Since the first cave dweller scrawled on a rock, artists have been trying to teach us. We ignore them at our peril and we thus live in the most perilous of times. And so we slog forward as best we can.
LAUGH OR CRY DEPT. Cartoonists condense reality better than even bumper sticker…er…meme writers. Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Trudeau delivered a typical gut punchline in last Sunday’s “Doonesbury,”
The scene, a DeSantis Florida classroom.
Teacher: “Then came the Civil War, caused by a controversial labor practice. Moving on…”
Black Kid: “Huh?”
Blonde Girl: “Who won? Did the whites win?”
Ouch.
Words matter. So does silence.
MARK TWAIN & BIG WILL. A few years ago, some revisionist published a sanitized version of “Huckleberry Finn” with the word “slave” replacing the reviled en-thing. Sign of the times, I suppose. Even the Bible has undergone housecleaning.
More than a half-century after the legendary Britannica Great Books collection was first published in 1952,, Associate Editor Mortimer Adler was asked if he would add any titles. The volumes span the western tradition from Aeschylus to Freud. Yes, he responded, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Twain’s magnum opus.
Twain labored long and hard to capture the language of the old south where he grew up. Now, even Cliffs Notes risk being banned rather than smiting the sacrosanct sensibilities of our precious snowflakes.
In Gov. Ron DeSatanist’s Florida, anything is fair game as long as it generates media exposure for the wannabe godhead.
The Bob Englehart cartoon I posted at NevadaLabor.com will remain forever current.
It shows a Puritan leader making an announcement to his righteous school board true believers.
“We’ve solved the book banning problem. We’re not going to teach kids to read,” quoth the holy man.
Not even William Shakespeare has proved immune to Orwellian revisionists. Pentameter must be like Devil worship, right?
Words matter.
RAINBOW BEND. When President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the country went thru self analysis and self-flagellation. Was America a sick society, suffused with hatred creating a miasma of violence? We now have a poster-child moment with the murder of shopkeeper Laura Ann Carleton of Cedar Glen, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles.
Her crime? Displaying a rainbow pride flag in front of her store named “mag.pi.” The 66 year-old mother of nine was beloved in her community and is now the latest casualty of the culture wars. Sad and sick.
Right after JFK was blown away, a cartoonist said it all without words, drawing an American flag shot off its pole by a rope-piercing bullet.
ORWELLIAN HELLSBELLIAN AWARD: This week’s winner is Russia’s Wagner Group mercenary mogul Yevgeny Prigozhin who asserted that his shock troops are making “Africa even more free.” Words matter.
GET EVEN, PART DEUX. Much has been written about the Marion, Kansas, police dept. ransacking the local weekly newspaper’s offices and the home of its 98 year-old owner, contributing to her death the next day.
Less noticed was the case of the Wausau, Wisconsin, Pilot & Review, a non-profit news website founded by a former Gannett chain journalist.
The publication reported that a wealthy state senator had called a 13 year-old boy a “fag” at a county board meeting. The paper acted on a tip and obtained several confirmations.
Didn’t matter, the rich guy sued and lost. But the little paper is almost bankrupt as a result, an example of a cancer spreading throughout the American body politic. It’s basically the Donald Trump strategy to shut up the fake news media.
The Pilot & Review has been forced to spend almost $150,000 to beat back the lawsuit. The judge threw it out of court but Mr. Magabux is appealing.
Founder-editor Shereen Siewert told the New York Times that she has no idea how to continue paying both her lawyers and her staff of four.
I have an idea.
By putting in the work, people who can read and write proper English can represent themselves in court. (Sincere apologies to all my valiant attorney friends.)
Small media can effectively fight delicately sensitive and vindictive wealthy individuals who possess bottomless funding to sue the humble into silence — especially in states without legal protection from SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) actions.
Hire a lawyer to consult on strategy but have staff and/or volunteers do the basics: thoroughly learn court rules, hit the law library, find standard forms, use the Internet.
Journalists are already good writers and researchers, so write and research, dammit. Use your power of the pen to great effect. The court house is your house, too.
This is an imperfect solution, but it’s better than being forced to stand silent in the face of money, power and corruption.
FUKUSHIMA YOURSELF. This week’s accidental self-satire award goes to the place bearing the name of the most-banned dirty word in the English language. The moniker more than adequately describes the Japanese government’s contempt for all living things.
One might think that the nation suffering from the world’s worst use of nuclear technologies for the past 78 years would know better. Alas and alack, apparently not. They plan to release into the Pacific Ocean millions of gallons of radioactive water from their blown-up nuke power plant.
As satirist Tom Lehrer once sang, “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, but they don’t live long if they try.”
Fukushima.
HOW TO SPEAK MAGA DEPT. Closed minds cannot be opened with either logic or humor. So try logical humor.
Question: You believe in the U.S. Constitution, right?
MAGAN: Yes.
Q: You also believe that Donald Trump was elected to a second term in
2020, correct?
M: Yes.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Therefore, by your own admission, Donald Trump is thus ineligible to appear on the 2024 ballot.
Game, set, match. Next case.
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since August 12, 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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