CSotD: Lost Weekend
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I’m as distracted as Mo — this has been quite a weekend, and if the worst outcome is a chunk of pineapple in your martini, you got away with a better taste in your mouth than the rest of us.
It’s even worse than this. Ann Telnaes apparently drew this one before Trump first failed to acknowledge white supremacist groups as a problem and then retweeted two white supremacist messages from one of the most notorious alt-right trolls on the Internet.
And four from Chuck Collesto, who apparently believes it’s all a huge conspiracy against Trump and God’s Chosen.
And he threatened to have the FCC investigate SNL for making fun of him (in a rerun, BTW).
And he called upon Fox to go easy on Jeanine Pirro, whose show was pulled over her Islamophobic hate speech.
Then, having trashed the late Senator and non-draft dodger John McCain, he retweeted an attack on Meghan, too.
“Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?” is a stupid question today, because the answer is so plain.
Though the real chill comes when you see that Dear Leader does not stand alone.
Michael Ramirez would like the Democrats to stop going on about equality and civil rights and simply accept the ring in the nose that makes America so great.
Or, as the old phrase goes, “I doan no nuffin bout no sibble rights, but Mistuh Chollie, he treat me good!”
And Ramirez is hardly Mistuh Chollie’s only fan. After an exhausting day of presidenting that included firing off 31 tweets, Trump finished with this one and promptly heard back from an admirer.
Now, Donnie, ain’t you proud?
And I’m sure he is, and, whether he is the symptom or the disease has long since become completely irrelevant.
To repeat once again what Frank Zappa told me in an interview back when Trump was merely an incompetent team owner:
To which we can only hope that other Americans are seeing what Matt Wuerker sees, and that the Democratic opposition will not injure each other in the pre-season to the point where they can’t compete in the actual elections.
But, to begin and end this rant with Ann Telnaes, it’s clear that the Republican Party — which posted a “drunken Irishman” post worthy of the Know-Nothing Party on its official Twitter account yesterday — is full of loyal caddies for Dear Leader, like Lindsey Graham, who blocked a resolution to force release of the Mueller Report.
Classical Gas
As an improbable but delightful bonus to all that discouraging real-world discord, Existential Comics offers a look at political philosophy, which begins with Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer promoting pot luck dinners as a means of using the free market to build society, and includes this confrontation between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which takes the whole conversation off the rails, as comparisons of Hobbes and Rousseau are wont to do.
We often argued the Hobbes/Rousseau thing in seminar, but I was more challenged in a class in which we read Rousseau alongside Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, which was hardly fair because she was talking about real people in the real world, while his bloviations about Noble Savages were purely theoretical.
It’s like asking how Superman cuts his hair.
But I would be remiss if I did not point out that Hobbes’ speculations about the nature of humanity are equally theoretical, and, no, I don’t believe that people will reflexively poop in the punchbowl unless they are restrained by a monarch.
Though we certainly should keep the current monarch and his cronies away from the refreshments table.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Here’s a bit of the old one-two, as Norm mocks the time-worn notion that little boys and girls hate each other, and Wallace the Brave offers a more modern depiction.
The Cooties thing is one of those comic strip perennials that may have never existed in the first place.
But that doesn’t make it harmless. After all, we were just discussing kids thinking umbrellas might work as parachutes the other day and I’m sure kids take all sorts of cues from the media they consume.
At the risk of breaking both legs.
And there are some very popular, successful comic strips that would have to fold up their tents tomorrow if they were forced to give up the idea that little boys and girls hold each other in contempt.
However, I think it is fading to the point of being as true-to-life as women in the comics putting pies out on the windowsill to cool.
Yes, it could happen. But not as often as it once did. If it ever did.
I coached youth soccer at the level where the teams were co-ed and never ever got a hint of boys disparaging girls or vice versa.
That blue-clad goalkeeper in the background was indisputably the best athlete on the team, to the point where putting her up on the front line was even more unfair to the other team than keeping her in the nets.
Which was unfair enough, since she didn’t let anything get past her.
But none of the boys cared that she was not only a better weapon than any of them but also than all of them, nor did any of the girls feel she should dial it back and act more ladylike.
You’ve got to be carefully taught, and they hadn’t been.
Come to think of it, maybe I should have juxtaposed Wallace the Brave with that Wuerker cartoon.
Because that little goalkeeper, wherever she is today, is in her early 40s and there are plenty of princesses in her demographic who aren’t waiting for anyone in shining armor to come save them.
My guess is that she’ll be voting for one of them — and probably volunteering for one of them — in 2020.
Love — and life, for that matter — has become more complex since pies were cooled on windowsills, and that’s not a bad thing for girls or boys.
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