Incoherent Much In The Most Recent 5 O'Clock Follies From The White House?

Along with today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote the following e-mail message:

Hey All,

This was supposed to be a cartoon about the rise and fall of Trump’s fixation with hydroxychloroquine, but literally minutes after I finished writing a first draft, he held his now-infamous press briefing and mused aloud, "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.” I’ve had to rewrite a lot of cartoons at the last minute over the past three years, as Trump does something dumber than you would have imagined possible up until the moment he actually does it, but this may be the first time he literally acted out a cartoon-in-progress before my eyes.

In the original version in which the president suggesting that you drink bleach was supposed to be wacky satire, I had Trumpkins making a run on ammonia and bleach, and ultimately rationalizing the fact that it would probably kill you by noting that it would kill the virus as well, so the president was at least half right.

I had to do some rewriting, obviously. And I decided to go meta at the end, because it was just too absurd to have this cartoon transform into mundane reporting rather than over-the-top satire and not make note of the fact.

I’ve also decided to try to start incorporating more of the strange word-salad of Trump’s speech patterns, i.e. “a very much large percentage of numbers.” I’m barely exaggerating him there; it really seems like he’s becoming more incoherent by the day.

In personal news … ha ha just kidding, there is no personal news! Another week, same as the last. I miss the world. I miss crowded subways and late nights out in other neighborhoods. I imagine there’s a slightly different flavor to this experience, if you are settled in your life and in the place you live, but I’ve been making slow passage through a liminal space for two years, grappling with unresolved questions that have only been magnified by isolation. Do I stay in this city? Is there any point to living in cities at all anymore? I don’t know if I’ll still be in this apartment in two months, or if I should just try to rent a house up near my kid somewhere. If this is just what life is going to be like for a year or two, it seems absurd to keep paying NYC rent for a life that could literally be lived anywhere. All I know is, the world is going to look very different, when we emerge blinking from our caves, into that transitional space between the lessening of quarantine and the arrival of a vaccine or treatment. All we can do for now is shelter in place and take it a day at a time.

Stay safe,

Dan/Tom

The despirited tone of the 'toonist's e-mail message reflects the bone-weary quality of life in the United States in late April 2020. The COVID-19 Pandemic still claims lives across the country and misguided people are demonstrating and seeking a cessation of shelter-in-place, social distancing, and the mask-in-public requirements. This civil disobedience will lead to more deaths across the land. We are moving toward the tipping point where people will wander the land pushing their belongings in discarded shopping carts, searching for abandoned can goods. The novelist Cormac McCarthy described the world after the tipping point following a future great unnamed calamity in The Road (2006). This blogger identifies with a shopping cart because on most of his ventures out of shelter, he is pushing a shopping cart in a grocery store, wearing a face mask. If this is (fair & balanced despair, 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

This genius parody has become this blogger's current earworm and Resistance Anthem. So, if this is a (fair & balanced) first step toward doing the right thing, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Press Briefing
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.]

Copyright © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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