Skyline Happenings

Thanks to Cyndi W.

Thanks to Mike C.

Thanks to Cyndi W.

Thanks to Mary Jane F.

Thanks to Pam P.

Thanks to Pam P.

Thanks to Bob P.

Thanks to Mary Jane F.

Ann Telnaes

Ann Telnaes, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for the Washington Post since 2008, quit the paper this week after her editor killed her cartoon depicting WaPo owner Jeff Bezos and other craven billionaires debasing themselves before Donald J. Trump.

This act of censorship, of course, isn’t an outlier: anticipatory obedience to fascism has risen ominously in recent months. It began with WaPo and the Los Angeles Times spiking endorsements of Kamala Harris, only to be outdone by Disney, who gifted Trump $15 million instead of fighting his flimsy defamation claim in court. Oh, and let’s not forget Joe and Mika’s humiliating field trip to Mar-a-Lago.

I don’t know Ms. Telnaes but I admire her work, integrity, and courage. I’m publishing the rough draft of her cartoon above in the hopes that you’ll share it. If enough people do, it will reach a larger audience than if her WaPo editor had had the cojones to run it. Actually, given how many subscribers have fled the paper in recent months, reaching a larger audience than the Washington Post isn’t a daunting task.

By David Horsey

Seattle Times cartoonist

Editor’s note: In this excerpt from “Unhinged USA,” his new collection of cartoons from The Seattle Times, editorial cartoonist David Horsey takes a look back at the fraught, four-year period — from COVID-19 to Kamala Harris — that is now coming to an end.

On Nov. 2, 2021, hundreds of Americans gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. They were convinced that, at 12:59 p.m., JFK and his son, JFK Jr. — accompanied, perhaps, by Michael Jackson and Princess Diana — would arrive in a convoy to restore Donald Trump to the presidency and destroy the evil cabal of liberal, pedophilic devil worshippers who control the world.

None of the dead celebrities showed up, but that did little to dampen the fervent belief of those who waited. They kept showing up on other dates — Nov. 22, July 4 — still clinging to a conspiracy theory that made them feel part of a holy contingent of patriots. In interviews, these folks did not seem especially weird or unusual, except for the ideas they spouted. In fact, they looked like the ordinary Americans one would see strolling through a shopping mall or cheering at a Little League Baseball game.

But, boy oh boy, were they unhinged from reality. And that kind of disconnect, which was increasingly common over the last four years, helped
inspire my new book, “Unhinged USA.”

No doubt, many Americans — maybe a consistent majority — have always been motivated primarily by simple faith, gut feelings and curious perceptions of how society and the universe work. Throughout history, humans have been transfixed by myths and storytelling and guided by high priests of various dogmas who claim to have a channel to one god or another. Even today, revelations of scientists and well-researched reporting of serious journalists lack the persuasive power to penetrate the minds of millions of people who are perfectly happy believing preposterous things.

Thanks to 21st century technology, we now are all being overwhelmed by an explosion of information, a tsunami of data, a cyclone of chatter. Instead of making us wiser, though, this endless flood gushing from our phones and laptops seems to be making us dumber and even more in thrall to fantasy. Outlandish ideas no longer languish on the fringes of discourse; they often take center stage. And, with most people choosing to segregate themselves in communities of like-minded people and to seek information only from sources that reinforce biases, it is harder than ever for hard facts to cut through the fog of disinformation and ignorance.

Thus, President-elect Donald Trump.

It did not matter to his fans that the 45th and 47th president of the United States was an obvious liar and quite in thrall of outlandish views himself. They were entertained by his belligerent, unfiltered rants that expressed in a tiny vocabulary the forbidden things they felt. Obsessed only with aggrandizing himself, Trump ignored inconvenient, if entirely accurate, information and promoted his own dark, improvised version of reality. And his supporters happily accepted him as he was, believing even his craziest claims, while rejecting any hard facts that contradicted his babble.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a horde of these true believers responded to Trump’s urgings by storming the United States Capitol, doing battle with police in an attempt to overturn the results of the election that Trump lost — the most brazen political act since the unrest of the 1860s.

The Capitol insurrection was just the starting point of four off-kilter years. These were the years of Joe Biden’s presidency, but it was not a period dominated by the president. A master of old-school politics, Biden accomplished a great deal against almost impossible odds, yet he disappeared from the news for long stretches of time, failing to understand what it now takes to grab the attention of a seriously distracted public in a diffused and ephemeral communications environment. Only one thing stuck in the incurious minds of most voters by the time the next presidential campaign rolled around: Biden was too old for the job.

The years 2021 through 2024 are bookended by the conclusion of one Trump term in the White House and the opening of another.

It was a norm-breaking period that began with furious arguments about masks, school closures and stay-at-home orders as the nation struggled to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Strangely, in a time of shared threat with hundreds of thousands of people dying, half of Americans dutifully sequestered themselves and got vaccinated while the other half refused to comply and acted as if it were all a hoax and an assault on their liberty.

In Silicon Valley and Seattle, high-tech companies rushed to invent artificial intelligence entities that could transform the world in marvelous ways, but might also eclipse the powers of mere humans. Despite the enormous risks — the least of which would be the elimination of millions of working class and artistic jobs, as well as the creation of a vast and deep swamp of bogus images and fake information — the tech titans resisted attempts to regulate their innovations or inhibit the ominous rise of an AI-dominated world.

On college campuses, there were hot debates about pronouns, microaggressions, cultural appropriation and whether it was racist not to use the term Latinx. This academic kerfuffle featured dogmatic students and cowed professors engaging in performative outrage and frantic apology to prove their “wokeness,” an exercise that was easily caricatured by conservative politicians and news media who used the ideological excesses on campus to effectively slander all progressives and liberals.

Wildfires driven by climate change burned throughout the West each summer and filled cities with smoke from Seattle to New York. Mass gun violence spread across the country, too, unchecked by the thoughts and prayers of pious politicians. The conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, opening the way for draconian abortion laws in red states and turning blue states into places of refuge for women desperately seeking medical care for life-threatening pregnancies.

Hamas conducted a vicious attack on innocent Israelis; Israel responded with a remorseless military campaign that decimated Gaza. Seized by visions of a restored Russian empire, Vladimir Putin unleashed a barbaric invasion of Ukraine that he expected would bring that country to its knees within weeks. Instead, like the conflict in the Middle East, the war dragged on and on.

In Washington, D.C., the Jan. 6 Committee convincingly made the case that Trump and his minions had plotted to overthrow a fair and democratic presidential election, yet the committee members’ work was denigrated and ignored by Republicans in Congress, who remained subservient to their master. A once-grand political party nominated for president a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse and indicted for several serious offenses. And why not? That man managed to win an election against Vice President Kamala Harris, whose own candidacy came about in a manner that, in times past, would have seemed a preposterous plot device in a ridiculous political novel.

Nothing is too preposterous or ridiculous to happen in public life any longer — not in the unhinged USA.

Thanks to Bob P.

Thanks to Pam P.