The True Believers
I cannot help but notice Democrat Bob Menendez resigned from the Senate after being convicted of everything but the Great Train Robbery, Democrat Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race for the sake of his country and party and Democrat Al Franken resigned from the Senate for pretending to sexually assault a woman for the sake of a bad joke.
But Republican Donald Trump is still running for president after sexually assaulting a wide variety of Real Life women and being convicted of 34 felonies.
If you’re still trying to figure out who to vote for (and I have no idea how that’s possible) how about not voting for a guy who doesn’t understand shame or self-sacrifice or why he would ever do anything for anybody else, all of which are pretty lousy qualities for a president.
BTW:
After Donald Trump got convicted of all those felonies a whole bunch of people said it proved no one is above the law which, if you look at the facts, is complete bullshit.
Most people (and that certainly includes me and probably you) can’t afford to keep appealing their felony convictions or appoint enough Supreme Court Justices to say, upon further consideration, whatever crimes we committed in the past are no longer crimes.
There’s a justice system for rich people and a justice system for the rest of us and if you or I got convicted of 34 felonies, by now we’d be in prison wearing lipstick, hot pants and calling some 325-pound meth dealer “Daddy.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s life doesn’t seem to have changed much at all and he’s still running for president and if you google “where does Donald Trump’s felony convictions stand today” it’s hard to find anything current because the media has the attention span of a hummingbird that just downed a 32-ounce Monster Energy drink and apparently everybody’s moved on to the latest story which is either “Donald Trump’s right ear is assassinated by lone gunman” or “Democrats holding breath while waiting for Kamala to tell another bizarre story about a coconut tree.”
The Danger of True Believers
According to the Oxford Languages dictionary, a cynic is “a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons” and a skeptic is “a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions.”
If those are the choices I consider myself a skeptic.
Probably for the same reasons I consider myself an agnostic and not an atheist, because an atheist is saying God doesn’t exist and agnostic is saying I don’t know for sure and you can’t either.
And while we’re browsing through the Oxford dictionary; “faith” – which gets way too much good press – is “belief without evidence” which is a slippery slope because that’s how you wind up believing there’s a child-sex slavery ring being run out of Georgetown pizza parlor basement even though the pizza parlor doesn’t have a basement and a UFO is about to come get you so you might as well put on a pair of Nikes and castrate yourself or giving your real money to Sam Bankman-Fraud for some imaginary money is a sound financial investment.
I mean how could giving your life’s savings to this guy ever go wrong?
While it’s had some good moments, overall “faith” has a lousy track record.
A long and colorful personal history of being wrong about a wide variety of subjects has convinced me that until I have enough evidence to be fairly sure I know what’s happened or continues to happen, I should withhold judgment.
Which, let’s face it, isn’t our best thing; we like to have opinions and want to have them right now this minute.
When we don’t know what’s happened we’ll start making stuff up because nature and insecure people abhor a vacuum, like when you send a text message to someone and they don’t answer right away, so you decide they must be mad at you for some reason, but you clearly haven’t done anything wrong, so fuck them and the horse they rode in on, they’re not your friend anymore and neither is the horse.
But then you find out they were stuck in traffic court or left their phone on a charger or were being held hostage by the same people who kidnapped or killed every member of Liam Neeson’s immediate family.
(Taken 27 is scheduled to start filming on the 12th of Never and will feature Liam rescuing his 2nd cousin’s third wife’s brother-in-law’s nephew, even though Liam is now 102 years-old. These movies where octogenarians kick the shit out of Green Berets and Hell’s Angels and UFC Heavyweight Champions are Old Dude Porn which is extremely popular with Old Dudes and why they made three Takens and three Equalizers and four Expendables and I know for sure because I watched all 11 of them.)
Anyway…
Jumping to conclusions about unanswered texts or anything else is a bad idea which is why Mark Twain probably didn’t say:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
According to the internet, that might have actually been said by Josh Billings or Artemus Ward or Kin Hubbard or Will Rogers or every Donald Trump supporter who ever wore one of those goofy red hats and put a giant-ass Band-Aid on his or her ear.
True Believers scare me and ought to scare you because, as I may have mentioned once or nine times before, a whole bunch of our current problems are caused by extremism. Idolizing some egomaniacal leader who doesn’t mind lying his or her ass off and never questioning what they say or do is how you wind up shouting “Sieg Heil!” and putting your neighbors in ovens.
And if you’re only skeptical about the other side, you might be part of the problem.
For quite a while the Democrats’ PR Machine was telling us Joe Biden was A-OK and started every morning with a hundred one-handed pushups, then solved three Rubik’s Cubes at the same time and learned a new foreign language by lunch, but it turns out some of the Democrats were lying their asses off and in reality had to draw Joe diagrams so he wouldn’t bump into the Oval Office furniture.
And now some of those same Democrats are telling us Kamala Harris is really really really terrific even though not long ago a fair number of them wanted Kamala dropped from the ticket.
Nevertheless, if the choice is Donald or Kamala I’ll vote for Kamala which is no surprise because if Donald Trump was running against a tree stump I’d vote for the tree stump.
The Democrats’ enthusiastic willingness to change horses in the middle of the stream reminds me of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Flat Nose Curry’s announcement of who he was really pulling for in Butch’s knife fight, but only after the knife fight was over:
Wait, where did I come up with that “withholding judgment” crap?
I’ve drawn five cartoons a week since the early days of the Hundred Years’ War and have expressed more opinions than the judges on The Voice, RuPaul and the U.S. Supreme Court combined, so how am I withholding judgment?
Over the years I’ve had the chance to think about what I do and have come to a couple conclusions:
1. I’m not telling anyone else what to think, I’m telling people what I think and if they find that convincing and it changes their thinking great, but if they don’t and it doesn’t I’m OK with that.
2. Over the years I’ve learned to withhold judgment until I have enough evidence to form an opinion (it’s better to gather evidence and then form opinions than forming opinions and then looking for evidence) and for the most part, most of my opinions seem pretty obvious like Donald Trump is a shitty human being, the people who adore him are gullible and some of the Democrats lied about Joe and now might be lying about Kamala.
When it comes to political opinions I think of myself as the cartoonist version of the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
As you might recall, in this fable a couple of tailoring conmen convince an emperor that they have a special cloth that only wise people can see and everyone wants to be considered wise so they all pretend to see it and the hoax is only revealed when a child sees the naked emperor and says the obvious.
The Emperor was naked, but the crowd needed someone to cut through the bullshit they’d been fed.
And we know this is fable because everyone immediately admits the child is right, but in Real Life the child would get a slap in the back of the head and told to shut the fuck up; the emperor’s new clothes look fantastic and the child must be a moron if he can’t see them and he’d immediately be enrolled in classes for children who are “differently abled” and be bullied throughout high school by the football team’s quarterback and his dumbass second-string buddies and then the overly-honest kid would go to work in a tire store and after a long hard day of recapping tires, stop in his local bar on the way home for a cold one, where the high school quarterback now works as a bartender and starts every conversation with:
“Hey, remember that time you said you saw the emperor’s dick?”
BTW:
Odd thought, and I have a Lifetime Supply of them: the emperor was told foolish people wouldn’t be able to see his clothes, so he had to know those foolish people would see him naked and if you do the math, there is no shortage of foolish people and yet he went out in public anyway, so maybe the emperor had a thing for exposing himself.
He wouldn’t be the first.
Today’s Lesson
You don’t have to express your opinions immediately, withhold judgment until you know for sure, if you see a naked emperor compliment him on his extremely attractive cargo shorts and if you’re over 70 don’t fight a group of ex-Foreign Legion mercenaries because it’s not a movie and they’re going to kick the crap out of you.
Have a good weekend.
Great column. You walk the line between humility and narcissism.