CSotD: Small Favors, Major Gaps
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I went looking for interesting Thanksgiving cartoons of the past but didn’t find much I hadn’t seen repeatedly since. But having praised big, wide newspapers yesterday, I got a kick out of this 1925 piece by Gluyas Williams.
As for this year’s Thanksgiving, Tom Tomorrow offers a panoramic survey of the mess we’re in. It’s hard to know how the MAGA crowd is taking things, given the revelation that many of their on-line influencers turn out to be foreign trolls and bots, not to mention outright delusional nincompoops.
Of course, the fact that they pass this nonsense on to each other is proof that they want it to be true, whether it is or not, and wanting things to be true is not confined to the right fringe. The news that Karoline Leavitt’s brother’s long-since ex was swept up by ICE is bringing way too much joy to people who ought to be more decent than that.
I guess the latest test of character is who you think of when the president says
You’re mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.
Jamal Khashoggi? Charlie Kirk? John Donne said any man’s death diminishes me, but that was a long time ago.
Bagley envisions an imaginary scene that might please both ends of the spectrum, but don’t hold your breath. As they say in the military, “Different spanks for different ranks,” and while daycare aides and construction workers get knocked to the ground, beaten, jailed and deported, the gentlemen at the top of the heap might incur a fine. Emphasis on “might.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
For that matter, sometimes people who set up and participate in sexual slavery and child rape end up getting special treatment.
It’s like the scene in Goodfellas where the gangsters congratulate young Henry on his first bust for having kept his mouth shut like a good fella ought to. Ghislaine is just getting the privileges that come with not squealing on the big boys.
The fact that people convicted of sexual offenses aren’t supposed to be eligible for Club Fed accommodations isn’t relevant, because friends of the boss have priority in these matters, though I don’t recall any scenes in either GoodFellas or the Untouchables where suspects were questioned by the boss’s personal attorney.
We have entered an era in which it is up to the Chief Executive to determine guilt or innocence and what color the flowers in the Rose Garden should have been painted.
Back, that is, when we had flowers and a rose garden at the people’s house. Well, never mind. Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Like the Rose Garden. Like the entire East Wing. Like the notion of The People’s House.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
It’s like Covid. If you don’t run tests, you won’t see an increasing number of cases. And, similarly, if you don’t release jobs reports or other economic data, everything will remain subjective and really, really good.
And if you hold your hands over your eyes, nobody can see you. At least in Georgia. It doesn’t seem to work as well in Florida anymore. Must have accidentally skipped a donation.
Meanwhile, since investigating military heroes for giving out accurate advice is going so well, the Secretary of War (patent pending) has widened his aim to cut ties between the Pentagon and the Boy Scouts of America, based apparently on their having admitted girls, which is against Department of War (patent pending) policy, given that his having been weeding women out of the officers’ corps in order to make the military a big manly masculine fortress.
He explained that letting girls become scouts was an attempt to “attack boy-friendly spaces” and that therefore the group no longer helps “cultivate masculine values,” which sounds like someone building up to making tasteless jokes about the group, but he appears to be quite serious.
Under his macho-macho-man leadership, The He-Man Woman-Haters Club is back in session!
However, we’re supposed to be celebrating Thanksgiving, and besides being grateful for women (acknowledging that most of the shortcomings were my own), I’m grateful for not having had to weave my way through a lot of traffic for Thanksgiving dinner. My in-laws were two blocks away when I lived in Colorado, and coming back East put me about 100 miles away from my folks, with deer crossings the only hazard on that drive.
This year it’ll be 10 miles to my son’s farm, which isn’t all that far from where Harry Bliss is holed up most of the year, so this cartoon doesn’t reflect his reality, either. I assume he’s also grateful.
You may also wish to be grateful that the world’s richest man seems to be fading in every sort of wealth except money. To be fair … oh, never mind, why be fair? His droogs rampaged through our government slashing budgets that now have to be repaired not out of decency but because they cut things that had to exist.
Cutting off those children saved us one percent of the federal budget. DOGE was supposed to cut $2 trillion in waste but came closer to $270 billion, only after the damage was done and the poo-flinging monkeys where chased from the scene, it turns out to have cost more than it saved.
In money, that is. We haven’t calculated the lost lives.
Horsey hit Thanksgiving from another angle back in 1994, and this cartoon was a favorite in my presentation to high school students, who laughed aloud to see the twist on the Thanksgiving myth and the heartless cruelty around them.
We can be grateful that they laughed. They’ll be voting next November.
I’m also grateful that Arlo has been channeling my life all these years. In the words of Charlie Sykes, we’re not the crazy ones. In the words of Joyce Vance, we’re in this together.
Be grateful.
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