I’m not buying what the woman in this Phil Hands cartoon is selling. She may be busy, but being too busy to keep up with politics in a presidential election year is just silly. It’s like saying you were too busy to notice three feet of snow in your driveway.
And it only snows a few months out of the year. We’ve been inundated with presidential politics since the last election. Most of us have had the shovels out since January 6, whether we watched the hearings that followed or not.
But it’s tacky to admit you don’t care, so people say they’ve been busy or that politicians are all alike or something suggesting they’re above the fray. Still, just as you can’t miss those three feet of snow, you can’t miss the floods of information and disinformation, even if you only absorb them by happenstance.
If you truly are ignorant, you have the option of not voting. Turnout seems depressingly low in this country, and I say “seems” because we’re not required to vote as happens some places, so there are a lot of apples-to-oranges comparisons made over the topic.
On the other hand, as has been said here several times, there’s no qualification requirement. You don’t have to pick out three countries on a blank outline map of the world or even three states on a US map before they hand you a ballot.
But my goo’ness gracious, you should have the pride and the common sense to choose between the myths and the facts.
However, you don’t have to do that either, which leads us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
One myth — seen here from both sides of the political spectrum — is that Kamala Harris is not talking to the press and that nobody can know who she is or what policies she favors.
It’s not true, though, as Darkow suggests, simply knowing who she is running against should give people a toehold, whether their response is to vote for or against her because she isn’t Donald Trump.
But aside from her speech at the Democratic Convention, she’s made many speeches in front of huge crowds, she was triumphant in her debate with Trump, she has appeared in televised and streamed appearances before the National Association of Black Journalists, for a CNN interview with Dana Bash, and most recently with Oprah Winfrey. In a single week in July she made two dozen appearances around the country.
She has laid out policy proposals in those appearances, while as for not knowing who she is, we ran a Dana Summers cartoon here two days ago in which he mocked her for repeating her life story so often.
Granted, she hasn’t played footsie with the usual suspects, which rankles the beltway bourgeoisie but seems part of a strategy to go directly to the people rather than wasting time with poll watchers and horserace coverage and the same-old-same-old questions.
If you don’t know who she is and what she stands for, you haven’t been too busy. You’ve been too apathetic.
Or possibly you’ve been buried deep in a silo in which you only hear one set of voices, and in which, as Bob Gorrell (Creators) indicates, any challenges to the accepted approach are seen as part of an intentional, dishonest conspiracy.
It’s true that, in the debate, moderators challenged Trump’s claims that Haitians were eating pets and that babies are murdered in delivery rooms, but asking interview subjects to stick to factual arguments is part of the role, even when you can’t fact-check every statistic someone may offer. Presidential debates are not an open invitation to tell whoppers.
However, as Mark Jacobs writes, Fox viewers get a version of reality that is deliberately skewed. As he suggests, the $787 million judgment against Fox for lying about the 2020 election has apparently just made them more cautious, not more honest.
Jacobs praises Media Matters for holding Fox’s feet to the fire, and I followed the link he provided, which leads to a stunning set of explanations and clarifications, most of them revealing that correcting Fox News’ coverage amounts to a full-time job.
The line between political opinions and actual untruth is becoming so faded that it’s not surprising if people believe blatant lies about Haitians eating pets and being in this country illegally, and that disease and crime have inundated Springfield (and now Charleroi).
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s insistence that you are entitled to your own opinions but you’re not entitled to your own facts is no longer operative.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Benson and Ramirez toy with the difference between economic reality and public perception, and they offer good examples of how political cartooning works.
Any competent economist would tell you that having inflation fall to 2.5% and the Fed cutting interest rates is good news, not only for the national economy but specifically for consumers. And they’d add, if you asked, that grocery prices can’t be expected to turn on a dime but that, over time, the improving economy will be apparent there, too.
However, competent economists don’t go door to door explaining things to everyone, and, if they did, a number of people would refuse to believe them or would, at best, respond that the long term is dandy but they have to feed their families today.
Ungrounded opinions may be a bad way to decide how to vote, but it’s inevitable, and just as people blame “Bidenomics” for the price of gasoline — which is (A) outside presidential power and (B) coming down — they invariably blame the current administration, any current administration, for other daily woes.
Always have, always will, and a cartoonist would be a fool not to exploit the factor.
But let’s have one more
Juxtaposition of the Day #3
Political cartoons should not only reflect public perception but should attempt to influence it, and these three cartoonists express varying degrees of outrage over Trump’s promise to protect women, made at a Monday rally and in this unhinged posting:
Again, political cartoonists are expected to comment, just as citizens are expected to notice what is happening in politics.
And whether there are three feet of snow in their driveways.
Thanks for including me, as for your comments on Phil Hands’ cartoon, you’re wrong. I wish you weren’t. I’ve been meeting so many people lately, especially young people who aren’t just NOT paying attention but are apathetic about the election. I’m with you in thinking it’s impossible to miss, and it blows my mind each time I talk to someone like that.
I’d wager Phil got his idea from a personal encounter, and I think he has his pulse on the situation.
I think if more people were paying attention, then Trump would be way farther down in the polls.
Read it again. I listed apathy, not busy-ness, as the probable excuse.
Trump’s post is word-for-word identical to his rally speech that I’ve seen at least three different times over the past few days and I doubt he wrote a word of it. It tells me that, having been on TV for eleven years, he learned how to memorize his lines. It doesn’t say anything beyond that; he has no ability to absorb things he’s been told, even by people he trusts, as I hear lines regurgitated from speeches made long ago with assertions which were proven wrong long, long ago, which I assume his handlers scrubbed from his rally speeches at the time, but which, like trauma-triggered memories, are just spewed out without any prior thought. I’m guessing he never wrote his own words, on TV or any of his speeches and probably didn’t do more than give his speech-writers a broad conception of what he wanted to say. That’s why he never answered any questions in either debate, he simply pulled all that crap out of his hippocampus from memorized tripe. What we’re getting now are a bunch of Mad-Lib sentences with a repeated structure which usually end with “the best/biggest/worst/-est in history.” If I drank I’d make a drinking game out of his rallies, downing one each time he says “communist/fascist/nazi, ” or “she can’t put two sentences together,” or other lines he’s repeated ad nauseam since mid-July. Guarantee I’d be drunk in ten minutes.
Your snow analogy is interesting. I think you assume that there is “3 feet of snow in your driveway” when in most places it is a light dusting at best. Most people don’t read the newspaper, most people don’t watch the news, most people are probably exposed only during commercials during their shows. For them, they don’t have to decide now anyway…