Few editorial cartoonists updated in the past 24 and a lot of strips are kind of in a trough, having crested for Memorial Day, but there are plenty of interesting odds and ends, beginning with the resignation of Theresa May and editorial cartoonists hoping Boris Johnson will become Prime Minister because he’s so much fun to draw.
For my part, I’m just tickled that, as Chris Riddell points out, the end of May came at the end of May.
And speaking of the end of May, here’s our
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’ve mentioned this before, but this Juxtaposition is a pretty stark example of how hard it is to time the end of the school year. The kids I work with in Colorado are out today, the kids here in New Hampshire have another week and kids in NYS won’t be out until mid-June.
The other end isn’t any clearer. Some of them will be back the second week of August, others will wait for Labor Day.
I remember when they first started floating the idea of year-round school and some of our more pragmatic educators pointed out that they’d need to fund air conditioning, because being stuck in a hot room with 25 or 30 middle-school kids who haven’t mastered the concept of deodorant and daily showers is bad enough on the current schedule.
Though if Dear Leader is going to continue to deny climate change, he may be forced to pony up for retrofitting schools anyway, which raises the topic of economic folly.
Part of the problem of having a semi-literate president with the attention span of a six-year-old is that, as Matt Davies notes, he comes up with expensive fixes that create problems instead of solving them.
So we’ve got tariffs being paid by American consumers, or, at best, being swallowed by American businesses, which Dear Leader seems to think are being paid by the Chinese and which he also seems to think are additional income which he’s shoveling back out in the form of subsidies to farmers.
No wonder he goes bankrupt so often.
Now I’m hearing rumblings that most of it will go to major agribusiness and not to family farmers, which I can’t verify but which would hardly surprise me.
We’ll know for sure when Jared and Ivanka start buying farmland.
Phil Hands suggests that the problem was not trade imbalance so much as a growing failure of subsidies to maintain our farming industry.
Granted, a large part of failing family farms is that it’s hard work and young people may not want to carry on the family tradition.
Part of which is changing times, part of which may be our exaltation of suits-and-ties over blue-collar careers.
Those two factors may fight it out like the gingham dog and calico cat, as young people begin to reconsider the value of college, but milk price supports in particular have failed to keep that portion of our farm business healthy.
I don’t mind the prospect of being cut off from new television sets and phones, because we could, if isolated, maintain our electronic gear the way Cubans have kept automobiles running for decades.
But the point of farm subsidies is to maintain our ability to feed ourselves, and that wasn’t supposed to mean giant hog factories.
Much as we’ve fallen in love with fat, sodium and nitrites, man cannot live on bacon alone.
Juxtaposition of Things We Dare Not Say
Two Memorial Day cartoons that mention the same topic but are otherwise nearly unrelated.
Tim Campbell is conservative, which makes me welcome his acknowledgment that not all who die are found.
It’s been a reality of warfare forever, though it became a larger factor in the Civil War, which was fought when we had the ability to transport and kill large numbers of people but had not developed the ability to keep track of them.
It changed our view of death, as noted in this film and the compelling book it’s based on.
But part of the effort to shift a war-weary, post-Vietnam America back onto a more aggressive footing was the MIA movement, which wove rumors of captive POWs with the predictable rate of unrecovered bodies (including, for instance, plane crashes into the ocean).
Most adherents have now shifted to demanding more diligent searches for bodies, which, thankfully, moves away from conspiracy theories.
However, we’ve still got those black flags at post offices, and, while the Rolling Thunder people have announced the end of their annual visit to DC, Trump has said he wants it to continue.
Which brings us to Telnaes, who points out that Trump wants his name on everything except that Tomb. He’s managed to avoid a lot of Veterans Day and Memorial Day events.
And much as I distrust and dislike “Occupy Democrats,” they’re right that, if you want to talk about what’s really Missing in Action, it’s the name “Trump.”
Hey, he’s simply honoring family tradition.
Following up
Yesterday, I suggested that a fellow named Ramsey was an illustrator rather than a cartoonist.
His potential identity was pointed out in the comments, but, then that searcher apparently discovered what I had, which is that Harry Ramsey is a pretty common name.
I poked around some more and found this mention, plus the above republication of that piece, and then looked for more of his contributions to the Dayton Whatever, turning up a few sports cartoons.
This 1919 piece about rivalry between the Reds and Giants pretty well convinced me that this Ramsey is none of those other Ramseys, unless his work improved markedly at some point.
The best of his work that I found, ironically, was this study of Ding Darling, who the paper seemed to be claiming worked for them on a much more personal basis than simply being a syndicated cartoonist whose pieces they featured regularly.
Note that they call Ramsey a “Herald staff artist,” and Ding a “Herald cartoonist.”
Ouch.
I was surprised by the name “Ding Darling,” since I’d only heard it as the name of a wildlife refuge on Sanibel Island. Big coincidence that there was also a cartoonist with the same unusual name. Maybe “Ding” was one of those old-timey names you never hear anymore, like “Mikey” or “Adolph”… Well, maybe not so much, since it turns out the refuge was named for the cartoonist. Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone was mildly interested.
I had long assumed that “Ding” was just a shortening of “Darling.” I don’t recall having seen it given as “Ding Darling” before.
It’s possible I wasn’t paying close attention, I suppose.
Anyone looking beyond 2 or 3 of my cartoons wouldn’t catagorize my body of work as either conservative or liberal, but rather independent by taking issue with both sides. That said, my Memorial Day panel was drawn simply under one label… respectful American.
Ding was his signature — short for his last name. And he was a great defender of wildlife and creator of the Duck Stamp, hence the place named in his honor.
Gotta follow those links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding_Darling