I suppose I should have done a Thanksgiving Day cartoon. But in a way, this is one. I’m thankful that there are elected officials, leaders, and everyday people who continue to try to do the right thing. They are out there speaking truth to power at a time when it seems like it has never been more difficult to do so.
So maybe next year something with pardoning turkeys, pilgrim immigrants behaving badly, and whatnot. But this year, I’m just gonna focus on the grateful and support the courageous.
Last month, the Trump administration and its FBI director made a big show of arresting some folks in Dearborn, charging them with plotting a potential terrorist attack. Two, Mohmed Ali and Majed Mahmoud, have now been charged. Guilty or not, there is little doubt that the outsized attention came from the fact that these men are of Arab decent.
The MAGA crowd in general has long been suspicious of Michigan’s large Arab-American population, Dearborn in particular with its Arab-American majority and mayor. Some even like to go there and try to pick fights, as happened earlier this week.
This sort of behavior is embarrassing and dangerous. But it’s especially difficult to reconcile when the MAGA leader welcomes into the White House the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS), fawns over him, excuses his brutal transgressions, and happily offers him premium military equipment for “deals.” It’s almost as if Trump would sell out his base for his own personal benefit.
It’s really weird to have achieved an age where I can feel both nostalgic and bitter about the past. But here we are.
Back in the tech boom of the late 1990s, I worked for a startup software company that got bought out by a West Coast dotcom, so I kind of had a front-row seat. And one of the true beliefs of the true believers was that this new era of work would be different.
They would derisively point to legacy companies like General Motors and say things like, “Our leaders aren’t like theirs — stogy old farts in three-piece suits and country club memberships. We like our workers, we care about our workers, and we care about the environment and doing good, positive work.”
And I guess in a sense they were right; these tech leaders turned out to be different from those old-style corporate bosses — they are exponentially worse. The Elon Musks, the Peter Thiels — they are somehow greedier, more irredeemably power hungry, and just plain more evil than the Roger Smiths and Lee Iacoccas of yore.
Michigan needs to be very careful about deals we make for data centers with these hyper-level robber barons.
Monday, November 10 is the 50th anniversary of the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior during a storm, with the loss of the entire crew of 29 men. It was a tragedy and treated as such at the time. I would hope it would be treated the same now, but I have some doubts about how long cable news could stay on topic before spinning off to pundit land.
It’s not that I’m nostalgic. I’d rather be a Great Lakes sailor today than in 1975. It’s much safer now, due in no small part to lessons learned. And weather forecasting has improved exponentially. Meteorologists now have much better tools for seeing storms like the one that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The Detroit Free Press had an excellent article about that this past Sunday. The storm was a “Panhandle Hook.” The article explains:
“A Panhandle Hook, a powerful, low-pressure winter storm system that develops in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandle regions. After forming, the storm initially moves east and then sharply curves, or “hooks,” northeastward, often heading straight for the Great Lakes region. It picks up energy along the way, rapidly intensifying and often leading to blizzard conditions with strong winds and heavy snowfall, especially north of the low-pressure center.”
If you look closely at the news ticker on the TV in second panel, I make a crack about the President blaming a modern-day freighter-wrecking storm on Canada. It may be imagined, but Trump being confidently, incuriously wrong is always predictable.
Auchtoon!
