CSotD: Walking the Daily Minefield
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Jen Sorensen gets more out of four panels than anyone else in the business, and this gut-clencher is as accurate a portrait of the moment as you’re likely to see.
Life does go on. Life has to go on. But the veneer of normalcy is wearing thin. At the dog park, we talk about an outbreak of ticks and the likelihood of this being a bad year for them, but that conversation is brief.
Mostly, we talk about a local man, Mohsen Mahdawi, who was snatched by ICE at a meeting alleged to be about his final steps to citizenship. He was cautious and didn’t walk into the meeting alone, as a result of which he had instant interventions that have kept him in Vermont pending legal action.
People here know Mohsen and speak of him fondly, and in addition to his being resourceful enough to gain high-level support from the governor and other political figures, his abduction has stirred up a hornets’ nest.
Similarly, an attempt by ICE to kidnap a family in Sackets Harbor — including a third-grader — provoked an uproar in that little town. The principal of the local school wrote an angry, brilliant letter, townspeople marched in protest and ICE was forced to return, and free, the family.
Point being that we can, and should, be angry when we hear of some kid in some distant city being whisked away — like the Venezuelan kid in NYC who was snatched despite not being the person ICE was seeking — but it remains somewhat theoretical, and different from the fury unleashed when it’s somebody you know.
No surprise there: People often say, “But what if it were your child?” or “What if it were your neighbor?”
When ICE descends on a neighborhood, it brings the atrocity home with far more immediacy than when we read that 200-some migrants were put on a plane somewhere distant.
Bagley’s image of ICE picking kids out of a pile, one by one, is where we’re at now, and while some of those people will have lived only on campus among other students, others are settled in communities, such that, for example, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was known in Baltimore, despite Pam Bondi’s declaration that despite his having lived in Baltimore for some 14 years, he’s not really from there.
Which is as close to a racist statement as she could make without saying what she means, and it’s only part of the outrageous lies the Trump administration is using to justify their actions.
Apparently, the majority of the people sent to the gulag in El Salvador were not guilty of anything, or, at worst, of minor traffic offenses. They haven’t all even been guilty of illegal entry: Many have reportedly been in compliance with immigration laws.
So, yes, it does seem inappropriate for a felon to throw the first stone.
It seems twice as horrific for Dear Leader to cheerfully invite El Salvador’s dictator to build more concentration camps so that he can start filling them with Americans who were born in this country but have demonstrated disloyalty.
He said “criminals,” but you have to take into consideration the fact that he has ordered investigation and prosecution of Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for having declared that there was no fraud detected in the 2020 election.
Luckovich may refer back to an old story in order to make his point, but the core of his cartoon is more reportage than satire.
Koterba also uses symbols to express the feeling among patriotic Americans as they watch the freedoms guaranteed in their Constitution being spirited away in shackles.
Emmerson, by contrast, dispenses with symbolism and satire and simply lays out the facts of the matter, showing the blatancy of the coup and the faces of those who are pulling it off and profiting from it.
As it happens, Doonesbury reruns have BD back in the Gulf, and today’s episode is a reminder of the lies that got us into the disastrous second war there, which caused thousands of American deaths, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the utter destabilization of the Middle East.
It’s also a reminder of the willful ignorance of some — and “some” is too many — of our fellow citizens. I ran into someone the other day who didn’t know Trump has instituted tariffs and hadn’t heard about people being deported.
He explained that he’s not into politics and he doesn’t trust the media, and when I shrugged and said, “Well, I guess that’s okay, as long as you don’t vote,” he was completely puzzled.
Why shouldn’t he vote?
It might be relaxing to take five minutes off from all the horrors, but any more than that is either willful ignorance or deliberate disloyalty. Around here, the snow is gone, the greenery is beginning to show and the birds are coming back a few species at a time. It’s very possible to take a walk and take a break.
But I worry about the brain candy being handed out to keep everyone calm and manageable, like the Soma-addled citizens of the Brave New World.
Juxtaposition of Shiny Happy Astronauts
In case you were doing something more important — like picking ticks off your dog — and missed it, Jeff Bezos sent a half dozen pretty ladies into space, including his fiancée.
It got a lot of pleasant bread-and-circuses coverage, but other observers, and especially women, remained not just unimpressed but insulted by the notion that it was some kind of feminist victory.
At the Guardian, Moira Donegan dismissed “the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody” while Sarah Manavis declared “no amount of supposedly landmark achievements will make these missions anything more than wish fulfilment for a billionaire’s boyish personal hobby.”
There was also pushback on Facebook over the fact that the achievements of actual female astronauts have been scrubbed away by the anti-DEI brigade while these photogenic passengers were praised as if they’d actually piloted the craft, which they hadn’t.
But let’s be fair: Neither did he.
Keep that Soma coming.
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