included an episode of Eric Orner's The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green with the best caricature of Pat Buchanan I have ever seen.

The Wisconsin LGBT History Project had few issues of Q·Voice, and I have even fewer occasions to draw Pat Buchanan these days, so it's now in their hands.