CSotD: Time to be Relentless
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So while I was eating cake and enjoying a blogday party, all Hell was breaking loose, and cartoonists like Ann Telnaes were keeping on top of it.
Much as I like this cartoon, it isn't all that creative, which is not a slam on her but, rather, a commentary on the times.
It's not rote, but it's not hard: You have an incompetent fraud in office being applauded by sycophantic underlings. How can you not draw upon "The Emperor's New Clothes" for the obvious metaphor?
And then he spews a continuous torrent of ridiculous, clearly untrue, blatantly self-serving, illogical, faux-patriotic nonsense. You just hold out your bucket and catch it.
There are good and bad ways to do that, and her sharp pen brilliantly captures his petulant, arrogant, pouting fascism, but Trump really needs to slow down and let the cartoonists catch up, ferchrissake.
I quoted this Dan Perkins interview in April July, but it has only grown in meaning since:
“It’s all about this one idiot now,” he says wearily. “Every week you’re writing about this one idiot and it’s just a struggle to keep up.”
Is the gaudy, cognitively-impaired oligarch not a boon for weekly news satirists like Perkins? He sighs. “[It’s] like waking up and saying ‘I’d like a glass of water’ and then having someone spray you in the face with a fire hose."
The best, most creative editorial cartoonists are hard pressed simply to keep up, never mind finding new and inventive ways to satirize Trump, and probably shouldn't waste time trying.
A bit of perspective: We've all seen Thomas Nast's famous cartoons about Boss Tweed. But, if you go through the archives of Harper's Weekly, you'll see that you've only seen the best of the best, and that he kept up a relentless attack, which infuriated Tweed.
We've all heard variations on Tweed's complaint that, while his constituents couldn't read, they could look at "those damn pictures," but it was the relentlessness, not the brilliance, of the attack that he objected to and that brought him down.
If you see all of Nast's Tweed cartoons, they were each good and even artistically spectacular, but not necessarily brilliant.
However, Harper's Weekly had an editorial mission.
That was then, this is now, and I'm hearing from cartoonists that editors complain of too many attacks on Trump, that they want to see other topics.
Well, yes, let's have cartoons about Pepsi's plan to introduce Lady Doritos, because everybody loves a good laugh, even if it's about something that isn't going to happen and never was.
Maybe the difference between ho-hum and brilliant is not the percentage of home runs you hit, but your sense of mission and your refusal to wander off into inoffensive Lady Dorito distractions.
If you keep pounding, the breakthrough ideas will happen, and Nick Anderson scores with this meld of two news stories into one devastating broadside.
But, even then, I'm breaking one of my own rules because he's come out with another cartoon since and they're coming so hot and heavy that I can't keep up.
Ditto with Matt Wuerker, who dropped this bomblet but then followed with another:
And as much as I like the former, which encapsulates my own comments on his inability to testify without at least convicting himself of perjury, Trump's latest great leap into autocratic fascism can't go unrecorded just because it comes so hard upon the last.
It's like one of those cheesy monster movies where they seem to wrap it up with a fairly easy destruction of the beast, but then, as they are congratulating themselves, the menacing music begins again as an even larger, scarier version of the thing looms up behind them.
Certainly, the fascist cult of personality Trump is building around himself, and which Telnaes and Wuerker's cartoons address, cannot be ignored.
It is ridiculous that this strutting chickenhawk was inspired to hold a military parade in France, whose most famous military parade went from the Maginot Line to the English Channel doubletime, and it is even more preposterous to think a president had never watched a State of the Union Address and didn't know the opposition party never applauds.
Maybe he's that ignorant. Maybe he's that dishonest. But, to quote a famous politician, "At this point, what difference does it make?"
I just hope someone has checked the smoke detectors in the Reichstag Capitol building.
There has been a lot of talk about Watergate vs. Trump, and Jen Sorensen takes a shot at the comparison, focusing on changes in media.
Now, Nixon certainly had his defenders, and they were loud, persistent and persuasive, but they were seen through a gatekeeping filter such that the insane rumors and certifiable falsehoods were circulating in barrooms but not in the viral, omnipresent way we see them today.
Still, there were loyalists to the last gasp and beyond, insisting that "everybody does it" and the Democrats were worse and he should have burned the tapes.
They are still here, and now they have bullhorns.
Though it appears that the Republicans are running out of friends and, more to the point, running out of candidates: In two special elections, they've been stuck first with a child molester and now with an actual Nazi.
And, as Steve Sack points out, Michele Bachmann was hoping God would send her a message to run for Al Franken's seat, but He was apparently silent, except for a billboard some pranksters erected.
Still, we cannot relax. I've learned to avoid Facebook and Twitter first thing in the morning because they sour my appreciation for innocent gag cartoons, and I don't worry about my IRA because I don't need to draw from it yet.
But contrary to the Ladies Who Lunch in this Jeffrey Koterba cartoon, I do pay attention, because, in a time of crisis, pretending that nothing is happening is what truly qualifies as treason.
The time to be relentless is now.
Ngeke sivuma – Ngeke silahla itemba.
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