“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school. They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool, ’til you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.” From Working Class Hero, written by John Lennon.
President Rapist and his incel storm troopers have been spending the weekend reinforcing the belief that with great bigotry comes great cowardice.
On his Day One, our Commander-in-Treason ordered the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, including but not limited to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Women’s History Month, Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day. DEI has replaced “woke” as a plague upon those who decided to abandon their morals.
But you already knew that. If you didn’t, you would have quit reading about two dozen words back. Anyway, it is incumbent upon us to pick up the slack.
This week I’m going to start with an amazing cartoonist named Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), a.k.a. “Roosevelt’s soldier with a pen.” It was World War II, and that was a great time for editorial cartoonists, a job that now is quickly coughing up blood but had been exceptionally fruitful in its communication abilities.
The Jewish Press notes Szyk was raised in Soviet-occupied Poland to a cultural Jewish family (as opposed to religious Jewish; quite like myself, including the Russian/Polish heritage part). He was in London when Hitler invaded Poland and availed himself of the freedom his location to pick up his pen and “comment” on Hitler and the Nazis with a clarity that would be unimaginable had he still been in Poland. And, history informs us, he would have found his work to be terminal.
In New York City back in late 1942, Szyk joined Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, Broadway director Moss Hart, producer Billy Rose, composer Kurt Weill (“Three Penny Opera”) and others to create a dramatic pageant in the form of a production at Madison Square Garden about the plight of European Jews called We Will Never Die. It debuted the following March to a sold-out crowd before the show toured the nation. Szyk was the artist for the entire operation: posters, sets, promotional material, and such.
Szyk’s work speaks for itself. I wish I was fast enough to do this before Holocaust Memorial Day last week; as President Rapist announced, this holocaust thing is no longer a matter of concern for his United States government and the MAGA rodents for which it stands. His main TechBro Elon Musk then told people, particularly Germans, to get over it.
As for the rapidly disappearing art of editorial cartoons, the pestilence in the White House, with the uncanny help of Junior TechBro Bezos the Clown, have pretty much put the final nail in that coffin.
Sigh. MAGAts and Great American Assholes would do well to understand this. We have all this stuff in books, in other forms of print, on microfilm, in libraries public and private, not to mention in colleges as well, and, of course, on all sorts of computer servers and unlinked storage devices all over the world. The truth will not be ignored and you will spend the rest of your days looking over your shoulder pissing down your pants legs. In my book, that is a small price to pay for treason.
And, by the way, Black Lives still Matter.
