The Sorensen Monologues
Nonsense Encounters Per Hour Rise Dramatically
Over the past year I’ve been struck by the frequency with which I encounter conspiratorial, false, or downright threatening messages throughout the day. I initially began calling them NEPDs — Nonsense Encounters Per Day. For the strip, I switched to NEPHs because you can actually pronounce that acronym. I’m not even talking about the headlines, necessarily — just ordinary life interrupted by a “Whoa, that’s odd!” moment over and over again.
A while ago, the US government’s Covid website was switched to a ludicrous list of conspiracy theories. So there’s that, too.
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Wrecking Everything
I often watch PBS or PBS Create, especially Rick Steves and other travel shows. The cooking shows are mostly mindless “comfort food TV,” sometimes literally cooking comfort food. NOVA and Christiane Amanpour are also excellent. Now this all faces an uncertain future. I also listen to community radio stations wherever I live, and since I’ve lived in several cities with good stations, I try keep up with some of them online. Now I hear announcements saying “We’ve lost our federal funding, please help cover the shortfall.” Same story for national parks. It’s just bizarre to see visitor centers shuttered in a country as prosperous as this one (speaking in the abstract). You’d think this was the Great Depression.
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Cutting Out the Middleman
I suspect that some readers might interpret this cartoon as a call for Luddism, but mostly it’s a reflection of thoughts I’ve been having lately about out-of-control data harvesting and a growing surveillance state. I find myself daydreaming about how one might go about circumventing the layer of invasive, extractive technology that comes between us and so many mundane tasks these days. Flip phones seem oddly attractive to me now, even though I hate texting on them and I’m not sure how I’d get by without a smartphone. (Tangentially, I’m reminded of a recent Onion headline, “Study: 97% Of Average American’s Day Spent Retrieving 6-Digit Codes.”)
Many people don’t realize new cars are collecting reams of personal data and selling it. Consumer Reports and other organizations have published investigations about this, which I can’t add a link to at the moment due to a WordPress glitch, but which I encourage you to look up.
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Terms for our Times
When we treat American politics as a spectrum of equally-valid ideas and good-faith arguments made in the public interest, we’re actually distorting reality. These old binaries have become a smokescreen for news outlets to sound like they’re covering issues neutrally, when in fact they are simply slapping vague labels on things. Whether the passage of a bill is a “win” for Trump, or Republicans, or Democrats is largely irrelevant. It tells us nothing about the actual effect on people.
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Facing the Threat
The brazen and often shameless attacks on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani from members of his own party reveal how they could be going on the offensive against Trumpism and the naked bigotry of far-right extremists if they were so inclined. Yet the Democratic leadership apparently has no trouble going out of its way to condemn a popular progressive candidate who actually inspires voters.
Many old guard Democrats went so far as to back the repulsive Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign the governorship over a report that he harassed eleven female employees. Thankfully, we’ve seen Democrats like the honorable NYC comptroller Brad Lander rise to the occasion. ” On Colbert, Lander said “No mayor is going to be responsible for what happens in the Middle East, but there is something quite remarkable about a Jewish New Yorker and a Muslim New Yorker coming together to say, ‘Here’s how we protect all New Yorkers. Jewish New Yorkers and Muslim New Yorkers are not going to be divided from each other. We build a city where you have affordable housing and good schools and safe neighborhoods for everyone.’” That’s how you do it!
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Future History
This moment really does feel like I’m living through one of the many documentaries I’ve watched about World War II and other periods when countries went haywire. I much prefer watching a film or reading a book about these events after the fact, as opposed to experiencing the unraveling in real time. Now we have war in Iran (or not?) and a Supreme Court that seems fine with shipping undocumented immigrants off to random hellholes around the world without due process.
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Welcome to the US
It appears foreign nationals entering the country are increasingly having their entire online lives scrutinized and used against them if they’ve expressed the “wrong” political opinions. This is, to state the obvious, a grotesque violation of the freedom of expression as well as an obnoxiously rude thing to do to visitors from other countries who pose no actual threat.
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Wealth Hoarders
It occurred to me that the world’s richest people who seek to accumulate ever more wealth and power are not unlike the troubled souls on the reality show “Hoarders” — although I have far more compassion for regular hoarders.
The cyberlimo does not actually exist in real life as far as I know, although various people online have made efforts to design one.
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Well Excuuuse Me
There’s a whole industry of political consultants and media figures making hay by relentlessly scolding Dems (and random people online who get conflated with Dems) for causing all of this, while billionaires flagrantly destroy our institutions and Trump voters embrace ever more extreme positions. The truth is that the right has long been an engine of demonizing liberals, while simultaneously portraying liberals as the abusers. It’s the “Always Blame the Left” strategy: “We can get ever more abusive and scolding and threatening, but if you say anything bad about us at all, then you are the problem.” And so it becomes a self-defeating doom loop, this attempt to solve the problem of fascism by insulting the very people trying to fight it. The idea that if “the left” just stopped saying x, y, or z then the right would stop getting more extreme and politics would go back to normal again is just completely absurd.
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What Lives Matter?
Perhaps slightly by coincidence, this cartoon is timely in that May 25 was the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death. On one level, the strip is just documenting what has happened, but it also works as a moral fable: embracing bigotry ultimately hurts everyone, even the bigots.
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First (and Last) Contact
I’ve been thinking lately about the fact that if life were an alien movie, and the aliens were doing some of the things the authoritarian billionaires are doing, most people would clearly see the aliens as problematic. Hoovering up the earth’s resources while leaving the rest of us to fend off multiple catastrophes seems pretty immoral. Unfortunately, the aliens took over much of our news media and convinced millions of Americans they’re acting in their best interest.
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Feds Crack Down on Spring Migration
I’m trying to glean some humor from a serious issue here, but when you think about it, a crackdown on migrating birds isn’t all that far-fetched. The rules of reality have been tossed out completely, so why wouldn’t the government launch a massive, hysteria-inducing propaganda campaign against warblers? (Closely related: the Birds Aren’t Real site satirizing conspiracy theorists.)
They are, in fact, trying to undermine the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, with the Department of the Interior issuing an opinion that individuals and corporations should no longer be penalized for the incidental killing of protected birds (as tends to happen with oil spills and other industrial activities).
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