We’ll start off with a major hit from Pedro Molina (Counterpoint), who skips all the cleverness and simply portays Replacement Theory for what it is: A perverse way in which racism masquerades as patriotism.
Sometimes you can be too clever. The first time I saw a cartoon pointing out that Europeans had replaced Indians on this continent, I liked it, but after several others, history began to seep into my mind and dull the edge. Aside from how various tribes encroached on each other’s areas here, we had “replacement” happening around the globe for ages: Follow the travels of the Celts for an example, or the Magyars, or the Moghuls, or look into how people from Scandinavia edged over into what is now Russia.
It happens, and it sucks to be on the receiving end, certainly, but Molina does better to penetrate into the heart of the matter.
There was always a tinge of “We matter/They don’t” in these encroachments, whether they involved edging people out or wiping them out, and there are any number of groups whose name for themselves translates to “the People,” which seems a bit presumptuous.
But it felt different in a world in which people didn’t know each other and in which there were major differences in technology between the encroachers and the encroached upon.
Today, as the song says, “It’s a small world after all,” and we all know each other. You can’t pretend anymore, and Molina doesn’t let the current crop of vicious, racist crybabies off the hook.
Joe Heller chimes in with a related commentary on an only somewhat lighter note.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, and it’s been a fascinating, illuminating and somewhat depressing read. The pre-Civil War matters of the Fugitive Slave Act and Bloody Kansas were bad enough, as we slide towards what Donald Trump hopes will be a new violent clash, but I’m up to the point where the 14th Amendment should have fixed everything, but the federal courts refused to enforce it and the lynchings and mass murders continued.
Everything old is new again and minorities can no longer count on the Supreme Court, any more than they could in Douglass’s day. Whether or not Black people want to join NATO, it’s understandable if they feel that 400 years of being “the other” is far more than long enough.
I can be guilty of taking metaphors too seriously, and I appreciate Jimmy Margulies (KFS)‘s point about how social media spreads hatred, racism and lies, though I’m not too crazy about the setting.
Social media stocks are in rough shape at the moment. Twitter’s travails are well-known, given the gyrations Elon Musk’s on-again-off-again courtship is putting the company through, but Snap just cratered with a 30% drop, and, as that article notes:
Shares of Facebook parent Meta dropped 7% in after-hours trading. Twitter fell almost 4%, while Pinterest slid 12%. Outside social media, shares of advertising companies also fell after hours — Google parent Alphabet was off more than 3%, while The Trade Desk fell more than 8%.
There was a bit of good news for the industry, as a federal court overturned a Florida law restricting social media from barring posters, though they also ruled that the companies have to be more open about their rules and more responsive to inquiries from those being kicked off.
Of course, the cynic in me expects De Santis to appeal it to the six-member Supreme Court, who will rubber stamp their approval while the three associate irrelevancies complain about First Amendments and private industry rights and what-EVER.
Clearing the way, as Margulies suggests, for fearmongering, hatred and disinformation to flourish online.
Maybe the GOP can get one of those midnight instant judgments so they can fire things up in time for the midterms.
It’s called the “Shadow docket” as in “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Cancel Culture is, of course, alive and well anyway, and Benjamin Slyngstad points out the absurdity of how it is applied in Magaland.
After decades of saying “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” the rightwing is turning to all sorts of other bans to solve what they perceive to be America’s problems.
Specific to abortion, Slyngstad earlier declared the folly of “canceling” things that work in order to impose something that won’t.
He’s right in that the number of unplanned pregnancies has diminished despite rightwing attempts to choke off Planned Parenthood and cancel all the other improvements that have given young people more autonomy over their bodies and their futures.
Unlike other cartoonists, he made the point without mentioning back-alleys and coat hangers and other sources of sepsis and death, or noting that middleclass families have always had access to wink/wink D&Cs from their regular doctor. But the fact remains that abortion will continue, and, as mentioned here before, the pro-knockedup lobby is now aiming to make contraception illegal.
And they vote.
However, there is this positive note from Kevin Necessary, who celebrates the fact that, when a school district in Cincinnati canceled Diversity Day (after six years), students got up and walked out.
Nearly all of the seniors, and some of the current juniors, should be able to vote by November, but they can all be active in the community now, persuading older friends, relatives and neighbors to get to the polls and help stop the hate.
We just need to hold things together long enough for the Z’s to gain a little more momentum.
Juxtaposition of the Day
As a recovering Catholic, I was glad to see Dr. MacLeod’s commentary on the “news” that the Southern Baptists have been covering up and ignoring reports of sexual abuse. Hall’s comment, however, relies on it being news, and the notion that it goes back only 20 years strains my credulity.
It’s nice to see some of the heat taken off the Catholics, so long as we bear in mind that “They all do it” is no defense for priests or pastors or scout leaders or teachers or anyone else.
And while Christopher Titus framed it in a Catholic setting, this applies to them all.