CSotD: Weekend Downer Watch
Skip to comments
A whole lot of Halloween-themed cartoons are now obsolete, and so, perhaps, are a flood of cartoons about SNAP benefits, given that two separate courts ordered the funds distributed after all. (The “perhaps” being based on the potential for Dear Leader to ignore the courts, or to appeal the decisions.)
For the next little while, we should assume the administration will stall and that it’s up to us. I’ve already heard from our local food bank and from one of my Senators, and things here are in motion, but we’re still all part of the solution.
Specific to Whamond’s cartoon, Halloween’s over, and it’s too late to hand out groceries to kids, which is just as well.
Rose Schniederman‘s appeal for suffrage also inspired a festival to bring bread and roses to the working poor, and Halloween, after all, is a rose. Even if all the kids who came to your door were, indeed, poor — which is doubtful — they’d still deserve candy while their parents figure out how to get bread.
You can better target those who need food by supporting local food banks with money or by filling grocery store donation bins.
And ramen is paste and sodium. Try baked beans or peanut butter instead, while cash donations help food banks get perishables like fruit, vegetables and milk.
If you enjoy a sense of giving, put those beans or peanut butter in a Little Free Library. The right people will find them.
Marlette notes the cruelty at the center of our crisis, which goes well beyond SNAP issues, and he reminds us that Jesus didn’t just preach offering food and health care, but did it himself.
The story of the loaves and fishes — stripped of its magical implications — is particularly appropriate, because rationalists interpret it as a situation in which Jesus set an example by giving away all he had, which both inspired and shamed people in the crowd to also share what they had, which is why there were more leftovers at the end than Jesus had handed out at the start.
It’s almost sinful to assume he performed a miracle rather than providing an example. Solutions don’t fall out of the sky, but require our active participation.
Espinoza captures the cruelty and greed, but also recalls a classic Sufi story. Sufi parables are less directive than the stories Christ told, and are more like zen koans, provoking reflection rather than preaching specific actions.
The story is of a poor man who paused in the bazaar to smell the food being sold by a merchant, who promptly grabbed him and demanded payment, saying that the poor man had gained by the pleasant steam from his cooking. A mullah was passing by and the poor man asked him to intervene.
The merchant explained that he deserved compensation for his talent and the mullah agreed. He took out his purse and shook it, jingling the coins. “The sound of money as payment for the smell of food.”
Which in turn applies to the billionaire in Bok’s cartoon, who had been hoping to collect for the smell of America’s plenty, and is horrified that he may, at least in NYC, be required to provide something more substantive in exchange for the riches he possesses.
Speaking of miracles, conservatives continue to hold out hope, but I think they’re gonna need some bigger clothespins.
Benson’s contention that the intentional cruelty of withholding those emergency funds was the Democrats’ choice was totally inoperative from the start.
They weren’t the ones employing hunger as a weapon and using the poor as hostages, and withholding SNAP emergency funding was a deliberate choice by the administration, with only a flimsy argument insisting it was legally impossible, which the courts dismissed.
The GOP would do well to release the funds and move on; this was a loser for them anyway.
Meanwhile, that Nobel Peace Prize just gets further and further away. Even a conservative like Walters concedes the folly of expecting Trump’s Gaza ceasefire to hold up, and an Israeli bombing that killed 104 doesn’t feel like peace to anyone except the Netanyahu government, which says the ceasefire is back in place now.
One ought not to use Mad Magazine parodies as the basis of foreign policy.
But however much Bibi and Donnie insist the ceasefire is holding, if I lived in Gaza I think I’d keep my head down a little longer.
Juxtaposition of the Day
American cartoonists haven’t caught up with the president’s Asian trip, but Le Lievre, from Australia, and Bunday, from the UK, have already evaluated the meeting between Xi and Trump.
As was noted here Wednesday, reports vary, with Trump announcing that it was a great meeting with several major agreements and the Chinese saying they agreed to discuss some things but hadn’t arrived at anything specific.
It may well be that Trump’s amateur diplomats have not absorbed the cultural fact that, throughout East Asia, the word “no” is rarely used but there are 100 ways of saying “yes” which are actually very polite ways of saying “no.”
It takes more than mere translation to interpret what you’re being told.
But another Aussie, Matt Golding, suspects that Trump knows his talks with Xi went nowhere and so has opened up an entirely different can of worms.
American cartoonists have picked up on this latest announcement, and Smith echoes the widely held fear that Trump’s decision to start blowing things up will encourage other nuclear powers to join the US and North Korea in setting off nuclear explosions.
Commentators almost universally suspect that Dear Leader has once more leapt into something with both feet without bothering to find out what it really meant.
Testing systems has gone on steadily and has nothing do to with blowing up anything, so for Trump to say other countries have been testing their nuclear arsenals is technically correct, except that we have been, too.
He apparently believes that they’ve been setting off bombs, which — except for North Korea — nobody has been.
But now whatever they did to the rain may be happening to it again.
Comments 10
Comments are closed.