CSotD: The Blogger Who Saw Everything Twice
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As everyone struggles to explain the young man who tried to shoot Trump, I thought of this Tom the Dancing Bug from 1999, when we were trying to figure out Columbine and everybody had a theory.
We didn’t actually come to a conclusion, or, at least, not to one that solved the problem, though, as Bolling suggested, we each found an explanation that fit whatever we’d brought to the question.
This made me think of all the other repetitions and endless cycles and moments of deja vu and presque vu and ou sont des Neigedens d’antan, and how very tired I am of seeing everything twice.
Tomorrow I’ll try to go back to seeing everything once, but here are some golden oldies that, alas, have not grown so old after all.
And, BTW, if you haven’t read Catch-22, or haven’t read it recently, I’d suggest you read it now, because it keeps becoming relevant, more’s the pity.
Besides the ink blot obsessions, observers have made a lot of comparisons between John Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life and the recent attempted shooting of Donald Trump. Jim Mazzotta accused the media then of making an anti-hero of Hinckley with their non-stop probing.
We do have to cover the news, of course, and there is a precedent for the futility of refusing to name someone in order to avoid giving him publicity: Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis in the fourth century BC and a law was passed making it illegal to say his name.
Obviously, we wouldn’t know his name if the law had been at all effective, but people keep proposing something similar with each new outrage, 2400 years later.
A more recent reflection on media matters came from Ann Telnaes in 2017, at a time when the connections between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin remained speculative. Today, not only is their friendship out in the open, but so are the threats to the press.
Kari Lake made a point of calling out the press at the RNC last night, saying “Frankly, you guys up there in the fake news have worn out your welcome. … You have spent the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump and his amazing patriotic supporters.”
But beyond that rhetoric, NBC Universal bent a knee and knocked Morning Joe off the air Monday, ostensibly to make room for more assassination coverage but raising suspicions that pushback from powerful sources has a chilling effect in boardrooms, if not on reporters themselves.
This Louis Glackens piece from the election of 1912 is worth a second look, as he predicted that Roosevelt’s third-party challenge would undermine Taft and lead to a Wilson victory.
There isn’t any credible third party challenge this time around, with RFK Jr providing more comic relief than actual threat, but the situation in which TR and Taft quarreled and split voters on their side is not unlike the current debate over whether Democrats should campaign against Trump or against each other.
This Boardman Robinson cartoon ran as Wilson, no fan of women’s suffrage, was inaugurated. It concerned hearings in the Illinois Senate about the wretched pay women received for honest work, which Robinson contended left them trapped between honest poverty and disgraceful means of getting by.
Women won the vote less than a decade later, but this week, more than a century after, we see powerful voices mocking the women in Trump’s Secret Service detail, while women continue to be robbed of control over their own bodies.
And the Republicans have nominated a vice-presidential candidate who feels women should stay in even violent relationships while their party considers laws to prohibit no-fault divorce.
Too many women remain trapped between respectability and survival.
One of the issues that comes up frequently is that of money in politics, not just the impact of megadonors on policy but the apparent need for personal wealth in order to run for public office.
Herblock saw the resulting lack of empathy back in 1964, suggesting that Barry Goldwater’s privileged past made it impossible for him to identify with the poor.
One difference since 1964 is that politicians are more bold in claiming to be good Christians, but in 2013, Steve Breen was not the only cartoonist to contrast the story of the Holy Family seeking shelter with that of the homeless doing the same.
Little seems to have changed except that the boasts of religiosity are louder and are now combined with laws forbidding the homeless to sleep on the streets.
Apparently not everyone realizes that “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a snake?” was not a call for a show of hands.
By the time the second Bush gained the White House, David Horsey was able to mock the transparency with which policies favoring the wealthy drove economics.
According to Brendan Duke at the Center for American Progress, the tax plan in Project 2025 will cost a family making $75,000 an additional $1,800 in taxes, a greater increase then that of a family making twice as much.
In 1999, an international case of custodial interference gave Lalo Alcaraz a chance to comment on how police were allowed, even encouraged, to confront minorities, until they retrieved a kidnapped child whose uncles and aunts held more acceptable political views than the child’s father.
The definition of family remains a topic of debate, with same-sex marriage, contraception and divorce on the chopping block, and not only have we continued to see extremes of police behavior towards minorities, but we’re hearing blatant lies that migrants are nearly all violent criminals and dangerous mental patients.
Republicans have embraced Project 2025’s plan to build concentration camps and deport as many as 20 million brown immigrants, including naturalized citizens.
Herblock charged the White House with covering up scandal in 1973, but we’ve recently seen a flood of cartoons in which Richard Nixon wishes the Supreme Court of his era had granted him the immunity from law that the current court has bestowed upon Donald Trump.
Now, as Mike Luckovich noted in 2009, we’re seemingly a nation in which power is more important than justice, and the good of the nation is measured in partisan units.
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