CSotD: This Uncanny Valley of Tears
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Non Sequitur (AMS) has it right: America’s favorite sport has become bitching and moaning and insisting that the refs are corrupt, the rules are wrong and the outcome must be challenged.
I promise you that, if Josh Allen had taken a clean snap, stepped back and knelt to take an intentional safety to give the Bills a 27-25 victory yesterday, Vikings fans would be flooding the intertubes with complaints about the dubious catch in the fourth quarter.
Which is part of the fun in sports but sure seems whiny and childish in politics.
Blamecasting is nothing new, as Tacitus noted: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
I’ll give Bob Gorrell (Creators) credit for conceding the loss and naming a major reason for the GOP’s surprising defeat, and extra credit for good use of an intact coat hanger in a cartoon, since keeping coat hangers from being un-twisted is the point of rejecting forced-birth mandates.
It’s not the only reason for the GOP loss, though, and I continue to be annoyed and a bit dumbfounded by the way rightwingers complain that the problem was too many people finding it easy to vote, early or by mail…
… while liberal pundits have been far too silent about the contribution of Gen Z.
The kids did rally around the issue of choice, but they had more than that on their minds and god bless’em for speaking up.
The right is trying to find ways to keep them from doing it again, but the left needs to pay more attention and court them more actively. As a wise man once said, “Your old road is rapidly aging; Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.”
Alex confesses the perils of Old Fartitude, and it particularly cracked me up because, politics and stock trading aside, I’ve been appalled by the number of cartoonists — strippers and editorialists — who steal gags from the Internet and repackage them in hopes we won’t have seen the originals.
As Clive says, they might better resort to knowing something about their jobs.
Though not all the farts are old. There’s a crop of young, pathetic wankers flooding social media, and I use the term literally as well as metaphorically, since they seem to simultaneously declare themselves to be incels — involuntary celibates — and alpha males, which isn’t exactly an oxymoron so much as a combination in which one term explains the other.
A prominent one-eyed king in this Kingdom of the Blind was wonderfully owned — or, as the old folks say, “pwned” — after making a claim that was both ridiculous and typical. He was so driven into the dirt that it made Newsweek, which is truly a case of adding insult to injury.
Speaking of which, Morten Morland targeted the Designated Loser and actually made me laugh out loud. As noted before, it’s not necessary for political cartoons to be funny, but blending humor and insight is a triumph, and the joke here is in playing upon how completely the GOP has rejected their erstwhile hero.
Dave Whamond offers a hip reference in the matter, and, while I’m not sure the Party is going to even allow Trump to play his radio at a reasonable volume, the bland, off-handed management style is a good summation of how readily the one-time idolators have turned their back on the Chosen One.
But, sliding from LOL to chuckle to reality, I like Greg Kearney’s pragmatic summation.
It’s not just a matter of being rejected but of being written out entirely. Maybe he should invite Former Chinese President Hu Jintao to Mar A Lago to commiserate.
The most interesting aspect of this descent into revisionism is how the sins of the Party are being loaded onto the Trump Scapegoat so that the Party itself won’t have to make any changes.
The GOP is sponsoring a Future Fair for everyone and no fair to anyone.
The future is fun
The future is fair
You may already have won
You may already be there!
Juxtaposition of the Quadrennium
(Bas van der Schot — Cartoon Movement)
The Beautiful Game will begin the World Cup Tournament next Sunday, but the normal joy and excitement of the event is, as both British cartoonist Jennings and Dutch cartoonist Schot suggest, gravely over ridden by the fact of FIFA’s having awarded the games to Qatar, whose building of venues resulted in thousands of deaths, almost entirely of foreign workers in conditions of near serfdom.
Schot’s caption translates roughly as “the shame of looking,” and, as he suggests, it’s hard for fans of futbol not to watch, because, dammit, it’s the World Cup.
(And let me pause here to offer the back of my hand to snobs who think it clever to speak of “sportsball” and profess ignorance with the same self-satisfied smirks with which other philistines dismiss ballet, opera and modern art. Mens sana in corpore sano, and the Renaissance ain’t over yet.)
Watching Swan Lake, though it is beautiful, makes me cringe for the horrific damage done to ballerina’s feet, but at least it’s their own feet.
The World Cup, as Jennings notes, will take place on the graves of poor workers and Schot is right: I don’t think I can put that aside regardless of the quality of play.
And as long as we’re talking about human rights and basic decency, Andrea Arroyo (Cartoon Movement) notes that November is “Native American Heritage Month,” and I’ve got a simple rule to suggest, not just in November but always:
If you want to post American Indian wisdom online, provide a source. Verify it.
These are real people with a variety of languages, traditions and cultures, and it’s as silly to say “Native American saying” (or “African saying”) as it would be to say “European saying.”
Then, if you attach a picture, make it of the person, or at least of the culture, whose wisdom you’re quoting. They don’t all look alike, y’know.
At the start of today’s posting, I quoted a specific Roman.
Offer the same respect to Indians, Africans and Asians.
Unless you also believe in Magical Europeans.
NOTE: You’ll still see my daily reminders and links on Twitter for now, but you can also find me here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikecsotd.peterson
Counter Social:@CSotD@counter.social
Mastodon: mas.to/@CSotD
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