CSotD: Catching up with the news

Cartoonists: Don’t forget that tomorrow is Small Child Saluting Day. Be sure to submit your cartoons of small children saluting before it’s too late!

There will always be an England

I’ve always like Charlie, except for that arranged-marriage thing, which was worse than having to make the King’s Speech to open Parliament each year, though at least he and Diana didn’t look quite this miserable.

I kind of expect the guy from the Progressive Insurance commercials to appear and say “We can’t save you from becoming your parents …”

It might be better if they’d kept him hidden away somewhere until he ascended to the crown, since, as Morten Morland suggests, the chain of office is all too real.

We know that Charlie has been outspoken on environmental issues in the past, but the King’s Speech is written by the governing party, and Rishi Sunak seems intent on more drilling, so King Charles has to pretend it’s a good thing, however Charlie feels about it.

It might sound better coming from someone who we could imagine at least somewhat believed it.

As the lady in this Jeremy Banx cartoon suggests, previous speeches were also ghost-written but with a bit more credibility.

In any case, as a Yank, I’m put off by the very pomp and circumstance that I gather endears the Royals to their subjects, which may be why I preferred Charlie to KCIII.

Most of the surviving royalty, at least in Europe, go around in business suits and so forth, but, then, they don’t draw throngs of people to watch them, nor are they paid nearly as well.

Still, forgive me if that picture of the King and the King’s Peach somehow reminds me of this classic John Dempsey cartoon.

Couldn’t save him from becoming his parents, but I think it’s a shame they were able to keep him from becoming his younger son.

However, the Speech is a passing moment and by no means Britain’s largest problem, judging by the cartoons coming out of the UK, as seen in this

Juxtaposition of People Named for “Dallas” Villains

Morten Morland again, this time portraying Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who honest-to-God was named after Sue Ellen Ewing, the alcoholic villain on Dallas.

Braverman has previously been targeted by cartoonists for her heartless approach to refugees and immigrants, but is currently being pilloried for — besides her obvious ambitions to become PM — a crusade against the practice of providing tents to the homeless.

The key phrase, as seen in this Matt Pritchett cartoon, being her declaration that homelessness is a “lifestyle choice.”

It has proved irresistible to cartoonists, and he circled back for another shot at her, this one with a holiday flavor.

While Guy Venables made the point without quoting the phrase, noting that other people also choose to sleep in tents.

And Ben Jennings brought in the plight of homeless veterans to double-down on Remembrance Day, when the wearing of poppies is intended to honor vets but is often a performative gesture on the part of politicians.

Elsewhere in the World

Robert Ariail notes the apparently insoluble division in the Middle East, with neither side willing to back down or to acknowledge any blame for how things are going.

Guy Venables adds a Remembrance Day touch, recalling the famous football game in No Man’s Land during World War I, contrasting it with the current situation, in which Netanyahu has allowed Biden to twist his arm enough to pause a few hours a day for refugees to flee the war zone.

Cathy Wilcox points out that a humanitarian pause is largely neither. Such pauses have often been called in war, as an opportunity to collect the dead and wounded before the next round of slaughter, but it’s been a long time since war was confined to battlefields.

Now a “humanitarian pause” is a break during which civilians can flee to a place where they can — as heard on NPR’s On Point yesterday — live with 30 people in a home so crowded they can’t all lay down to sleep at the same time, in a place where 90% of the water is undrinkable and where you stand in line for five hours for a loaf of bread, to eat in a cold meal because there is no fuel, and only a little, since you want to save as much food as you can for your children.

The saddest part being that it is still better than being bombed.

Biden, predictably, is being condemned for having only managed a series of pauses rather than a complete ceasefire, since, as his predecessor Obama liked to say, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Juxtaposition of the Day

Adam Zyglis

Andy Marlette — Creators

Scott Stantis

The capacity of people to twist guidance into what they want to hear has always been a hallmark of our species, whether it’s a matter of finding reasons to be stingy and heartless in the New Testament or cherry-picking the parts of Quran that encourage warfare or, in this case, of contorting a law of moderation into a justification for endless revenge.

Whether taken from Hammurabi or the Old Testament, “an eye for an eye” meant just that and nothing more, and was intended to stop the endless, spiraling circles of revenge and blood feud.

Joshua ben Joseph took it further:

But wotthehell, he also said “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar.”

We know how well that one went over.

Glen LeLievre suggests the futility of tough measures, and tough measures did just this in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Ulster, in Central America, in any place where tough measures have been instituted.

David Rowe suggests that Netanyahu may be running out of time, and, according to this story in Haaretz, there is growing discontent, even among hard-liners, with his far right government.

What eventually brought peace to Ulster was, first of all, a movement within the community to reject violence on both sides, and, also, the fall of Margaret Thatcher’s get-tough government so that those voices from the community could be heard.

I wouldn’t expect a change of government to entirely solve this particular problem, but this might be a good time to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.