CSotD: Civilization and Its Malcontents
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Fell cuts through the analysis and legal deconstruction and reminds us that racism is real, which, at heart, is all you really have to know.
Some racism is intentional and conspiratorial, like redistricting to keep Black candidates out of office or requiring bogus literacy tests to keep Black citizens from qualifying to vote. But it rests on a type of racism that is more instinctive and quiet.
The screaming idiots who turned out to harass Black students integrating schools were the tip of an iceberg of people who let it happen, who were more upset by the trouble it was causing than by the injustice at its core. They didn’t approve of the screamers, but neither did they approve of the people who were stirring things up and upsetting the screamers.
Fell suggests that the Supreme Court has ruled against screaming but not against quiet toleration of intolerance, and it’s worth wondering what difference it makes whether the racism is loud or quiet? And you have to ask what the racist bully in his cartoon asks: Whatchoo gonna do about it?
What a lot of people are going to do is close the curtains so they don’t have to see it, and turn up the TV so they don’t have to hear it. The screamers are only a symptom; the silent people are the true malignancy.
There are breakthrough moments. During WWII, Rupert Trimingham wrote a letter to Yank Magazine about how he and his fellow GIs had to eat in the kitchen of a Texas diner because they were Black, while a group of German POWs ate at the tables out front. It provoked a flurry of angry letters from white GIs who said this was not what they were fighting for.
Half a century later, I spoke with his daughter and asked if he’d always been a hell-raiser. She said no, that it was a small, isolated event in his life and she’d never even seen the letter (I sent her a copy). But she told me he was from Trinidad, and that was a kind of explanation: Perhaps if he’d grown up with Jim Crow, he wouldn’t have been so outraged.
Little drops of water, little grains of sand.
Or perhaps you prefer
What happens to a dream deferred?
Another follow-up to a larger story, and, like Fell’s, it shouldn’t have to be said, but neither should it be ignored.
Then-wife and I lived for a time next to a busy highway on a slope by a traffic light, so that 18-wheelers were either braking or accelerating as they drove past our house. If that wasn’t enough, we were also under the main flight path for the local airport. When people came to visit us, they were nearly driven mad by the constant noise, but we didn’t even hear it anymore.
If you took somebody from 1962 and dropped them into 2026, they’d react to talk radio and the speeches of politicians and the conversations on the street the way our guests responded to those trucks and airplanes.
But we don’t even hear it anymore.
Juxtaposition of the Day
There was a time when Tom Tomorrow and Garry Trudeau could concoct long, involved, outrageous parodies of current events, but the best they can do today is to reflect reality, add a touch of exaggeration, and hope that making things clear will provoke some outrage in readers.
Tom Tomorrow does it by concentrating a week’s worth of outrages into six panels and adding a few ad libs to otherwise normal conversation. Trudeau resuscitates the Red Rascal, Jeff’s imaginary secret identity, but things are already so absurd that his floundering fantasy can’t even entertain Zipper.
Meanwhile, Andy Borowitz, who gained fame by concocting ridiculous fake news stories, has begun posting real news along with his satires, and you have to read carefully to tell when he’s reporting and when he’s pulling your leg.
For example, Borowitz re-posted this CBS Facebook posting, adding only the comment “How could this possibly be true when Trump said the war was over?”
As I’ve often said lately, it’s not that you can’t make this stuff up. It’s that you don’t have to.
I pick on Kelley a lot, but you should see the cartoonists I ignore. I pick on Kelley because he ought to know that Trump’s claim to have destroyed Iran’s navy is based on the assumption that Iran had a navy in the first place. They had ships, many of them outdated, but the heart of their seagoing weaponry are small coastal gunboats, some under official government guidance, others under the Revolutionary Guard.
When my son was stationed in the Gulf, IRG gunboats would harass them, but never come too close because a cruiser could pop them off like clay pigeons. But they were a constant presence and occasionally captured a wandering ship’s boat.
In any case, claiming to have eliminated Iran’s “navy” is largely meaningless in an asymmetric war.
Ditto with saying you’ve destroyed their air force, given that they are producing quality military drones at a pace that allows them to both operate a healthy export market in them and send them out to attack US bases and their Arab hosts.
Department of Wretched Excess
Jeff Bezos and his pneumatic trophy wife dropped $10 million for the privilege of hosting the Met Gala. Jeff skipped the red carpet, but Lauren brought the twins and, as Telnaes suggests, they brought hoopla and publicity.
The event was, and remains, splashed all over the news, the coverage a combination of breathless “What did she wear?” and outraged “Who gives a ****?” As Goris says, some people in the world have other things going on in their lives.
Juxtaposition of Dubious Priorities
Slyngstad picked up on the pushback against Bezos as host of the event, and I know they don’t use actual food stamps anymore, but he made the point others have made, which is that wretched excess is even moreso when you’re shoveling millions out the door instead of sharing it with your underlings.
While Margulies demonstrates the only Mar-A-Lago face voters are likely to care about in November.
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