CSotD: Rolling the bottoms of my trousers
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I’m feeling old and grumpy, but, thanks to Paul Berge, I feel less alone.
I was tempted to do an entire blog entry of Saigon Evacuation cartoons, but he posted this on his page and it satisfies the urge, even if it doesn’t quell the frustration.
Some of the more recent variations at least acknowledge that those were refugees, not Americans bugging out, and make some statement about our need to help our Afghan allies escape, so that’s something.
Still, Afghanistan is not Vietnam.
If nothing else, Vietnam was before we declared war on each other. Reaction to our current withdrawal exemplifies the success we’ve had in dividing our nation.
Bill Day reports that Facebook took down this cartoon for violating community standards, and — since there are no bare titties to set off the automatic alarms — you can bet that it was the result of some offended snowflake who reported him in order to silence him.
Probably someone who decries the Cancel Culture.
FWIW, I don’t mind people hating other people’s opinions half so much as I object to Facebook’s willingness to, like the Queen of Hearts, impose the sentence first and hold the trial after, particularly since their notion of a trial generally seems to be to ignore your appeals.
Bizarro (KFS) dabbles in politics for the sake of a pun, but the cartoon couldn’t have dropped at a better time, since Nicolle Wallace is being widely quoted on Twitter for saying, of yesterday’s address to the public, “95% of the American people will agree with everything [President Biden] just said. 95% of the press covering this White House will disagree.”
That’s pretty stunning, coming from someone who not only works in media but has worked in a Republican White House.
And Jennifer Rubin, once the rightwing commentator at the Washington Post, has taken a more moderate viewpoint in recent times, or perhaps the country simply shifted past her, leaving her in the middle. Her response to the speech was simple:
She’s in the five percent of the media who were paying attention, and who realize that, while they should not be cheerleaders for the president, neither are they required to play the role of Inspector Javert in a relentless, heartless pursuit driven by blind obedience to mission rather than by a search for justice.
A lot of cartoons drawn early yesterday seem to have been upended by Biden’s speech, particularly those accusing him of claiming a victory and of failing to take responsibility for the chaos of the sudden collapse.
He was clear on acknowledging the mission creep of the past 20 years and the futility of seeking success where there can never be any, and he said of the current situation, “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.”
There have been several cartoons citing Bush’s banner, but only Peter Broelman‘s appears to have survived Biden’s speech, in which he made it clear that we were withdrawing in frustration, not glory.
Broelman pricks the bubble of the fatuous America First group who started this mess, without casting blame on the poor sod left with a mop to clean it up.
To which I would add that the brain trust who got us into Vietnam was a far cry from the neocons who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, and, if we continue to accept those wars as comparable, we’ll never understand either.
Though, even if we can’t figure out things that happened more than a half century ago, it might be nice to keep track of what was going on just in the past two years.
Perhaps it’s unfair to hold up Donald Trump Jr as an example, since he’s an obvious nitwit, but he’s a nitwit with a following and, as long as he’s got a platform, it hardly matters if he is consistent or knowledgeable or capable of tying his own shoes.
Which brings us back to Bizarro and the implied reference to Rupert Murdoch, because I hold the rightwing media responsible for making heroes out of nitwits and criminals in order to solidify the toxic factionalism started by Nixon and Reagan and refined by Gingrich.
And goodness knows, our situation relative to the pandemic would be better if Murdoch didn’t feature vaccinated commentators telling people the coronavirus is harmless and vaccines aren’t necessary.
But let’s not pretend these people are helpless tools in his hands, that they are “only following orders.”
We, like them, make choices, and we have our own responsibility to, like Jimmy Margulies (KFS), read between the lines of their screeds to uncover the corruption that lies beneath.
Clay Jones riffs on the apparent fact that the cruelty is the point, that the rightwing is triumphant over things that should inspire not joy, and certainly not laughter, but pity and fear.
He’s right, but that cruelty could not have risen in the political realm if it were not mirrored in the general culture.
Granted, I made a few changes to this photo a few years ago, but I had, by then, stopped laughing at “Animal House,” a 43-year-old movie that mocks foreign students, laughs at random acts of pointless cruelty, suggests plying underage women with alcohol and assumes African Americans are exotic but dangerous.
Its heroes are a group of rich preppies who blow off educations less privileged people strive for, its script a lazy pastiche of old urban legends from old Ivy League schools.
Yeah, I know. I’ve got no goddam sense of humor.
But here’s the challenge: Watch it again, and, in the place of Bluto, insert a different privileged slacker, one who paid someone to take his SATs and relied on his father to get him in, whereupon he never bothered doing any work.
(For additional laughs, imagine that, later in life, Bluto claims to have graduated with honors, and then threatens schools not to let anyone see his transcripts.)
We’re not simply the people our parents warned us about.
We’re even the people we warned ourselves about.
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