An Ouroboros (Earth Home Mixup Mixtape Mix)

Every once in a while, it pays to run the rhetoric to earth.

To wit, Jen Sorensen’s latest ‘toon might seem aimed at Republicans, especially if you just hang with the “not a scientist” detail we offer here. But it’s not really so direct a criticism of the GOP; where that sneaking suspicion comes from is the (ahem!) “accidental” coincidence between conservative rhetoric specifically and irresponsible rhetoric in general.

If Sorensen really wanted to make it about Republicans, the swimming pool frame would not be about biodegradation but, rather, blaming Democrats for the lack of undocumented immigrants to clean the damn pool.

Sure, it’s a little thing, but details matter.

And, certes, we would acknowledge a certain weakness of this sort of rhetoric. After all, the home is different from the world at large in the same way the family budget is different from the business budget is different from the government budget. Still, though, the only reason we put up with treating the world around us this way is because we don’t see it so directly. If all the waste we’ve dumped into the ocean was instead piled up in the streets, people would actually give a damn. Of course, they would just vote to dump it all in the ocean, which in turn leads us back ’round the ouroboros.

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Sorensen, Jen. “If people treated their homes like they treat the earth”. Daily Kos. 17 February 2015.

A Jump in the Water, Come on Baby Get Wet With Me

Perhaps it is a bit early in the day to be diving into the comics page, but we might as well pick up where we left off yesterday. Well, okay. Sort of. You know what I mean.

Mark Fiore animates the “Frog of War”, who in turn reminds that NBC News’ Brian Williams is hardly the only person to have lied about what went on in Iraq during the Bush Wars. The cartoonist himself reminds:

Sure, it boggles my mind how Brian Williams could embellish and “misremember” an event like his helicopter ride in Iraq years ago, but the firestorm around his imagined combat experience is inordinately fierce compared to the relative silence around all of the other Iraq War-era ‘misrememberings’, journalistic and otherwise.

Remember the networks’ “military analysts” who were part of a coordinated Pentagon propaganda campaign to sell the war, who personally profited from defense contracts at the same time? I don’t remember any higher-ups in the media or the military getting fired or suspended because of that shameful episode.

Pass/Fail

Remember how the cycle works.

It is a really simple idea: We would like to be able to support our law enforcement institutions and personnel.

This argument has been going on for a while; cartoonist Jen Sorensen asks an obvious question. Indeed, it is so obvious a question one need not wonder why the public discourse flees it in screaming terror.

So here’s the thing: When an ugly episode arises involving law enforcement, we are reminded that these episodes come about because of a proverbial few bad seeds. Yet these few seem rather quite protected by other police traditions that require the participation of the rest of those allegedly good officers. Didn’t see a thing, or the guy was definitely reaching for a gun, or what, do you want a guilty person to go free just because of a technicality?

But that is just a fallacy, a fundamentally dishonest reaction. It always seems to come down to an all-or-nothing proposition put before us by police supporters.

A Perfectly Reasonable Request

Over at Daily Kos, Dartagnan makes a perfectly reasonable request:

Considering the gravity of the circumstances and their potential impact on race relations in this country, it would seem prudent to hear from some actual police officers reacting to the non-indictment of one of their own for the “chokehold” death of Eric Garner. As has been pointed out repeatedly both here on this site (although those voices are decidedly in the minority) and in many other web-based forums, the job of a police officer entails a high degree of personal risk and stress often with very little in terms of reward. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to at least consider and try to appreciate some of their views so we can have a full understanding of the attitudes towards African-Americans in general of the officers to whom we have entrusted our safety and protection.

As Reported in The Week, several confirmed legitimate police have publicly weighed in on this tense and delicate debate on the website PoliceOne.com ....

With that kind of setup, certainly you have some idea of what comes next.

Call it what you want, but it is important to note that the one thing we shouldn’t call it is new.

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Dartagnan. “Wait A Minute—Let’s Hear From Some Actual Police Officers Before We Rush To Judgment”. Daily Kos. 4 December 2014.

Image credit: Detail of cartoon by Randall Enos, 4 December 2014, via Cagle Post.

Something About Justice

This is what it comes to. This is the problem. And no, it is not so simple as black and white.

Jenny Durkan, formerly a U.S. Attorney from Seattle, offered some insights recently, in the wake of the Ferguson Grand Jury decision to not charge Officer Darren Wilson with any crimes related to the shooting death of Michael Brown, about why it is hard to secure any sense of justice when police officers have the appearance of being criminals. “I know firsthand,” she writes, “how difficult it is to prosecute police officers.” And then she recounts a really awful period in the history of the Seattle Police Department, a force whose misconduct demanded and received federal attention, a story that is still playing out, a hyperdrama that includes the police complaining that they cannot do their jobs properly and safely without excessive force.

There comes a point at which some might argue that of course the police are going to fight for every last scrap of force, and it really is properly arguable in the context of how the laws of our society operate and intermingle with diverse customs. Trying to identify a threshold between what is tacitly known and accepted—officers can customize their incident reports, omitting or rearranging details as they please to make for a more prosecutable narrative, and the state is allowed to destroy the evidence that would support or contradict those narratives—is an abstraction both peculiar and common. It is customarily inappropriate to speak ill of the police in any terms, which is its own bizarre question insofar as we should not hold our breath for any explanation of just how one applies to become black.

An Extraneous Blame Game

Briefly: Sure, if your mother is still accessible to you in this world, give her a hug.

The rest of this is just … I don’t know, silly.

Quite literally on the day Keith Knight’s cartoon, detailed above, posted at Daily Kos Comics, a note popped up from a friend that her mother had fallen and broken her arm. You know, a request for prayers and best wishes.

Naturally, I sent my friend a link to the cartoon.

It was … what, two days later? Another friend informed us that her mother had fallen and broken her wrist. Prayers and best wishes dutifully filed in, and I won’t nitpick the point that it seems a dubious proposition to pray that God will undo His will and magically heal the damage. We can set prayer aside, and just send cartoons on such occasions.

A bit before midnight last night that same friend checked in: “So, guess what…Mom fell again today. This time she broke her right wrist.”

Sigh. I don’t have a cartoon link for this one.

Best wishes, of course. But come on, either God or Keith Knight—who do I get to blame for this absurdity?

How about Isaac Newton?

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Knight, Keith. “Visiting Germany”. Daily Kos. 11 November 2014.

A Burden of Wealth

Jen Sorensen notes:

Now, it seems to me that other factors may be coming into play here. For example, when 1% of the world’s population holds as much wealth as the bottom half, you’re going to see some pressure on those Picasso price points. It’s a clash of the titans — titans with near-infinite resources to spend impressing each other to death!

When you see the price of luxury homes as a more reliable indicator of inflation than the price of milk or gas — or government data showing that inflation is under control — it says more about your limited, paranoid perspective than anything else.

Which, in turn, reminds me of something Emma Goldman wrote a century ago:

For surely it is not the rich who contribute to patriotism. They are cosmopolitans, perfectly at home in every land. We in America know well the truth of this. Are not our rich Americans Frenchmen in France, Germans in Germany, or Englishmen in England? And do they not squandor with cosmopolitan grace fortunes coined by American factory children and cotton slaves? Yes, theirs is the patriotism that will make it possible to send messages of condolence to a despot like the Russian Tsar, when any mishap befalls him, as President Roosevelt did in the name of his people, when Sergius was punished by the Russian revolutionists.

What else are we supposed to think when rich Americans complain about the burdens of shopping for real estate in London?

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Sorensen, Jen. “Life in the billionaire bubble”. Daily Kos. 18 November 2014.

Goldman, Emma. “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty”. Anarchy and Other Essays. Second Revised Edition. New York & London: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911.

Not What We Would Call Comforting

So here’s the score.

There is always a ripple of gratification when it emerges that one is not alone in noticing something. That is to say, as something obvious occurs and nobody else seems to notice, or else they simply do not care, there will always be a sensation of encouragement in recognizing that other people both notice and care.

To wit, cartoonist Jen Sorensen.

So, yes, it is nice to know that we at This Is are not alone in the Universe; other people notice the functional contradiction. To the other, it is also a price of political liberalism: More often than not, when you’re right, there is no cause for celebration.

Election Reflection

It seems a vicious cycle.

One party, usually the Republican Party, stoops to a new low in campaigning. The people validate the maneuver because negative ads, argumentative fallacies, and outright lies are much more entertaining than boring policy details. Now it’s on the market. The other party must play along, or else get waxed yet again. And that’s when voters start complaining.

It’s been this way at least since Atwater.

Who remembers 2004?

With John Kerry on the Democratic ticket, a pack of angry conservatives who showed up for basically any election he was involved in unleashed their fury on the nation, denouncing him as having received combat awards he did not deserve. It got so bad that a man named Paul Galanti denounced truth as un-American. But the ringleader, named Larry Thurlow, swore up and down that he had eyes on Kerry and the future Massachusetts senator and U.S. Secretary of State did not do what the reports earning his medals said he did.

One of Kerry’s awards was for pulling a man out of the drink under fire. This is an ironic setup, of course, because life provides great punch lines.

Larry Thurlow himself received awards for that day.

And there was a third medal. Eventually a reporter figured out who received it and obtained the relevant reports.

That medal was for pulling Larry Thurlow out of the drink, while under fire.

You would think that would pretty much end the fake scandal. Except it didn’t.

The accusations continued to erode Kerry’s credibility, despite the fact of being untrue.

So the question is: In a competitive marketplace, why would what works not be adopted by competitors?

So every time Americans reward that kind of vice with votes, they are simply setting themselves up for more viciousness.

And then they complain about the wretched state of our politics.

There seems to be a contradiction in that outcome.

It is almost as if we are enacting a modern variation on the ancient scapegoat ritual, and elect politicians specifically to complain about them. And while that might seem an entertaining sport of some kind, it also has real, living consequences.

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Wuerker, Matt. “Poli Sci”. Daily Kos. 6 November 2014.

The Call of the Wild?

Oh, meow.

Click. Read. Figure it out for yourself.

Detail of cartoon by Matt Bors, 5 November 2014, via Daily Kos.