I find myself with a lot, and yet nothing, to say, so I'm going to send you off to places like the Nib, where 10 cartoonists vent their feelings about the election, not all of which I agree with. I like Luke Howard's take, I suspect, because he matches my ambivalence: On the one hand, I feel we should be cool about this, while, on the other hand, WTF?
That particular collection is interesting, but if you back out to the main site, you'll get several other cartoons on the topic, which I found more frantic than enlightening, more angry than thoughtful. If that's what you need right now, have a look.
Cartoon Movement's newsroom -- where international cartoonists submit their own work -- is full of cartoons on the topic, including this piece by Australian Pete Kreiner.
There are angry, apocalyptic cartoons all over the Internets right now, along with social media comments along the same lines, and I find it tiring because it seems not just futile but an odd reverse echo of the cock-sure arrogance we mocked in the come-up to the election.
Not that there isn't plenty to feel bad about: I've said that the most important goal is to seize back the Senate before the rightwingers get to replace a second Justice.
I looked it up and, of the 33 Senator seats up for re-election in 2018, only 8 are currently Republican. When you only need three seats to turn the tide, it would be nice to have more than eight targets and let's not forget the need, meanwhile, to protect the 23 Democrats.
And Bernie.
So there's plenty to be upset about without going off on ridiculous tangents about petitioning the Electoral College to break faith with their constituents.
Which, by the way, wouldn't work even if it did work, since it's not that hard to challenge and is quite difficult to uphold.
I also doubt that it helps to continue to sling insults around. Not only does that rarely convert an opponent to an ally, but, despite the reports of individual hateful events, let's bear in mind that even Hillary only said half of Trump's supporters were deplorables who could not be reached.
"I know there are only 60 days left to make our case -- and don't get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."
"But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
We didn't even try. In fact, we continued to lump those reachable people in with the deplorables, to insult and belittle them and drive them away.
A large part of that may be because the reporters took the flammable quote and ran with it.
There are several cartoons on that topic, as well as on how the pollsters got it so wrong, but most are simply angry with no discernible argument other than "You got it wrong!" which is an accusation, not an argument.
At least Signe Wilkinson understands that sending people who get things wrong out to investigate why they get things wrong is, at best, circular.
Ann Telnaes repeated a piece she drew in August about how we managed to get ourselves into this position, and, while the whole thing is strongly recommended, it includes this portrait of the media, which I think is more to the point than Wilkinsons, though the truth is somewhere between them.
It's easy to condemn on TV: If you employ telegenic airheads, you can't expect good, incisive work from them. And if you make them into stars, you get Andrea Mitchell.
The issue of bad reporting becomes slightly more nuanced in print, because the conceptual bottleneck is an editor who, far too often, sends a reporter to go out and get a story that has already been determined in advance. And I say that as someone who was sent out on those stories.
Which means that, if a photographer takes 120 pictures of relatively normal-looking (i.e. "boring) people at a Trump rally and one picture of a goofball in Nazi regalia, the editor will pick the photo that best tells that story about deplorables.
This is nothing new: The overwhelming majority of people at Woodstock had relatively short suburban haircuts and kept their clothes on, but you didn't see them in Life or Time because those photos didn't tell the story.
It's not "prejudice" so much as it is arrogance. "I know what the story is" is a cousin of "Global warming is a myth," because offering evidence to the contrary is futile.
And, in a newsroom, will damage your career. Shut up and take a picture of the Nazi.
Well, we'll have plenty of autopsies in the days to come, and plenty of finger-pointing over who voted wrong and who didn't vote at all and how we need to change the system.
None of which will change the outcome.
Which, Doc of Doc and Raider not withstanding, is not a suggestion that we just continue to eat, drink and be merry while we wait for the roof to cave in.
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