Doonesbury today. A monologue by “Jimmy Crow” to GOP Candidates, across eight panels.
We’ve passed dozens of new voter suppression laws to help out… but the rest is up to you!
Now is the time to announce that the election is rigged! Why? Because it’s never too early to seed distrust in democracy!
That way, if you lose, your aggrieved supporters will be primed to challenge a “stolen” election — by any means necessary!
Your opponent will be delegitimized, and you won’t have to concede! Like Mr. trump, you can just pretend you won!
This is happening already.
\
Last Sunday’s strip. Guy in a gun story, apparently knowing nothing, trying to figure out what gun to buy.
Store clerk: What do you need it for?
Customer: I need it to prevent the government from taking it away from me.
Bah-dah boom.
\\
I always have political issues to link about, but for today let me choose something a little broader.
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 21 July 2022: The middle of history
We live in an unhappy valley between two heavenly peaks.
Conservative political ideologies look to the past. They imagine a golden age, a mythical era of stability and contentment, now lost to decadence and corruption.
Liberal political ideologies look to the future. They envision a futuristic utopia of peace and prosperity, the ideal end state of humanity, but held back by bigotry and greed.
Obviously, these ideologies have stark differences when it comes to why the world is unsatisfactory and who the villains are. But either way, true believers are stuck in the dissatisfied middle, always longing for another, better time. The more fervently we believe in either of them, the more the present suffers by comparison.
The writer goes on to discuss Lenin and the Bolshevik revolutionaries who created the USSR. And compares their defiance of election results in 1917 to the January 6th insurrectionists supporting Donald Trump. Both felt any means were permissible to attain their utopian goals. But it’s not just a problem with utopians. The problem is that belief in reaching such a world is simple. Progress is incremental, not revolutionary.
I don’t mean any of this as a knock against progressives who dream of a better world. On the contrary, I’m in their corner. I’m a utopian by nature. But I’m also a skeptic by temperament. Too many grand philosophies have wrecked on the rocks of human nature—or worse, dissolved into tyranny when people stubbornly refused to conform to their assigned ideological roles.
We should do what we can to make the world a better place, but we should try to stay humble about it. It’s fine to cast our sight toward that heavenly peak, so long as we bear in mind that we’re unlikely to reach it in our lifetimes. We need to make peace with living in this messy, perilous time of potential and despair, of plans made and left undone—in the middle of history, rather than at its end.
Yes, human nature is inescapable. People’s happiness is relative; it’s adjusted based on the circumstances of those around them, not any kind of absolute standards. And some people are contrary by nature. There will never, ever, be any pleasing of all people, not as long as humans remain human. (Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic visions of the original Star Trek, as many have noted, removed the potential for conflict among humans, and therefore brought it in from outsiders, aliens and whatnot. Never from within the crew. That’s why he rewrote Ellison’s original script. But his vision was an ideal. Not realistic. Unless human nature changes, and if it does, if conflict is removed, how will the species advance?)
This echoes some of my own thoughts, from 2017 (point #10), about the future of humanity:
Still, there is no one endpoint, no one-time catastrophe or utopia. Wherever the race might land in the next century, there will always be change. (Even religions that have lasted for a couple millennia might fade away to other religions, in another couple millennia; thousands of other religions throughout human history have similarly disappeared.) Even in a utopia, unless every person is utterly like every other person, there will be differences, and differences will lead to those who want change, and those who are happy enough and resist change. This is perhaps the ultimate dynamic of human history.
