Meet the Author

People keep asking, “Who are you?” With reluctance, I include this biographical sketch.

My parents hailed from Cleveland. My father was an art director for Life magazine during its best years. I was named after my grandfather, Thomas Clough, who was one of the early Provincetown painters. The last name rhymes with “rough.”

I was born in Westchester County, NY (1945) where I attended several good public schools. I have been, by turns, a son, a student, an infantryman (heavy weapons), a college grad (architecture), a portrait painter (realist), a commercial artist, a husband (29 years), a father (son and daughter). When my daughter’s school screwed up, I home schooled her for a year. I’m a card carrying member of American Mensa and smart enough to know that being clever is not the same thing as being wise. I do my best to keep my facts straight, but whether my conclusions have merit is left to the reader.

The Website

Each morning I scan three or four or five newspapers and clip anything of interest. This clipping collection would make a fire marshal swoon. I also spend way too much money on books.

The essays on Weird Republic are handwritten on yellow legal pads with number three Ticonderoga pencils. The illustrations are done on illustration board with pens and a simple watercolor set. I transcribe the essays into Hypertext Markup Language and then I give the text and the illustrations to my son who handles all the computer work. The actual website that you see is his creation. That’s the entire operation.

Weird Republic is financed entirely from my average income. Essays are written and posted as often as my work schedule allows. If I were independently wealthy, then I would be posting a new essay every week.

There is an e-mail address on the website. Everyone who has written to me these past years has been sent a civil reply. Not all of these replies were deliverable. If you didn’t receive a reply, blame the fog of technology. “Thank you” to everyone who corrected my spelling and who offered helpful suggestions for making the website easier to read.

Weird Republic was created to be an archive of recent historical events, of events too recent to be in history books and yet too old to be in the memories of young adults who were children when the events happened. College students have written to say that Weird Republic was the only place where they could find details of the Tawana Brawley Hoax. They were old enough to vote; Al Sharpton was a candidate for president of the United States of America, and the liberal press corps was content to let Sharpton get away with the preposterous claim that he was guilty of no more than believing a distressed teenager. What’s a young voter to do? Fortunately, I saved hundreds of newspaper articles from the time of the hoax which were later assembled into a coherent mosaic. I tracked down a book vendor in a far-away state who still had a copy of Al Sharpton’s out-of-print autobiography. Then I got my hands on a copy of the court transcript of the civil case against Sharpton brought by Steven Pagones. All of this stuff was fast slipping away down the memory hole when I pulled it together and made it an exhibit on Weird Republic.

Where else on the Internet will anyone remember the violent acts of Ron Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa? His misdeeds have been erased from virtually every computer file of every newspaper in America, only to be replaced by sappy hosannas to the “Father of Kwanzaa.” There is no mention in the press of women being stripped naked and tortured for days on end, or of a fatal gun battle on a California campus. Once again, the truth was about to vanish down the memory hole.

Please note that Weird Republic is not a crime blotter; it is a political website. If Tawana Brawley’s hoax had been investigated and resolved by the local authorities it would have remained a local curiosity. It was only after hucksters, such as Al Sharpton, made Tawana’s lies a grotesque metaphor for race relations in America that the hoax became political and therefore a fit topic for Weird Republic. Likewise, it was only after the radical Left made false martyrs of the murderers Rubin Carter and Mumia Abu Jamal that I felt the urge to set the record straight. Their crimes alone didn’t land them on my website.

If an unusually high percentage of the essays touch on the lives of persons who are black (a sore point with some readers) it is because so many black folks are emotionally attached to leftist political programs. It is these perspectives that are the focus of the essays, not the race of the people who are attached to these ideas. Sometime in the 1960s most black Americans virtually married the Democratic Party. Since then, that party has moved steadily leftward and taking black America with it. This places much of black America within my target zone. My purpose now is to bombard them with better ideas and better choices and sometimes criticism. I refuse to treat them (or anyone) like pampered children, to patronize them as the white liberals do.

This brings me to the website’s cartoons and caricatures. They drive some people bonkers, especially white liberals. The cartoons seem so unfair, so extreme. Some people have even suggested that some of the cartoons are racist. Is this true?

There is definitely a long and ugly history of racist cartooning. The targets of these cartoons have included blacks, Jews, Poles, Catholics and the Irish, among others. The last wave of American racial caricatures focused on the “buck-toothed Jap” depicted on posters during the Second World War. All racist cartoons demean their target populations as a people. Demeaning depictions of blacks as a people were already in disrepute by the 1930s. As a teenager, I chanced upon a book on cartooning at my local pubic library, written in the 1930s, which specifically cautioned budding cartoonists against depicting black folks in the style known as “mushmouf.” Many years later, as a parent, I tried to explain to my perplexed daughter the essence of mushmouf. It took me half an hour of sketching to recapture what it was about this style that made it so distinctively offensive: those big white eyes and the sofa-cushion lips. It used to be commonplace; now it is extinct.

The cartoons on Weird Republic are not aimed at populations; they are aimed at individuals. I am not a journalist; I am a moralist, a public scold. My purpose is to heap ridicule upon the ridiculous. If the black men depicted in The Rotten Roots of Kwanzaa seem positively demonic, it is because I sympathized with their black victims who also saw them as demonic. If the character Yacub in Nation of Islam seems a bit bent, it is because NOI theology describes him as a black mad scientist, a sort of dusky Doctor Frankenstein. As for the gloved and leather-clad lads of the Black Power Movement, they had already reduced their public image to a caricature long before I had a go at them.

If a cartoon requires a generic numbskull, then that fool is always a white person, because a minority numbskull would feel less generic. Most of my individual targets have attained celebrity status. They may be celebrity criminals, but they possess the power of all celebrities to influence public opinion. None of my targets are powerless. If you still think that blacks are getting a raw deal, then take another look at the white folks in my cartoons. I’m an equal opportunity sniper.

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