Auchtoon!

Sometimes I need to assume (and hope) that readers will know all of the stories I’m referencing. I had no concerns about you not being aware of this presidential election thing going on. Nor did I worry that, as Michiganders living in a swing/battleground state, you would have experienced more than your fair share of mailings, messages, and commercials intended to sway your vote. And finally, I was pretty sure you all saw or at least heard about Donald Trump’s torrent of lies in this week’s debate.

What you may not know about is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to clean up sites around the country contaminated with radiation from nuclear weapons development by shipping the waste to hazardous waste disposal facilities. One such facility is Wayne Disposal in Van Buren Township, which is in the Detroit Metro area.

The Michigan Public article does an excellent job providing all of the details, and it’s not as dystopian as you might imagine. Still, there is always room for concern when something coming to your community can be accurately described as toxic waste. (I’m referring to the radioactive waste, but the rhetorical waste is likely the more pressing danger.)

I was listening to a recent It’s Just Politics podcast, which included a conversation between co-host Zoe Clark and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell. Clark noted that Dingell has been particularly adept at identifying political cross-currents and trends, mostly due to Dingell’s habit of going to where her constituents are and, you know, actually listening to them.

Dingell has been frequenting union halls, and as it turns out, it’s very unlikely that every rank and file worker is going to vote Democrat, despite official union endorsement. This should surprise no one — the days of political machines delivering votes are, blessedly, gone. Ideally, voting is a personal choice, not a group activity.

But as a personal choice, it’s easy to overcomplicate. We go down rabbit holes trying to align politics, anticipate outcomes, strategize on issues. We are usually better off just keeping it simple. So putting myself in a union worker’s shoes, I think I’d go for a presidential candidate who didn’t have a well-documented history of stiffing workers (and customers and creditors and…).

I think the biggest tell that the current Republican Party is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan is its complete lack of positivity. I mean, sure, Reagan went down some dark paths scaring us with stories of welfare queens and godless commies. But he also presented the United States of America as a shining city on a hill and was endlessly enthusiastic about not just our past, but our present and future as well.

Now and for the past few years, the GOP has been so committed to messaging with fear and anger that the sudden wave of happy, optimistic Democrats and their appeal to voters have caught them completely off guard. Worse, they seem incapable of generating any positivity themselves. And specifically in Michigan, their options to find a Reagan-like personality on their team to somehow get that mojo back appears to be, well, limited.

Is it just me or have you, dear readers, also seen a considerable uptick in politics-related email and texts these past few months? It may be related to this editorial cartooning gig, but I don’t think so.

‘Tis election season, of course, but then when is it never not election season?

I could invest some time and try to remove myself from these lists. But I get such a wide variety (both parties, candidates, and nebulous “committees”) that I’m afraid it might cause more harm than good — if it’s confirmed that I’m a sentient being, I may be completely overrun.

Would love to write more, but I have an inbox to clear out.

I drew this cartoon a week ahead of time so I’d be free and clear to enjoy vacation. It’s always a challenge to guess ahead at what might remain relevant. But to be honest, I hedged my bet considerably by picking race as a topic because it is safely always relevant.

So a week ago, the buzz was about Kamala Harris and floating the accusation that she was a DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hire. This has now been superseded by Donald Trump’s rant about Harris that, in his esteemed assessment, she is somehow not Black. This, of course, from a person and a party (they are really now the same thing) who often profess not to see color and are annoyed by all this racial stuff. Yet they keep weaponizing it.

In any case, I’m sadly confident this cartoon will have another good reason to be relevant next week.

But I do think the common ground here is the aspiration to treat all people as people first.

You may think I’m calling out the excesses of the political parties or social media or the so-called mainstream media and the breakneck speed with which they all flood us with news. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But the more subtle thing I’m calling out is us and what we do with that news.

Big news is breaking all the time (most of it not necessarily big). But even when truly big news does break (an assassination attempt on a former president, a current president bowing out of a re-election campaign) we tend to allow ourselves to accelerate past the actual news and move swiftly on to speculation about the consequences and ramifications.

Let’s call this the punditfication of America. We no longer receive news as something to learn about but as something to opine about. We are all pundits, supposed experts, talking past each other. We leave what is too soon so we can be the first to have a hot take on what might be.

There is a LOT of campaign left before the November election (and a new cycle that begins the day after that). Maybe now is a good time to take a deep breath and try to pace ourselves.

Last week Michigan Public had a story about the EPA’s latest Climate Indicators Report and how it shows significant changes for Michigan and the Great Lakes as a whole. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.

OK, you’re busy. And there is a lot to think through. That’s because it was created from data collected and vetted by scientific experts — highly trained teams of individuals whose literal job it is to put these reports together. What’s more, it is the job of the entire scientific community to test and question and poke and prod to try to find errors, biases, and false claims in those reports (and it fills them with delight when they find something so there is every incentive to make them airtight).

Meanwhile, there is an ongoing battle in the country as a whole over education and what exactly we should be teaching our children. The only thing that approaches consensus is that STEM-related courses (science, technology, engineering, math) should be a priority.

And yet, we routinely dismiss the scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians when their expert recommendations do not align to our feelings and desires. The Supreme Court seemingly validated this by throwing out the so-called Chevron doctrine last month.

We’ve been doing a fine job of chasing teachers and nurses out of their professions. Are scientists and researchers next?

I’ve commented before about the challenges of dealing with hyper-fast news cycles. The presidential debate last week took place a few hours past my deadline, so I missed that. Then earlier this week was the bombshell ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on presidential immunity.

And now with the Fourth of July holiday, I’m working a short week and guessing today (Wednesday) what might still be relevant Friday when the cartoon is published. This has left me playing catch up — but still needing to be careful not to run too far ahead.

So, no, I don’t really know how I came around to the Star Wars theme. And to readers who are Star Wars fans, yes, I realize that Trump is really more of a Jabba the Hut character, but I couldn’t make that work.

As you may have gathered, I’m not a “make America great again” kind of person. It’s not that I don’t think America is great. (It is — especially the concept of it.) It’s just that I don’t think America has been a substantially better country at any given time in its history than it is now.

If we’re honest, we tend to paint the supposed good times with broad brush stokes that cover over those who were having a bad time. Nostalgia, rose-colored glasses, call it what you want.

Nevertheless, I can unabashedly say that I think our country was in a much better place 30 to 60 years ago when nearly everybody read a daily newspaper and was availed to network news broadcasts that had journalistic guardrails. There was a baseline level of knowing what was going on that was generally shared by everybody. It wasn’t perfect. It provided limited options. And, horrors, it could be considered not very entertaining. But the net effect was an at least somewhat informed electorate.

I’m not suggesting that we should try to go back — most obviously because we can’t. The newspaper business model has been thoroughly eviscerated and technology has nearly left network news in the dustbin of history. But it would be helpful if we could find another way to get to that baseline level of shared knowledge.