Today, Beware OF Officer Unfriendly Of The TMW Police Department (On The Right)

In the e-mail that brought today's TMW 'toon, Dan/Tom also wrote:

The extraordinary thing about police behavior right now is that this is what they do when they know the eyes of the entire nation are on them. Rayshard Brooks, killed in the parking lot of a Wendy’s after falling asleep in his car. The protesters who have lost an eye after having been shot in the face with “non-lethal rounds” — at least six that I’m aware of, including my Twitter friend, the activist and journalist Linda Tirado. The protesters in Philly who were coralled by the side of a freeway and tear gassed. The demonstrators in Portland, Oregon who were attacked with a sound cannon, which can cause permanent hearing damage. The numerous protesters who were arbitrarily arrested during the NYC curfew, the only point of which seemed to be to give police an additional excuse to arrest peaceful demonstrators. The old man who was pushed over for no apparent reason and then ignored as he bled from his ear. And of course the peaceful protesters who were cleared from Lafayette Park with chemical irritants (*not* tear gas, the White House was quick to note), flash bangs and rubber bullets. And on and on.

Meanwhile the pandemic still rages — the only reason we’re not going to have a second spike is that we’re still in the middle of the first one. And as I’m writing these words, Trump is planning to hold a massive indoor rally, and the right wing talking point is that if the demonstrators can protest, the trumpkins can rally. I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about the effect of the protests on the Corona numbers, but they are still flat in New York City two weeks later, which suggests that outdoor crowds, in motion, with near-universal mask wearing has not been a significant vector of transmission. An indoor rally full of shouting redhats who eschew mask-wearing as a matter of ideological solidarity will almost certainly be a different story.

Finally: The skeptical cop in this cartoon is wearing a Punisher skull, which many real-life cops wear as a symbol of police solidarity and god knows what else. The comic-book Punisher, of course, is a lawless vigilante who murders with impunity, so it seems like either a self-own or truth in advertising.

Until next week,

Dan/Tom

Until today in June 2020, The This Modern World had featured a neighborhood cop, Officer Friendly, who offers explanations of the real world to neighborhood kids. And thanks to the New Normal, there's no more friendly cops in a militarized outfit known as Officer Friendly. If this is the (fair & balanced) image of life in our streets, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x TMW]
Protecting & Serving
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]


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