CSotD: Living in the Ambient Noise
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There’s so much Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose going around that there’s a danger of things not being seen as news anymore. This is not to be confused with Steve Bannon’s “flood of sh*t” policy, in which each new outrage drives the previous outrages from sight, though that is a related factor.
We’re inundated with things that, a decade ago, would have been outrageous but that, today, have become part of our environment. It’s like living near the airport: After a while, you don’t even notice the planes taking off and landing overhead anymore, but everyone who visits you asks how on earth you can stand to live there.
Example: Trump has signed a memo of understanding, which he’s selling as a treaty. It’s not a treaty, however, and the way things are going, it’s barely an opening to start negotiations, but any failures involved are all someone else’s fault.
Herbert and others have snickered over his signing it at the spot where Germany surrendered after WWI, and have pointed out that he tore up a better deal only to waste money and lives and wind up with a worse one.
What it really comes down to is a test of whether Trump really could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. Or murder two or three people in the streets of Minneapolis, and walk away as the little man so spic and span who was out of the room when it all hit the fan.
Kal shows Uncle Sam and Liberty being appalled at the Iran blunder and the massive debt for the war, but it’s not clear that either the loss or the cost is penetrating Dear Leader’s cult.
People talk about the MAGA faithful “drinking the Kool-Aid,” but it was Flavor-Aid and the more important thing is that they drank poison because they knew the jig was up and the Jones empire was crumbling.
The MAGA cult remains faithful because they don’t realize anything is wrong.
F’rinstance, the announcement is made that we’re going to have to cut Social Security soon because, gosh, we just can’t afford it anymore.
Bernie Sanders and many others have pointed out that we could solve the problem by doing away with the cap on how much wealthy people have to contribute to the fund. That’s not even “raising taxes,” but, rather, eliminating an anti-social benefit.
When teenagers get their first paycheck, they react with horror and fury when they see that a chunk of their earnings are going to something called FICA, but that’s how we fund benefits like Social Security, and it’s ridiculous to say that, if you are earning minimum wage, you should pay your fair share, but if you become uber-wealthy, you’re off the hook for most of it.
It’s a stupidity based on the idea that the money you pay into Social Security is like a 401k, that it’s your money and is sitting there waiting for you to get it back. If that were true, it would make sense that you shouldn’t have to put more in than you expect to draw out.
By that reasoning, if you have no kids in school, you shouldn’t have to pay school taxes. And if you never drive on Maple Street, you should get a rebate for the portion of your city taxes that paves and plows it. And if your house isn’t on fire, you shouldn’t have to pay taxes that support the fire department.
And if you think that’s how civilization works, you should be put out on an island somewhere and left to fend for yourself.
Juxtaposition of the Day
You would think that the expensive idiocy of the reflecting pool would be a vital tool for opening the eyes of the MAGA faithful, a wedge to get them to start questioning their devotion to Dear Leader.
But if you go over to Xitter, where the paranoid morons hang out, you’ll find a flood of people outraged that vandals have poured algae and chemicals into Dear Leader’s lovely pool. Granted, a goodly portion of these alleged “people” are bots and employees of foreign troll farms, there to pump up ridiculous conspiracy theories.
However, scams persist because scams work.
Back in Trump One, before Jeff Bezos turned it into Pravda, the Washington Post used to track Dear Leader’s lies, and there were so many of them that it boggles the mind that anybody took anything he said seriously.
But he was reelected, and if you think common sense is common, you’re as deluded as they are.
Leahy’s latest is one of many cartoons showing Trump naked as a result of a treaty that the entire world sees as an obvious surrender. The entire world, that is, except for the MAGA faithful, who continue to view the MOU as a fair offer from the mighty US of A to a bunch of primitive ragheads.
We’re living among people who not only think Trump graduated with honors, which is obviously and clearly not true, but that Haitians eat cats and dogs, which ditto.
And they vote, but they don’t trust the results of an election unless their candidates win.
The MAGA faithful hate snobs and elitists, and resent those who get a leg-up in life because of wealthy parents, but they are blissfully unaware that Jarvanka has touched off a rebellion in Albania, having discovered an unspoiled island they want to spoil by disrupting fragile wildlife and building a playground for uber-wealthy nepo-babies and oligarchs.
Meanwhile, back at the wretch, Daddy attacked Senate candidate Graham Platner for having been accused of treating women badly, and dismissed his business acumen because his parents helped set him up in oyster farming.
Yes, the thrice-married, adulterous man accused of domestic violence and convicted of sexual assault attacked the guy rumored to be mean to his girlfriends. The nepo-baby whose father financed a series of multi-million-dollar business failures for him is attacking someone who got help for a venture that worked.
It should boggle the mind. And once upon a time, it would have.
But today, it’s just another jet passing low overhead.
We don’t even hear it anymore.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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