Auchtoon!

I had a completely different cartoon mapped out when I sat down to draw, and then this story broke: Michigan reaches $600M settlement in Flint water crisis.

So I started again from scratch. It didn’t take me long to find parallels between the current coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing Flint water crisis — how Flint was kind of a “canary in the coal mine” for what we as a nation are experiencing now. Well, I suppose it’d be more correct to say that the Flint water crisis could have been a canary in the coal mine. (We all would have needed to notice and care that the canary died for the analogy to play through.)

But here’s what I really find notable: There are three basic types of consequences for these tragedies — death, chronic health conditions, and money. Which one is most likely to motivate people?

I’d say that evidence shows death is the least effective. We can’t (or simply don’t want to) relate to it. It’s too abstract, especially as numbers grow. Chronic health conditions are a bit more tangible — we can all imagine being sick. Perhaps not lead poisoning or lung damage sick, but sick.

But I think the best motivator is money. More specifically, our money, taxpayer money! The idea of somebody wasting our hard-earned money is pretty much what motivated this country to be a country. Perhaps we can channel that. A completely avoidable health crisis has now cost Michigan taxpayers $1 billion (this recent $600 million added to the $400 million already spent). That would seem like enough to get us to listen to medical experts.

As many of you college football fans are already painfully aware, the Big Ten conference postponed its 2020 football season in hope of being able to play it next spring. The Pac-12 quickly followed suit. Many other conferences with smaller schools (including the Mid-America Conference) have already cancelled theirs.

It’s not surprise. Even if this country had a coordinated and effective response to COVID-19 (spoiler alert: we don’t), college football would be unwise before a vaccine (a real vaccine) can be administered nation-wide. 

Still, my first inclination was to poke fun at the superfans (But where are middle-aged men going to go to openly and freely unleash abuse upon 19 year-old kids?) or at the anti-fans (At last! Now competitive quilting is really going to take off!). But in the end, neither felt right. I like college football. The money around it is all messed up, and I worry about the long-term effects on the players, but it’s fun to watch, and it’s fun to be part of supporting a school. 

Good thing Scott Frost, coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, spoke up and provided me a focus. Earlier this week, while school administrators were deciding what to do about the season, Frost let it be known that his team was looking for other options. Wait…what? Options? What kind of options do you really have? Either you’re part of a conference or you’re not. There are no other options, technically or realistically. 

For somebody who gets paid millions of dollars and has done pretty well by the system, he sure doesn’t seem to understand or respect the system.

Do you remember how I wrote last week that I was on vacation? Well, that means that this week is the first week after vacation, which everybody knows means two weeks of work scrunched into a single week. Which means no additional commentary because I have to get back to work!

This is family vacation time for me, so in order to fully appreciate and benefit from the “not working” part of what a vacation is actually supposed to be (a bit of a foreign concept to most of us Americans, I know), I drew this cartoon a week ago. That’s always a challenge — picking some topic that can remain relevant (heck, even recognizable) when news cycles continue to accelerate toward warp speed.

I was pleased to come up with an idea that (as the old-timey news people used to say) has legs. Much less pleased that it’s so true — that the opinion of a wingnut YouTuber or FaceBook “friend” or Twitter troll can so easily outweigh the thoroughly researched and vetted reporting of a professional journalist.

I understand the reflexive tendency. Journalism (or more typically, “the media”) falls just below politicians and lawyers on the list of professions we distrust (and apparently on par with scientists and medical experts, God help us). Already real journalists create uncomfortable situations by asking challenging questions, seeking the true story, and then reporting it. But lump them together with the bloviating talking heads of cable news and smart-aleck opinion writers like editorial cartoonists (the worst), and you get this ongoing rancor that is seemingly always at least a low boil.

Okay, fine. Let’s all shake our tiny fists at “the media” and how they all collectively have it in for us. But let’s at least try not to give in so quickly to fully embracing any opinion that happens to align with what we want to believe. Let’s seek and support real news.

In lieu of additional commentary this week, I would just like to encourage you to find reliable news sources (AP, Reuters, NPR) and follow this story — the President deploying federal law enforcement to Portland and Chicago (with Detroit on the short list for next). It’s chilling and wrong and everything the United States of America is not. It’s vital that patriots (real patriots) take a stand against it.

There’s an under-appreciated scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ferris’s sister Jeanie (filled with indignation and attitude) walks into the principal’s office. The school secretary blankly greets her with, “Hello Jeanie. Who’s bothering you now?” 

That’s it. That’s the scene. Well, it actually goes on from there and is very funny, but that short bit I think captures perfectly the general vibe currently in Michigan (and probably the whole country). 

The thing is, Jeanie does have some understandable reasons for her smoldering anger. Her brother is charmingly duplicitous and always seems to get away with things she cannot, and she’s looking to pick a fight over it.

We’ve seen this play out over and over in real life, especially as masking rules have tightened to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Witness all those defiant Costco shoppers — bare-faced, phone in hand, and full of fury. Unfortunately, we’re now seeing how that can quickly escalate — from alarmingly racist rants to stabbings and even death.

Later in the movie, a drug-addled young man identifies Jeanie’s problem for her. “The problem is you.”    And I believe it is. We could all do with less self-righteousness and more self-awareness.

I feel the need to let you know — this cartoon was inspired by the first Betsy DeVos story this week:

Several Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia have joined in a lawsuit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, accusing the Trump administration of trying to unlawfully divert pandemic relief funds from public schools to private schools.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/07/888793021/states-sue-education-department-over-allocation-of-pandemic-funds-to-schools

I completed it before I realized there was a second Betsy DeVos story:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday assailed plans by some local districts to offer in-person instruction only a few days a week and said schools must be “fully operational” even amid the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2020/07/07/betsy-devos-schools-full-time-coronavirus/5392310002/

Now as I write this, I see there is a third Betsy DeVos story:

“If schools aren’t going to reopen, we’re not suggesting pulling funding from education but instead allowing families … (to) take that money and figure out where their kids can get educated if their schools are going to refuse to open,” Betsy DeVos told Fox News in an interview.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-education/us-families-could-use-federal-funds-elsewhere-if-pandemic-closes-schools-devos-says-idUSKBN24A25U

But probably the best Betsy DeVos story this week wasn’t actually about her (but might as well have been):

The institute promoting the “laissez-faire capitalism” of writer Ayn Rand, who in the novels “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” introduced her philosophy of “objectivism” to millions of readers, was approved for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan of up to $1 million, according to data released Monday by the Trump administration.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ppp-ayn-rand/in-sign-of-the-times-ayn-rand-institute-approved-for-ppp-loan-idUSKBN248026

I apologize for not being able to keep up.

I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience on Facebook — a post from one over-the-edge friend complaining aggressively about how her views are being systematically suppressed next to a post from a befuddled friend who went missing for awhile having been booted for something totally benign. Or maybe one of these people is you. In any case, the common theme (and irony) is that Facebook has done them dirty, and they are telling you about it on Facebook.

Add to the mix a recent campaign called “Stop Hate for Profit” that has 400 companies reconsidering their advertisement spending on Facebook, including major corporations like Michigan’s own Ford Motor Company. Facebook gets nearly all of its profits from advertising, so it might be what it takes to get their proper attention to address their complicity in spreading toxic content.

Past efforts by Facebook to correct this have been found lacking. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been called to Capital Hill on many occasions where he has so far avoided regulation by making weak promises and shirking responsibilities. All this makes it even easier to dislike him. True, not all of it is deserved, but a net worth of $79.7 billion and an app that is doing a fantastic job of undermining our democracy makes you kind of an easy target.

I considered holding off on drawing this cartoon and saving it for next week and the Independence Day holiday. It would have been more of an indictment of how we as a nation have seemingly forgotten our ideals, how the United States was once young, scrappy, and hungry and we didn’t throw away our shot. (I can steal from Hamilton, too, Mr. Bolton.)

But ya know what? I want to celebrate America next week because there is still plenty to celebrate. I’m proud of my country and its talent, resources, and institutional structure. We have achieved brilliant success in our brief past, and I believe in the vast potential for success in our future.

Besides, I was feeling the frustration of our collective inability to take on difficult problems right now. No reason to save that up. Express it. Get it out there. Confront my fellow Americans with it and challenge them to reconcile who we are with what we want to be.

I have no idea what I’ll draw next week. It may come out as a criticism — it may come out as praise. Either way, it’ll be patriotic.

This week, the City of Detroit removed a bust of Christopher Columbus from its pedestal near the entrance of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. It’s in storage for now as the mayor and city officials decide what to do with it. No doubt it has historical value — it’s 110 years-old. Like many Columbus-related honors, this one came as a gift from Italian-Americans.

Columbus sailed under the flag of Spain, but he was born in Genoa in what is now Italy. Promoting the memory of Columbus was a way for Italian-Americans — who were heavily discriminated against as new immigrants in the early 1900s — to promote themselves as “real” Americans. So the statue was less about honoring Columbus the person and more about what Columbus represented. 

In a similar way, we know the statues and military bases in the South were not so much about honoring the supposed virtuous lives of Confederate Generals as it was about intimidating Blacks many years after the war to codify Jim Crow laws.

Still, history can be a very sensitive thing. We as a society need to be careful about how we handle it. The best take on this that I’ve seen is a recent post by journalist Mike Peterson on his Cartoon Strip of the Day blog, which can be found on dailycartoonist.com. What should we do?

The answer is to stop teaching Great Man History and switch to Major Moment History.

The coming of Europeans to the New World was a Major Moment, and it’s more important to study what it meant to everyone — everyone — involved than to memorize the names of individuals in the big chairs.

Important Point: The cure for Great Man History is not adding the names of Great Women and Great Minorities to the list of meaningless crap kids have to memorize.

It’s teaching how Major Moments — inventions and immigrations and wars and pandemics and economic booms and busts — changed normal lives and, hence, the flavor and tone of the entire nation.

It means fewer statues and more local museums.

You can read the whole article here: http://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/06/13/csotd-monumental-questions/