Comic Strip of the Day: Happy Juxtaposition Day!

(Ann Telnaes)

(L’il Donnie)

Jeff Sessions is a busy, busy man, and it’s little wonder that he hasn’t time to cater to every one of Dear Leader’s needs.

Telnaes attributes it to his natural tendency to stick his nose into other people’s private affairs, while Norton gets an additional laugh by making it all a bit of confusion between Trump’s many needs to manipulate and interfere.

BTW, I’ve never read Margaret Atwood’s book nor watched the HBO series, but, even before it was televised, the piece had achieved enough prominence such that it’s hard not to know the basic premise.

And it’s easy, in the current marketplace, to appreciate its timeliness, but she had people talking about the novel back when it was first published in 1986, just as Donald Trump’s substitution of ego for expertise was destroying a viable football league.

(BTW, I note that PBS has declared the book a “Great American Read.” And here I thought the thistle, shamrock, rose entwined “The Handmaid’s Tale” forever.)

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

(Steve Kelley)

(Tank McNamara)

This could have been a juxtaposition of far more than two cartoons, perhaps because sports scandals are popular and not nearly as divisive as political ones.

Since I don’t follow baseball, however, I had to go to Google when this issue began to pop up all over the comics.

It seems that, just as a prominent pitcher was set for the All-Star Game, a bunch of his youthful tweets were outed, showing him to be, at best, insensitive and, put more bluntly, a racist, homophobic jackass.

The usual explanations have followed, about the folly of youth and how people have grown since, which makes me think of when Henry Hyde (R-IL), in the midst of his war on Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair, turned out to have capsized his own marriage with what he described as “a youthful indiscretion.”

Hyde was 41 when he was young and indiscrete. Clinton was 49 when he and Monica Lewinsky began to not have sexual relations.

So, if you want to know what sexual misadventures you can be forgiven for and what ones you cannot, it’s somewhere in your mid-40s.

Racist idiocy apparently has a younger cutoff date, since Josh Hader is only 24 now and it was some years ago that he was, in his own words, “young, immature and stupid.”

Well, time will take care of “young,” my friend, but “immature” takes some intentional effort to overcome while, in the words of Ron White, “you can’t fix stupid.”

Henry Hyde being one of my favorite examples.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #3

(Steve Breen)

(Kevin Siers)

Here’s a bicoastal blow at willful scientific ignorance, as the impact of climate change begins to manifest itself.

I have this suspicion that, when the Tobacco Institute was finally closed down, all those duplicitous liars simply shifted over to jobs in the fossil fuels industry and continued to crank out reasons why everything is just fine and there’s no reason to change.

And I’m not going to put up any links or charts because the facts are so plain and so often cited that ignorance is no longer a credible excuse.

In fact, dishonesty is the only explanation, since, if you really were stupid enough not to understand it, you wouldn’t know which end of the pencil makes marks on the paper.

Yet with every heavy snowstorm, someone will draw a cartoon showing a man with a shovel declaring that — See? — there is no “global warming.”

Similar to the person who argued that his grandfather smoked every day and lived to be 100.

Which proves that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, just as jaywalking every day proves that being hit by a car won’t hurt you.

 

Unintentional Literary/Biblical Juxtaposition of the Day

(Joe Heller)

(Michael Cavna)

Joe Heller’s cartoon about the wildfires didn’t fit that previous juxtaposition, since he doesn’t address climate change, but it did bring James Baldwin to mind and, as it happens on an appropriate day, makes a dandy juxtaposition of its own.

Baldwin reportedly based his title on one of those old slave songs that offered secret hope and resistance masked in religious themes, but the promise to Noah also popped up two years before Baldwin published his book, in a classic piece by Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp which he almost certainly heard as well and which adds more emphasis to the critical line:

Your Moment of Zen