Auchtoon!

In 2009 more than 11,000 untested rape kits were discovered in Detroit’s abandoned crime lab. Rape kits contain the physical evidence of victims of sexual assault. When processed, the DNA data generated can be used not only to bring perpetrators to justice, but also to add this information to a national database of sex offenders. This is especially useful because those who commit these crimes are often serial rapists — if they are successfully prosecuted, it can prevent future instances and help victims to find closure.

In response to the situation, the state of Michigan passed a law to fund the processing of these rape kits. Still, there has been a need for private donations and fundraising campaigns to get through the backlog and then to provide money for investigators to actually finish the job.

It’s easy for those outside the city to shake our heads (or wag our fingers) and say this is all just another example of Detroit’s uniquely awful dysfunction. But as it turns out, further investigation has revealed that smaller cities and towns are also suffering from backlogged rape kits. From a recent Michigan Radio report:

“The Michigan Attorney General asked cities to submit a count of untested rape kits in their jurisdictions. Backlogs turned up in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Flint, Lansing, Battle Creek and several others.”

Exactly why this is, experts don’t really know, but the Detroit experience provides clues: Budget cuts and overwhelmed staffs. The lack of a clear and complete procedure for the entire process. Police sometimes callous indifference to the victims.

We are six weeks away from an election, so now is a pretty good time to ask: Do we want a responsive, reasonably funded government interested in real protection and prevention? Or do we want to continue down a path where rape victims end up depending on bake sales to provide them proper support? Please vote accordingly.

Listen, if you got yourself a big ol’ pot of roiling outrage going right now, I’m not the one to tell you to take it off the heat. It’s election season and who am I to talk you out of the delicious indulgence of indignation? I’m an editorial cartoonist, for crying out loud!

It’s fine to be appalled, exasperated, horrified. Perhaps you detest a particular candidate so deeply your very soul is in danger of choking on your own bile. Lovely. Feel your feelings. I’d advise against acting on them, but, certainly, go ahead and feel them. Right down to bitterest loathing and utterest disgust.

However, if you want a breather you might consider coming to Grand Rapids in the next couple of weeks and checking out ArtPrize. It really is quite remarkable — an inspiring mix of public art, entrepreneurship, governmental coordination and cooperation, and civic pride. Oh sure, you can find negatives if you look hard. Some people get in a snit over the founder being an Amway scion. Others have had issues with how the prize money is awarded.

So it may not be all rainbows and unicorns. But there is art and lots of happy people. You can even vote for something, not against it! And also there is beer. It is Grand Rapids, after all.

Who else thought when you first heard Basket of Deplorables: “That’s the perfect name for a punk rock band”? Well I definitely did, and it got me thinking.

Punk rock was in general a reaction to what rock and roll had become by the mid-1970s. It had more or less bypassed its original audience: the young and the disaffected. Radio stations had become categorized, playlists were standardized, established acts were given every advantage over the new and different. There were people who wanted to take rock and roll back, make it great again (to borrow a phrase).

Along came the Sex Pistols. Or more precisely, an awful person named Malcolm McLaren caught the punk rock wave and ruthlessly promoted the Sex Pistols. He was really quite ahead of his time in leveraging media for free, viral publicity. For McLaren, the music was secondary to the packaging. The well-being of band members was inconsequential. Infamy was the product.

The Sex Pistols only ever had one studio album and one very short train-wreck of a United States tour. At the end of the last song of the last concert, lead singer Johnny Lydon (known then as Johnny Rotten) famously asks to the audience, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and dropped the microphone.

It was a moment of stunning honesty. At that point, Lydon and the fans were all disillusioned. They had wanted to believe they were part of something meaningful (and maybe they were), but now it was pretty obvious that they had been totally used along the way. I’m wondering if there’s going to be a “mic drop moment” with the Trump campaign.

My first instinct was to draw the weighty Student Loan Debt object as an anvil. You guys know what an anvil is, right?

An anvil is a block with a hard surface on which another object is struck. The block is as massive as it is practical, because the higher the inertia of the anvil, the more efficiently it causes the energy of the striking tool to be transferred to the work piece.

Yeah, that’s not very helpful for me, either. How about this:

An anvil is the very heavy hunk of metal that falls from the sky onto the head of guys like Wile E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam in Warner Bros. cartoons.

Better? Because I grew up watching those cartoons and apparently anvils are actually used for blacksmithing, which I was not aware of till much later. But then, most millennials probably have not seen those cartoons, so I went with the big boulder.

In a similar way, young people today are having a difficult time imagining starting off their adult life without significant debt. Earlier this week a study was released by the Michigan League for Public Policy that showed Michigan college students who graduated in 2014 had $29,450 in student loan debt on average. It’s a complicated issue, and there is plenty of blame to go around. I didn’t want to go down that road. I simply wanted to point out that crushing student debt has specific consequences for us Michiganders and our dependency on the auto industry.

Another report came out this week showing that Americans are borrowing more than ever for new and used vehicles.The total balance of all outstanding auto loans reached $1.027 trillion between April 1 and June 30, with 30- and 60-day delinquency rates rising.

Hmmm… More young people need to watch those old cartoons — I’ll definitely be wanting to use that “anvils falling from the sky” metaphor.

Telling the wife of your boss at a dinner party that she is a racist is not a career enhancing move. Turns out, people don’t like to be called racist — even if they are.

Let me explain. Many years ago my boss at the time generously hosted a holiday dinner for his three employees and their spouses. I was sitting next to his wife and in the course of conversation she mentioned growing up in Grand Rapids and her not-so-positive experience with school integration. She had some lingering issues and asked me my assessment.

In a very academic (maybe even Aspergerian) way I told her, yes, I thought she was racist, but qualified it with my mini-thesis on what that means: There are three degrees of racism. First degree is a negative view of somebody else because of their race and openly acting on that negative view (think Archie Bunker). Second degree is a patronizing view of somebody else because of their race (think of kindly people of previous generations, “I feel sorry for colored people.”) Third degree is simply letting a person’s race affect how you treat that person, however small that effect may be.

I told her, like most Americans (including myself), she was probably a third-degree racist. Only the very young and the exceptionally pure are not racist. Still, it didn’t go over well. Also, I had a hard time hiding the fact that I really didn’t care for the mutton that was served, so that didn’t help.

If you are ever faced with a similar situation, my advice would be to avoid rolling out a mini-thesis. And if you can’t deflect the issue altogether, have a discussion instead of forcing a “teaching moment,” which is what I tried to do with this week’s cartoon. How’d I do? (If you feel compelled to call me an idiot, please qualify with what degree.)