CSotD: Global Prospectives
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Madam & Eve has been having fun with Trump’s expansionist ambitions, and why not? As noted before, they have no oil for him to covet and, thanks to his gullible acceptance of toxic, one-sided fables, he’s opened the door to accept a group of faux-refugees that will relieve South Africa of their whinging.
But, as the penguin says, a little goes a long way, and any laughter is dark.
Far from trying to collect Putin among his souvenirs, Dear Leader is eager to join Russia and China in dividing up the world, which, as Royaards says, is an affront to the United Nations and puts America in some brutal and repressive company.
Moudakis is not the first to compare Trump’s incursion into Venezuela with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and both have explanations of why their military moves make perfect sense and are not in any way imperialistic.
Dear Leader also mimics China’s policy of rewriting history: Beijing has erased the Tiananmen Square Massacre from existence and now the White House is performing a similar magic act in recasting the facts about the attempted coup of January 6.
In addition, Trump, who has often praised China for executing accused drug dealers after a one-day show trial, declared that Renee Good brought about her own death by being “disrespectful,” saying that “law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”
He proudly joins Putin and Xi in dividing up the world into spheres of influence, a form of colonialism and imperialist hegemony that harks back to the 19th Century, though, despite his decision to resurrect what he calls the “Donroe Doctrine,” the divisions are not as clear-cut as Ratt depicts in this familiar projection, another attempt to lay out the planet on a flat plane.
It’s not just that China’s interests are extended well beyond the reach of Xi’s portion of the cartoon, but that the projection does not account for the Arctic region, which, as Goris says, matters a great deal, given Dear Leader’s simpleminded fixation on geographic, rather than political, proximity.
Distance seems a dubious factor in the 21st Century. For James Monroe, European interest in the Western Hemisphere literally hit home, but he didn’t care what the colonial powers were up to in Asia because we could barely get there. As transportation and communication developed, however, McKinley and Roosevelt took a more active interest in the full globe.
Today, the world is within seconds in communication and a few hours physically, and the fact that the continents of the Northern Hemisphere converge towards the Arctic Circle is all but meaningless: It’s been a long time since anyone obsessed over finding a Northwest Passage, though, ironically, we seem set on eliminating the ice that stood in its way.
But Dear Leader has noticed that Greenland is near Russia if you hold the globe right, and as he is building a wall to keep everyone south of the Rio Grande from coming here, he’s now trying to find a way to keep Europeans and Asians from walking across the North Pole right into our 51st state of Canada.
As Whamond, an inhabitant of that 51st State, suggests, it’s best not to get too wrapped up in trying to understand how Dear Leader’s mind works. Being part-Danish, I was fascinated, as a child, with Leif Erikson’s claims to have discovered America. I outgrew it, but not before learning that he was a real estate developer and, as his father, Eric the Red, successfully marketed Greenland, attempted to sell Norsemen on settling in the land Bjarni Herjólfsson had actually discovered.
Sons of real estate developers rarely achieve the same success as their fathers, though nobody sued over Vinland.
But we also know that bullies rarely make their decisions based on logic and fairness, and, as Guy Body says, they’re willing to justify whatever they planned to do anyway with whatever excuse they’ve found worked in the past.
Nor, Herbjørn Skogstad points out, are bullies often satisfied with one victory. Each success motivates them to try for another, and, as he points out, Trump has already issued threats to Colombia and Greenland.
And those are only his current ambitions. You can’t expect a bully to stop until somebody makes him stop.
Historical Juxtaposition of the Day
If Whamond casts back half a millennium for his imagery, Emmerson is more frugal and goes back not quite a century to draw a disturbing but relevant parallel. Granted, by the time the angels of peace descended upon Belgium, anyone who didn’t understand what was happening was either an idiot, still active in the dwindling America First Movement or both, but we’re well past the point of wondering what we’d have done if we’d lived in Germany in the 1930s.
Emmerson, being in New Zealand, can watch in horrified detachment. Horrified detachment is an option no longer morally available to Americans.
Herbert is also in the Antipodes and thus far away from us, but, like Emmerson, she seems to be able to see clearly from there what many of us apparently can’t see before us, and the father in her cartoon has the right idea, though he assumes he can keep his little boy out of whatever comes next.
Which wasn’t the case for the ANZAC crew last time around, but we have immediate issues closer to home that we should probably worry about.
Napoleon, after all, was a pretty tough cookie until the world’s opposition and his own prideful overreaching caught up with him, and, at the end of World War II, my dad encountered a Hungarian regiment in surrender, in which he saw nobody between the ages of 16 and 65.
The world can be full of painful lessons.
I’ve seen several octopus cartoons, but Rogers offers the most chilling, because of that plaintive “I don’t remember voting for this.” Maybe you don’t, but that’s no cure for what ails us now.
The midterms are coming, however, and we must remember that elections are the province of the states, not the federal government.
Nobody can cancel us except ourselves.
Keep the faith.
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