CSotD: No, Don, it’s not.
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Here's a departure from custom: I'm starting with the vid clip.
The elections were a slap-down to the politics of hate, fear and division.
Kinda.
Clay Bennett was nice enough, before he posted it to his Facebook page, to tip me early with the answer to my speculation yesterday about the second cartoon he had in readiness. It cracks me up, but I'm awful grateful he didn't get to use it.
For all the traditional talk about editorial cartoonists praying for the success of the candidates who promise the most material, that only works when the potential office-holder is some powerless but amusing goof. Cartoonists have to live in this world, too.
Meanwhile, in Green Bay, Joe Heller noted this reaction to the election:
24 hours ago, I'd have called this too triumphalist to be fair. But when I went to check my mail yesterday, I found a pair of nice, polite 30-ish women camped in front of the post office with posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache and petitions to impeach him.
This, of course, is an example of free speech, just as are the Women in Black who used to appear in front of the post office in Farmington, Maine, every Friday, and I assume still do. And perhaps, if these two zealots make a long-term commitment to their cause, they'll drop the offensive signage and learn to attract people with honey rather than vinegar as the WiB have over the years.
But they, and various extremist postings on Facebook yesterday, suggest that it's not really time for Dandy Don to sing.
Heller is right: While America is headed in a more progressive direction, there is a strong trogolodyte faction that will drag its heels the entire way, aided and abetted by talk radio, Fox News and the extremists that I doubt are going to resign from the GOP.
Someone also noted on Facebook the crossover on maps between the Red States and the Confederacy, but one can only wish that the resistance were that geographically isolated.
As it happens, I'm currently working on a story about the Civil War and the prison camps. It came as a surprise, in reading accounts of Johnny Rebs who escaped from Elmira and made their way back to the South, how easy it was for them to knock on a farmhouse door and find sympathy, food and shelter, even in New York and Pennsylvania. I had been under the impression that copperheads were to be found mostly in places like Kentucky and southern Indiana, but that was apparently not at all the case.
And so we go back to the argument long advanced by southerners that the north was no more free of racism than their part of the country, and memories of the busing controversy in South Boston, which was just as vicious as anything seen in Selma and Birmingham.
Except, y'know, for the connivance of the police, the support of the governor, and the bombings, lynchings and murders. Mere details.
But they're right that an escaped rebel wouldn't have had to sleep out in the barn, and that the N-word does not go unheard above the Mason-Dixon line.
I'd like to hear that word a little more often, in fact. I'm tired of people coming up with elaborate ways to avoid saying why they are so much more vicious in their objection to this president than to previous progressives.
I mean, at least FDR's opponents cursed him as a Jew (not that it matters, but he wasn't). And, more recently, when the lunatic fringe was objecting to Barney Frank, they had the personal courage and integrity to admit that it wasn't just his policies they hated.
It's out there. Let's admit it. If you're ashamed to put your cards on the table, maybe you should fold your hand and retreat for a little self-examination.
Be like Bill O'Reilly. Use completely transparent code words and then provide a translation for anyone still too stupid to figure them out: "Twenty years ago, Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority … The demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore."
Racism is not going away, and not just among those who oppose Obama. Recently, I donated to keep Tom Racine on the air or on the computer or wherever, and my gift for having done that was a copy of Keith Knight's new collection of strips, "The Incredible Cuteness of Being," among which was this gem from 2008:
Perhaps predictably, the cartoon caused a ruckus at Montclair State among students who were either immune to the message of eccentric, limited optimism, or else convinced that, if we ignore racism completely, it will cease to exist.
But it does exist. This blogger interviewed Knight about the backlash.
The results of this week's election spared us from curling up in fetal position under our desks, and, for that, much thanks.
But the response to the election strongly suggests that it's not time to turn out the lights, that, if anything, it's time for cartoonists to crank up the spotlight and scatter the cockroaches.
'Cause tomorrow starts the same ol' thing again.
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