A Family Trait

If you're flawed, feel free to blame your parents...

For the past few days I’ve been assisting a friend who asked me to help him paint his beach house.

Looking back:

I said yes because I was overly-focused on the word “beach” and he invited me because he was overly-focused on the word “paint” and I think we’ve both been a little disappointed in the results because I never got to the beach and my house-painting skills turned out to be pretty much non-existent.

Which is not surprising because drawing cartoons and painting houses require two entirely different skill sets which most people fail to realize and over the years I’ve had a lot of friends ask work-related questions like:

“You’re an artist, could you paint my car?”

Which is kind of like asking a podiatrist to perform brain surgery because he’s a doctor.

Thanks largely to the efforts of others, my friend’s beach house did get painted (I was quickly demoted to power-washing and taping up windows), but I did offer to sign his house in the lower right-hand corner, an offer that has yet to be accepted.

All of which reminds me:

I also recently mowed my mom’s backyard which consists of a weed-covered hill that Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders would have found too steep to charge up and when I went out to do it she said I shouldn’t have to mow the hill all by myself and I said if you see a gang of free-range landscapers with nothing better to do, send them back to help, but until then it looked like it was up to me and I better get started.

Then she said it was way too hot and she was worried about me, but I told her she could stop worrying about my health because I give up pretty easy.

To which she said: “I know…it’s a family trait.”

To which I said: “If we all have that trait, who did we learn it from?”

After which she admitted she was always advising us not to do something because we might get hurt and she may have had a point because our youthful activities included experiments like seeing how fast our cousin’s Honda 250 could pull a Schwinn bike if the two were connected by a rope. (The answer is: quite a bit faster than the Schwinn bike rider was prepared to handle which is how one of my brothers ended up making an airborne arrival in a blackberry thicket.)

In any case, I cranked up the mower and my mom sent me off into a blazing summer afternoon with these encouraging words:

“You won’t last long.”

I think it’s safe to say we’re all lucky my mom was not there to give an inspirational send-off speech on June 6th, 1944 when the Allies set sail for Normandy or we’d all be speaking German.

So in the future if I fail to demonstrate the resolve that made America great and convinced us we had the God-given right to settle the West and steal the land from who and/or whomever got in our way, I think it’s only fair to blame my mother even though I moved out of her house at 18 and have had five decades to change my habits.

Anyway…

Now that I’ve explained what I’ve been up to, it’s now time to move on to some cartoons and we’ll start with…

As I mentioned in a previous post, Donald Trump had the annoying habit of tearing up government documents that were supposed to be preserved and that meant somebody had to tape them back together and when I read about that in an Associated Press article it inspired the cartoon you’re looking at.

Turns out Trump had Top Secret documents mixed in with old magazines and newspapers so he seems to be using the same filing system as my 97-year-old mother. When she recently showed me some of the “important” documents she’d saved, the first one I pulled out was a pink slip for an automobile from 1933.

And…

According to the AP, the National Archives had made repeated requests for Trump to return the documents, starting in May of 2021 and Trump ignored the requests, so his “all they had to do was ask” pose is once again bullshit which is a word I find myself using repeatedly whenever I write about Donald Trump.

The above cartoon was actually inspired by two stories:

1. A poll that said the majority of Americans would like to see stricter gun laws…

2. And a recent story about a father shooting his 19-year-old son he mistook for a burglar.

Which raises the question of whether or not gun ownership actually makes you and your family safer and a number of sources say it doesn’t. Here’s a very lengthy link to an article on a Harvard University website and it argues that the presence of a gun makes encounters more violent.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/do-guns-make-us-safer-science-suggests-no/#:~:text=A%20more%20reliable%20source%20of,reduces%20the%20likelihood%20of%20injury.

Here’s another article that says pretty much the same thing:

https://research.northeastern.edu/does-having-a-gun-at-home-really-make-you-safer/

And here’s another from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence that explains how owning a gun changes your behavior:

https://www.csgv.org/psychology-gun-ownership/

Feel free to reach your own conclusions, but as you can see from the cartoon above, I’ve reached mine. (Hey, because I have no previous experience, I’m bad at house-painting; how proficient do you think I’d be at gun battles?)

Just in case you haven’t noticed: the weather has been pretty much batshit crazy (a highly-technical meteorologist’s term that you shouldn’t use lightly) and droughts have been followed by floods and if I turn on the local news and their weatherman is predicting a plague of locusts interspersed with light showers of frogs I wouldn’t be overly surprised.

It’s getting downright Biblical.

The above cartoon was inspired by driving past what used to be a huge lake and seeing more brown than blue.

Okey-dokey, that’s it for today and I’ve got to get back into political cartoonist mode, but just in case you’re wondering, that picture at the top of this post is a pretty perfect Manhattan with a Sun-Going-Down-Over-the-Pacific backdrop so I feel well-compensated for whatever contribution I made toward my friend’s beach house getting painted and if my mom would start serving cocktails as an enticement, I just might go back and mow the rest of that hill.

We’ll see.  

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/