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Jack Ohman notes the 53rd anniversary of the Kennedy assassination with several postings on Facebook, and people have been chiming in with their own memories of the day. Aside from rekindling my own memories — I was in eighth grade — it of course brought to mind this classic Mauldin cartoon, which he dashed out in time for the Extra that the Sun (a morning tabloid) ran that afternoon.
The story is that the Sun ran it full page on the back and the newsies simply flipped the bundles and that was the paper that sold out first, before all the stacks that showed headlines: The brilliant cartoon of a national monument, a murdered president, a murdered man, mourning a murdered president, a murdered man.
It sent me to newspapers.com, which I recently subscribed to, for more political cartoons from the week, but most of the papers there are small and I didn't come up with much.
But there were several pages like this and it made me think: Is that when the crazy began? Is our appetite for paranoid, lunatic theories all Jack Ruby's fault?
And, of course, it isn't, because, if Oswald had lived to come to trial, the loonies would simply declare that he was lying, that the CIA paid him off, whatever.
I visited Dealy Plaza once and was surprised at how small it is, compared to the panoramic view seen in pictures and videos. It's full of vendors selling screwball brochures and I talked to one of them, who told me he was selling the stuff for a friend and, for some reason, mentioned being a Vietnam vet.
I pointed up to the window and said, "I've got a dozen friends back home who could have made that shot," and he admitted he knew plenty of guys from his old unit who could have done the same.
But he said that there were still a lot of things that couldn't have been coincidences.
It happened that, having used an airport vending machine on the trip in, I had a Sacajawea dollar coin in my pocket and I handed it to him, telling him how this woman, kidnapped as a child and raised by another tribe, had been hauled all the way up the Missouri river to translate for horses with her birth-nation, only to discover partway through the negotiations that the band leader was her long lost brother.
There are some amazing coincidences in the world.
Though what is even more amazing is our capacity for stringing together ridiculous non-facts to fit our unfounded beliefs.
And, as Clay Jones notes, not only is the sky the limit on this delusional idiocy, but we don't lock up our loonies anymore. We offer them the presidency.
Which is funny on Monty Python and not nearly so funny when it's actually happening.
I have no idea what you do when you have liars and lunatics leading the polls except make sure the sane people you know turn out on election day.
Because I don't think the loonies are a majority, but I also don't think we should take the risk.
Equal Time
And, just to be fair and note that all the delusional nonsense is not on the right-hand side of the ledger, this Baby Blues brings up the mythology our kids are taught in school.
Actually, I don't care if the kids dress up as Pilgrims, but I find it offensive to have them making construction paper headbands and feathers and I'm glad they don't take a similar approach to Martin Luther King Day. (Oh, god, they don't, do they?)
And, yes, the original Thanksgiving didn't happen the way our national myth says.
But, then, there was no census that forced people to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem and reindeer can't fly and St. Valentine didn't send out cards and may not even have existed and rabbits don't lay eggs.
Not every tradition is a nefarious plot.
Zoe is actually historically correct in wanting to gussy up her Pilgrim costume. They weren't Puritans and wore relatively colorful clothes, though I'm guessing not a lot of tiaras.
However, it would be good to stop putting faux-Plains regalia on faux-Woodlands characters, and then go ahead and teach that the Pilgrims and Indians got together pretty well in 1621, because they did.
Maybe use the story to mourn how short a time it lasted. That would be a good lesson and a way to start teaching real history.
Meanwhile, back at the myth-making factory …
Teaching "real history" does not mean "teaching revisionist nonsense from the opposite direction."
I've been seeing this MTV-sponsored video all over Facebook and it's entertaining, but I hope their turkey was as full of stuffing as she is full of shit, 'cause they would sure have plenty of leftovers.
For instance:
1. There were no slaves in New England at the time of the first Thanksgiving, and when they first arrived, it wasn't in the Pilgrim's community but among the Puritans.
2.The wars with the Indians didn't happen until nearly 20 years later, so she's wrong about that. (In fact, the Pilgrims and Wampanoags had just signed a treaty of friendship.)
3. Squanto was indeed abducted to England, but calling him a "slave" is being argumentative — he was taken there to be trained as an interpreter and when someone else did try to sell him as an actual slave for plantation work in the West Indies, he was rescued and began doing the work he'd been trained to do — and then quit and went home. If he was a "slave," then sailors taken aboard ships by press gangs were slaves. She cheapens the horror of the word.
4. The Pilgrims-and-Indians story came in no later than 1882. I've always suspected it was added as PR to lure foreign factoryworkers and homesteaders to the country, but, however it came about, she's wrong about the timing by a long shot.
The funny part is the teaser headline "Everything you know about Thanksgiving is Wrong."
If you fall for this sloppily researched load of bullshit, it still will be!
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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