CSotD: Welcome to the World
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Seems like a good jibe at the expense of our exalted Secretary of Health and Human Services, doesn’t it?
But Garry Trudeau was early, because I came across this last week when I was looking through the 2006 archives for flag desecration cartoons. It ran July 2, 2006, which was not only well before RFK Jr was anything but a fringe screwball, but even before Dear Leader was recommending home remedies for covid.
Nuttery was out there. It just didn’t have official recognition yet.
Also came across this news item in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for July 7, 2006, and the illustration is a giveaway for when it ran. Schools didn’t think kids ought to have phones in class then and a number of them banned the devices, either ordering kids to keep them in their lockers or having caddies or cubbies in the front of the classroom into which students had to deposit their phones.
But whining and cajoling won, and for the next 19 years, teachers in most schools had to compete with texts and lord knows what other electronic distractions.
I’d tell you why, but I have no idea why.
If you dig back a bit farther, to 1969, you can find something I hope nobody will show Dear Leader, because his penchant for glitzing up the White House to make it look like a cheap bordello makes me suspect he’d love the uniforms Dick Nixon designed for the White House guards.
Cartoonists laughed at ridiculous poor taste in those days, and Nixon could read. The uniforms disappeared from the White House and were presented to a high-school marching band.
Konopacki updates a classic illustration of an escaping slave, comparing the Fugitive Slave Act with the current war on immigrants. It’s a good parallel, because not only was the Fugitive Slave Act an intrusion that made the slavery issue more immediate for Northerners, but it led to non-enslaved Black people being seized and put into bondage, and was upheld by a Supreme Court led by Roger Taney, seen in retrospect as a corrupt vessel of a corrupt system.
It should be noted that immigrants, with the notable exception of Chinese immigrants, faced few hurdles in coming here until a wave of nativism brought about legal restrictions in 1924. Anyone who says their families came here legally before that may be correct, but is likely making a meaningless and irrelevant point.
Konopacki’s parallel offers hope, because the Fugitive Slave Act so appalled and infuriated people in the free states that it brought a lot of them off the fence and into the abolitionist camp, if not by inspiring active resistance at least by changing the way they voted.
We’ll see if having armed, masked thugs seizing people on the street will have the same impact today.
On a brighter note, for them at least, the folks in the Southern Hemisphere will be starting spring tomorrow, at least in countries like Australia that mark their seasons by months instead of by equinoxes (equinoces?) and solstices. I’m pretty sure the weather doesn’t care which method you use, just as I’m pretty sure the changeover isn’t as sudden as Golding suggests.
I’m also pretty sure it means our Antipodal Facebook friends will soon be posting lovely pictures while we’re getting out our snow shovels, which brings to mind Gilbert’s Law, which states that the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, have nothing to do with the case.
Which in turn reminds me of my newsroom days taking down obituaries in the winter, which often said “Burial will be in the spring.” My reaction was that I wouldn’t drink the water there.
One bit of Hands Across the Water is that Dear Leader’s on-again-off-again and possibly illegal tariff system has caused a number of countries, including Australia, to stop accepting small packages for mailing to the US because they’ve no idea how to apply charges that refuse to stay in place.
I have no problem with this, because I wouldn’t expect them to know what the hell is going on here, and they at least have the excuse of not living here.
And lord knows mailing packages is hardly the biggest issue facing those who observe us from abroad. Watching from the UK, Morland has trouble understanding why we let preventable diseases like measles and gunfire strike down our children.
Maybe some of those righteous people who want to put the 10 Commandments in schools and other public buildings should, instead, install millstones for us to contemplate.
To repeat a dark observation I’ve made before, when Jesus said “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” he wasn’t asking for a show of hands.
Though if it’s any comfort to Yanks, I had to doublecheck to confirm that Harry Burton is from Ireland, because this cartoon could have run nearly anywhere.
And Wilcox helps spread the schadenfreude with a cartoon meant to criticize Australian bureaucrats but applicable far beyond their shorelines. Art should be a universal language, but there are times when we wish it were not.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Note, too, that climate change is an issue in Austria and Ireland, even if it’s been declared a nonexistent hoax in this country.
This juxtaposition has a pair of interesting contrasts, with Keyes mourning a worldwide failure to deal with the issue while Schopf is more specific in singling out Trump’s bizarre loyalty to petroleum and his active shutting down of alternative energy sources for being “woke.”
Note, relative to Keyes’ piece, that while we may think of wildfires here and in Canada, they’re a major problem in Europe as well.
I guess this 1990 follow-up to a 1971 commercial is supposed to be inspiring, but I found it a depressing reminder of the difference between pleasant ideas and concrete action.
There’s a difference between marking a moment and keepin’ keepin’ on. I’m more aligned with these folks, most of whom weren’t born in 1985 when the original of the song they gathered to perform was released, but who seem to get together for more than a soft drink.
Keep the faith, baby.
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