My title today may prompt you to think, “Apparently, when Mickey does art it is stupid art.” If my title didn’t make you think that, then my first sentence certainly did. I am literally putting stupid ideas into your head. And this is a problem because the people currently at the top of the people pile that is our modern society are shoveling great smelly heaps of stupidity directly into our brains.
I know stupid. I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years. No one survives the mine-field of stupid bombs in the classroom without being able to recognize the incoming booby-head missiles. Years worth of lame homework excuses have made stupidity easily recognizable. Being stupid is easy. Countering it is hard.
So how does one be stupid? I nearly found out yesterday as I was driving on an access road for I-35. I was going the 40-mile-per-hour speed limit and got a phone call on my cell phone. All I did was look at my phone to see who was calling in case another school child was calling because pollen season was killing them again and they wanted to come home from school… again. My son shouted a warning of imminent death and I looked back at the road in time to see the car dealer had left a car-carrier trailer in the road with the ramp down. Wow! That was almost an epic Evel Knievel stunt.
But being epically stupid is simply a matter of not paying attention well enough. It is easy to achieve. Note how often President Cheeto-head achieves it.
I have also found it to be a remarkably easy thing to be stupid on Facebook and Twitter. All you have to do is post and repost stuff, or tweet and retweet stuff, that speaks to your own prejudices and ignores what is factual and what is not. I have seen very elaborate anti-climate change graphs that seem to show a correlation between sun activity and periods of warming and cooling climate. The biggest problem with this frequently debunked “take-that-and-stuff-it!” evidence is that it was created by a pair of propagandists with oil-company ties who were only masquerading as climate scientists.
When you vet that source and introduce evidence to your conservative Facebook friend you will get back a horrified speculation about the depths of your own stupidity for believing that Snopes.com is not also propaganda and you can’t believe everything NASA says because their funding is at stake. And I end up having to admit I do say similar things about their cherished sources like Infowars, Breitbart, and Fox News. Truth is apparently more the product of faith than it is the province of science.
Besides not knowing what facts are, it is fairly easy to be monumentally stupid by having no empathy at all. Iowegians who would bend over backwards and feed their own liver to a hungry Iowan, will routinely cry about the dangers of Sharia law and talk about wall building at the sight of Syrian widows and orphans. And don’t even get me started about shoot-first Texans. Not after they just shot and killed another unarmed black teenager in Balch Springs.
So how do you make an Art out of Stupid?
Well, the CBS Morning News has started running down the key events in the news with snippets quoted from late-night TV hosts and comedians like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and James Corden. You defeat stupidity by aping it, imitating it, and making people laugh at it. It is really defeated when you make someone laugh about their own stupidity, like the story about me and the I-35 launch ramp. Comedians seem to be the only ones effectively reporting on the current Presidential situation, and even CNN and MSNBC news anchors have begun making jokes in their reporting. I have become a lover of political cartoons like never before.
You may not be able to rescue other people’s minds from being stupid. But what you can do and be artful about is… make them laugh.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Bitter Black Hearts of the GOP
Yes, this is another pitiful attempt by Mickey to be a political cartoonist fighting the good fight by slaying the bad guys with really weak and awful satire. But I can’t help it. Just as Popeye had a powerful urge to sock goons in the puss with his spinach-fueled twister-sock, I have to throw some derfy toonage at the vile and heartless members of the GOP (Greedy Old Perpetrators).
After all, they are easy to make fun of. Republican job applications all start with the question, “Which cartoon Dick Tracy villain or comic book Batman villain are you most like?”
They do things like organizing an Oversight Committee for the sole purpose of spending millions of dollars to point fingers at Hillary and shout the name of a North-African town where diplomats died basically because of budget cuts to security ( a Republican budget) and shout it loudly until people begin to think Hillary must have had something to do with it because men with heads shaped like sports equipment are shouting it so much.
And Republicans are able to do this stuff because they know how to win elections and control the government.
Basically what I am saying is that Republicans cheat. They get to rule even though they generate fewer votes in the country.
And what do they do with that power once they have it in their tiny, tiny hands? They use it to make more money. The rise of the billionaire class in the last thirty years is evidence that they are insanely good at it. Do they use that money and power to help their neighbors and better the lives of everyone? Of course not! Why would you think that?
Republican priorities are obvious when you look at the first things on their agenda. They want to roll back environmental protections and pour more pollutants into rivers and into the air. They want to do away with Obamacare to eliminate the extra taxes that wealthy people have to pay. They want to prevent people from immigrating from lands where people don’t have white skin, because the only part of a Republican that can be black with the full approval of their party, is the heart. Yes, that part can be jet black and rancid.
Take that, evil Republicans! Wait, why are you laughing? Didn’t my satire slay you?
Oh, well, another day, another cartoon.
Oopsie! Wasn’t that heart supposed to be black?
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Filed under angry rant, cartoons, commentary, humor, pessimism, politics, satire
Tagged as cartoons, cheating, gerrymandering, Jason Chaffetz, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, political humor, rants, Trey Gowdy