CSotD: Banging Her Face Against the Golden Door
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Several cartoonists have used the image of Trump abusing either Liberty or Justice or Truth, but I'm giving Dan Wasserman honors on the metaphor because he doesn't inject any element of light-hearted ridicule into his cartoon.
Not to say the others found it funny, but there are times to ridicule the president's preposterous lack of grounding and there are times when it's inappropriate.
Great example: The silly jackass posted this piece of rah-rah fantasy bragging to Twitter and promptly got schooled by the subject of his blathering, and I think it's absolutely appropriate to point out that the Emperor has no clothes, no brains and nobody keeping him from making a damn fool of himself. (H/T to Michael De Adder)
There are certainly times when we can have some fun with the fact that we've got a spoiled six-year-old running around the Oval Office.
But when the topic is domestic violence, there's an obligation to stifle even the slightest urge to ridicule his stance and go straight for what it means.
Clay Jones depicts the reality of this cold-blooded, heartless approach, then doubles down in his essay, noting that the only priority of the Trump White House is Trump.
Jones notes that the times Trump has come out against abusers, they were his political opponents: Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein. Beyond that, he consistently defends the accused, including not just Porter but Roy Moore, Cory Lewandowski, Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes, with never a trace of "if true" to his comments.
And, as he notes, "At some point, while discussing violence against women, a decent person would actually discuss the violence against women."
Are there false allegations? Certainly, and we should always look for due process before a criminal conviction.
But when multiple women independently provide credible evidence, it's not he-said-she-said anymore, whatever you think of the credibility of women versus the credibility of your buddies.
And false accusations go both ways. One of the things about being a reporter in a small market is that it puts you in touch with people who have inside information, sometimes available only on deep background because it is privileged.
Such that, f'rinstance, when a Father's Rights advocate wants you to write about how the interfering authorities keep parents from disciplining their children, someone might perhaps break a rule and quietly let you know that his idea of fatherly discipline is grabbing his teenaged daughter by the throat and banging her head against the wall.
Nothing humorous in it, and Lalo Alcaraz notes the bottom line, again without any touch of humor.
And this is a time when Clay Bennett's deadpan style comes to his aid, because he can express a wish in metaphor without humor, though I think this may be a great deal more optimistic than called for.
We'll have to see how much impact this latest demonstration of how little Trump cares for others has on those who hang around on the fringes of the Deplorables, though it will surely add steel to the determination of women who have already figured things out.
(By the way, the bits poking out from the suitcase are a great indicator of "thrown together in an emergency.")
In the end, John Deering sums it up best, because this is less about what one monumentally ignorant, misogynistic, self-centered barbarian thinks as it is the fact that the monumentally ignorant, misogynistic, self-centered barbarian is the head of our government.
Whatever campaign promises he has broken, whatever asinine lies he has told, however much he has humiliated our nation on the national stage, the real damage is to the social contract itself, the basic idea that the government is here to serve and protect.
And that our federal officers vow to uphold a document based on that social contract.
Meanwhile …
Joey Alison Sayers has a cartoon over at the Nib, of which this is a snippet, in which she lays out the concept of "mansplaining" and other insults to dignity in a way that only someone who has genuinely been on both sides of the issue can.
She drifts off-topic at the end — or, at least, if curiosity about gender reassignment is exclusive to males, curiosity about cancer isn't — but her overall perspective is extraordinarily valuable, given that accusations of "mansplaining" have been thrown around haphazardly in a way that often reflects more snowflakism than serious attention to feminist research.
It's not a new topic — I addressed it a quarter century ago and it was only slightly new in those days:
But it's new to have somebody who can lay it out in such personal, authoritative terms.
Sayers doesn't offer a solution and neither did I but it's time to move from accusations and observations to suggestions, and we need people like her who can address it with the gender-based equivalent of those irrefutable photos of bruises and black eyes.
Non-Comical Book Plug
The resurgence of interest in domestic abuse, its victims and perpetrators, put me in mind of Roddy Doyle's "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors."
Doyle is more known for "The Commitments," "The Snapper" and other roughly humorous tales of life among Dublin's working class, but this powerful novel is a dour and deeply moving study of a topic that contains only the very darkest of gallows humor at best.
It's fiction but he didn't invent the title. I went to a wedding once at which a former college classmate explained her shiner that way and we all smiled and pretended to believe her and were relieved when she divorced him.
Doyle's powerful book moved me so much when it came out in 1996 that I promptly gave it away and can't remember who to.
So I ordered a new copy and I don't know who I'll give this one to, but it's the kind of book you don't just read and keep.
Apparently I'm not the only person who liked it:
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