Jeremy Banx offers the only Armistice-Remembrance-Veterans Day cartoon you’ll ever need, reminding us that the only thing that can stop 2 or 3 million bad guys with guns is 3 or 4 million good guys with guns.
Which may or may not be true, but if we can’t even agree on what the day is called or what it’s for, we haven’t got a chance of following through on that “War To End All Wars” idea.
In this country, we’ve got Veteran’s Day, which was yesterday but is also today because the banks wouldn’t have been open on Sunday anyway, and that’s when we thank veterans.
Then in May, we have Memorial Day, when we are only supposed to thank dead veterans but we thank them all anyway.
We have to have two such holidays because we’ve lost so many people in war that we can’t possibly remember them all in 24 hours.
Though we might be able to if we would actually focus on them for more than a few minutes at a time. Most of us have to go to work on Veterans Day, while Memorial Day has a lot more picnics and softball games than solemn moments in cemeteries or gatherings at churches.
And if you think I’m being flippant, compared to whom?
If you read what thrice-wounded Civil War veteran, later Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said on Memorial Day 1884, you’ll realize how flippant we’ve all become, not simply about war but about life in general, by contrast to those whose “hearts were touched with fire.”
So the election is over except for counting the ballots and we might just skip that part, so now we can get back to the crisis of inclusion, as depicted by Kal Kallaugher.
I’ve long questioned the theory of art critics that El Greco was astigmatic and that is why the people in his paintings are so elongated.
It struck me, even as a fairly young student hearing this, that, if he saw people elongated, he would have painted them elongated but only to the extent that it would look that way to him. They’d look normal to us.
Similarly, if he had a disorder in which red looked blue, and he painted an apple, he would still select red paint because it would look blue to him.
In Kal’s cartoon, the artists are creating metaphorical, not visual, depictions. But just as El Greco painted what he saw, so, too, does Dear Leader. There is no attempt at distortion but an honest effort to show us what he sees.
And, to us, El Greco’s paintings appear distorted and so should Dear Leader’s.
But the frightening thing is that he’s not making a point but simply sharing his perspective.
Matt Wuerker pulls back to give us a wider view of Dear Leader’s perspective, and this is funny in a painful way, by which I mean I’d laugh a lot harder if we were talking about somebody else’s national leader.
The real laugh is that Wuerker is going easy on the man, who, at a White House visit, began blaming the leaders of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia for the war in Yugoslavia, apparently because he thought they were from the Balkans, not the Baltic.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.
If I were living in Lithuania, I’d be hoping that Mr Geography didn’t suddenly get pissed at his in-laws and start punching the wrong atomic code buttons.
And speaking of cartoonists struggling to keep up with the stupidity, Nate Beeler suggests that Free Speech is under attack by extremists on both sides, and I generally agree, but am glad he didn’t label that Far Left guy “Antifa” because I’m not sure Antifa is a real thing.
I interviewed Bobby Seale in the early 80s and he confirmed something I had suspected, which was that at some point, the Black Panther Party lost control of their membership.
That is, their actual members were aligned with the party’s goals and purposes, but, meanwhile, all across the country, any jackass with sufficient melanin and access to a leather car coat, sunglasses and a beret could declare himself a Panther and become a celebrity in the local protest community.
The difference being that there really was a Black Panther Party, and I’m not clear on who Antifa is or if it is a thing or if it is just something that delusional troublemakers claim to belong to.
What I do know is that when you’ve got compulsive liars, fabulists and lunatics playing hob with the truth on both sides, it’s apt to spark some unnecessary public pushback against the First Amendment.
The latest example being that a bunch of leftwing nitwits went to the home of a rightwing fabulist, sprayed an anarchy symbol on his driveway and pounded on his door.
By the time it got on Fox News, they had brought in siege machines, flattened his house, burned his crops, slaughtered his livestock, salted his fields and poisoned his well.
Which the police report failed to document.
The only damage the cops found was that spray paint on his driveway.
Though I suspect there were additional scratches and tears to the inside of Daniel Patrick Rotisserie Moynihan’s coffin.
Well, here’s someone you can believe in
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and Angry Santa Elf is back on Twitter.
In fact, I got an email about him just the other day:
Some of my little friends say there is no Angry Santa Elf. Papa says, “If you see it on Comic Strip of the Day, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there an Angry Santa Elf? — Virginia Marciuliano
Virginia, your little friends are humorless dweebs. No Angry Santa Elf? Why, you might as well say there’s no Rudolph Giuliani. In fact, they may be the same person.
And you really should believe in him, because, if you don’t, here’s who will come to your house instead:
Wuerker’s map is terrific, and probably not far from a true reflection of the Great Leader’s POV.
I went and read Holmes’s speech. The man could write. I get a little flavor of Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech, which Holmes of course knew, tempered with a lot of unsentimental clear-eyed reflection of what real war means from someone who, unlike Shakespeare, actually fought in one. It’s the kind of thing that ought to be read aloud at various veterans’ and memorial ceremonies, if only modern audiences had the ear to understand it and the patience to sit through it.