CSotD: Bury the flag deep in your face
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Steve Benson offers a futile reproach to fear, intolerance and bigotry, "futile" because the people who most loudly declare themselves Christians do not follow the man's teachings.
Moreover, they do not simply ignore what he said, but are openly hostile to his message: As Woody Guthrie wrote long ago, "If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee, they would lay poor Jesus in His grave."
And I think we've gotten past the point of quoting Yeats about how "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," because, yeah, the Revelation is at hand, and so what are you gonna do about it?
Someone commented this morning that now we have to find out what the flag of Mali looks like so we can drape that over our profile pictures on Facebook, and it reminded me of the recurring line from "The Lonesome Death of Poor Hattie Carroll," "Take the rag away from your face, now ain't the time for your tears."
At the end, the line changes to "Bury the rag deep in your face, for now’s the time for your tears," Dylan's point being that the tragedy was not her pointless, brutal, needless death, but that the response of the system was so completely inadequate.
The Paris attacks were sad and frightening, but it is the response that is even moreso, and the shutting down of our borders is a heartless and unnecessary step.
When he posted this cartoon, Scott Stantis also offered a link to an NPR article on how hard it already is obtain refugee status, and I would add this CNN article as well.
France has responded to attacks on its own soil by increasing its commitment to the refugees.
We have responded to attacks on French soil by soiling ourselves.
We welcomed 130,000 of our Vietnamese allies here after that war. As that link notes, polls showed that most Americans opposed allowing them in, but you have to remember, that was back before our leaders became sniveling, gutless cowards.
We're changed since then, and John Oliver has a great segment on how, despite a nice bit of theatrical visa approval from Congress, it is still nearly impossible for the translators who risked their lives for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to come here and escape the death squads. It's not simply a great rant: It's a great, well-documented rant.
But it's not about the sad plight of the translators, or the family members murdered while they struggle through the endless, bureaucratic process of escaping death for having been our friends.
It's about us.
It's about the heartless, posturing, hypocrites we've become, still proudly singing about the "land of the free and the home of the brave" while turning that legacy into a steaming pile of rancid, stinking bullshit.
It currently takes two years to get refugee status to come here if you are among the 10,000 (a third of France's voluntary quota) out of 4.28 million displaced Syrians, but that's not enough: We're making it even harder.
Any legislator who pretends that the measure passed in the House last night simply tightens up some loopholes has, first of all, no concept of how tight the net already is.
And, second of all, is a contemptible fool. How dare you insult us with this transparent nonsense?
The bill, which passed, 289 to 137, with nearly 50 Democrats supporting it, would require that the director of the F.B.I., the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no threat.
I await the Defense Bill that requires the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to personally inspect every airplane, every ship, every gun before it is released for use by the military.
After all, we have to insure that they work, don't we? Don't you care about the safety of our troops and the defense of our nation?
I'll give Donald Trump this much: He's an honest man. Clay Jones draws an appropriate parallel to Trump's announcement that he wants a registry of all Muslims in the United States. His accompanying commentary is also worth reading.
Godwin's Law is often mis-stated as a prohibition on comparing people to Nazis, and that's not the case. Rather, it says that, when a conversation gets to that point, it's over and nothing constructive will follow.
But perhaps the best reason not to frivolously throw the comparison around is that it then has no impact when people genuinely are behaving like Nazis.
Trump and his fans are behaving like Nazis. That's not an opinion; it's not an analysis. It's history.
The disturbing thing is not that Trump is proposing things done by the Nazis. We've had plenty of racists and xenophobes and hatemongers throughout our history, as this link — which includes a very un-Hortonish Dr. Seuss cartoon — documents.
But when he proposes a Muslim registry and no Republican leaps up to cry "enough," when nobody steps forward for that Joseph Welch moment of "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?", that's when I wonder where we're headed.
And one way to assess where we're headed is, as Darrin Bell suggests, to examine where we've been.
Bury the flag deep in your face.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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