CSotD: When You Wish Upon a Tsar
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There are a lot of cartoons about the renovation/destruction of the White House, but I like Matson’s take because it not only captures the ambitious glorification involved but the combination of fantasy and madness behind the action.
If nothing else, we no longer have to ask if Dear Leader believes the things he says, because as long as he has the power to make them happen, the state of his grasp on reality is irrelevant.
We’re facing a critical situation, and it doesn’t seem to do us any good to insist, for instance, that Adolph Hitler also built a ballroom and wanted to erect an arch of triumph, which is also on Dear Leader’s agenda, though Brodner mocks that ambition.
Shopf goes further, and the frightening thing is that he may not be all that far off the mark. The other frightening thing is that, as an Austrian, he’s not all that far from his source of inspiration.
The problem is that, just as we can’t be sure where Trump’s ambitions cross the line from vanity to lunacy, so, too, we’re beginning to realize how ineffective it is to hold up his similarity to Hitler and expect his followers to recoil in horror. Frank Zappa’s opinion was that, if Hitler hadn’t existed, the German people would have found someone like him, because that was what they wanted.
I’m less convinced that it was a conscious choice, but somebody was cheering in those Leni Riefenstahl documentaries, and if a larger group of people stayed home ignoring the whole thing, well, they weren’t rising up to stop it, were they?
And what if they’d tried? When seven million Americans turned out last weekend to protest Trump’s overreach, the response was not to rebut their accusations but to lie about them.
This photograph of the crowd in Boston was branded false, a phony claim passed along by Senator Ted Cruz and a variety of conservative websites. It is, however, a lie, named by NewsGuard’s Reality Check the “False Claim of the Week.”
The fact that NewsGuard even has a “False Claim of the Week” tells you how deep in the Big Muddy we are.
And having informed Cruz’s office that the photo was authentic, they report that his posting, which earned him 674,100 views and 13,000 likes, was deleted but never corrected. It’s not just that a lie is halfway ’round the world while Truth is still lacing up its boots, but, rather, that even if Truth catches up, it can’t always undo the damage.
There will always be people who need to be the smartest person in the room, even if it requires believing that Elvis is alive, that the Moon landing was faked and that Obama was born in Kenya but the conspirators placed a phony birth announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper.
The problem is not that such people exist but that they exist in such large numbers. That doesn’t mean we should stop circulating facts and correcting errors and lies, but it does mean we should work to convince those at the edge of things and not the irredeemable fools at the center.
The argument is not between truth and lies, but rather between apathy and action.
Getting seven million people to turn out for a day of shouting and celebration is a major victory, given that we are not a nation with a history of general strikes and other more drastic actions.
Stein is one of several cartoonists to equate the destruction of the East Wing of the White House with the destruction of the nation, and that approach may help lure some people off the bench and into the game.
Not that you can’t have some fun with the message. Bramhall mocks Dear Leader’s insatiable ego while noting the damage he is doing to our democracy.
Telnaes points out the greed with which he raids the national treasury for his own benefit. She’s counting on readers realizing that Trump has announced his plan to have the government pay his legal bills in a case he instituted himself, but, again, if the target is the people who can be persuaded, it’s not unreasonable to think they may already have some doubts about this issue.
Moreover, you aren’t likely to persuade the True Believers however clear your argument, but you’re even less likely to succeed if they are getting their news from channels in which Trump’s dubious actions are ignored.
You can’t argue with someone over a matter they’ve never heard about.
Which brings up a topic that we can begin with a laugh:
I was thrilled to see First Dog pick up on the ridiculous story of the malfunctioning mattresses that went into conniptions the other day when Amazon’s Internet system had a major blip.
There is substantial schadenfreude when a $2500 mattress cover turns on its owner. The idea of sinking that kind of money into a magical cover for which I’d still have to supply a mattress is a maddening example of wretched excess.
First Dog is correct that this is only one example of high tech geniuses shoving their inventions where we didn’t want them shoved. But much as I laughed over First Dog’s wonderful rant, there’s a more serious issue lurking under all this.
Whatever Bari Weiss does to CBS, however much NPR rededicates itself to both-sidesing every issue, we’ve still got a growing network of SubStacks and other samizdat-style independent outlets, proclaiming facts and offering strong opinions when none of the Big Official Outlets are willing to do so.
Until someone pulls the plug on the Internet, at which point Big Brother becomes our only source.
The Reagan Foundation simply said the Canadians didn’t ask permission, and hinted that the excerpt lacked context. Here’s the Canadian ad:
Here’s the entire speech:
And here’s the continuing challenge:
Don’t give up, folks. You can’t convince them all, but crowd size is going to be critical.
We need to make it clear that facts matter, that the country is worth saving and that we can’t count on others to do it for us.
Meanwhile, Phil’s gone, but the melody lingers on. What rhymes with “Caracas”?
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