Nick Anderson (Tribune) gently transitions us from two days of comedy to a day of politics.
It’s appropriate, because RFK Jr, as it happens, seems to be a 2:1 mix of comedy and politics, in the same way that a (real) martini is a 2:1 mix of gin and vermouth, except that a lot of people describe a good martini as a glass of gin with a vermouth cork waved over it.
So comedy, a faint whiff of politics and many puns.
Robert the Lesser saw a dead bear cub on the side of the road, decided he wanted the skin, then drove around for a few hours until he realized he didn’t have time to skin it and dumped it, as one does, in Central Park.
The strangest thing about it all being that he was 60, not 19, at the time.
Or maybe the weirdest thing was that he posted a video of him telling the story to fellow deranged screwball Roseanne Barr, though it might be a better story if he’d told it to fellow deranged presidential candidate Jill Stein, who wants to debate Kamala Harris or maybe Donald Trump so people will remember who she is. And why she only got 1.1% of the popular vote in 2016.
Perhaps I digress.
But so has nearly everyone else, because the only thing easier to cartoon about than a fake accusation of sex with furniture is a true story about hauling around a dead bear.
Matt Wuerker (Politico) points out what all this amusing-ourselves-to-death is being offered in lieu of, which is a story of political bribery and cover-up that makes Bob Menendez’s conviction look like a parking ticket. Though a parking ticket from the same country that gave Trump a whole lot more.
At least Supreme Court Justices have the decency to take most of their bribes from domestic sources. Maybe we should slap Egypt with bribery tariffs to protect local corruption.
Outsourcing political bribery just doesn’t seem patriotic.
But it’s all very complicated and people prefer to laugh about raping sofas and stashing dead bears, just as they wanted to hear about the invention of the Internet and about dog kennels strapped to the roofs of station wagons and about misspelled sixth grade spelling words.
I can see the end of civilization from my porch!
The whole world is watching, but First Dog on the Moon is also laughing, the point being that it’s okay to laugh if you have an actual point to make.
Stashing bears is not a point, but when the weirdness leaks over into policy it matters, and, while I feel sorry that the bear cub apparently stepped in front of an automobile, I’m a lot more concerned about preventing the election of people who want to rob women of control over their bodies but refuse to help support the children who result.
As for dark humor, First Dog mocks the authors of Britain’s violent racism, but Ben Jennings is more somber about what happens when racist misinformation whips up hatred among violent thugs.
Don’t you dare say “It can’t happen here.”
Juxtaposition of Hateful Lies
There’s plenty of hateful misinformation whipping up bigots on this side of the Atlantic. Chip Bok continues to spread lies about the female competitor with a chromosomal abnormality that is uncommon but not unknown.
A few days ago, the transphobic accusations sprang from ignorance, but, having since been widely explained and dismissed, continuing the rant qualifies, yes, as hate speech, despite Bok’s mockery of common decency.
And Garrison’s biggest problem is being mistaken for “Cartoonist Kelly,” the fictional Onion cartoonist whose deliberately off-target cartoons are intended as a parody of ignorance, bigotry and hatemongering. Garrison isn’t joking, but at least he’s obscure.
I’m far more bothered by GoComics having eliminated comments on their political cartoons, leaving readers the options of “liking” a hateful, dishonest comic or not expressing any opinion about it.
We’ve seen how things turn out when misinformation and bigotry are met with either applause or silence. Arguing over a cartoon can empower trollery, but offering readers a thumbs-up, thumbs-down option would provide balance.
Allowing only positive responses gives credibility to purveyors of false information and hateful viewpoints.
And misinformation is not the exclusive territory of the right, though I think Steve Cousineau is more guilty of not thinking things through than deliberate error here.
The silver spoon is well placed, but success-through-nepotism — what Ann Richards referred to as being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple — is precisely the opposite of DEI placement.
DEI refers to giving qualified people an opportunity for which they might otherwise be looked over or actually denied because of race, creed or national origin. Nepotism is handing well-placed people opportunities for which they otherwise would not qualify.
I get what he means, but that’s not what he has said here, unless his purpose was to say that people hired as part of a diversity goal are unqualified.
I doubt that was his intention.
Juxtaposition of the Day
When I began running educational programs at newspapers, I inherited the “Stock Market Game” in which students tracked imaginary portfolios for six weeks and whoever made the most money won. I hated the damn thing, because it encouraged short-sighted, short-term profit-taking, otherwise known as “plunging.”
I got a kick one year out of a team from a juvie facility who won by buying penny stocks, waiting a week for them to double and then sinking it all into rock-solid utilities to maintain their lead for the rest of the game. Checking with colleagues around the country, I learned that juvies often won because they were already well-versed in con games and saw Wall Street as just one more.
Thank god the brokers quit sponsoring that toxic game so I could drop it. Though maybe it was just because plungers began pissing away their money on-line, without brokers.
Here’s yesterday’s terrifying tumble, shown against five-year trends. Roughly speaking, if on February 16, 2020, just before that downstroke, you had put $3,000 into something that mirrors the Dow, it would have been worth about $4,100 Monday morning, but now it’s only worth a tad under $3,900.
Well, boo-hoo for you.
“I’m far more bothered by GoComics having eliminated comments on their political cartoons, leaving readers the options of “liking” a hateful, dishonest comic or not expressing any opinion about it.”
I really wish Go Comics offered a “dislike” button
It’s so unbelievably cowardly to only offer “positive” feedback, and unfortunately more social media sites are going that route.
I suppose it goes back to the childish notion of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” but that flatly ignores the reality that some opinions and beliefs deserve to be torn down.
Is this a typical Garrison comic? Throw a lot of tropes around and hope someone likes it?
Ben Garrison is pretty much the king of bad political cartoons. I had actually almost forgotten about him, so it was rather jarring to see him featured here.
He makes the regular right-wing loonies like Mike Lester, Lisa Benson, Chip Bok, Michael Ramirez, Steve Kelley etc. appear sane in comparison.
You missed the fact that RFK Jr wasn’t planning to just skin that bear roadkill, he also wanted to eat it.
Pretty sure that makes him more of a hillbilly than JD Vance could ever hope to be.
Wuerker’s cartoon is rather chilling though, in how the breaking story of Trump’s massive Egypt payment has been largely ignored in favor of all the “weird” rhetoric going around. Then again “Trump scandal” barely even registers with most people anymore, like what else is new.
FDOTM manages to hit the nail right on the head yet again. Yes, Republicans/conservatives pride themselves on being “normal” so calling them weird is the greatest insult imaginable. Since they also openly embrace Nazis and fascism neither of those really has a sting.
Bear meat is quite greasy, but I know people who eat it. There were 1356 bears taken by hunters in New York last year and I doubt many go to the trouble and expense of hunting bear without wanting the meat. But I don’t know anybody who would want one that had sat for a few hours without having been field dressed — it goes nasty fast.
Funny story: When I was editing a small paper in Maine, a freelance writer we sometimes worked with pulled a moose license in the annual lottery. This generally sets off purchase of a higher caliber rifle, hiring of a guide and a long search for the right animal. As it happened, her SO was a moose guide, so when I ran into him, I said I’d like her to do a journal of this whole process, but he waved it off.
“She just wants a meat-moose, not a trophy,” he said. They’d be out and back in a day.
(We’ll deal with JD’s degree of authentic hillbillitude another day.)
That’s not a Ben Garrison cartoon. Look at the signature. It’s his wife, I believe.
So I see. He has a single site and I don’t visit there often. All cats are grey in the night, and he’s as benighted as they come.
Re: GoComics: you can no longer even like a comic, which is sad because there have been some excellent ones that deserve at least that limited feedback.
To be more clear, I am referring to the political cartoons that have commenting removed.
Absolutely. As I said, the option of thumbs-up, thumbs-down would be a fair alternative to allowing comments. The current situation is not.
Apropos none of the preceeding comments, Alberta Hunter is/was cool, and lived a long life worth appreciating. Her album Amtrak Blues is a good a listen.
The joke in the “DEI recipients” cartoon has nothing to do with what DEI is SUPPOSED to mean, it’s that they’re the initials of the next generation of the Trump clan.
True, but I wouldn’t have done it. Too easy for people to take it the way I did. You have to tread lightly in areas that you don’t own. Richard Pryor could make jokes that Shelly Berman could not, and vice-versa.
In this case, I was so offended by the concept that I didn’t ponder the word play. I think a standup could have led into it — great example being Pryor and Chase and the job interview skit, which let them both slide into the danger zone — but that conceptual switch was hard to pull off in a one-panel comic.
Thanks for pointing it out, by the way. I knew Steve is a good man and this really puzzled me.