CSotD: Name it and claim it
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We'll ease into this topic gently, with today's Loose Parts, wherein Dave Blazek jokes about a phenomenon that, as it happens, was quite real.
If you look at the maps of the Rocky Mountain West, you'll see a difference between, for example, Wyoming, which was settled (to the extent it was) by ranchers, and Colorado, where the Front Range in particular was not so much settled as it was developed by railroad magnates.
And so places in Wyoming have gritty names like Dead Indian Pass, while Colorado has places with Realtor-friendly names like Cherry Creek or Colorado Springs, the latter of which is notable for not having any springs.
However, Easterners looking to relocate out west liked the idea of springs, and Colorado Springs was a magnet for people with tuberculosis (including Doc Holliday), despite the fact that they'd end up either drinking well water or perhaps water from Manitou Springs, which was a good seven miles away.
Manitou Springs was named by the afore-mentioned real-estate developers for an Algonquin deity who was, like them and most of their prospective clientele, from back East, but whose name was known through the works of James Fenimore Cooper, which gave him some marketing clout.
I imagine the poor fellow for whom Dead Indian Pass was named was at least found on the pass or possibly nearby on Dead Indian Hill.
Just a theory, but one tied into the idea that naming things gives you a certain amount of power over them.
If nothing else, I don't think you'd have much luck luring consumptives or any other East Coast city folks out to a place where their water would come from Dead Indian Creek.
Which brings us to Obamacare, which is very, very bad, but, when it was a very similar program in Massachusetts, was good, not because of the differences between the two programs but because then it was called Romneycare.
As Andy Marlette points out, we're now going to replace it with something else and the important thing will be to name it properly so that people will like it, regardless of what it actually does for them.
And I'm sure the premiums for this magical replacement coverage will never, ever go up, because health insurance premiums never went up before Obamacare.
Which is why your auto insurance and home owners insurance premiums haven't increased over the past six years, have they? (This conversation may be recorded for training purposes.)
The last theory I heard was that all the people with pre-existing conditions would be put into the assigned risk pool, which means they'll have coverage but they won't be able to afford it.
So they'll get to keep their pre-existing coverage for the rest of their lives, a duration which, y'know, could vary a bit.
Nate Beeler is not the first, or only, but the most recent cartoonist to note that the term "swamp" appears to be fairly flexible as well.
But I like his approach because, while several have shown Trump ignoring or encouraging the reptiles rather than getting rid of them, Beeler ties in the issues of executive orders and federal lands.
Someone was bemoaning a federal legislator from out West who is part of the movement to sell off federal lands which, she noted, would potentially close them to hikers, hunters, fishermen and other nature lovers.
But I pointed out that the same people who want to get rid of the National Parks and wildlife preserves and open lands seem to also want to get rid of health care.
Once a little congestive heart failure and emphysema and cancer begin to go untreated, those folks aren't gonna be out hunting and fishing and hiking anyway, are they?
The problem solves itself.
At least we can still poke fun at Fearless Leader without getting locked up. He talks about it, and dreams about it, but that's one thing I'm pretty sure he won't be able to push through.
In Turkey, you can indeed go to jail for it, and Kal Kallaugher is one of several cartoonists in support of Musa Kart, who has been twice sued by Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and is now in jail for mocking the government and its leader.
Kart's paper, Cumhuriyet, used to run his work on the front page. In his absence, they're either running a blank space or using other pieces, like this one by Australian cartoonist David Pope.
It reminds me of when the Nicaraguan paper, La Prensa, would respond to Somoza's censorship by replacing the article their on-site guardian of propriety had nixed with a picture of Rita Hayworth.
Readers didn't know what they were missing, but they knew why, and could tell by the size of the picture how major the article had been.
It's an effective protest in places without a free press.
Kart is only one of several writers and artists jailed by Erdoğan, who I guess continues to campaign to get Turkey into the European Economic Community, by which I mean, I haven't heard he has given up, but he sure doesn't seem to be as intent on pretending to respect human rights anymore.
Then again, Angela Merkel green-lighted a lawsuit by Erdoğan against a stand-up comedian in Germany who did a decidedly vulgar bit insulting the Turkish leader, so I guess "human rights" is just one more of those terms that means whatever the most powerful person in the room thinks it means.
Bart van Leeuwen captures them nicely. Geez, I hope they don't sue!
(Merkel later changed her mind, apparently having initially been intent on maintaining Turkey's cooperation on the issue of involuntary expatriots from the alleged conflict in what many think of as Syria.)
Meanwhile, here's a very scary link.
Not that it's all about words …
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