CSotD: Chapter MMXVIII: A New Hope
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The order in which I read comics in the morning is intentional: I warm up with strips and save the editorial/political stuff mostly for the end, after which I go to Facebook and Twitter to look for cartoons that haven't hit the syndicate sites yet.
So I was impressed with the Bad Reporter posted at GoComics this morning, because, while Don Asmussen often posts funny, timely single panels on Facebook, his three-panel syndicated format requires three really good, really timely pieces in order to stand out.
He met the challenge this morning.
Then, when I got to the editorial cartoons, I saw a couple on the ridiculous dust-up between Biden and Trump, and I use the term "ridiculous" because it put cartoonists in the position of commenting on something so absurd that it was a challenge to strike the appropriate tone.
L'il Donnie absolutely did that.
I don't know what Joe Biden was like in high school, but I remember being protective in a way that 17-year-old boys can be. On our Senior Trip to Washington, we had several all-nighters going, when, at about 2 AM, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the girls, going room to room, telling us that Dixie had gone missing.
Many of our female classmates could take care of themselves, but Dixie was quiet, shy, deeply religious and hardly the type to look for adventure. We put down our beers and fanned out through the hotel until we found her in a stairwell talking to one of the security guards.
She'd gotten homesick and gone for a walk, and the guard suggested we all call it a night, my point being that our class ran the gamut from scholars to tough guys, but, had Dixie been in a difficult situation, it wouldn't have mattered which of us came across it first.
I believe Biden.
Meanwhile, I have wondered how an obnoxious jerk like Trump got through boarding school without a broken nose, because I spent several summers at an eight-week summer camp and I understand how bullying works in that world of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Lord Of the Flies."
There are bullies who enforce their will with their fists, but there is another kind who simply bullies because everyone accepts his bluster.
Until somebody doesn't.
There was a kid at camp we called "Sharkey," a notorious bully who focused on younger boys and on guys he knew wouldn't stand up to him. He was in my cabin the summer we were 13, and he ruled the roost, until one day he punched me for one reason or another and I removed what little filter there was between my brain and mouth at that age and lit into him with a torrent of clever, cutting abuse.
At which, to everyone's amazement, Sharkey burst into tears.
His humiliating breakdown signaled the end of Sharkey's reign of terror. In fact, he didn't even come back to camp the next summer.
I wish someone had stood up to L'il Donnie like that back in military school because I'm sure the puffed-up blowhard would have folded like a card table.
Though maybe someone did, and that's part of the revenge he seeks (besides for his parents having given up on him and sent him away in the first place.)
In any case, he knows his trade and he carefully avoids anyone or anything that might put him in his place.
Pity.
Because I'm sure he'll never see how perfectly David Rowe has captured the situation as it developed over the past 18 hours.
The more you look at the blood, bodies and damage in this devastated hellhole, the more you appreciate Rowe's ability to put things into perspective in a very short time.
As for "Here's Johnny," while Bolton is holding an ax, he didn't need it. The door was opened wide and a major architect of our endless, bloody, pointless Middle Eastern war has been welcomed in.
Up to now, I've figured that, as Trump flew into his final desperate fits, there would be grownups in the White House to wrestle him down and keep him from doing something that might obliterate the nation for good.
However, we may now have to hope someone arises to do for America what — as shown in this 1991 John Trever cartoon — Boris Yeltsin did for the Soviet Union … and then hope not to wind up saying, as the tank commander who stood with Yeltsin says in that 2011 article:
What we have ended up with is what we were fighting against at the time. The population is separating into the extremely poor and the extremely rich. Unfortunately our people have always been very passive except at critical moments.
Here's our tank crew:
There have been several cartoons about the student activists who will be descending on Washington tomorrow, but I think Steve Sack best captures the gravity and mature sense of strategy they bring to the moment.
The Children's Crusade that challenged Jim Crow and registered new voters was a smaller, more specifically tasked group, and had leadership from people like James Farmer who had been fighting the battle for a generation or more.
This crew — counter to the paranoid ravings of delusional talk radio hosts — is self-directed in a crowd-sourced manner, relying on their own good judgment and on a sense of history that pops up in some odd places, like this tweet.
They seem angry, and they ought to be angry at being left to defend themselves in a world of thoughts and prayers, but, when you get past that anger, you find that what they really are is serious and practical.
And personable, reasonable and focused: They're not just running around in masks, breaking windows and screaming about capitalism. They have a plan, they have a purpose and, god love'em, they've got a sense of humor:
A Sense of History right down to the midi soundtrack!
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