CAPTIOUS CARTOONS CANTANKERZING US ALL

        Welcome back. This isn’t like me to blog on a Saturday, but the cartoon above really bothered me. I'm blogging about the cartoon above to point out what is wrong with it. It resorts to shame, that an old tactic taken from the Demagogue Bag of Gooey Calumny and Shame.

        We resort to tricks when we are too lazy to talk to one another and try to understand one another.

        I see calumny all the time between Republicans and Democrats. Theirs is an ideological antagonism. The animosity between Bernie and Hillary supporters is that between bad sports and lousy winners.

        In any case, when we talk to each other some of us have already switched our minds and our tongues to the COCKFIGHT setting whereby we hope to spur each other to humiliation by seeing who can come up with the most provocative put down.

        I can't refute the other guy so I change the subject by calling him names or shaming him. Changing the subject does not address the issue of who would be the best person to run our country. How much of the antagonism against Hillary is due to smear instead of truth? Who will leave a better country when they leave office, or at least a nation that has not gone backwards?  If he is not nominated, Mr. Sanders must be reckoned with and allowed to influence the Democratic Party so that it shifts toward “them that brung it.”

        There is nobody more progressive than I. Indeed, once I became conscious I could never agree that capitalism worked well for people who work. Trickle down to me was just a deceitful way of saying, "letting the crumbs fall off the table."

        That is because I watched my step father work eighty hours a week in a Chattanooga factory so he could have the overtime pay that would allow him to afford the luxury of keeping up a house, feeding four kids and a wife, giving a tithe to a church, buying a new car every five years, taking a vacation occasionally and never farther than Florida, and going to Neyland Stadium in Knoxville six times a year.

        As long as he could do all that with middling trouble, he was okay with the status quo.

        He could say he made a good living. He earned a decent pension, but like Job, if God took away those Neyland Stadium tickets I suspect he would have raised hell.

        It never bothered him that the DuPont family got filthy rich off of his labor and the labor of hundreds of others who stood on their feet eight to sixteen hours a day operating those machines that produced DuPont nylon.

You can bet the Duponts kept their labor budget as low as they could get away with because they did not give a shit about my dad or anyone else's dad.

        For the sake of my stepfather, other family, and friends who work my heart and head say Mr. Sanders is right, but Mrs. Clinton is right too for other reasons. I wish they would run on the same ticket. I don’t know if they will. No matter what happens, I believe progressives will come around.

        We must all stand and vote. For we find ourselves in a predicament unlike any I can recall. We have a candidate who must be defeated or God knows what he might do.

        No one really knows what a Trump presidency would look like because he refuses to explain it. Instead of explanation, we get insults. It is a tactic designed to change the subject. Mr. Trump insults anyone who disagrees with him or requires facts from him.

        The poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote about the furious politics roiling in Ireland at the turn of the 20^th century. Consider this line from “The Second Coming”:

        "The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

        The fury is here, now, and roiling at the heart of Mr. Trump’s campaign. We need to stop it.

        It is a dangerous thing when a candidate can articulate any absurdity with a straight face and enjoy a surge in his popularity. We need to vote against it.

        Indeed, Mr. Trump could say, “I can turn water into wine. I promise. I can. I do it all the time. I’ll turn every drop of water into wine when I’m president. I drink a lot of wine. I know what good wine is. I will do it. And it will be good wine too. The best you ever had. Elect me. You’ll see.” 

        Shame is not going to build a wall around that level of falsity. Shame will not persuade anyone to vote against Mr. Trump. What we need is a culling. We need to gather all the commonalities shared among Democrats that make winning urgent for the United States.

        If you don’t know what they are, listen to what Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton are saying. One commonality is my stepfather. The other guy has nothing for him except an aphrodisiac for his racism.

        Finally, Democrats should never stop debating among themselves, but this time is unlike any time in the history of national elections. Circumstances are compelling us to get up, get out, and vote.

        That’s where we should start. Forget the shame. The future demands we communicate, offer good information, question without condemning, and agree to disagree. The present demands that we vote Democrat.

        Blessings…