Just When We Thought 2020 Was A Bad Year & We Were Done With All That, January 2021 Has Proved To Be Even Worse & The Month Is Barely Half Over

In the e-mail that brought today's "This Modern World" 'too, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) also wrote:

This is the last cartoon I will write under the presidency of Donald Trump (unless he wins another term in 2024, but I’m going to let that be a problem for another day). I wanted to write a piece that marked the transitional moment, but obviously there was no way to summarize the awfulness of the past four years in a single cartoon. I know that I am barely scratching the surface here, and that there are countless things I left out — no need to write me to tell me what I “forgot”! This is gestural rather than inclusive. I do not believe the burden is on people who despise Trump for extremely good reasons to reach out and make nice with the side that tried to delegitimize the election, overturn the results, and incited an armed insurrection. There are 20,000 National Guard troops in DC right now, sent there to protect us from one of our two major parties. The GOP will try to shrug it off and carry on as usual, and why not? They got away with it after George W. Bush left the country in tatters. I don’t know if the Trump legacy will be as easy to shake off, but the bar is continually lowered and our standards constantly shifting for the worse. I am hopeful, at least, that we might have a marginally competent government in charge of the covid response, moving forward. I realized with some horror after the election that we were basically going to have to wait out the next three months before anyone addressed the pandemic with any seriousness or urgency, and that’s exactly what happened, but maybe things are about to shift? I have no idea what happens next, I just feel like we are all shipwreck survivors who have managed to drag ourselves up on a beach somewhere. The Capitol riot laid bare the sheer depravity of Trumpism and the right wing echo chamber. I hope it is a stain that never washes out of the Republican party, but I have been doing the work I do for too long to be overly optimistic about that.

Until next week, when Donald Trump will be a private citizen facing countless lawsuits, possible bankruptcy, and a post-presidency impeachment trial....

Dan/Tom

January 2021 is barely half over and it has felt like a continuation of horrible 2020. This blogger's gloomy prognosis is being confirmed day-by-day. The hopeful wish for better days to come is very shaky as we begin the bottom half of January 2021. If this is (fair & balanced) legitmate pessimism, so br it.

[x TMW]
The End Of An Error
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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