CSotD: Things Said And Left Unsaid
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There are a lot of Rob Reiner/Pearly Gates cartoons out there, but you won’t see them here. I’m sorry he and his wife are dead, but the best I can do is refer back to John Donne yet again: Each man’s death diminishes me.
But Donne also challenged Death, and warned it not to be so proud, since Death comes to everyone. Donne believed in an afterlife that made Death even less frightening, but I’m open to whatever happens next, even if it’s nothing, and I’ve reached an age where most of my childhood heroes are gone along with more than a few of my childhood friends.
Instead of Pearly Gates, I endorse Anderson’s commentary, because we’ve put a toxic narcissist in charge of our country, and this isn’t the first time he’s made someone else’s problem all about himself.
Anderson takes off the gloves. There’s no value in showing Reiner (with or without his wife) at the Gates of Heaven. For one thing, he was Jewish, and for another, he had become an atheist, a combination that makes his connection to Pearly Gates a little dubious.
More to the point, however, is that Anderson doesn’t just illustrate Trump responding like a psychotic pig, but details how his twisted mind processes the world. Anderson isn’t just name-calling. This is diagnostic, and could move the needle for someone who can be moved.
Trump’s inability to empathize with others has always been part of his personality, along with his apparent inability to tell what really happened from what he wishes had happened.
If anything positive comes of his latest ghastly, tasteless declaration, perhaps it is that people who thought it was funny when he tossed paper towels to hurricane victims will recognize the cruelty at the heart of his sociopathic detachment.
I noted yesterday that Aussies were slow out of the gate with Bondi Beach cartoons, and said I hoped it meant they were searching for something more than acknowledging that it was sad. We all knew it was sad.
There have been cartoons honoring Ahmed al-Ahmed, who stepped up to tackle one of the shooters, but Harwood has stepped back from the incident itself and focuses, instead, on the diversity of united responses in a diverse community.
She borrows candles from the menorah, a choice that also reflects the notion first advanced by William Watkinson in 1907, in a sermon in which he noted that calling out evil is less effective than promoting the good:
(D)enunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves a popular temptation. Yet it is far better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
De Adder mocks Trump’s egocentric ability to blame everything on Joe Biden, but he also touches on a common thread this time of year, which is the matter of Mary and Joseph finding no space in the inns of Bethlehem.
It doesn’t take much scholarship to recognize that the Nativity Story is folkloric. There was no census, shepherds wouldn’t have been out with their flocks in winter and it’s a charming story that has no historic basis. To be fair, I also doubt that Constantine saw a cross in the sky and heard a voice cry “In this sign you shall conquer” and I’ve got some reservations about Ulysses and that wooden horse.
But Constantine did win the battle, and Troy did fall, and there’s no reason not to believe that Jesus was a real person, however much the folklore may have exaggerated the details.
It’s a nice touch to have him born in a manger as one of the common people, but at the moment, the more interesting part of the legend for Americans comes when Herod decides to kill all male babies and so Joseph, Mary and the child seek asylum in Egypt.
I’ll bet they didn’t have green cards, and, even if they had, masked Egyptian secret police might have wrestled them to the ground, bound them and forced them to return to Israel where the child would have been seized and killed.
That’s this year’s Christmas story.
I cannot tell you how many editors have had to explain to furious readers that “freedom of the press” doesn’t mean the newspaper has to publish any cockamamie letter sent to it, and German is also correct that free speech doesn’t mean social media companies are forbidden to moderate their content.
Not that they aren’t the first to argue that they don’t want to spend money on quality control freedom of expression is a precious gift. And it’s a gift they are eager to share with bots, sock puppets and foreign-based trolls, because even non-people have a right to pretend to be real.
The flood of lies, errors and misinformation has become so unrelenting that Politifact has given up on declaring a “Lie of the Year” and has, instead, declared 2025 “The Year of the Lies.” They’re doing a series of the most outrageous falsehoods advanced in the past 12 months because picking just one seemed futile.
As covered here, Australia has instituted a ban on young people accessing social media, in an attempt to let them grow up before they are inundated with lies and hostility, but other countries don’t want to interfere with that process. Or something.
When my kids were young, we had “the Archie Bunker Rule” (sorry, Rob), which stated that nobody who would not be welcome through the front door was welcome through the TV. It didn’t last forever, and I didn’t expect it to be bullet-proof. I could keep them from watching violent, anti-social, misogynist garbage at home, but, the next morning, they’d be in a classroom full of kids who’d seen it all.
Like Grandpa, I accepted the limits of possibility and embraced the occasional victory.
But when you see an infant placidly sucking on a baby bottle full of Coca-Cola, you know you can’t be your children’s only influence, try as you might.
The Swiss Family Robinson led a quiet, placid life on a desert island, but when Disney got there, he brought Japanese pirates and coconut-shell hand grenades, because placidity is boring and nobody wants boring.
Or so I hear.
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