CSotD: To Live and Die in LA
Skip to commentsA bit of poetic license here: The tanks are in DC waiting to rumble past Trump’s collection of contributors in a Soviet-style display of macho goodness. They haven’t been deployed in LA, despite several Tank Man cartoons.
I hope at least a few people know that Tank Man only slowed the tanks down for a moment and that they had already slaughtered thousands of kids in Tiananmen Square. And while we remember it here, nobody remembers it in China because it got dumped into the memory hole, a non-event that never happened.
Anyway, Duginski exaggerates to place tanks in LA, but Dear Leader is indeed playing a game of Shock and Awe which involves plenty of more toxic exaggerations and disinformation.
Dana Summers cooperates in the effort with an over the top cartoon that offers a false vision of the streets. There’s no denying that things are being thrown and that some self-driving taxis were burned. It’s as if the Dodgers had just won the World Series.
But I’ve taken a pretty good look at photos from the scene and I haven’t seen any Free Palestine banners.
Granted, if there were pro-Palestine or anti-Netanyahu demonstrators present, it would provide an excuse for trotting out the antisemitism accusations. There really are both antisemites amongst us, and people with a genuine mission of fighting antisemitism.
But it seems to have also become a synonym for “Shut up and behave yourself,” which doesn’t happen to apply in the LA riots. But why let facts ruin your argument?
For an honest exam, however, let’s go back to Duginski’s cartoon and ask why it takes a major military presence to round up a handful of undocumented restaurant and construction workers?
And why officers have to cover their faces, hide their badges and wear tactical gear?
I suppose that busboy might grab a steak knife or something, but I strongly believe that a couple of guys in suits could walk into the restaurant and ask to see his papers. Maybe station a pair of cops at the back door in case the place empties out.
This is, however, a Homeland Security operation, and that department is led by the Queen of Cosplay. I guess I’d rather be an undocumented busboy than a poorly trained puppy.
In any case, it’s being staged to impress the rubes, and Heller is not the first cartoonist to point out how the rioters who tried to overturn the government on January 6 have been pardoned and turned into heroes while street demonstrators in LA are being portrayed as the enemy.
German repeats Duginski’s point, but in a less innocent tone. Duginski offered potentially neutral phrasing, but German starts from the assumption that the Washington parade is an exercise in purposefully feeding the Cult of Personality, and adds that what is happening in LA is similarly geared to demonstrating the dominance of an authoritarian government.
There have been 42 reported arrests of demonstrators, or possibly of busboys, among whom Homeland Security assures us are the “Worst of the Worst Illegal Alien Criminals in Los Angeles Including Murderers, Sex Offenders, and Other Violent Criminals.”
We should all be very frightened and grateful, and if not, we should be arrested as accomplices.
Juxtaposition of the Day
An interesting pairing of the “pouring gasoline on the fire” motif.
I like Anderson’s take because it emphasizes the dishonesty of Trump’s pretense of protecting us and trying to bring peace to the situation, when he’s clearly stirring things up.
On the other hand, in Bramhall’s cartoon, Dear Leader doesn’t even fake an interest in peace and justice, and it’s plain that he wants to set up confrontation in a state he has repeatedly attacked as the bastion of liberal commie socialist unpatriotic disloyalty. And electric cars.
He could have deployed the flying monkeys to Miami or Texas and touched off a similar reaction in the streets. The choice of Southern California seems more strategic than random.
Though I guess it would be politically risky to whip through Miami picking up Cubanos. As Alcaraz noted back in 2000, some undocumented aliens are, to conservatives, more equal than others.
Whether they like it or not.
The irony of little Elian being that, having been abducted in a custody dispute, he was anxious to “self deport” and the conservatives were equally anxious to keep him from going back home.
Who says this country can’t change?
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Speaking of innocent parties being cynically turned into political pawns, I like Wolterink’s vision of our most famous immigrant being hauled off as an alien, particularly since she represents the people who have entered the US legally and been deported anyway.
But in altering the famous Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school, Slyngstad emphasizes that US marshals were dispatched in that case to preserve her rights, and contrasts it with government forces operating with the opposite intent.
It’s also, with a bit of poetic license, a good response to those who note that the Civil Rights Movement was the last time the National Guard was ordered to intervene without a request from the governor of that state. Bridges had her moment in Louisiana, and it was two years later in Mississippi that JFK called out the guard, but the point holds: In that case, the guard was dispatched to ensure civil rights, not to override them.
Slyngstad had to play with timing and location, but he is accurate in summing up the difference between Kennedy’s actions and intentions and those currently unfolding.
And the chef’s kiss to his suggestion is the case of ICE agents seeking to enter an elementary school in LA to arrest five children in first to sixth grade. Had school authorities not stood up to them, Slyngstad could have had live models for his cartoon.
Katauskas wraps up today’s commentary with a modern version of “The Whole World is Watching.”
Indeed they are, and the example we set will not be forgotten, for better or for worse.
You don’t have to live in LA to see your country die in LA.
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