Joel Pett lays out the litany of hate Americans are exposed to on a regular basis and ends by portraying one of the innocent victims of this toxic bile.
I can’t be the only person who has so curated his social media and learned to avoid hatemongering broadcasters that I’m not bombarded with this garbage, but, then again, I’m not like a baby who covers his eyes and thinks he’s made the world disappear.
Our nation is steeped in this swill, and while it’s possible to walk around the mire yourself, you have to accept that not only do plenty of people walk through it, but some of them get down and roll around in it.
So it was good news last night to see that Marjorie Taylor Greene is pretending she didn’t suggest forming a caucus to promote “Anglo Saxon culture,” though the good news isn’t that she’s given up the belief but that others in the GOP slapped her down for, as the catchphrase du jour puts it, “saying the silent part out loud.”
She’s blaming the now-withdrawn announcement on her staff, claiming she never saw the memo before they released it.
Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!
And if that were all there was to it — a stupid person saying something stupid — it wouldn’t matter. But Sarah Churchwell is an expert on the history and meaning of the term “America First” and offered this quick discussion, which is worth your time.
Greene’s fault was, indeed, that she said the silent part out loud, but how many others have said it in the past five or six years? To paraphrase Dylan, how many ears must one man have, before he can hear people lie?
And my insistence on keeping people like MTG and her pal Gosar the Arizonian — not to be confused with Gozer the Gozerian — away from my door doesn’t make me immune to what NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill decries, which is the media’s decision to play “on the one hand, but on the other” games with this topic.
We used to joke about attempts by media to be “fair” by finding balancing opinions, saying that, if someone said Hitler was bad, they’d search for someone to say he was good.
Not so funny now that they’re actually doing it, and whatever faults Dr. Seuss may have had, some of his oldest stuff isn’t so wrongheaded after all.
One positive development this week was that John Deering (Creators) offered the only “bridge out” cartoon on Biden’s Infrastructure Plan that I found apt and/or amusing, since the GOP had no scruples about running up our national credit card to fund that stupid wall.
Which was not only not needed but didn’t even work.
We might better have spent that money on facilities to handle the people who were coming anyway, and whose labor we depend on.
And this note for the bigots: Making it harder to cross the border simply means fewer braceros who come to work the harvests and then go home again. Now they stay for fear of never being able to return.
Not that living here is easy, even for people who were born here, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
There has been a sudden realization among cartoonists and commentators that houses are becoming expensive, which I doubt is much of a revelation for young people or anyone who doesn’t already own a place.
The Old Woman in Luckovich’s shoe may have a lot of offers, but unless her kids are gone and she’s downsizing to a sandal, any profit she makes on the sale will disappear right into the place she buys next.
While that young fellow in Tornoe’s cartoon is going to find that he’d better come back when he’s married, because one kidney isn’t going to get him into anything.
Which I note because I looked up the first house then-wife and I bought in Denver in 1972, for which we paid $23,700.
Zillow now prices it at $485,000, and it’s not that I expect prices to remain the same for a half-century, but we lived there — admittedly on a razor’s edge — on one salary.
Specifically, as long as I was flipping burgers and making pizzas, we ran a deficit, but when we swapped roles and my wife put her journalism degree to work, we were able to make it.
I don’t think anyone’s going to make the mortgage on a half-million dollar house these days by editing a bi-weekly hotel-handout travel guide.
Depending on your choice of towns, two kidneys will about get you one of those places that’s so small you have to go outside to change your mind.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I think to get the real impact of this, you’ll have to follow my personal train of thought even moreso than usual.
Last night, I watched “Mulholland Falls,” a film with great promise and little delivery, probably because, while you’ve heard of everyone in the movie, they’re a collection of co-stars, with nobody able to grab a tired script by the throat and make it work.
The good part being that John Malkovich plays an old guy dying of cancer and radiation poisoning, so that his trademark weary lack of affect is, for once, appropriate for the character.
Anyway, so when I saw Bizarro this morning, it occurred to me to wonder if kryptonite might not be radioactive and hence not terribly good for anyone to ingest, not just Superman.
And then I got to Brewster Rockit, where they calmed my doubts by explaining that, hey, everything is radioactive and yet we all go on because bananas won’t kill anyone.
Except maybe Green Lantern.
He should stick to plantains.
So let’s end the day on a hopeful note, because, if we’re lucky, it’s possible that mutually assured destruction is just God’s way of calling us all home.
Don’t often see Spiderman holding food, and there’s an obvious question.
Is he the poster child for “keep your mask on unless eating”?
I do recall Newspaper Spidey removing the lower part of his mask once on an airplane to drink a beverage (soda, I imagine). His seatmate, a nasty little kid who later tried to remove the mask while Spidey was sleeping, gave him a good look, and I imagine was thinking “well, he’s obviously Caucasian and doesn’t have any facial air, so that narrows the ‘secret identity’ possibilities down to just a few million in the greater NYC area.”
Tara, Spidey has hoisted his mask up to his nose on numerous occasions, to eat, drink and even kiss.
As for Kryptonite — John Byrne gave Lex Luthor a Green K ring to keep Superman away. The prolonged exposure eventually meant they had to amputate that hand. (Since retconned away.)
I always supposed Green K radiation was much faster than earthly sources. Because Superman’s atoms are packed together more densely, Green K waves are likelier to hit something, whereas an Earthling would be more like shooting a machine gun at a beaded curtain. It takes longer, but eventually you lose your beads.