Jen Sorensen either has good contacts in Copenhagen, a crystal ball or one helluva nice bit of luck with timing. I suspect a combination of the three.
This cartoon went up before the IPCC issued its latest report, which has been read as conclusive by everyone except, as she suggests, the tinfoil brigade.
But, the peril to our planet's future being secondary to the peril to the next quarter's profits, the paranoid and ignorant are being fed raw meat as usual, and, while it's vaguely amusing to see how Biblical literalists struggle to maintain the Flintstone Theory, this particular campaign against science has more specific and immediate impact than does the long-range campaign to undermine our educational system.
Which is to say that it comes on the verge of a very depressing election in which much of the debate has been carried forth on the rhetorical level of "Is so!" and "Is not!", not so frequently about climate change this time around, but decidedly about the absolute certainty that affordable health care is (A) a bad thing and (B) is not working, and that paying people a living wage is a very bad idea indeed.
Moynihan's famous dictum that you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts is completely out of date at a time in which facts of all sorts are handed out on street corners.
For instance, I saw the other day the proposition that the ACA was forced down the Republicans' throats with no input permitted, and that it is a lie that it was patterned on conservative proposals in the first place.
This despite the clearly provable fact that -- however much it may have varied from the program put in place by Romney in Massachusetts or proposed by Republicans in 1993 -- consideration of the Affordable Care Act included the proposal of 788 amendments, only 67 of them (8.5%) from Democrats. Of the 197 amendments which were adopted (one-quarter of those presented), 161 (82%) were Republican-sponsored.
Hardly seems like anything was shoved down their throat, despite the fact that they snapped to and voted against it in lockstep.
The overwhelming sense that tomorrow's event is not so much an election as a National IQ Test is so depressing that I decided to go look to see what an off-year election looked like a half-century ago, or, more precisely, in 1962, since '64 was a presidential year.
One of these days I may pony up for a subscription to wider offerings, but for now my range of post-1923 newspapers is pretty much limited to Northern New York, whose small community papers used a lot of Bill Crawford's NEA offerings.
In 1962, this panel appeared just before the elections, and it does seem odd that unemployment and the economy would not be front page news, until you see what was.
Well, yes, that would tend to focus the attention, especially at a time in which the national interest was occasionally placed above partisan loyalty and corporate profits.
And so the famous blink took center stage.
I decided, therefore, that instead of casting back to the off-year elections of 52 years ago, we'd see what was being debated and cartooned about two years after the 1964 election, in 1966.
Turns out that LBJ had just returned from a trip to Asia, where he declared that the US was going to stand up to the spread of Communism in the current world just as it had successfully done in Korea a decade and a half earlier.
Well, gosh. I guess they had a few things to ponder on their way to the polls, too.
Meanwhile, over in Buffalo, the Criterion, a black weekly that remains in print today but has no appreciable on-line presence, was promoting the idea that turnout not only matters in a vague sense but is a moral duty.
The Civil Rights Act was only two years old at the time and the Civil Rights Movement remained in full swing, so this probably wasn't a difficult message to get across that year.
The quote, by the way, is from Goethe: Duty is carrying on promptly and faithfully the affairs now before you. It is to fulfil the claims of today.
The African-American vote had not been substantially repressed in the North on a systematic basis, and the cartoon is part of a traditional get-out-the-vote message that had been part of that community for a long time, in part because of times when voting was denied and in part because of places where it was still a struggle despite the gains made.
And a right being undermined, as we return to the current year for this Pat Bagley cartoon, which has a great deal more heft than the vague "if you don't vote, don't complain" cartoons seen in the runup to election day.
But which of course will fall right into the "Is not!" and "Is too!" endless cycle of current non-argument, which tempts me to post this classic Monty Python bit as the moment of zen.
However, I'm not feeling the humor in it at this point.
Instead, I'll go back to history, for this classic Thomas Nast panel (the original of which is at the Billy Ireland in Columbus), in which the Tammany Tiger, symbol of arrogant wealth, misused power and self-serving corruption, stands over the prostrate form of Columbia, with Justice and the Economy equally savaged in the background, snarling at the reader and defiantly asking, "What are you going to do about it?"
It's an excellent question.
I wish I had an excellent answer.
Comments