CSotD: It’s Always Something
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This is a really good cartoon. Bennett has excellent artistic skills and a keen eye for depicting frustrated despair, which he make a recurring motif in his work. He’s even color-coded his firefighters with red and blue clothes under their bunker gear.
The problem is that this shouldn’t be an evergreen — a cartoon that could run anytime — but it is, and in turbulent times, there’s no place for evergreens. And specifically in this case, how can a Dumpster fire presidency and a Congress that refuses to rein it in qualify as evergreen? Shouldn’t it be an emergency?
We can thank Steve Bannon, who counseled Trump to “flood the zone with sh*t.” Or, to quote Roseanne Roseannadanna, “It’s always something.”
By keeping us in a constant state of panic, by piling one crisis on top of the other, we are left not dealing with any of them, and, by necessity, letting every crisis become yet another neglected issue.
I’ve had something rattling around in my brain so long that I forget where I got it, but possibly from Mark Harris in Bang the Drum Slowly: It’s like being buried up to your neck in manure, and someone is throwing rocks at your head.
What do you do? Duck?
If Bennett’s piece is an ongoing problem with no specific target date, Anderson offers a slightly different issue: He’s on top of what should be a major scandal, but this bout of insider trading has become such a constant that the cartoon becomes a different sort of evergreen: It can run anytime because nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Nobody even seems interested in doing anything about it.
Robert Reich goes on endlessly about the small number of obscenely rich people and the huge number of people who are struggling, but one result is that if somebody makes a few million betting on death and misery, we’re so used to inconceivably huge figures changing hands that it doesn’t even seem to register.
We all agree that someone should put a bell around the cat’s neck. We just can’t agree on who, or when, and sending JD out to look for Medicare fraud requires, as Pett suggests, that he make a significant effort to ignore the other corruption he might otherwise stumble over.
It’s not easy to ignore, but, again, there are so many other things flooding the zone, and so little will to find answers to questions we aren’t supposed to be asking.
Part of the problem is in Bennett’s cartoon, but the rest of it may come to light when the No Kings crowd votes in the midterms.
Or maybe it won’t. We’ll see.
Brilliant caption: “Meanwhile, in Gaza.”
It’s not that the crisis is over. It’s that we’re no longer paying attention because we’re focused on the Strait of Hormuz or whatever other rock is being hurled at our heads at the moment. Except, as she says, for those who hope to make money betting on the next outrage.
And nobody in the West seems to be paying any attention at all to the violence on the West Bank, where Israeli settlers are burning crops, destroying orchards and using violence to drive Arabs from their land.
We’re like children who cover their eyes so the scary thing won’t be happening. And yet it is.
At least the Australians aren’t shy about distinguishing between the Israeli government and the religion of its inhabitants. Americans are so cowed by claims of antisemitism that, while they’re perfectly willing to condemn Iran’s mullahs for not reflecting the will of their people, they’re afraid that criticizing Netanyahu — whose party does not hold a majority in the Knesset — will be taken as bigotry.
It doesn’t help that we’ve got genuine antisemites crawling out from under their rocks, but so do the Australians and yet they manage to address that as a separate matter.
Here, we’re in the midst of a new flurry of hate, luring the Klan back out from under the rock they slid under half a century ago, when they expressed their hate of Catholics and JFK not only in public, but also anonymously, adding nail polish to quarters and putting Washington in a cardinal’s cap.
And something else the rest of the world seems to care about more than we do: In the Irish Times, Turner notes that restoring the flow of oil, if it happens at all, will just make it easier to upend the environment.
While in France, Derenne makes it clear that not only is the whole world watching, but the whole world knows why petrol is in short, expensive supply.
Emmerson jokes that New Zealand PM Christopher Luxon has a solution that lines up the continuing need for petroleum with the growing suspicion of modern medicine. I remember that, when we got our Covid shots, we were given cards, and I would think you could show them at gas stations, but I’m not sure whether I’m more in favor of the health benefits or of the explosion of paranoia that concept would touch off if anyone proposed it here.
Though Sack’s evaluation of our chosen path makes me wonder how different this dust-up with Iran might be if we had expanded alternative energy programs instead of cutting them off.
And, for that matter, whether we’d have even attacked Iran if we didn’t have a thumb plunked into the petroleum industry pie.
Another forgotten crisis: Heller reminds us that rising grocery prices seem to be largely a self-inflected wound, thanks to ICE raids on migrant labor, trade deals destroyed by nonsensical tariff policies and the shortage of fertilizer, since oil isn’t the only thing bottled up by the Hormuz closure.
We elected Dear Leader because groceries were expensive and he promised cheap gasoline, but that was two years ago, and who can remember back that far?
Well, as Roseanne says, it’s always something.
But not to worry. The strait is open, or possibly not, but it probably will be, because the war is nearly over. Or not. Check again in two weeks. In two weeks, for sure.
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