As the NYT’s Linda Greenhouse notes, the five Republican judges simply ignored the context of a deadly pandemic, insisting that elections rules should not “ordinarily” be altered close to an election. Never mind that these circumstances were anything but ordinary, and that failing to make a reasonable extension for mail-in ballots would disenfranchise tens of thousands, and possibly lead to more deaths.
The good news is that the Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court still managed to pull off a victory over the Republican incumbent that the GOP was trying desperately to protect. This makes all those people who stood in line to vote, in face masks, in the rain, pretty darn heroic in my opinion.
I have trouble watching the debates these days because they feel like a gigantic farce. They’re like a holdover from another era, normalizing events that gloss over Republicans’ breathtaking attacks on democratic norms. Here we are, gathering the candidates to discuss the nuances of their policy proposals so Americans can make a rational, informed decision about whom to vote for. Never mind the GOP’s scorched-earth obstructionism, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, Trump’s packed judiciary, absurd gerrymandering that favors Republicans, the Electoral College, and massive voter suppression efforts (more than 1,000 polling places have closed since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act). I realize this can sound a little cynical and defeatist, which isn’t my point. Hearing good ideas and having a vision for the Democratic party is important. But there’s a big authoritarian elephant in the room.
As I was finishing up this comic, I saw that Paul Krugman had some similar thoughts in his latest column.
Yoga pants may seem like a trivial subject matter, but I’d argue this cultural stuff is way more important than most people realize. It’s about so much more than the pants, which of course I wore as I drew this cartoon. These ideas form our symbolic vocabulary and frame our entire way of seeing the world.
NYT columnist David Brooks is the latest in a long line of yoga pants bashers, from incels who think women wear them to torment men (one of whom committed a mass shooting at a yoga studio, you’ll recall), to a Montana politician who wanted to make them illegal, to random guys in New Zealand. Brooks adds a new angle in a recent column written from the perspective of an online extremist:
Did you really think you could raise me on gourmet coffee and yoga pants and I wouldn’t find a way to rebel against your relativism and materialism? Didn’t you observe the eternal pattern — that if you try to flatten a man to the bourgeois he will rebel by becoming a fanatic?
Ostensibly Brooks is opposing both the alt-right and the “alt-left” (whatever that is — people on Twitter upset about racism, I guess?) in this strange piece, but it reads like his usual shtick of painting liberals as decadent, effeminate aristocrats. Never mind the opulent tastes of the right-wing donor class, or the bourgeois materialism of the Republican suburbs, or the moral travesty of polluters hastening the death of the planet. It is the gourmet coffee and yoga pants leading us to our doom. Which makes me wonder: Does David Brooks only drink Folgers Crystals out of solidarity with the working class? I’m guessing not.
Back to the yoga pants for a sec. It’s ironic that a form of exercise that increases strength and flexibility could be spun as some kind of cultural weakness, but women are used to having our interests diminished as “chick flicks” or “chick lit.” Anything that could be perceived as emasculating is mocked as silly and inferior. The alt-right has its origins in reactionary opposition to women’s empowerment, and equates the liberalization of America with feminization. David Brooks is actually very much in line with this school of thought, though with a more polite pseudo-intellectual veneer.
This was inspired by a Wall Street Journal article that was published in March, but for some reason went viral over the weekend. The article specifically discusses multi-million dollar dream homes in the Sunbelt that aren’t selling:
For their retirement in a suburb of Asheville, N.C., Ben and Valentina Bethell spent about $3.5 million in 2009 to build their dream home: a roughly 7,500-square-foot, European-style house with a commanding view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Bethells said they love the home but it now feels too big, especially since their adult son visits only about once a year.
“It now feels too big.” WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN? Meanwhile, an entire generation stuck with student loan debt, capricious contract work, and sky-high real estate prices, can’t afford to buy at all. And the minimum wage remains $7.25/hr, where it was last set a decade ago.
I suppose everyone is talking about the Mueller Report now, but I don’t really have much to say until we learn what’s actually in the report. We know from public records that the Trump campaign had all sorts of dealings with Russia that any reasonable person would interpret as coordination; we do not know why Mueller was unable to bring charges. Anyone making sweeping conclusions based on the wording of the Barr letter is engaging in uninformed spin and premature bloviation. Unfortunately, this seems to be most of the media.
Speaking of which, a far more important issue we face is the crisis in journalism. I’ve had the idea for a while now that if Fox News were an individual reporter, he or she would have been denounced as an unethical fraud and exiled from the profession. But when this same lack of ethics applies to an entire network, many media insiders can’t bring themselves to apply the same standards. Anyone remember Jayson Blair, the fabulist reporter who caused a major scandal for the New York Times? You might say Fox is like that, but with a plutocratic agenda.
Fox covers for itself by sprinkling in very small amounts of real reporting alongside wackadoo disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and hate speech. This leads other media professionals to erroneously defend the network in the name of “press freedom.” It creates an opening for holier-than-thou pundits to call the Dems “closed-minded” for not having a debate on the channel, when a more apt comparison would be having a debate on InfoWars. Well-meaning progressive groups play into this strategy when they celebrate the occasional Fox anchor who criticizes Trump or says something sane. Recently, former Democratic strategist Donna Brazile made the decision to join Fox as a contributor, further lending them the veneer of legitimacy. (I was going to include her at the end of the cartoon, but decided it made things too complicated.)
Watching New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the terrorist attack against Muslims in Christchurch threw into relief what a real leader of a country looks like. I couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous of my antipodean sistren and brethren. Meanwhile, here in the States, Trump is downplaying the growing threat of white nationalism that he’s helped foment.
I had a bit of an internal debate over the title of this cartoon, because I felt using the first name of a female politician while using the last name of a male one could be seen as tapping into gender preconceptions about authority figures. But in my personal experience, New Zealanders often refer to Jacinda Ardern as “Jacinda” much like Beto O’Rourke is referred to as “Beto.” I had to identify her as being from New Zealand, since many Americans don’t know her name, and “Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand” was getting a bit unwieldy.
I read a depressing Dave Eggers article in the Guardian over the weekend about the recent Trump rally in El Paso, where multiple people are quoted as liking Trump because he’s “strong.” This would be the ultimate triumph of form over content, of personality cult over policy, of perceived “masculinity” over “feminine weakness,” of unhinged belligerent bluster over anything real. So, with this in mind, I tried placing progressive policy ideas in the voice of someone hypermasculine and dumb. Some may think this is similar to the Liberal Redneck, who I’m a fan of, but the Liberal Redneck spouts wisdom in a lovely southern drawl. The character in my cartoon is intended to be more like George W. Bush or Trump, someone who simply acts dumb (or is dumb) to advance a political agenda.
Got a chuckle out of this letter to the editor in my alumni magazine:
I was dismayed when I opened my copy of Virginia Magazine and found a short article celebrating the appearance of John Waters at the Virginia Film Festival (“Filthy Fun,” Spring 2010).
It is to my shame and regret that I admit to attending a late night showing of his Pink Flamingos in Wilson Hall in the spring of 1975. I remain haunted to this day not by the “fun” of attending the film, but by the fact that it was my first experience with true pornography.
The invitation by the U.Va. arts community to host Mr. Waters is a profound commentary on our social order today. Surely a host could have been found to help celebrate light, goodness and truth in the arts, rather than one who will lead minds and hearts into the descent into the shadows of the soul.
In retrospect, I probably should have drawn the MILFs more attractively in this cartoon, with a bit more emphasis on the “F” than the “M.” But really, the whole thing isn’t about their attractiveness per se — I have no problem with attractive women entering politics. What I’m talking about here is the normalizing veneer these wingnut ladies lend to radical ideas. They pose as nurturing everymoms, but advocate the same old anti-worker, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-education agenda the far right has spewed for years.
If you had any lingering doubts that the right is pursuing a strategy of putting a pretty face on ugly ideas, check out the trailer below for a new propaganda film called “Fire From the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman.” Never mind that many of the women featured aren’t exactly from the Midwest. Filled with empty platitudes, it’s put out by Citizens United, the same people who brought you the Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions by corporations. Be sure to wait for the grizzly bear! (Via TPM.)
This past weekend was the 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art, held every three years at Ohio State University. I was invited to be a speaker this year, which was an incredible honor; hopefully I’ll have time to blog about it soon. My strip was due mere hours after landing back in Seattle, and I hammered this out in a state of utter exhaustion. But I like how it came out. It was probably more than a little inspired by the “Life in Hell” cartoons Matt Groening was reading at his talk the night before, in which he simply illustrates crazy stuff his kids said. At OSU, I engaged in a year’s worth of wacky conversation over a four-day period. These snippets are just the ones that came to mind first. Pictured in the cartoon are: Rina Piccolo, Dan Piraro, Sean Parkes, and… well, maybe I’ll hold off in revealing the last cartoonist, lest he not want that to be Google-able forever.
As Paul Krugman pointed out yesterday, the more market fundamentalism fails, the more vigorously it seems to be embraced. Bipartisan compromise now consists of agreement between the center-right and off-the-deep-end psychocapitalists. I honestly don’t see a way out of this self-defeating feedback loop given our current political environment.
Before I wrote this cartoon, I was actually thinking of doing one that showed Republicans praising FDR the way Obama has praised Reagan, just as Krugman mentioned (hey, great minds think alike!), to show how ridiculously improbable that would be. Also, is it just me, or shouldn’t more people be freaking out about Ron “End the Fed” Paul overseeing the Fed? I dunno, maybe not enough Americans understand what the Fed is.
On another note, all I want for Christmas is for you to join the Slowpoke Facebook Krew, or follow me on Twitter. If you don’t already do so, of course.
I’m not saying all protests are intelligent, or that they cannot be criticized. The problem is that, like “political correctness,” the term “cancel culture” paints all civil rights activism with a broad brush and shuts down thoughtful discussion. The right rules in part by means of Orwellian Newspeak concepts that masquerade as objective phenomena, but are really just name-calling.
Now, there is a real tendency for large numbers of people on social media to demand that someone be fired, but this can be good or bad; it depends entirely on the specifics of the case. Social media is full of toxicity and abuse, and I think a lot of issues can be addressed without calling for someone to lose their livelihood (though there are cases where public figures should step aside, and it is perfectly legitimate to express this).
For further thoughts, I’d check out this essay in TIME by a Muslim woman in Toronto. And as Paul Krugman recently tweeted, “The rage over ‘cancel culture’ is also, I think, part of this syndrome; some people can’t stand the idea that they should be asked to, say, avoid insulting women or minorities, as if that were a terrible imposition.”
Jen Sorensen is a cartoonist for Daily Kos, The Nation, In These Times, Politico and other publications throughout the US. She received the 2023 Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning from the National Press Foundation, and is a recipient of the 2014 Herblock Prize and a 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. She is also a Pulitzer Finalist.
