CSotD: Illusions, allusions, collusions
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David Rowe begins today’s conversation with this delightful take on everything.
Fauci’s deadpan expression captures his serious intent, while his expertise is shown in the charts on his desk, ready for use in his testimony, his framed degrees and his overflow of books.
But despite his having shut the door and put a “closed” sign on it, the self-centered, attention-seeking baby has broken in and is performing one of the background distractions that have become part of so many video appearances.
And the details of Baby Trump are as telling as that serious expression on Fauci’s face — the rattle, the crown, the phone ready to Tweet some more, and, of course, his devout “Me the People” corruption of the Constitution.
His fat gut overhanging the baby walker being a delightful insult but also a defensible commentary on the degree to which he should have outgrown his infantile behavior.
There — have I explained it enough to kill the joy?
Onward!
I’ll be less intrusive with this Michael de Adder commentary on the reopening of the beaches, because while the whole business of “Darwin Awards” makes summoning the man a bit of a tired concept, it is, like most such things, rejuvenated when applied properly as it is here.
I’d also point out that there are several horrified photos on line which, if you examine them more closely, are not so horrifying: If the picture were taken from a higher level, you’d see that the people are, indeed, in family groups six feet or more apart.
But just as we don’t seem to be ranking contagions by population density, we also don’t seem to be opening beaches based on regional IQ.
I’d like to know if people are driving down the coast inspecting one beach after another until they find one not overcrowded with lunatics, kind of like family road trips back in the days before McDonald’s, when Dad would go into a diner while we all waited in the car until he declared it sanitary.
Which I guess makes Dr. Fauci our Dad in this Matt Davies cartoon, only when he tells us the diner looks like a petri dish full of e-coli, salmonella and typhus, we pile out of the car and push past him into the place.
Or, in this case, floor it and drive off the bridge.
Or we simply grab our guns and head for Subway, because, as Pat Bagley suggests, we don’t have a terribly firm grasp on what makes us look stupid and what makes us look smart.
And this is one case where the memes are getting ahead of the cartoonists, because there are any number of people on-line observing that you have to be quite the coward to be scared to go to Subway without packing heat.
In the words of Homer Simpson, “It’s funny ’cause it’s true.”
But it’s only true, not funny, which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
There are several things going on here, beginning with the selfishness that keeps these anti-science clods from realizing that, even if they don’t get the virus, they may bring it back to less resilient people in their family circle.
Plus I’m not sure how many of these knotheads are old enough to recognize that Hitler was a very bad man and that Russia is not our friend.
And that to risk killing your parents is wrong.
Though xkcd points out that they are only loud, hardly a majority, and that most people are pretty decent, thoughtful and intelligent.
Which should be a reminder that we’ve always had our share of sociopaths, crackpots and fifth-columnists.
It’s just that we didn’t always have the kind of leadership and major media outlets that encouraged them to climb out from under their rocks.
As First Dog on the Moon says — at greater length and you really need to click on this — hearing delusional nitwits spout screwball theories used to be amusing.
Not so much anymore.
I don’t know if Existential Comics staged this conversation between Schopenhauer and Hume in light of current events — a second case where the comic doesn’t all fit here — but it’s certainly true that it’s easier to be a self-proclaimed skeptic than to dig down into sometimes confusing concepts.
The search for something “to piss off my parents” not only made me laugh and think of sophomore seminar, but fit in nicely with a spate of cartoons by people who no longer have the excuse of being 19 years old but who are — I’m not making this up, but I’m also not going to feature their work — drawing cartoons of how Obama has been caught in the trap of … wait for it … Obamagate!
They don’t explain what it is and nothing they draw gives much indication except that it’s very, very bad. I think you have to be monitoring Alex Jones and the investigative citizen-reporters at Q-Anon to know what “Obamagate” is.
Or simply loyal enough to Dear Leader that, when he declares that it exists, you start drawing cartoons that don’t require you to actually know what in the wild, wild west he’s talking about.
Think of it as a bad case of COVFEFE-19, and pray it’s not contagious.
But the plain fact is, if you want him to be your friend, you have to buddy up to him and trust him and not ask him nasty questions or, as Jeff Stahler says, he’ll just take his ball and go home.
Now click on this:
A disclosure: Kal Kallaugher and Ann Telnaes are two of my favorite people in the cartooning world, and all the time you just spent reading my thoughts on the medium would have been better spent hearing theirs.
They’re two of my favorites because, while their styles are very different, they are both excellent and, more than that, their work combines artistic instinct with thoughtful, intentional application.
Also because they’re nice folks.
If you like cartooning, this is not a conversation you’ll want to miss.
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