CSotD: Rush to Misjudgment
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I wasn’t blown away by today’s Pearls, at least when I first came across it. The first cartoon websites I visit each morning are humorous, and I got the gag. I even agree that we’d all be happier if we disconnected and lived in the moment. As the saying goes, “Ignorance is bliss.”
But the significance of the gag didn’t hit until I got into the political cartoons.
You can’t go back. Smartphones and computers and 24-hour television are all here and while you can choose not to use them, it’s hard to play ostrich, and you’ll overhear enough to know that something is happening here, even if you don’t know what it is (Do you, Mr. Jones?).
Bliss is for kids. When I was four, I was playing down the street when Patty Rinehart told me there was a colored woman calling me. I ran home to see this astonishing sight, but when I got there, I just saw the babysitter, Mrs. Franklin, who wasn’t colored. She was dark brown, but I’d been expecting a rainbow.
Well, you can’t be four years old forever, and I eventually figured out that, while I loved Mrs. Franklin, there were people that hated anyone who was dark brown.
There’s a point at which not knowing what’s going on is no longer charming, because it begins to require an effort, and a definite purpose, and as John Donne wrote,
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
I was still too young, at five, to know about the death of Emmett Till, but I learned about it later, and I did hear about the deaths of three civil rights workers buried in a dam when I was 14, and Viola Liuzzo, murdered for helping register Black voters, and Medgar Evers and on and on and on.
Today, I have a computer and I not only read the news but look things up when they make me curious, so when the Justice Department announced its indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, I began looking to see what had driven them to concluding that it was corrupt.
It didn’t take much effort to punch holes in their accusation, and the sense that they were performing for an audience of one seemed confirmed when that audience blasted the SPLC and somehow tied the accusation into his loss in the 2020 election, which he wants to erase the way the Chinese government has eliminated Tiananmen Square.
But history and logic don’t work that way. It turns out that the SPLC has been able to investigate hate groups and terrorist organizations by hiring people to infiltrate them. And I didn’t have to wait for this morning’s NYTimes to learn that.
The New Republic was on the story yesterday. As was Joyce Vance, who opened with a general overview, then returned for a lawyerly dive into the indictment itself. Which, BTW, you can read for yourself.
But a good journalist doesn’t run with a single source, or even two. I readily found back-up from Harry Litman. And from All Rise News. And from Public Notice. And from Mitch Taylor at Defiance.
The timing is perhaps ironic, since earlier that day, I had criticized the many cartoonists who have assumed Kash Patel’s guilt of accusations he is a habitual drunkard.
Now, from the other side of the aisle, we have similar assumptions that DOJ’s indictment is sound and that the group that, among other things, bankrupted the KKK, won a major judgment against the Aryan Nations, and shined light on the white supremacists at Charlottesville, is absolutely corrupt.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’m not going to assign motivation to any of these cartoonists, but I’ll repeat how readily I was able to find sources that questioned the DOJ’s accusations, and I’ll repeat once more my oft-stated opinion that political cartoonists should be journalists.
It’s not that DOJ is automatically wrong, but the surge of expert commentators springing to SPLC defense introduces a more than reasonable level of doubt that will need to be sorted out in court.
And I’ll admit to having at least a small dog in this fight: When I was doing talk radio, I came across a pamphlet from a hate group and decided to have them on my program. They agreed and sent me more literature and I found it frightening enough that I canceled the interview. My radio station couldn’t pay me enough to sit down with those people.
About three years later, talk show host Alan Berg took on a similar group and was murdered by them.
Whatever the SPLC was paying people to infiltrate these groups was not enough.
As for the DOJ’s accusation that donor funds were being misused, the NYPost says that neither George — Soros nor Clooney — offered comments but somehow the newspaper knows they didn’t know how their funds were used.
However, the Intercept found 20 donors who said they knew SPLC was paying investigators and approved of it. So take your pick.
Meanwhile, the author of the Atlantic’s story on Patel says she has “been inundated” with contact from additional sources confirming her report. Which doesn’t justify pre-trial drunkard jokes, but should make Patel’s lawsuit that much harder for him to win.
Zapiro gets a laugh at the expense of South Africa’s new ambassador, given that Trump not only ignored President Cyril Ramaphosa’s correction of the lies about white genocide, but has increased the flow of Afrikaaner arrivals while limiting other refugee admissions.
And is deporting Afghans who assisted US troops during the war.
I’d suggest you get your bets down quickly, but only if you’ve got inside information, because nobody could possibly guess what’s going to happen next around here.
Unless they’d attended some Cabinet meetings.
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