CSotD: Self-Owns, Own-Goals and Unforced Errors

Mike Smith (KFS) offers a common though often dubious critique, that the Republicans are flooding us with criticism of the Biden administration without proposing any solutions of their own. I say “dubious” because sometimes an act is so clearly foolish that you only need to point it out; you don’t need to specify the non-foolish alternative.

However, this is an election year and the GOP has not simply avoided alternatives but has shied away from crafting any formal platform beyond negativity, division and fear-mongering. They’re bold to denounce both Democrats and democracy, but silent as to what we would get by putting them in power.

And, as RJ Matson describes it, when one of them does come up with an actual policy proposal, it is seen more as a misguided disaster than a bold move.

Note that nobody believed that early aviator “Wrong Way Corrigan” had accidentally crossed the Atlantic rather than flying to California, but he stuck to his story anyway.

By contrast, “Wrong Way Riegels,” cited in Matson’s cartoon, had made a true blunder that cost his team the game and left a talented athlete with an undeserved reputation for lousy judgement.

 

Lindsey Graham’s declaration to abandon the GOP’s support for states rights in favor of a national restriction on abortion leaves him somewhere between the show-off and the unintended fall guy, and where he stands on that continuum can perhaps be shown in Clay Jones’ piece, noting that McConnell and other Republicans have spoken up, not so much to deny what he said but to say he shouldn’t have said it.

 

But Bill Bramhall declares that there’s little doubt how Graham’s announcement was greeted on the other side of the aisle, a reminder that Georgia Tech fans welcomed Roy Riegles’ wrong-way run, which ultimately led to their narrow Rose Bowl victory over his UC Berkeley team.

His erstwhile opponents even blocked for him as his desperate teammates attempted to stop him.

 

Meanwhile, as noted, Dennis Corrigan’s wrong-way flight was an intentional, show-off grab at publicity which succeeded in making his name a household word but did cost him his aviation license.

Michael de Adder suggests a similar Pyrrhic victory for Ron DeSantis’s adventure in human trafficking.

Granted, he never tried to fool us into thinking it was unintentional, though his reasoning depended on the theory that people crossing the border in Texas were naturally headed for Florida. But others have noted that a lot of people illegally crossing Florida’s border are Cuban and he’d be a damn fool to start picking on them.

In any case, while GOP Twitter Trolls are praising the move, it resulted in a heart-warming outreach by the people of Martha’s Vineyard, who rallied to provide their unexpected guests with housing, food and welcomes.

The rightwing response at the moment seems to be pledges to send more, but, since it won’t be a surprise the next time, those welcomes will likely be faster and more complete.

And I don’t know who the Texans and Floridians expect to pick their fruit and vegetables or shine shoes at Mar A Lago, but there are plenty of jobs for willing workers elsewhere in the country.

 

The leftwing response, as Steve Breen (Creators) indicates, is that migrants are seen as pawns, not as people, and that it’s more proof that the cruelty is the point.

How that will play out in the midterms will be an interesting revelation of who in this nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Drew Sheneman)

Meanwhile, all the misguided outrage is not entirely on the right side of the aisle, as the left continues to defend Disney’s further Disneyfication of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story.

Sheneman takes a relatively nonpartisan view of the kerfuffle, while Dr. MacLeod pins it directly on the Republicans. I agree that the GOP has been quick to dredge up foolish examples over which to be outraged, but I’m not so sure this one is entirely theirs.

As noted here before, it’s important to differentiate between declaring that no mermaids can be non-white and recognizing that this particular mermaid was not only described by the author as white but became emblematic of a nation that was predominantly Caucasian in 1837. Her race was assumed, but, if he’d pondered it, he’d have made the same choice, just as Cervantes “decided” Don Quixote was Spanish.

To which I would add that cartoonists who become furious when someone crops their signature off a cartoon, then changes the caption and reposts it, should be defending Andersen, not Disney.

I would also add that, having been raised on the Mary Poppins books well before the movie, I felt it had nothing at all to do with Mary Poppins, as did PL Travers, despite Disney’s fictional, self-praising movie on the topic.

Which is particularly bizarre, given that Travers hated the ending of Andersen’s story, as Sur La Lune reports in its extensive footnotes to the tale:

This amuses me because the appeal of Mary Poppins stories was that she was mean and harsh and kind of scary, but fascinating enough that you’d follow her anyway.

And my bottom line on the whole thing remains that, if you want to inspire young children of non-European backgrounds, how about telling stories from non-European sources?

 

Hend Amry, a Libyan-American who tweets as @LibyaLiberty, posted this picture and I don’t know where it came from, but I love the image.

Someone replied with Suvannamaccha, from the Indian epic, Ramayana. If the first pic is an act of imagination, this is a statement about the universality of mermaids throughout the world cultures; someone commented that there are also mermaids in Brazil.

As for the notion that nobody offers these things, three minutes of looking around reveals mountains of kid-lit starring racial minorities, kids with disabilities, kids with gender dysphoria and so on. Much of it is relentlessly preachy and dreary, but Rick Riordan, who made Greek mythology cool with his Percy Jackson stories, has branched out into guiding and producing modernized folklore books from a variety of cultures.

The notion of colorizing European tales has more to do with Photoshop than with diversity.

It’s a case of running the wrong direction and scoring for the opposition instead of for your own team.