CSotD: Pointing fingers
Skip to comments
I haven't featured Madam & Eve much here recently, not because it hasn't been just as sharp as ever, but because — apart from them hogging all the good weather for the past several months — it's been commenting on news stories that, like the aforementioned weather, haven't really made it out of South Africa.
That would include President Jacob Zuma's multimillion-rand mansion, which was — after much outrage — finally the topic of an inquiry. What will eventually come of said inquiry is taking, for the moment, a backseat to the President's response, which was that he didn't know all those things were being done to his modest little home.
The benefit of M&E's take today is that it's universally understandable. By contrast …
Jeremy Nell's cartoon is equally effective at home, but an outside audience would need to know that South Africa has added automated toll booths (e-tolls) to some highways and that their already-unreliable public utility company has been scheduling what is there called "load shedding" and what in America would be a planned brown-out.
Which does not in the least detract from the impact of his work on its intended audience, mind you. Jerm isn't aiming to amuse the rest of us, and his what-if-we-all-did-it appropriation of Zuma's response to the report is sharp, particularly since it includes a call to action in the last panel.
It's just not universal.
Like, say, Chip Snaddon's take on the presidential response to the report.
I don't think you need to follow South African politics in a whole lot of depth in order to grasp that message.
And I don't. Once in a while, one of my SA friends will post a news report on Facebook, but, for the most part, I follow their politics through the work of their cartoonists.
Which reminds me of when I was in high school and had a subscription to Punch. Apart from arriving a minimum of two weeks late and not always in chronological order, a lot of the cartoons were based on current events over there, so that everything I know about Ted Heath, I learned from cartoons about him.
Ditto, now, with Jacob Zuma.
In neither case do I think my perspective is so far skewed as to be seriously inaccurate.
And in return …
I offer foreign readers Don Asmussen's analysis of the recent Supreme Court ruling on political spending, which will give them as accurate a picture of the issue as anything else they're going to come across.
I think yesterday's CSotD, besides featuring the best of the first cartoons on the topic, pretty much featured a spectrum of the best takes, and I don't intend to simply run more of the same. But Asmussen does bring a different level of mockery to the table and I'm always impressed when all three of his japes hit home. It's a tough trick, in a world where even the goal of hitting the target squarely once can be elusive.
And, yes, thank god we're being protected from having any of those oligarch dollars breaching the levee and reaching us!
And, in a pending decision …
Lee Judge compares the Hobby Lobby call for a religious exemption against providing full health insurance to its employees to the legal necessity of people with a religious objection to war having to pay the taxes that support the military.
He doesn't say so, but he's tapping into a resistance movement that goes way, way back, as this page from an anti-war tax web site details. (It's also the source of the 1967 ad here, which you may click to embiggen.)
What's interesting is that, according to that page, while choosing not to pay the proportion of your taxes that goes to war is illegal, the individual amounts make it unprofitable for the IRS to go after the protesters.
Yet it remains illegal, and not simply in the distant past, as that page attests:
In 1993 Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in an attempt to accommodate individual conscience in instances where a person’s religious beliefs may be adversely affected by the government. In the late 1990s three court cases were filed by Quaker war tax resisters using RFRA and the First Amendment guarantee to the free exercise of religion in an attempt to have penalties against war tax resisters removed and permit them to pay only for non-military programs. These cases were dismissed in lower courts, appealed, then dismissed again in the Second and Third Circuit Courts. In 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear any of the appeals.
So the question would be, if the Supremes grant Hobby Lobby CO status based on its policy of being closed on Sunday and thus being deeply religious, shouldn't it revisit the question of requiring religious pacifists to pay for wars?
And, if they uphold Hobby Lobby's claim of exemption but refuse to reconsider the Quakers appeal, will the Fox News Christians cry persecution?
I don't know if that's a segue or not …
… but, speaking of self-serving logic emanating from the top, I did suggest that the current arc in Retail would be worth following. Today's is proof of that.
Just 'cause it's Friday
Speaking of seeing a nation through a particular media filter, my introduction to things South African came via "Wait a Minim," a musical mounted by a pair of South African folklorists, Paul and Andrew Tracey, together with Jeremy Taylor (fun stuff there), which broke a good number of barriers back in the apartheid days before heading for stages worldwide.
I was delighted, in speaking with Johnny Clegg after one of his appearances here, to know that not only was he well aware of their work but knew them personally and considered them a resource. It suggested that my first steps had not been misguided.
So here's a pair of South African songs and a lot of photos of Paul Tracey, for no other reason than to spread a little joy as the weekend begins.
Comments 2
Comments are closed.