CSotD: Selfishness and sacrifice

Here’s a snippet of a longer piece by Ann Telnaes, contrasting the sacrifices Americans made in WWII with the ones certain Americans refuse to make today. Click that link and see the rest.

 

And here’s a reminder that she cut her teeth in the animation business, and also that she has little patience with fools. She sets the stage (heh) by doing the most devastating thing you can do to a fool: Quote him accurately.

“Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz complained at a Senate hearing last week after the Boulder, Colo., mass shooting. 

 

And speaking of talented cartoonists with little patience for fools, Kal Kallaugher explains China’s predictable reversal of its promises that Hong Kong, once united with the mainland, could keep most of the freedoms it had enjoyed under British rule.

Was there anybody who didn’t see this coming?

And is there anybody who wants to draw that many scales? In a medium that has gone over mostly to simplicity, Kal’s detail adds rare beauty to insightful commentary.

 

Jeff Danziger (WPWG) also draws in detailed old-school fashion, and I can appreciate this one in particular because I bought a dependable Honda a few years ago, knowing I was about to retire and it might have to last the rest of my driving days.

I can salute the move to electric cars, but doubt I’ll be able to afford one, so they’d better keep a few gas stations open. OTOH, I might be able to adapt to an electric bike, and so they’d better put in some charging stations as well.

But the idea that we’ll all switch over to bikes seems a bit utopian.

For that matter, the change to electric is going to be difficult for those people who take pride in having noisy mufflers. Maybe they can put baseball cards in the spokes of their electric bikes, and add booming basses to their otherwise silent cars and trucks.

Though the ones who already have those car stereos will be stone deaf by the time of the switchover.

 

Mike Thompson (USA Today) makes a point we talked about earlier, which is that, while it’s all well and good to talk about “Buying American,” that train has left the station and the anti-Asian bigots are going to find it hard not to see their dollars going to the continent they hate.

In announcing his infrastructure plan, Biden said something that might help the fellow in this cartoon and also covered some of my doubts about the changeover:

We’re going to provide tax incentives and point-of-sale rebates to help all American families afford clean vehicles of the future. The federal government owns an enormous fleet of vehicles which are going to be transitioned to clean electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles right here in the United States of America, by American workers, with American products.

The issue being that we’re likely to get into the matter of automakers who build cars here but are owned over there, and, though I suppose it’s possible this new breed of automobiles could have all their new and innovative parts crafted in the good ol’ USA, I’m a little dubious.

Danziger also commented this week on the increasing complexity of automobiles, and it may be that the days of the shade tree mechanic are coming to an end, but mechanically-inclined kids will soldier on, even if it means swapping out chips instead of spark plugs.

I’d add that it would be good to emphasize the value of Voc Tec education, both for the economy and for the kids who learn better there, because the learn-from-your-dad situation Danziger recalls might have to go on hold until newly schooled people are old enough to carry on the tradition.

Two observations:

One was that I bought some new wiper blades at Auto Zone last year, and the clerk offered to install them. I noticed that the name on her tag was “Jolene” and was willing to bet she’d been handing wrenches to her dad since she was a tiny tot.

The other is that the senior ad salesman at a paper where I worked, who had dealt with all the local dealers for years, said they don’t want to hire Voc Tec kids for body work, because the kids have been taught to do it right.

They don’t want it done right. They want it done fast.

I think we’re all going to have to make some adjustments to this brave new world.

 

Stepping away from politics but staying with the theme of good work, happy anniversary to Frazz (AMS), one of my favorite strips.

 

The original of this strip is framed and hanging over my desk.

 

And I think of this one at Passover and other Jewish holidays and commemorations, and also during football season. This particular strip is nearly 20 years old, but both Judaism and the Lions are deeply rooted and unchanging.

 

While, speaking of classic strips, Existential Comics provides a mash-up of Hobbes the comic strip character and Hobbes the philosopher. Here’s the rest of this adventure.

I’m not as familiar with John Calvin, so I’m not sure he figures in this, but I would suggest that he’d make Calvinball even more contentious because he’d insist that the final score was already determined.

 

Finally, today, Lefty Cartoons puts our current intersection of hope and futility into focus as we enter a fourth wave of covid. The vaccine is here, and more states are offering it to more age groups, and that promises an end to what has been a long, hard slog.

But between the Spring Break nitwits and governors who would rather be popular than sensible, we’re jumping the gun in a way that seems likely to threaten the optimistic scenario and prolong the pandemic.

And, of course, the rightwingers are attacking Fauci because of his insistence that the coronavirus is real and that it needs to be dealt with seriously.

Hard to remember that there was a time when loyalty outweighed selfishness. See Ann Telnaes, above.

So here, with a h/t to Aislin, is Bowser and Blue with a song for the health workers.

Hang in there, gang: