CSotD: Encouraging Messages, Stony Ground
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Luckovich poses an important question: What’s so bad about being woke? Or, grammatically, “awakened” or “awoke” but let’s hope at least one?
By illustrating the opposite, he somewhat answers the question, but it should be noted that the popular slang term wouldn’t exist if it weren’t a protest against and rebuke of those who either don’t get it or don’t care.
Ay, there’s the rub! He’s right to criticize the Trump administration for its lack of wokeness, its lack of attention to things that matter, its lack of interest in the common good.
But if people were consistent and well-intentioned, there’d be no need to fret over such things.
As it is, however, we can and should complain about people who claim to be Christians but exhibit no trace of the values that Christ preached.
But to be realistic, if people were naturally inclined to goodness, Christ wouldn’t have had to point out their faults and shortcomings, while, if his message had gotten through, we’d scratch our heads over his stories of the Good Samaritan and the sower of seeds and the workers in the grape arbors, because we wouldn’t be able to picture anyone behaving that way.
And we’d be puzzled by his condemnation of whited sepulchers for the same reason: We’d wonder what he was even speaking of?
The real question, then, is “Why all the surprise?”
Perhaps what is unusual about our world and our experience is the two or three remarkable decades after World War II. Shocked by the atrocities of the Axis nations and also awakened by the admittedly limited but real mingling of races that took place in our armed forces and in the factories back home, we went on a spree of decent behavior.
However, 49% of American voters have now selected the collection of leaders in Luckovich’s panels.
I don’t like to be a downer, but I won’t minimize my own despair. Having grown up and lived most of my life in that interlude of human decency, I’m sorry to see it come to an end.
But having studied history, I realize that what we are currently experiencing is, if not the default, at least nothing new.
The Bible tells of God despairing of the wickedness of mankind, and hitting the reset button with a great flood to wipe out everyone but Noah and his righteous family. In that story, which is folklore rather than history, God promises not to do it again.
Instead, despite a series of avatars reminding us of how we ought to behave, we’re on our own, and often the words of the avatars, like sown seeds, fall on stony ground and fail to germinate.
There are, at the moment, some cracks in the evil empire, and I’m glad to see them, but I start the day with this depressing message because we ought not to expect a few cracks to set things right.
At least not without a great deal of effort from those who want real change.
Still, it’s fun to see the sunshine peek through the thunderclouds, and we may rejoice, as long as we, ourselves, remain awake, awakened and woke.
A compensation for the elevation of incompetent people is that, when placed in positions of power, they have a prodigious talent for screwing up, and Pam Bondi has fouled up what may have been an impossible task in the first place:
Take a man who has cheated on multiple wives, bragged of grabbing women’s privates, burst into dressing rooms full of underage young women, been convicted of sexual assault, and boasted of his friendship with a known trafficker and rapist of teenaged girls, and portray him as an innocent man.
It could work, because he leads a cult and they are apt to believe in him no matter what.
Howsoever, he has encouraged a substantial subset of his cult to believe his opponents are pedophiles who perform unspeakable acts in the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor, and so “pedophile” has become one of their favorite insults and accusations.
Now, having taught them to attack and despise pedophiles, Bondi has to convince them that the close personal friend of America’s most notorious pedophile never joined him in any untoward activities.
And not only did Dear Leader suggest that he would release the files, but his son insisted on it. Yet despite Bondi denying that the files contain anything incriminating, she says she isn’t going to release them.
Does anybody on either side of the aisle believe Bondi’s explanation that there are thousands of videos of underage girls being sexually assaulted, but Epstein is the only man seen in any of them?
Half the country wouldn’t believe it in the first place. Now we’ll find out how many of the other half can’t believe it either.
If Epstein wasn’t Donald Trump’s best friend, perhaps Elon Musk was, but Musk said Trump was in the files, before saying that he shouldn’t have said anything about it.
Now he’s starting a rival political party.
Danziger is unimpressed and suggests that, however much money Musk may expend in promoting his party, his target audience won’t be impressed either.
The ever-loyal Benson declares that the GOP is also unimpressed, though she specifies that Musk’s party is a rat, which avoids summoning the well-known myth about elephants being afraid of mice.
Sort of. We’ll see.
Ross Perot failed to win a single state in 1992, while when George Wallace ran a third party candidacy in 1968, he picked up 14% of the vote but Richard Nixon still handily beat Hubert Humphrey.
And if Perot handed Clinton the presidency by nibbling away at (incumbent) GHWB’s vote, note that it wouldn’t take much to derail Trump’s successor, given how close the vote was in 2024.
A third party could be a monkey-wrench in 2028, but much could also depend on candidates giving up on fear-mongering and on wonkish policy arguments, and, instead, plainly addressing the true concerns of the 99-percent who will, by then, likely be hammered by cost of living increases, loss of health care and a failing economy.
Ed Stein drew this cartoon in 2011. Hasn’t anybody learned anything in the years since?
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