EVERYTHING WRONG

H.T. Webster was a cartoonist who was very popular in my parent’s and grandparent’s time, and who is now largely forgotten. Like the painter of Saturday Evening Post covers, Norman Rockwell, he felt it was his duty to help us to smile at ourselves. He didn’t much want to deal with the heavy duty stuff, such as racism and genocide, and preferred the innocent problems of old fashioned sexism, back when there were only two sexes. Of the over 15,000 cartoon panels he published in newspapers, hundreds were entitled either, “How To Torture Your Husband” or, “How To Torture Your Wife.” However even these cartoons tended to make the reader smile and shake their head over our insensitivity, rather than to infuriate people into holding demonstrations and fomenting riots and revolutions. Not that he was unaware of the horrors humanity is capable of bringing about. Rather he felt his job was not to further horror, but rather to make people smile. The cartoon below is from 1940, as the storm clouds of World War Two gathered.

The first cartoon is from 1938, when the suffering of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were to some degree lessening, though many were still hard pressed to get by. By poking fun at a schoolboy’s deep depression over a temporary state of affairs, to a degree where the schoolboy states “everything wrong”, it reminds us, as adults, that whatever hardship we face is only temporary. “This too will pass”, and even, “Some day we will laugh about this.”

H.T.Webster left the world shortly before I entered. Perhaps we waved at each other as we passed. In any case, a memorial anthology of his best cartoons was in my parent’s bookshelf, and as a small boy I recall very much liking the “everything wrong” cartoon. I very much identified with the boy in the cartoon.

Perhaps it is because there is a power in New England which is resistant to spring. The warm air surges north from the south, but can’t quite make it all the way north. Various meteorological factors are involved, including but nor limited to “back door cold fronts” and “cold air damming”, but in essence what resists the surging warmth is a mighty sea-breeze. The high sun warms the land so that air rises, and draws the cold air inland from over the chilled North Atlantic to fill the vacated space. This might be bearable if it was only on the coast, but it often is hundreds of miles inland, past the Hudson River to our west, and hundreds of miles south, sometimes to Virginia.

Rather than the winds from a benign “Bermuda High” to our south, from the southwest and balmy and dry, we get winds from a high pressure to the north called “The Newfoundland Wheel”, and get cold east winds and drizzle. You want to play baseball but the base paths are muddy and the grass is wet. You can’t garden because the soil is clinging mud. Perhaps the only good thing is that sometimes the temperatures drop below fifty, and then even the black flies and mosquitoes go dormant and don’t bite. But for the most part one has the discouraged, depressed sense “everything wrong.”

Perhaps I should add to this the fact that, as the end of the school year approached, time slowed down, and it seemed the end of school would never come. Even back then, just as is true now, being normal could get you sneered-at in schools.

The so-called “teachers” doing this “disciplining” may change their definitions all they want, but sneering remains sneering, and boys remain boys. What was politically correct may be very different now from what it was in 1959 when Eisnerhower was president, but teachers are still bullies, for all their mouthing about how bullying is bad, and ordinary boys are “disciplined” by sneering as badly now, if not worse, than in 1959. Which makes boys yearn for the end of such a cold wind. They long for the summer, when the awful school is shut down, and the sneering ceases. But it seems summer will take forever to get here. And so “everything wrong”.

However, after what seemed like five or six forevers, the future would at last arrive, and I’d escape the sneering, and enjoy a wonderful time of healing, called “summer vacation”.

I don’t get to have summer vacations any more. I haven’t had one in over fifty years. But I still entertain the idea a beautiful future will arrive, and be much better than the present.

Back in 1923 H.T. Weber penned a cartoon imagining life a hundred years in the future, in 2023. It is interesting how he, without describing computers, glimpsed Spell Check and AI.

CORONA VIRUS –Who Is Paranoid?–

Some cartoon speak better than essays.

TRUMP’S TECHNIQUE

Socialism Reattempted

I have been working on a political cartoon that would portray, in a picture, the sheer ignorance of certain “political correctness” and “virtue signalling.”

I use the word “ignorance” because it is the most spiritual way of stating another brother or sister doesn’t know what the -bleep- they are talking about. It is better to call a politician “ignorant” than a “liar”, when they promise everyone free cheese mined from the moon.

Truth is beauty, but ignorance is the lack of Truth, and tends to create ugly consequences. The way to solve problems is through Truth, albeit often solutions appear in a slower and more painstaking manner. Ignorant promises of quick-fixes may draw a crowd, but the happy crowd becomes an unruly mob when the promises are revealed to be lies. Then the ugly mob requires policing, and all too often what began as benevolent promises deteriorates into brutal oppression. (For example, Venezuela.)

When one has been sold a shadowy snake-oil, there is a sad moment when one realizes the stuff doesn’t work. It is during such times Truth may be called “cruel.” Also there may be a period when one undergoes disbelief and denial. During such times ignorance takes on a life of its own, fighting for its very existence, like a shadow attempting to avoid vanishing in a beam of light. Ignorance can then become dangerous, like a cornered rat, but also comical, for there is something humorous about the sight of a person attempting to cling to a shadow.

For example, when I have studied long and hard to glean some tidbit of Truth, (for example about Arctic Sea-Ice), I find it comical when some young whippersnapper, who knows nothing about the topic, acts as if they know more, and furthermore claims I should be censored. In some ways they work harder to censor Truth than to know Truth. Such behavior deserves a cartoon.

In order draw out the humor and create a cartoon one needs to adjust the contrast, placing events together in a way that reduces ignorance to absurdity. While I haven’t worked out the details, I have been toying with the idea of comparing the 1968 Democrat Convention with the 2020 Democrat Convention, and guessing what young Democrats outside the convention might protest about, concerning the politics of Democrat higher-ups, inside the convention.

In 1968 Democrat policy had us in the Vietnam War, but the young Democrats, who faced being drafted and being forced to fight and perhaps die, were demanding a reason to die, and refusing to fight without reason, but rather than reason they were attacked by the police of the Democrat mayor of Chicago, whereupon the youth began chanting, “The whole world is watching.”

In 2020 Democrat policy seems at least as ignorant as 1968’s, and it occurred to me young Democrats might be equally frustrated, but have a different chant outside the Democrat convention. This time it might be, “The whole world is laughing.”

(For in my eyes the lack of Truth involved among Democrats makes much, spoken as gospel by the “Politically correct”, appear so ignorant it sounds like the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s fools. But modern youth are not always the fools their brain-washers assume, and already bristle at some of the ignorant suggestions they are asked to swallow, if they are to be “Politically Correct”.).

My personal cartoon of this situation would have 1968 and “The whole world is watching” on a first frame and 2000 and “The whole world is laughing” on the second, but lots needs to be worked out. I’m not sure I’ll ever get the details of the picture right.

Therefore I was glad to see a fellow did get a lot right, and displayed, in a different way, the joke of “Political Correct Ignorance”, at least in part:

AVOIDING CIVIL WAR

This seems to be a time when it is important to stay calm and not to be provoked, for the inhabitants of the so-called “swamp” in Washington D.C. actually have no interest in preserving the peace. Why should they? Peace would involve exposure, for peaceful people have honest discussions, and honesty would expose a lot of corruption, which is how the name “swamp” was earned.

The corrupt have backed themselves into a corner, and therefore many will not do the spiritual thing, which is to publicly confess their wrong-doing. For if they were spiritual they would not have been corrupted in the first place. Therefore many will do the unspiritual thing when cornered, which is to fight like a cornered rat.

The thing that always amazes me is the ability the corrupt have to deny their own corruption. They often are oblivious of the way their greed has led them astray, even when it is blatantly obvious to others. “All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the Lord.” (Proverbs 16:2)

In the case of communism the greed is justified in three ways. First, the highest spirituality is dismissed as “the opiate of the masses”, and atheism is put forward as being more pragmatic. Second, coveting what others own is justified as “sharing”, in some ways like Christians shared what they owned in the book of Acts, but in other ways by brute force, at the point of a gun, like a bank robber. Third, dishonesty is made to look positive because “the ends justify the means”.

The dishonesty always seemed most vile to me, especially when it involves using others, and laughing at them behind their backs. To use another as a “useful idiot” always seemed like a violation of trust to me. Furthermore the person most likely to be fooled is the person doing the tricking, because procrastination is a way we mortals have of never doing what we promise ourselves we will do “someday.” Therefore “the ends justify the means” is like a person buying cigarettes so he can seriously think about planning to quit; (the person will never quit by smoking, but it placates his uneasy conscience to “plan“.) Lastly, the “means“ get meaner and meaner, because the greed for power gets greater and greater. Stalin may have meant well, but he killed off more and more “partners“, erasing them from public pictures until he alone was pictured, for that was his “means” of effective control, good governance, and order. He was proof that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Our Founding Fathers were well aware of how power corrupts, which is why they were so careful to devise a constitution that shares power between three branches of government, with checks and balances. Some in Washington want to escape the checks and balances, because it seems to obstruct efficient governance. Therefore they speak of the constitution as being an “evolving” document, which is just a way of trying to get around its constraints. They don’t want to be constrained, because they feel they know best, and others are not as wise as they are.

This is how corruption begins. One loses respect for being open and honest and discussing things with others in a respectful manner, and resorts to some form of dishonesty and disrespect. Rather than arriving at a decision based on higher Truth, back-room deals are made, involving bribes of one sort or another. Rather than what is best for all concerned, the focus becomes narrow: “What’s in this for me?”

When such rot sets in our nation is designed to expose it. A free press is suppose to be part of that exposure, but in our current crisis the press was purchased by the elite and all but emasculated. Were it not for the unexpected blooming of the internet in the past twenty years the free press would be dead. As it is the public became aware of how bad the corruption in Washington was becoming in the nick of time, and now a desperate battle has begun.

This is a battle between Truth and deceivers. The deceivers do not want to give up all that deceit has illicitly “earned” them. They think they know how the game is played, when in fact they have broken countless rules. They want to continue to play as they have played, unaware that they have broken so many rules they have created a sort of anarchy, and have undermined their own foundations, and are sawing off the very branch they are perched upon. If they studied history at all they would see that, if they “win”, they are likely to inherit horrors as bad as, or even worse than, the horrors they fear they’ll face if they “lose”, and have to give up all the perks of their corruption.

One attribute of the corrupt, and also of communism, is that there is a movement away from true sharing of power. It involves the mentality of all-or-nothing. Communism allows no other party besides the communist party, and corruption allows no alternative as well. It is a narrowing down of thought, a diminishing of the mind.

Because of this, communism prefers violence to civil discourse. It wants no checks and no balances. In order to eradicate opposition it seeks to “purge” differing views, and dislikes individuality. Individuality is abhorred because it differs, whether it differs as a person, or a family, or a community, or a state, or a nation. Communism seeks a “multiculturalism” that abolishes all nations, and therefore all cultures. All the talk about “respecting diversity” actually disrespects differences, when you look hard at what is actually stated. In the end what is wanted is not a cultured people, but culture-less masses.

A cultured people prefer to use civil procedures, to becoming a rabble that riots. The corrupt prefer a riot, and encourage riotous behavior, because if things get out of hand they may seize power in the name of “restoring order”, whereas civil procedure would expose their corruption and face them with reform.

Therefore it is important to stay calm and not be provoked. When faced by useful idiots chanting nonsense, point out the nonsense quietly. Over and over and over again. For many innocents have not thought all that deeply about what they do, and are largely being loyal to a cause. And one thing about the loyal is this: Once they discover they have been lied to, and are being used, and are laughed at behind their backs, they flip sides with astonishing alacrity.

Lastly, keep your sense of humor even when things look grim.

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LOCAL VIEW –Who’s Obstructing Whom?–

I’m nearly too incredulous to be disgusted by the insanity occurring in Washington these days. As usual, whatever the Democrats accuse others of is their projection; they are experts on what they themselves do, even if others aren’t.  Therefore, if a president is accused of “obstructing justice” (or merely “investigated”, which is the same thing, in an insinuating way),  I immediately look to see what sort of justice the Democrats are obstructing. (Forgive me if this seems a bit rash, but it has become habitual, because it so often is justified.) Then, secondly, I postulate what their reasons might be.

My conclusion is that the FBI is part of the “swamp” that President Trump wants to “drain”, but that there are some in that swamp that fear exposure. The process of cleaning up the FBI would expose the mud, the rot, the corruption. This is not desired by those who have sold-out or bought-into the stink. Therefore they will do anything possible to divert attention and obstruct the searchlights of review.

All the clamor about investigating the President is an attempt to investigate the investigator, by those who shrink at the prospect of being investigated.

Or it sure looks that way to me.

But doing this obstructs the President the People elected, and is in fact an obstruction of the American Way.  A murmur of discontent is growing.

The Beltway Bunch are seemingly oblivious to the fact that, while they may be a huge majority (roughly 90% voted against Trump) in the District of Columbia, they live in an Ivory Tower in a sea that is rising towards storm. Rather than leading the People they are betraying them, and that is no way to create happiness.

LOCAL VIEW –Tipping Point–

When life gets too quiet we crave some noise.
Noisy life makes us seek quiet again.
We’re always alternating our joys.
We have visions and get busy and then
We feel over-worked, and seek some new toys,
Some new hamster wheel to take a spin in
But it becomes a rat race; with the boys
We go out, and begin with a big grin
But wind up hung-over; each pleasure destroys
Its foundation somehow; each winking allure
Winds us up jaded. Our poor brain employs
Years of research to find peace that is pure
And will last: Perfect balance; perfect poise…
…but then it’s too quiet, so we crave some noise.

My wife and I have decided we don’t feel fulfilled unless we are busy as bees. We cannot seem to sit and sip a drink without brainstorming and coming up with a whole new crop of ideas. Soon our schedule is filled to the brim, and we are happy, until…

There always seems to be one unplanned thing that pops in, and tips us from joy to complete despair. What saves us is our sense of humor. It has happened so many times that we have a private motto (regarding how full our schedule is.) “99% equals joy; 101% equals despair.”

Some people say, “Into each life a little rain must fall.” Yesterday I decided it could also be “Into each life a little weasel will call.”

Should some weasel enter your life today, remember you are not alone, and keep your sense of humor.