CSotD: You Gotta Believe! (or else)
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This, unfortunately, is a good way to start the week. It’s unfortunate because, yes, that could be you being grabbed off the street, beaten, jailed and deported. As we’ve seen, you can even be a citizen. Heck, as we saw with the snatching of Ogalala men, you can have roots here further back than the people who seize you.
But it’s also unfortunate because probably it’s not gonna be you.
The good thing about the Covid pandemic — from the POV of social consciousness — was that it affected people all across the country and regardless of race, creed or color. It’s a lot easier to feel immune to this current plague, assuming you don’t live in an urban center, aren’t an immigrant and don’t have dark skin.
Then it’s only a concept, a distraction, rather than a threat. Part of the answer to that is “Be patient. They’ll get to you.” But even if it’s true, it’s out there beyond the horizon.
And it’s probably not true. Where do you think the “good Germans” came from? They knew what was happening, but it wasn’t happening to them.
This seems like a light-hearted approach to the issue, but it is — pardon the expression — chilling, because you don’t have to be a genius to stand in the snow and know damn well that it isn’t 82 degrees out.
But if you want to believe it, well, there it is on the sign, so it must be true.
Asha Rangappa has a long, brilliant piece on all this, but here’s the critical paragraph:
Historians have noted, for example, that in Nazi Germany, contrary to the prevailing view following the war, ordinary Germans were aware of Hitler’s concentration camps, which were widely publicized but to which they were desensitized through consistent and prolonged exposure to propaganda. Over time, news reports matter-of-factly characterized those imprisoned in the camps as “race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals” which provided a convenient justification for ordinary Germans to not be particularly alarmed about them. Sound familiar?
It’s little things, not major efforts. We can argue about the motivations of those who protested the war in Gaza, but Ramirez sneaks in “Student Protesters Inc.” on her shirt. Motivations are a big deal, but the repeated lie that protesters are being paid gets under the skin without attracting nearly as much attention. We heard it, too, during antiwar protests half a century ago.
Nobody ever shows pay stubs or the receipts because there aren’t any. It’s just a lie to undercut people without addressing the issues they raise. And now the Trump administration is claiming that the protesters in Minnesota are being paid, because, well, because that’s a lie that you never have to prove and that works on that gullible segment of loyalists who willingly believe that it’s 82 degrees out and snowing.
Some of the damage is self-inflicted. “Defund the Police” was, as James Carville said, a stupid phrase, not because putting money into preventive services wasn’t smarter than putting it into militarization of the police, but because it was so easily misinterpreted. As seen here, years after it was relevant.
And you can tie it into the Harris/Walz campaign, though the connection is slight, because while Trump is doing horrible, hateful things, you can distract people by reminding them of how badly the Democratic campaign went. Dear Leader, after all, has been in power for a year and is still blaming his failures on Joe Biden.
So the reason we’re shooting people in Minneapolis today is that some of them got mad five years ago when we suffocated one of them to death. Or something. Doesn’t matter.
This dichotomy is just as obviously bogus as the temperatures in Weyant’s cartoon, and just as attractive to people who dearly want to believe what they’re told even when it makes no sense. But just in case you have questions, Dear Leader has erased the old history and posted a new version that explains it all.
Elvis is alive, Kennedy was killed by the CIA and January 6 was just a visit by peaceful tourists. And nobody landed on the Moon — that’s just silly.
You’ve just got to want to believe it hard enough, which means, if you don’t believe it, that’s your fault. And since nobody really attacked the Capitol police on January 6, we can arrest people for mouthing off at ICE today or photographing them or watching them at all. On accounta that’s different.
On accounta we said so.
Another example of how a light-hearted approach can be chilling. What really works in Bollings depiction is that the Richard Scarry landscapes depict normalcy, and by riffing on that established concept, Bolling makes the horrible seem normal.
If it seems normal to you, you’re probably enjoying those 82 degree temperatures, too.
I had a couple of these to choose from. It’s an obvious issue of hypocrisy for Trump to be criticizing the mullahs, though they’ve stepped things up from his similar violent suppression of dissent. But come on. If you believe the body count makes a difference, you’re not recognizing the morality.
Does it make more sense the way Rogers frames the issue? Because the federal government has made the conscious decision that they aren’t going to investigate the killing of Renee Good, but they’re going to investigate her wife and, by the way, they’re also investigating the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of the state. But not ICE.
We’re not investigating the guy who pulled the trigger, because why would we? He was just doing his job, and she was a paid troublemaker who ran over him and put him in the hospital no matter what all those videos suggest.
And since we’ve already determined the truth, why bother looking into it any further?
There are all sorts of things we don’t need to be investigating. But your lack of faith? That’s something we plan to look into, because it’s unpatriotic and unAmerican and somebody must surely be paying you.
But not to worry. We’ve got everything under control. First we take Venezuela and Greenland.
Then it’s on to Tatooine.
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