Auchtoon!

I wish all you readers a happy holiday season and a blessed new year. (What do you say we give this common good thing a try in 2022?)

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” contains so many all-time best comedic scenes — the Black Knight (“Just a flesh wound.”), the Coconut Debate (“An African or European swallow?”), the Killer Rabbit (“And we’d better not risk another frontal assault — that rabbit’s dynamite!”). One of the most overlooked (and under appreciated, in my opinion) is the Guarding the Room scene.

If you don’t remember, here it is:

It wasn’t until I had completed this week’s cartoon that I realized how closely it tracks with that scene. It seems the one consistent thing that Michigan citizens asked of the newly formed commission to determine Michigan congressional districts was transparency. And yet, here we are with several news organizations suing the commission because of their secret memos and closed-door meetings. The Michigan Supreme Court could possibly make a ruling on this by the time this is published.

Of course, if you look closer, there are reasons for this — relatively standard “we are in a position of power and our lawyers advise us to not tell you everything” sorts of reasons. So, I’m not feeling all high and mighty for calling them out. (And neither should Governor Whitmer and the state legislature, considering their own issues with similar shenanigans, such as stonewalling freedom of information requests.) But it is ridiculous. Not as funny as Monty Python, but nearly as ridiculous.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t easy or comfortable or even appealing (as strange as that may sound now) when laws were passed and enforced to prevent people from smoking in public areas. The pushback was enormous — can you imagine a bar where people weren’t allowed smoke? Are you kidding me?! Or on airplanes when smokers are super-stressed and need a cigarette to calm their nerves? It’ll never happen.

And yet, it did. There was overwhelming evidence that these measures would save lives and reduce injuries. It was a national health concern. So it was the responsible thing to do to pass laws and enforce the laws even though it was difficult.

Now I am absolutely not saying that it is the exact same situation with guns and gun violence in America. But in the context of health and safety, it is quite similar. There are deaths and burdensome costs that we as a country endure year after year because of the inertia of the status quo. And seemingly there is nothing we can do about it.

But there is. We can enforce existing laws to remove firearms from homes with reports of domestic violence. We can augment existing laws to ensure that all legal guns are registered. And we can certainly pass new laws to ensure that adults are held responsible when guns they own find their way into the hands of minors. And we’ll look back in a few years and say, yep, that wasn’t easy, but it was sure worth it.

We ignore at our own peril the continuing efforts of former President Trump to undermine laws and norms to claw his way back into power. He’s a demagogue in full-bullying mode, and a brief glance at history reveals the devastating consequences of letting somebody like that get their way.

And yet, the paradox is that attention — any attention — is exactly what a demagogue desires. He will use any and all attention to skew, manipulate, and outright lie in order to create legitimacy for furthering his singular, self-serving agenda.

A simple flowchart seemed like the best compromise to sound the alarm without feeding the monster.

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I realize, of course, that the most obvious topic for a Michigan editorial cartoonist this week would have been the mass shooting in Oxford. Please don’t construe me not addressing it as “now is not the time.” Now and every moment from now is exactly the time to discuss and find solutions for gun violence. We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is an intractable problem, and it’s not. I’m just too sad at the moment to come up with anything to say.