CSotD: On Beyond Clownwashing
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I’ve been feeling sorry for Tom Tomorrow and other deep-digging satirists lately, in part because the real world is becoming so ridiculous that it doesn’t give satire anywhere to go, but, particularly in his case, because Steve Bannon’s ongoing flooding of the zone makes multi-panel humor hard to sustain.
At any given moment, something may happen to make one of the panels non-operative.
Though I’m not sure whether Bannon’s recommendation to flood the zone with sh*t is happening, or if it’s that Dear Leader is so incapable of focus that it feels like he’s creating all this chaos deliberately.
Either way, people like Tom Tomorrow or Andy Borowitz or the Onion have their work cut out for them, trying to keep their absurdist comedy ahead of absurdist reality.
Wuerker points out a critical issue: No matter how offensive, insulting or degrading the real news becomes, there’s always a new offensive, insulting degradation just around the corner, and it’s obvious that nobody in a position to do anything about it is going to.
Which brings us to the first of several links you really should click on this morning.
I recognize that there are readers who only come here to leaf through the cartoons, and that’s okay as long as you occasionally click on a link and bookmark the site of a favorite cartoonist. It’s supposed to be a sampler.
On the other hand, recommended links provide deeper context, and here’s a piece from the Guardian on the topic of “clownwashing,” a term he uses for jokes and humor that make us chuckle and tolerate outrages instead of making us become furious about them.
And here’s an example of that danger:
Juxtaposition of the Day
These are two of a whole lot of gags about the (allegedly) drunken leader of the FBI, who is suing the Atlantic for what sure looks like a well-documented article about his drinking on the job.
They’re funny and they do make a genuine point about the incapacity of Trump’s cabinet due to its being filled with loyalists instead of competent people.
There’s also value in personal ridicule because (A) it keeps readers focused on the overall issue and (B) it is apt to infuriate our notoriously thin-skinned Fearless Leader.
But while columnists can elaborate on what the FBI ought to be doing besides trying to keep its leader upright, it’s hard for cartoonists to make that kind of deep-dive criticism.
Joyce Vance has a good look at how this looks beyond the funny parts. Because it’s not funny.
OTOH, Duginski combines personal ridicule with a genuine policy point. When Trump announces that he’s sending a team of negotiators to Islamabad to try to settle the war, the laugh comes when he announces that it’s going to be his grifting son-in-law, the guy who screws up everything he touches and some inexperienced loyalist non-entity. Whatever you may have thought about Henry Kissinger, these guys aren’t him.
But Duginski expects you to know that. He makes a solid point, but has no room to fully explain it.
Similarly, Venables gets a laugh, but his political point relies on the reader already being aware of the insider trading and profiteering that accompany our foreign policies. The message here is not one of personal ridicule but, rather, one begging readers to wake up and face the corruption around them.
It will raise questions in those who get all their information from Fox and Newsmax, and that Guardian article notes that making jokes is a better way to challenge settled beliefs than by direct debate. This is the little beaver undercutting the tree instead of trying to just push it over.
Wilcox could be criticized for essentially drawing a photo we’ve already seen, of Trump’s evangelical cheerleading squad gathered around him in prayer, but her caption explains the hypocritical bigotry in the ongoing attacks on the Pope for speaking up on Christian values when other religious views are not just tolerated but solicited and celebrated.
It’s much more direct than yet another cartoon marking insults to Catholics, which have begun to roll off without impact.
You should read Asha Rangappa’s comparison of Trump and Henry VIII, in which she notes:
I’m not sure his goal is to actually win against the Pope. I think it’s to get his followers to abandon their faith in anyone else but him. In other words, it’s a loyalty test, and he’s not the first one to make people choose between him and the Catholic Church.
Not only is Rangappa not Catholic, which adds some credibility to her analysis, but Trump’s faith counselor has, genuinely, sincerely compared him to Christ.
Even Henry’s loyalists never did that.
And as long as we’re parsing propaganda, your next extra-credit reading assignment is Charlie Sykes’ latest Substack, in which he reports at length, with examples, on the flood of bogus AI postings in which imaginary people express their deep love for Dear Leader.
As he notes, it doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to spot the nonsense, but, then again, the votes of the gullible count just as much as the votes of the well-reasoning, and while it used to cost real money to run troll farms, these AI pieces are pennies a piece.
And even if the social platforms genuinely want to exclude fake postings, they’re hard-pressed to keep up the pace with which AI slop can be generated.
And oh-by-the-way, Dear Leader has tasked the Federal Communications Commission with threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of those who report news in ways that fail to conform with the official version of truth.
Kash Patel is not only suing the Atlantic for reporting on his drinking issues, but promises arrests of those who failed to agree that the 2020 elections were fixed to defeat Dear Leader.
If you expect our free press to save us, go read Charlie’s Substack again, where he links to an open letter from Ron Fournier, asking his fellow reporters why they are going to the White House Concubines Association dinner this Saturday, to smile and schmooze with a man who hates and undermines them?
They’ll all agree. And then they’ll show up anyway.
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