CSotD: With the best of intentions
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We’ll start with something that hardly counts in the Grand Scheme of Things, except that accuracy does matter, even when good intentions only pave the road to Heck, not Hell.
Clay Jones has a point to make in observing that Trump can no longer shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote because his felony conviction means he’s not allowed to own a gun in NYC.
It’s not a profound observation, but it’s a funny jab at the fellow, though what does matter is that Trump was right: There is nothing he could do that would destroy his cult’s faith.
Out in Hollywood, con artists like Elmer Gantry and Dusty Rhodes are eventually brought down by their own hubris, but if that were going to happen to Trump, it would have by now.
All of which is worth commenting on, but nobody over 50 makes spacegun noises. I’ll let the Star Trek/Star Wars gang argue over who said it first, but people Trump’s age — my age — say “Bang” or “Pow” or make a sound in the back of their throats to simulate gunfire.
Hey, I said it was small potatoes. But for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost, and, from an artist’s point of view, you don’t want to distract readers with dubious trivia.
The principle is more important in this Rick McKee (Counterpoint) cartoon, because for all the chatter about Biden’s age, he certainly doesn’t use a walker. He jogs regularly and rides his bike several times a week.
The argument in favor of McKee’s depiction is that Trump doesn’t actually wear a ball and chain either, and nothing in the cartoon is supposed to be taken literally — in the old-fashioned sense in which “literally” means “literally.”
Fair enough, except that Biden’s gaffes have been inconsequential, and despite a hitjob from the Wall Street Journal in which they interviewed Biden opponents about his sharpness, he is generally respected as fully capable. The “old fogey” accusations are largely made by GOP loyalists, and McKee is entitled to his opinion, but overstatements undercut your message.
Gary Huck, by contrast, makes a quiet joke about an old fogey who made wandering, almost incomprehensible remarks about electric boats and shark attacks that would have sunk any other candidate for office.
When Jimmy McMillan declared “The rent’s too damn high,” he was laughed at and his apparent race for the presidency collapsed on the spot, despite the rent being too damn high and still being too damn high.
But somehow Donald Trump manages to make people take him seriously but not literally, and his nonsensical, rambling, unhinged speeches are not expected to say anything sensible about sharks or electric vehicles or much of anything else.
He probably could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose a single vote. It is a puzzlement.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This is a more nuanced matter. Anderson criticizes the IDF and the Israeli government for going after Hamas in an indiscriminate manner, and portrays Biden as a willing associate in the operation.
It is somewhat the opposite of Trump’s ability to shoot people on 5th Avenue: One hallmark in the current divisions is that liberals and progressives are willing to hold their own politicians’ feet to the fire while conservatives appear to only raise questions when their fringiest fringe dwellers — MTG or Lauren Boebert — get out of hand.
Katauskas lays out the central issue vis-a-vis Gaza: It shouldn’t be hard to make the point clear that being against bombing entire neighborhoods or criticizing repeated incidents in which aid workers, journalists and civilians are killed does not mean you favor brutal terrorists.
I like both cartoons, but Anderson’s comes off as more metaphorical and imaginative, while Katauskas’s piece seems like a lecture rather than a graphic depiction. Anderson’s is therefore more open to misinterpretation while Katauskas’s can be brushed off because it lacks an emotional gutpunch.
Political cartoonists continuously walk a tightrope between those two hazards.
Marc Murphy makes a solid attempt to thread the needle between being too symbolic and too didactic, and I think does a good job, though the word “genocide” is something of a poison pill. The word may alienate only those who insist on being alienated, but that still makes it worth avoiding. However, his illustration makes the logical connection clear.
Fair-minded people realize that “manifest destiny” was a racist concept that justified Europeans forcing native people off their land, often in brutal ways. Murphy quietly connects that discredited theory with the overall notion that God wants certain people to have certain land, and he’s not exaggerating: Those who supported manifest destiny 150 years ago did so under the sincere, unshakable conviction that they were carrying out God’s will.
The hazard in using that word is that nitpicking its definition avoids addressing the actual issue. Whether Americans were killing buffalo or killing native people seems secondary to the fact that both actions had the same ultimate effect on those whose way of life was being purposefully ended.
Jeffrey Koterba hints at the connection, given that Palestinian olive groves on the West Bank have been set afire as part of an effort to drive their owners from the land, while Bedouins have also been threatened, assaulted and forced from their settlements.
Such actions didn’t bring peace in our West and seem unlikely to bring peace in the Middle East.
Except the peace of the grave, but we’re avoiding the word that might describe that.
The good news for political cartoonists is that people like to complain and they like feeling frightened and picked on and put-upon. There will always be a market for fear and loathing.
The threats facing the family in this Dave Granlund cartoon are mostly overwrought. There have always been shark attacks, but until Jaws nobody freaked out over them, while bison don’t attack so much as respond to foolish actions by foolish people. And rip currents are nothing new, either.
Granted, the weather-related hazards he lists, including landslides, wildfires and beach bacteria, are becoming more common but it’s not as though anybody wants to do anything about these shifts in our environment.
Except Ron DeSantis, who signed legislation prohibiting climate change.
He should write Mother Nature a ticket.
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