Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Whos afraid of going for a walk with Virginia Woolf?

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: September 1, 2010 1 minute 2 comments

Saw a tabloid at the supermarket yesterday with that old picture of Obama in the turban, headlined "Obama is a Muslim!" and claiming proof inside, and I thought, no wonder 18 percent of Americans believe this stuff. We keep telling them it's true.

Maybe they're idiots to believe it, but if you know people are gullible and you take advantage of that to make money, even if you know it's harming the spirit of the nation, what does that make you?

And I thought about a letter to the supermarket, asking why they sell magazines that tell blatant lies, but of course the response is that they have a checkout aisle where they don't, and you can use that aisle. They don't sell Playboy or Hustler at all anymore, the "large panel to block out the boobies" ploy having apparently failed, but people aren't sufficiently offended by lies — about Obama or Bush or Lindsay Lohan or whoever — to take the tabloids away. It's free press, yeah, but, come on. It's free enterprise. They make a nice buck selling this junk, and that's why it's there.

Again, if you know people are gullible and you take advantage of that to make
money, even if you know it's harming the spirit of the nation, what does
that make you?

So where is the opposition on all this? I've looked at a lot of political cartoons about the Glenn Beck rally, and so few of them get it. There were lots of cartoons suggesting that Glenn Beck is a doo-doo head but not making any actual point about his ability to draw a crowd, except to say that he draws a crowd of doo-doo heads. Calling names is not political discourse.

The most intelligent thing that anyone has said about it so far was said well before Beck's rally, which is that a lot of people are frightened by the economy and by a sense that they have no control over the forces that shape their lives, and that, in that situation, it's not surprising that they cling to things they feel they can get a grip on, like their religious beliefs and, yes, the Second Amendment. You can have sympathy for those people and try to reach them, as that fellow suggested, or you can exploit their fears, which approach appears to have won out.

Which brings us to Bruce Beattie's cartoon, which captures my mood but doesn't really resolve much.

Maybe resolving things is not the mission, but muddying things certainly shouldn't be. When the best cartoon of the day simply states the situation, I guess that tells you a fair amount about the situation.

Still, I hope you'll forgive me if I have a bit of a flashback …