Okay, so this is not part of my regular pattern for blog posts, but I did need to say something. This won’t be an extensive post, but it will be an intensive one. You can get a sense of my concerns if you insert a Jeepers or a Crikey or some similar expression after each sentence. Save me some work.
I have a handful of comics that I read daily on rotation—you know, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, a few others, and the one that brings me to this comment, which would be Doonesbury.
Doonesbury, like Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes, recycles old comics, with the exception of the weekends, when Garry Trudeau deigns to give us a new one. This all works out on average because back in the day Trudeau had a functioning sense of humor—unless and until he was within fifty yards of a Republican president. Then he would turn into a hamfisted propagandist, about as humorless as old Herblock would have been right after he learned that a cigar-smoking capitalist had run over his dog.
Anyway, on to the point, as I do have one. In today’s installment, Trudeau has a cartoon shrink helpfully explain to us all the symptoms of Donald Trump’s developing dementia. Trump’s dementia, not Biden’s, making this one a howler for the ages. We have been watching the elder abuse that has constituted this administration for three years now, with the president shuffling around like a remote-controlled somnambulist, and so Trudeau is trying to warn us about the dangers of putting someone with dementia into the White House. Look at that last panel. Whatever would we do if the president of the USA were non compos mentis? Same thing we are doing now, I suspect.
Trump’s syntax is convoluted enough that a talented cartoonist could have some fun with it, and could even try to give us a send up like this . . . if anybody but Joe Biden were the current president. But as it is, Joe Biden is the president, or whoever runs his meds is the president, and Garry Trudeau thinks he still has an ear for the satiric opportunity. Yeah, but that ear has the acuity of about three feet of tin foil.