CSotD: Swings, Misses and Foul Tips
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This certainly set a foul mood for the day. It’s perfectly valid to criticize Hamas, or the Netanyahu government, or ours. But I cannot understand the editing process by which this got through at Tribune or posted at GoComics, and I sincerely hope no newspaper editor would choose to run this hateful slandering of two billion Muslims.
Worst part is, if an editor did, instead of blaming his own lousy judgment, he’d likely use the furious reactions as an excuse to drop political cartoons entirely.
By contrast, I disagree with Summers for a couple of reasons, but I’m not offended by his cartoon. Most of my criticism today is intended as a professional, rather than a gut level, response.
Consider, first, that both sides have broken the ceasefire. Israeli forces put a tank shell into an SUV that went over an invisible line, killing 11 members of a Palestinian family attempting to return to their home. Hamas has reportedly been carrying out deadly reprisals against rival forces in Gaza.
I don’t like both-sides arguments, but there aren’t a lot of saints in this situation. Still, that’s an issue of disagreement, not cause for condemnation.
Besides, Summers raises a genuine question. When the ceasefire was signed, I remember reading that return of bodies of dead hostages was going to take a while, because some of them were buried in wreckage, along with bodies of Gaza residents killed in the shellings.
But now this delay is being cited as evidence that Hamas is not abiding by the terms of the agreement. Did nobody else recognize the difficulty in locating bodies? That’s a serious question, because I’ve waited in vain for someone to point it out, once the objections began.
So I differ with Summers, but I’m more intrigued by the failure of reporting than by anyone’s slant on it. It seems less a case of partisan posturing than the result of universally sloppy journalism.
My mood is considerably brightened by Baron’s hopeful, wistful view of things. She isn’t making a lot of promises, and she’s acknowledging the odds faced in building peace in an area that has seen so little of it. And yet she sees a few seedlings poking up.
I would note that Baron has visited war zones and spent real time with the people in these shattered places. It gives her a different perspective, and it certainly gives her firm standing to comment.
I wish I could call it a trend, but I can at least note that we’re seeing younger cartoonists (Baron is under 30) doing more on-the-scene reportage, and if that’s the next direction, it would be a positive one.
The issue of the Young Republican chat unfolded over several days, and Bennett led off with a very strong response to their sexist, racist, antisemitic conversations.
It’s harsh, but it was, at the moment, an honest reaction to a jaw-dropping exhibit of appalling, smug bigotry, a response accented by an established history of similar outrageous misbehavior having been ignored or explained away.
Wuerker chimed in soon after, with a piece that seems more analytical than strictly reactive. Bennett left no doubt about his immediate reaction to the remarks, but Wuerker, slightly later, reflects instead a broader response.
Use of swastikas is automatically an incitement, but Uncle Sam is examining the leakage in puzzlement, which seems a reasonable summation of how the issue hit the public.
Obviously, those are swastikas, and there was nothing subtle that required pondering in the conversations. Rather, the question was who these people were and to what extent they reflected wider thinking within either the party or its official youth wing.
Granted, portraying the GOP as a Trojan horse suggests that Wuerker had his doubts about who was hiding within the horse preparing an ambush. That puts a spin on Uncle Sam’s puzzlement and asks if maybe he should have been more suspicious in the first place.
Now comes Sheneman with a condemnation of the Young Republicans, and the difference here is that there has been time for responses, and he’s condemning the group, saying that they are distancing themselves from the chat without renouncing the prejudices behind it.
I’m uncomfortable with it, despite generally agreeing with his overall view of things. That is, I’m sure these aren’t the only individuals in the party who harbor those feelings, and I’m willing to believe that others have remained silent for a reason.
Still, a Vermont state senator in the chat was called upon to resign, and did, and the State of New York has suspended its Young Republicans group.
“The Young Republicans was already grossly mismanaged, and vile language of the sort made in the group chat has no place in our party or its subsidiary organizations,” said NYGOP Chair Ed Cox.
And if that name sounds familiar, he’s married to the former Tricia Nixon. You can’t get a whole lot more Republican than that, and his statement certainly doesn’t echo the denial Sheneman suggests.
Though of course JD Vance defended it as the sort of thing young people say.
Maybe JD needs to start hanging around with a less crass, bigoted crowd, but my overall take is that I’d be more comfortable with the cartoon if Sheneman had featured Vance instead of a generic elephant.
But that’s more an issue of timing than anything else: Bennett could hit hard because he hit first. As a story develops, the reporting aspect becomes more critical, and a cartoon becomes more subject to picking at details, which is what criticism often involves.
Which, by the way, means that, if an editor picks out a cartoon but then leaves it on his desk for a few days, he’d better take a fresh look before he runs it, in case the world has kept turning in the interim.
Thank Goodness For Jewel Thieves
After all this kvetching and nit-picking and general grousing, I’m grateful for those thieves who may have absconded with a necklace but succeeded in brightening my mood by resuscitating the Pink Panther.
Though, if you want to go back to the real origins of caper films, here’s the movie that everybody else borrowed from:
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