CSotD: A Good Day To Stand Up
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Today is the day for the No Kings demonstrations. Even if I’d forgotten, I’d know because Facebook was crammed this morning with rightwing screeds against it, largely colored, as Telnaes suggests, by people who claim to love the country but seem to be doing all they can to undermine the Constitution and do away with diversity, both of opinions and of ethnicity.
The “My country right or wrong” crowd never seems to know Stephen Decatur’s entire quote, which was “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” much less the clarification offered three-quarters of a century later by Senator Carl Schurz, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”
It also brings to mind that, when Barry Goldwater’s campaign slogan was “In your heart, you know he’s right,” the rejoinder from across the aisle was “Yeah, far right.”
If you want to Make America Great Again, there’s a start.
There’s a lot that people have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, including that there was no Headless Horseman. It was just the local bully, Brom Bones, picking on a rival and driving him out of town with a practical joke that included hurling a pumpkin at him. Not even a jack-o-lantern, and certainly not a head.
The end of the story is that Ichabod Crane was never seen again and Brom Bones married the fair Katrina, which proves that bullying works if your victim is submissive enough.
Not that Crane could have beaten Bones in a fair fight, but he never even tried, making the story that much more relevant.
It doesn’t speak well for Katrina van Tassel, come to think of it. I’d like to see a mash-up where Rip van Winkle meets her 20 years later and she’s miserable, having turned down a nice guy to marry a jerk.
You’ll never persuade people that there was no Headless Horseman. The image is too engrained and people are too invested in believing it, just as you’ll never convince them that Donald Trump only dodged the draft once, that his four student deferments were absolutely standard for male college students of the era.
For that matter, I didn’t know I had four deferments. I thought it was the same one, stretched over four years, since each semester we signed an “I’m still here” card. It could have been eight deferments, for that matter, if you counted each semester separately.
But it wasn’t dodging, except in the very general sense that the law was unfair and designed to keep Senator’s sons out of the rice paddies.
Telnaes also notes that Mike Johnson is nominating Dear Leader for that Nobel Prize he wants so much, which is ludicrous considering that his one move, to force Netanyahu to quit stalling and talk, remains unfinished, his other claims of peacemaking are nonsense and he’s killing random strangers at sea and turning the military on his own people.
But, while the knee pads are a nice touch, they seem redundant, or perhaps are standard issue for Trump’s inner circle. I don’t know where to draw the line between parroting an official story and telling a deliberate lie, but the steady stream of clearly “inoperative statements” coming out of legislative leaders, cabinet officers and official spokesmodels is benumbing.
Which they are supposed to be.
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. — Hannah Arendt
After awhile, it no longer matters who is deliberately lying and who is innocently arguing from a hollow base of ignorant acceptance.
Blame for the shutdown is evenly distributed between Republicans and Democrats, according to the polls, but if you have a fixed notion, numbers don’t matter. This poll shows a parceling out of blame that defies mathematics, but if the same majorities blame Democrats and Republicans and it totals well more than 100%, you’re free to take away whatever you like.
Benson finds the right numbers, or perhaps ignores them all.
There’s no particular logic or meaning to this cartoon, but Summers ties the release of the hostages into an insult of Charles Schumer without establishing any connection to the shutdown.
And Varvel offers a mystifying commentary so unclear that, if you’d like, you can interpret it as meaning that, if Mamdani wins (as seems likely), NYC will become a workers’ paradise and people will be flocking to go live there.
I rather doubt that is his intention.
BTW, when I showed this cartoon to juniors and seniors in 1998, they all recognized Castro, John-Paul II and the cross, but nobody knew what that thing was that Castro held behind his back.
If they were 16 and 17 then, they’re 43 and 44 today. Median age in America is 38.
Better update your icons, and your talking points.
Ironically, I suppose, the GOP continues to scream about socialists and communists, secure in the knowledge that most Americans can’t define either, and so, Bramhall suggests, they remain confident that the Central Government can assume more and more control over private industry, education and the media without anyone recognizing the commissars’ attempts to seize the means of production.
The weird thing being that, a generation ago, rightwingers were obsessed with “states’ rights” and the 10th Amendment.
But that was then. This is now.
Our task today is to show up. That sounds simple, but bear in mind that, for all our celebration of the Spirit of ’76, most people ignored the Revolution at the time. The ones who stood up were the ones who made America happen, but they weren’t a majority.
Only the labels have changed. Kings still act like kings, peasants still act like peasants and patriots still respond to the call.
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