Road trip: Guided by Voices

 

It is a Greater Honor For ME!

 This idea popped into my head after watching Tom Waits’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on YouTube. During his acceptance speech, he mentioned that he had been given the Key to the City of El Paso. My mind immediately went to Alaska, where recent per-capita case rate for COVID-19 is the highest in the United States, and higher than any country in the world. COVID-19 is running wild here yet the Mayor has refused to support a mask mandate, and consequently our hospitals now are forced to ration care. People who don’t even have COVID are being turned away from emergency rooms. The Mayor protests that the scientific validation of masks and vaccinations is lacking, He seems to be running an experiment of his own, one that is proving how wrong he is in handing the key to the city to the pandemic.

Star Crossed

 Anchorage anti-maskers abused history in protests against a proposed ordinance requiring masking at indoor events to curb the spread of COVID. Somehow in the minds of the protestors this ordinance became comparable to the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews, with the part of the Jews played by the anti-maskers, who signified their role by wearing yellow Stars of David, as Jews were forced to in Nazi-occupied Europe. The anti-maskers did this to protest an ordinance that will save lives, not mark them for extinction. Our mayor initially backed this tortured symbolic logic saying it was a credit to the Jews. Later he backed off, with a classic faux apology, saying “If I offended anyone, I am truly sorry.” Apparently he is not sorry for backing a grotesque misinterpretation of history.

Freud Series #4 Pretty Boy Freud

 

Freud Series #3, Schadenfreude

 

Freud Series #2, Freud Chicken

 

Freud Series #1, Pink Freud

 

Smokin' In School

 

Defend Reality, Slap a Republican

 We have a problem with reality in this country. In the the post-Trump era, facts are downright unwelcome among many of our citizens if they don’t fit their preconceived world view. Instead of changing the worldview to fit the facts, citizens dispense with the facts, preserving their world view. We are left to chart our course by what, astrology? 

This hostility to facts thrives among the COVID deniers, the anti-vaxxers and the “Goop” devotees. And of course Trump’s Republican Party. It’s there in Steve Bannon’s strategy to flood the zone with bullshit. It’s there in the GOP’s insistence that Trump won the election in spite of the mountain range of evidence to the contrary. It’s there in their resistance to a commission to investigate the events of January sixth, when we all saw a right-wing mob storm the Capitol building. A mob now being transformed through the magic of GOP hindsight into a bunch of hyperactive tourists instead of the terrorists they were. 

This eagerness to put party above reality is unpatriotic. Bullshit and hysteria are not the best foundation on which to build. A country cannot have contempt for reality and expect to prosper. That connection between reality and patriotism prompted the image of the famous poster by James Montgomery Flagg on which this cartoon is based. The entire predicament makes me want to slap a Republican to bring them around. Maybe it wouldn’t help, but it might make me feel better. 

 Laura Reinbold, a state senator from Eagle River has been kicked off her Senate Judiciary chair, off the  Judiciary committee, out of the capitol building and off Alaska Airlines for her unwillingness to mask up. She claims she is defending liberty and fighting tyranny, but how insisting on exposing your colleagues to potential death from COVID-19 amounts to fighting for freedom is obscure at best.