Selling Us The Rope
An essay about Corporate America...
In an impressive display of Presidential Petulant Vindictiveness, Donald Trump is suing a pollster in Iowa for saying that Kamala Harris was ahead in the race he eventually won and frankly, if we start suing pollsters for being wrong we’re going to have our hands full.
To be completely accurate (don’t get used to it) Trump is suing pollster Ann Seltzer, her polling company, The Des Moines Register newspaper, its parent company Gannett, the kid who delivered the newspapers with the incorrect prediction and the makers of Schwinn Stingray bicycles.
(Hey, I warned you not to get used to accurate information because I made those last two things up, but I get the feeling if someone had the foresight to suggest suing a 12-year-old and the makers of the bike he rode, Trump would have been gung ho because he likes suing people and according to the people who have nothing better to do than put possibly-inaccurate information on Wikipedia, between 1973 and 2016 Donald Trump and has businesses have been involved in over 4,000 legal cases and I’m guessing Donald didn’t slow down all that much since 2016.)
We’re well aware of how Trump behaves when he loses and now we’re seeing how he behaves when he wins and yes, I’m also aware that I used the term “Sore Winners” to describe Chiefs fans who are/were upset that their 13-1 team weren’t winning by a big enough margin, which is probably why I thought of that term after reading about Trump’s pollster lawsuit, but I haven’t used “sore winners” in a cartoon and I have absolutely no compunction about stealing lines from myself.
This Thought Just In
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier, but it seems entirely possible that some of those upset Chiefs fans are sports bettors and are pissed off that the Chiefs didn’t cover the spread (like it’s Patrick Mahomes’ and Andy Reid’s responsibility to make their bets pay off) and I’m thinking that because I just read an article about sports betting and how it’s getting out of control now that we’ve decided it’s OK for the NBA/NFL/MLB to have unprotected 3-ways with FanDuel and DraftKings.
Also…
You can now watch four games at once and it took one of my more hip sons (which describes all three of them) to point out, “Dad, they do that for gamblers.”
Because if your gambling’s out of control and you placed four bets on college football teams you never heard of and know nothing about, you don’t want to have to keep changing channels to find out if you’re going to have to inform your son and/or daughter that you can no longer afford their tuition and after the Christmas break they’re not going back to Harvard and need to find a job as a Starbuck’s barista.
And Now A completely Unnecessary Digression about Harvard
Along with some cartooning colleagues – Jeff MacNelly, Bill DeOre and Paul Szep – one year I got invited to give a lecture at Harvard and part of the deal was spending one night in JFK’s college dorm room and they had a guest register with lots of famous names and being who I am and where I’m from, the name I found most impressive was Roy Rogers.
No idea if Dale or Trigger slept in the room’s other twin bed (I was stuck with Bill as a roommate) but the upside of the whole adventure is Bill and I can now say we’re not the kind of people who attend Harvard, we’re the kind of people who lecture at Harvard.
Which is a great item to casually drop into any conversation and when I get asked what kind of soft drink I want with my McDonald’s Double-Quarter Pounder combo I start my answer with:
“Well when I was lecturing at Harvard…”
Which is a great way to make a big impression on total strangers and wind up with more than the average amount of spit in your Double-Quarter Pounder.
It has been my experience that people can be extremely short-sighted, which I prove every winter by skipping my daily walk when it gets too goddamned cold (it’s currently 19 degrees outside) and killing time by overeating like I’m about to hibernate for three months and then wondering how I gained 10 pounds over the Holidays.
So we make satisfying short-term decisions, but then suffer long-term consequences and right now I’m thinking about the people who sell us guns.
Hal Holbrook was right, if you want to understand something: “Follow the money.”
Which is a dated reference to All The President’s Men, a movie worth watching more than once and if they ever make a movie about my life I’m hoping a Young Robert Redford plays me, but if they haven’t invented a time machine by then, I’ll settle for an Old John Goodman.
But back to those short-sighted gun merchants:
According to the internet the United States currently has more guns than people – about 120 guns for every 100 people and since I don’t have even one gun, someone somewhere has at least 2.4 of them – and our easy access to guns helps explains all the gun violence.
Hard to have gun violence if you don’t have a gun.
For instance…
Canada has approximately 34.7 guns per 100 people so if 100 Canadians get pissed off 65.3 of them have to settle for a fist fight or calling someone a “hoser” (no idea if that’s actually a Canadian insult, I got it from watching the McKenzie Brothers) and their scarcity of guns might explain why in 2020 the Canadian firearm-related homicide rate per 100,000 people was 0.73 and during the same time period ours was 13.6.
But at this late date, why bring logic into it?
Corporate America sells us guns and then fires as many people as logistically possible (and quite often, a few more than that) and fucks us out of the medical insurance coverage we paid for and then are totally shocked when a CEO gets shot.
Apparently they just thought it would be poor people shooting other poor people, which is understandable because that’s mainly what happens, but let a rich person get shot and now we have national crisis on our hands.
And, yeah, I know suspected shooter Luigi Mangione used a “ghost gun” but all that actually demonstrates is that in the US of A we have way too much access to firearms even if we have to make our own using a Xerox machine. (Actually, you need a 3-D printer, which are surprisingly cheap).
And if anyone says, “Wait a minute, maybe untraceable guns that can go through a metal detector are a bad idea” someone will start waving the Constitution around (a document they’re happy to ignore whenever it suits their purposes) and start talking about Freedom and the Ability to Resist An Oppressive Government and Red Dawn scenarios (the first one, the remake was shitty) like you and your plastic gun are going to hold off the Russian/North Korean/Bad-Guy-Du-Jour Army when they show up with helicopters, tanks and rocket launchers or blow up your house with a Predator drone being piloted by some 19-year old sitting in a warehouse in Reno, Nevada.
Anyway…
Hal Holbrook was right, the real reason we’re armed to the teeth is:
M-O-N-E-Y.
There’s way too much of it to be made selling guns to people who think they need one and if some school kids have to die in the process, so be it.
Today’s Lesson
According to the internet (at least theoretically) either Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin or Chico Marx said some version of: “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.”
A pithy quote, but as History has shown us Vlad/Joe/Chico were way off…
They sold us guns instead.
That was exceptionally pithy.
Good stuff in bad times. How do you keep your bouyancy?
Seems like the constitution has gone the way of the bible… just a useful quote generator when needed.