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CSotD: Cultural Notes

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Mike Peterson January 13, 2019 1 minute 0 comments

Perhaps the view from a distance is clearer. British cartoonist Brian Adcock manages to freshen the familiar panhandler concept by propping her up against the wall — excuse me, the barrier or, shall we say, steel slats — with her MAGA hat as the receptacle for the charity she needs.

Though part of the Trump Party Line is that federal employees are almost all Democrats, so they don’t matter. Paul Fell suggests otherwise.

There’s no point in asking where Trump got that voter information because he obviously just says whatever comes into his head, but it is worth pointing out that, while some federal employees are married to other federal employees, others are not, and they also have parents and siblings, such that the potential 800,000 pissed-off voters should have some sort of multiplier applied.

Though Trump has never cared about his opponents and is happy to play solely to his base.

I have no idea, however, why his Republican enablers don’t see the looming disaster, but they clearly don’t, since they’re also willing to alienate large blocs of voters.

Perhaps they have more faith in their gerrymandered districts than they should.

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Rob Rogers)

(Clay Bennett)

Here we have a pair of cultural references with an interesting and, I think, critical difference.

The Fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf and the Story of Chicken Little are often used interchangeably to refer to someone spreading panic, but they’re very different stories.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf invents threats in order to get attention and relieve his own boredom, and Rogers does well to apply it to Trump’s lying claims of looming disaster, most of which appear to assume xenophobia and some degree of racism among his followers.

In that fable, the problem comes when a real disaster appears and the boy has no further credibility. Which might happen, so I like the parallel.

But Chicken Little is a different story, in which Chicken Little’s foolish, misguided panic is exploited by Foxy Loxy, as a trick to make the animals vulnerable to his predation.

But there was no stenographer or translator present when Chicken Little was told the sky was falling, so we’ll never know quite where he got that information.

Or why he allowed his followers to be led into the cave.

Meanwhile, Dave Brown goes past folk tales and reaches into the Classic Poetry bag for a little Percy Bysshe Shelley.

We’ve seen the prideful Ozymandias drawn into political battles before, but never with such a wonderfully well-suited parallel, and, though most people encountered the poem in one class or another, it’s short enough to quote, given its spectacular applicability: