On 9/11, again

If NPR can do it, so can I: Herewith, an encore presentation of my post from 9/11/2011, a decade after terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and took thousands of lives. If anything, my sentiments intensified.

We are celebrating that moment today, and I don't use the verb lightly. My city today is honoring three young men, raised here, credited with thwarting an attack last month by an alleged gunman on a French train. Surely you read about it.

The men will have a parade and of course it is a fine thing, and as I hear so often and agree with, they should get a free drink in whatever watering hole they pass for as long as they live. The story given is that today is the only day the three lifelong friends could be in town together. OK.

Maybe we are trying to take back 9/11, to rise from it, to shake it off, to reclaim it. My late dad-in-law's birthday is today. I never asked, but I imagine he relinquished something on this day in 2001, as people on occasion might have said, "Wow, you're birthday is 9/11? That must be tough." "Nine eleven" itself, a phrase never before spoken until 2001.

That's the only way I can fathom the organized barbecues I'm reading about for today. Otherwise, celebrations of this day ring hollow and flat and out of touch.

This day is still harnessed and pulled and prodded for ideological purposes. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush blames Obama, of course, for failures in Iraq and the Middle East, and leaves out what his brother wrought to exacerbate the terrible toll, the loss of trillions into somebodies' pockets and the desert sands, the deaths of tens of thousands, that his father started, on an ornate fabric of pretext and lies. Some of the engineers of that terrible toll serve among Jeb Bush's campaign advisers. And so it goes.

#neverforget means to me never forget the terrible cost wrought from that moment, that continues today in the long and terrible line of refugees from Iraq and Syria into Europe, the rotting bodies in a refrigerated truck trailer, the tiny bodies washed up onto Turkish beaches.

We are nation run more and more by ideology than substance and sense. We are, as critics said of George W. Bush, all hat and no cattle.

The rich get richer and the haves, to quote Eddie Vedder, have not a clue …

No superlatives can ever contain the horror and shock and sadness and disbelief of Sept. 11, 2001 — though we all will try in many and varied ways as the tenth anniversary approaches this weekend.

In the news media, the effort has already begun in earnest. News anchors introduce the myriad angles on the anniversary, their chins pointed slightly lower to their chests, their eyebrows arranged just so, conveying a calculated look of somber observation.

But we never truly grieved that impossible horror, never got a chance, even though the innumerable tributes under way say that we did. The Bush administration, helped by the mainstream media's lack of backbone, co-opted that day as a symbol to make us afraid of one another.

Our leaders used it to incite two protracted, misguided and ruinous wars we still wage against dubious enemies, begun on the basis of outright lies. Instead of having nothing to fear but fear itself, we have accepted the offer of fear by itself, which at first did frighten us but now has dulled and callused us, enabling the puppet masters of big oil, banking and military industry to profit mightily in our torpor.

Mission accomplished.

All the while, we still send women and men into the teeth of these wars — and will still, for years — yet barely receive them when they return damaged or dead, and the nation has fragmented.

The redemption and healing that should have followed those terrible events have been tainted by what followed instead. I can't consume any of the 9/11 remembrances and never-before-heard audiotapes, can't stop for a moment to regard that day for its own sake, without immediately linking it to the bloody horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are WTF? funhouse-mirror countermeasures in search of phantom WMDs. It's impossible to mourn because it's impossible not to be angry — at this absurd sequence of events, at myself for succumbing to indifference and impotence.

Those people who fell from the World Trade Center towers to their doom — such nightmarish visions! — might as well have disappeared into the desert sands around Fallujah, for all that we got to consider their horror and loss, to themselves, their families, their employers, their communities. They became fodder for what I still believe is George W. Bush's intent to salvage the legacy of his father.

Since 9/11/2001, we have become Lord of the Flies, reduced to our baser selves. Psychiatrist Justin Frank of Washington, D.C. holds a similar view, that we have become babies, viewing the world in black and white and Us versus Them.

Opposition to our nation's response — to war, to torture, to degradation, to community-endorsed hatred of Muslims, even to this strange semantic casting of ourselves as The Homeland — means being unpatriotic.

And patriots, as we know through the doublespeaky Patriot Act, willingly give up many of our freedoms in exchange for what we want to think is our comfort and safety. Air traveler with a Middle Eastern kinda name? Sure, haul him away without benefit of a doubt, just so long as I can stop feeling the fear you keep waving in front of me.

You can trace all of this to obvious outcomes, such as a divided, uncompromising Congress, and to the accepted notion now that compromise is bad (when in fact compromise is the nature of action in a representative government).

You can trace it to our economic crisis, to jobs lost at a bewildering rate, to the banks that took our money to stay in business despite being criminally bad at it, to us no longer having the money to teach our children well or keep our bridges up and pay people to do all of that.

Hand in glove, you can trace it to the artless propaganda that divides us. I'm not so naive as to believe propaganda hasn't always bedeviled us, but it used to be sophisticated. Now it's an open wound. Even before an idea rises into public view, haters of that idea create words to kill it and replace it with new ideas that make us afraid.

Propagandists repeat that simple anti-idea ad infinitum until the idea wilts in its dense shadow. So we have "Obamacare," "death panels," and the anti-ideas that President Obama is a "socialist" with designs to ruin this country, that he is Muslim (with the presumption that this is a bad thing), that he is not a citizen, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and on and on. Just shouted and bellowed over and over again, without regard to merit, until the shouts and bellows become the new normal.

Tell lies often enough, and they become the truth. 

If not for the path down the rabbit hole that we took after 9/11, we wouldn't have the Tea Party, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Fox News. Hey, you say, those are all right-leaning people and entities! Don't you like right-wingers? Love 'em, actually. We should be a people of diverse ideas working toward the pursuit of happiness. I hate that they exist solely because of the artless propaganda that the fallout from 9/11 made fashionable.

It has begotten the abysmal meanness in which our governments still deny and delay needed medical care to those who suffered from environmental toxins as they rescued the people from the World Trade Center collapse.

I trace it farther, to reality TV shows where we get to watch people re-enact Lord of the Flies in all manner of novel ways — on supposedly deserted islands, fashion runways, celebrity kitchens, New Jersey, wherever the Kardashians are.

I trace it even to last week's Fox Sports' idea of a funny bit in which a reporter interviewed only Asian students — preferably students still learning English — from USC (because that's the entire student body, right?) to have them give a "good old-fashioned, all-American" welcome to two universities that had joined the expanded Pac 12 football conference. They talk funny, get it? Some of them don't even know what the Pac 12 is — hilarious, right? Because all of us normal people do, or should. It's football, and that's American, see? Those people are different from Us, so we get to mock them.

Fox canceled that show, saying it resulted from a "breakdown in our internal processes," which I suspect is doublespeak for, "We couldn't possibly have envisioned, in the current cultural climate, this could be offensive." As is the custom in public apologies these days, Fox apologized only to those who found offense, rather than for its base cruelty.

I'm looking for signs — glimmers — that we still may truly heal from 9/11/2001. Maybe this show's cancellation is one glimmer, that time will come when all divisions cease, and our tragedy against ourselves and the world dim in memory.

When?

Of the free

I can't believe anyone could speak up for torture.

(There, I said it. I discarded a lot of high-minded ways to start this post, full of fake erudition, when all I really wanted to say is:)

I can't believe we aren't, as one, condemning torture.

By that, I mean the world, but I'll settle for my country.

I can't believe that as the Senate Intelligence Committee last week released a report on torture conducted by the CIA since the events of 9/11, the debate has spun on the merits of torture, the report's lack of thoroughness, the political timing of its, the global repercussions of its disclosure, the who-knew-what-when.

The merits of torture. Really? Agents of our government torturing people in our name.

(Pardon me, sir, but your naïvete is showing.)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said last week President Bush knew about the torture, it saved a lot of lives, and he'd authorize it again if he had the chance.

Though as I recall, events under his purview went like this: (1) Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, (2) agents began torturing people in our name, (3) our country went headlong into a war with Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist (and where also didn't exist the terrorists who directed the flying of planes into the World Trade Center), and then into war in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, leader of the terrorists claiming responsibility for the U.S. attack, was found and killed 10 years later, in Pakistan.

Maybe valid information comes from torturing people. Two wars having little to do with the events of 9/11 indicate: Probably not.

Agents also tortured innocent people in our name, extracting information that couldn't possibly have been useful. 

President Obama declared an end to torture, saying it is not what our country is about, and I agree.

Tell me: Do you believe no one right now is torturing people in the name of our country?

Maybe because it's not called torture. In this report it was often called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

One of the exquisite qualities of our government is that we are a nation of laws, not of men and women. Not only is this meant to prolong the health of our country, it's designed to protect us from the whims of despots and tyrants and loonies.

On paper. In theory.

Clever people see to the conduct of our country, based on those laws. As a rule, I favor clever people, rather than stupid people, representing me.

But key clever people have used law to say torture is not torture, that with a change of name, change of angle on a dislocated arm, change of voltage and — voila! — not torture. Enhanced interrogation techniques.

Maybe it's called something else now. Maybe by its new name, it's legal, because it's not "torture."

We are nation of laws.

Last week two memes did their trick on me, leaving me cold and peeved. You know memes, a means peculiar to social media in which an image and phrase are put together, usually cleverly, to comment on issues of the day.

[Digression: Where do memes come from? Is there a meme factory? I ask because the font, called Impact, all uppercase, white overlaid on a diffuse black shadow, is the same in virtually every one. Is there some kind of international meme style book? Some kind of global meme law? What gives?]

One meme is a variation of the World Trade Center towers exploding and burning, or of the infamously chilling image of a man falling headfirst down a tower's face, both soon to be no more.

"THIS IS WHY I DON'T GIVE A SHIT," the meme explains, "HOW TERRORISTS ARE INTERROGATED."

The other is a still frame from a video moments before the beheading of American journalist James Foley by a member of the Islamic State in Iran and Syria (or Islamic State in Iran and the Levant, what have you). The text is something about how these "pricks" behead Americans, so why should we worry about torturing some terrorists?

I'm sort of glad I can't find the meme now.

I get the sentiment: Terrorists are despicable, enraging, cowardly, beyond words. The world must stop this hell ISIS/ISIL has unleashed, not to mention the Taliban in its many forms, al-Quaeda, et. al. 

But the United States is not ISIS/ISIL, does not aspire to be ISIS/ISIL. Supporting torture in our name because terrorists commit terror sort of says terrorists call the shots, set the culture.

We try to forget, though we really shouldn't, ours is a nation built by, and on, atrocity. I am here in this place and in this state, as a result of government trying to wipe this land clean of native people so intruders — my forbears — can have it and make their own life in their place. Atrocity scars the veins of lineage, bloodies the memory, for many Americans.

Looking for a global hypocrite? Look no farther. We're hard to miss.

But ours is also a nation that hews to fine words, lofty ideals. If we mean to follow those words, we can be better. We should be better. Torture is us, but it should not be.

We are a nation of laws.

Hope as a four-letter word

How fascinating is this week's work by World's Best Editorial Cartoonist Pat Oliphant? Let me count the ways:

(Fanboys and girls of editorial cartoons — ye tiny but zealous lot — commence salivation …)

1. It's vintage Pat Oliphant:

Artistically, it's the cartoonist, two or three bottles of ink and a brush, and get outta the way! The result: A maelstrom of lines and squiggles and scribbles and scratches and the blackest blacks and the most delicate and telling of details, gelling into a complex serving of cold gall that few besides Oliphant can pull off.

Politically, it's Oliphant in the dark recess of his citizen heart.

Cynics could say Oliphant, the elder statesman of great cartoonists at 77, simply wanted an excuse to draw the villains of the Golden Age of editorial cartoons; I know it's a trope among several top cartoonists who joke they wish they had Nixon to kick around some more.

But here Oliphant unearths this lot for grave purpose. In fact, I think this cartoon is a personal appeal to President Obama; he's not trying to mess with the minds of the shrinking op-ed reading public; he's trying to mess with the president.

At heart, Oliphant is a patriot who regards his work as duty, ever vigilant to our country's flaws, ever hopeful that we do what we can to mend those flaws.

This cartoon suggests to me that Oliphant is about to give up hope in the president — as I am about to — dismayed that rather than ushering in change and progress and rescue of the Constitution, Obama instead carries on more of the same opaque imperialism he replaced, only moreso.

Oliphant has penned one (last?) wake-up call. Will President Obama see it from Senegal, where he's traveling?

Oliphant has been moving toward this statement for a while. Shortly before calling Obama out as just another crony, he produced this one:

Completely devoid of laugh lines, this cartoon is simply a severe interrogation, questioning President Obama's grasp of his office. It is cold and hard and cutting. Oliphant is fed up.

2. J. Edgar is wearing high heels. An Oliphant never forgets, and never foregoes a chance to pierce with his fiercest stereotypes.

3. It's raw art, no attempt made to erase pencil lines or to scan and Photoshop®™© it for clean clean contrast. It's as if the cartoon missed a step toward reproduction, as if Oliphant or an assistant rushed it to dissemination. It's full of smudges and extraneous pencil lines, reminding me of editorial cartoons I've seen in museum exhibits, warty and coated in Wite-Out™® blobs to hide mistakes from the press; we've been let in to where the wizard works the levers.

•••

So appropos of nothing you'll miss it: Suppose California voters passed a proposition outlawing interracial marriage. You'd be horrified, or should be. But say it passed anyway, and proposition supporters argue (without any proof) that children deserve to be raised by a mom and a dad of the same color, that parents of different races will just not provide the correct upbringing required. Then let's say the governor and the attorney general decide that the proposition, though approved by voters, violates the Constitutional protections for all under the law, and do not support it.

Then say U.S. Supreme Court decides that since the governor and California attorney general will not defend the proposition, there's nothing to decide on and the proposition has no merit. Then say the proposition's supporters decry the Supreme Court's decision, saying the court has taken away our vote. Wouldn't you counter that even though the majority of voters approved the measure, it's still blatant discrimination and violates the Constitution? Wouldn't you? (The answer is yes.)

The same for the Supreme Court's take Wednesday on Proposition 8, which would restrict marriage to between a man and a woman. Now I'm hearing the same arguments, that the high court has taken away our vote. Ah, the essential barely fathomable beauty of our democracy: That just because most people may vote for clear discrimination against those they find different or loathsome, checks and balances protect us from our stupid selves.

Moreso utterly appropos: Why do people take pictures of the foods they're about to eat and post them on facebook, et. al? You could explain it to me, but it won't make any less silly.

What a long strange trope it's been

By law, every editorial cartoonist must — at least once — draw the cliché of Father Time, passing his burden onto the New Year, a (sometimes) tophatted baby … each sashed, the old guy carrying a sickle, an hourglass passed between them. Maybe the sickle too, I dunno.

It's just enough to draw the cliché, not to know too much about it.

Smart/lucky cartoonists use this trope only once, then find something original to say instead. I used the cliché three times, in succession. In fairness, I tried once to make it fresh (above), twisting George Bush's "Thousand Points of Light" (which, kinda like Ronald Reagan's "Just say no," or President Obama's "Race to the top," really means, "Don't look behind the curtain — we got nothin'!")

The thousand points of uncertain light were certainly leading us into the darkness of war in Iraq.

Maybe I was a glass-half-empty guy, but I saw 1987 as a particularly bloody year, with the expectation of more to come.

Tragedy bookended Stockton's 1989, with a schoolyard shooting, five children dead, 28 others and a teacher injured in January, and a big rig hitting an Amtrak train days before Christmas, killing three people.

Notice a trend? Similarities, perhaps, to any recent years?

The word that comes to mind is intractable.

Happy (?) new year.

Black-and-blue déja vu

Bow before my awesome artistic influence! Bwa ha Ha HA HA HA HAAAAAA!

Or, just indulge me this quarter-century coincidence:

Michael Ramirez, a conservative editorial cartoonist (not one of my favorites, only because he barely budges from his conservative line rather than expose hypocrisy from all sides, as the best do; but a talented illustrator and two-time Pulitzer winner, so there's that), published this cartoon this week to say CBS' "60 Minutes" aided an alleged Obama administration cover-up of the Sept. 11 attack, 2012 on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

(The Obama administration knew the attack was imminent, critics say, and did not avert it, despite early warning. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed in the attack.)

Which means it took 26 years for my trendsetting cartoon (above) to seep out of Ramirez' subconscious and become the cartoon he drew. Or not!

Which also means, were it not for this timely coincidence, you might never have seen my 'toon … because I have no idea what I was referring to.

Exhaustive research suggests the closest match is the bizarre event in which CBS News anchor Dan Rather was supposedly attacked in New York City by a man who repeatedly asked him, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

Except for the REM hit the incident inspired, it wouldn't have motivated me to draw a cartoon. More likely it alluded to another CBS News coverup or an embarrassing news blunder. If you've got better research or a better memory, let me know what I was talking about.

Even so, I ask you, who won the graphics battle, me or Ramirez? My bias shows, but I think if you have to write "CBS 'Black Eye' Logo" and draw an arrow to the thing you're describing, Chester Gould/ Dick Tracy style, you've come in second.

BwahahaHaHAHAAHAAA. Ha!

Five stages of "Good grief!"

Shame on two men today.

(Not those two, not Romney or Obama, though they could take heed.)

Today two men should feel properly hung over, as if awakened from a stupor, having let their baser Mr. Hydes overtake their Dr. Jekylls, with disgusting result.

Two decent men, I'll wager, became less in their attempt to be more.

Two who would not ordinarily act as they did the last two months, and would not have drawn their friends and families and co-workers into shame on their behalf.

Except this, they decided, was an extraordinary time, and shame, they decided, had use.

Tomorrow one of these two men may wonder if he could have managed without acting like such an ass. He will be declared the winner. The other may wonder if he should have — and somehow could have — been more of an ass. He will be the loser.

We lose, either way.

In the spirit of Tip O'Neill's "all politics is local," I confine my rant to the race for my assembly district.

The Republican candidate is Peter Tateishi, as close as I've ever been to knowing a real-life politician. He and his siblings went to the same school my kids did. His mom teaches at the school. His dad is a deacon in the church.

I don't know him personally; I have surmised from the literature that he has sought a political life — maybe even, you might say, a life of public service. He runs on his experience as chief of staff for Rep. Dan Lungren, our congressman, himself having run a shame-for-shame campaign with his opponent Ami Bera.

Peter came to our doorstep one day, canvassing the neighborhood, also a first; I've never seen a candidate show up at our door. Just him, with his satchel of pamphlets, surprised I recognized him.
His red-white-and-blue signs had covered the intersections long before. "Peter Tateishi … To Fix the State Assembly." Quixotic and awkward: Does any voter really expect one representative to clean up an entire legislative house? Tip O'Neill would have told Tateishi the slogan should be, "To Fix our Potholes."

Peter Tateishi's career has included serving as a planning commissioner, a parks and recreation district commissioner, a president of a state group of parks and rec commissioners, and creator and CEO of a foundation to support parks in his community.

In other words, he's doing something, trying to make a difference, to lead the way, not relying on the public weal. An honorable person, I'm willing to guess.

As is his opponent. Ken Cooley is a city council member from Rancho Cordova, has been since the new city was incorporated, was mayor twice. Outsider news media might call Rancho Cordova a hardscrabble city, with an equal share of mini-marts and massive corporate headquarters, never the twain meeting. Crime and blight, outsiders may first think of Rancho Cordova. Ken Cooley lives there and has been walking his talk to make his community better.

Here are two candidates who present a tough choice, two candidates who could have — should have — run on their records and left it at that.  But of course, politics must be usual.

The campaign has run a cycle, a kind of reverse interactive Kübler-Ross five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).

We started with acceptance, as each candidate presented himself, stated his qualifications and achievements, with solid street cred and just enough bunting on their campaign literature.

Then commenced the anger, with a trickle of accusations that arrived in our mail. They're running for office, after all. Being good, making a difference, is not enough. The other guy must be evil.

The endorsement groups — firefighters, police officers, teachers, nurses, the League of Women Voters — began bargaining with us over the candidates. If you're one of us — if you want us patrolling your neighborhood, teaching your kid — vote for our guy.

We became depressed. We accepted the deluge of mail that our postal deliverer actually complained about having to bring us. With a smattering of "I'm the good guy" came mailers mostly with variations on "He's the bad guy!!!" Charges of corruption, of dark connections, of trojan horses disguising wicked agendas; multiple mailers from each candidate, every day but Sunday.

"He's Dan Lungren's chief minion!"

"Oh yeah, well he's the insurance industry's henchman!"

"I balanced 10 straight budgets. He only improved a local skate park."

"He gave away pensions and went on trips at taxpayer expense!"

"He'll raise your taxes!!"

"Lobbyist!"

"Lackey!"

And so forth. My favorite moment so far was last week, listening to a radio commercial featuring Peter Tateishi's wife, who outlined her two tours of duty in Iraq training police —a family embodying public service! — and then deplores Ken Cooley's hurtful lies and accusations against her husband.

Simultaneously came the Tateishi fliers, proffering their own lies and accusations.

(Second favorite: An anti-Cooley flier with a connect-the-dots line-art portrait of Cooley, the dots representing the increments of donations "Big Insurance" has made to Cooley's campaign. Unlike the postcards, this flier is folded an closed with two stickers. That's asking a lot of the people who applied the stickers, and a lot of voters to work so hard to be insulted.)

Neither of these candidates is the scum the other has suggested. Each is doing far more for their communities than I and most others. But they fell into the mucky pit of politics, or someone pulled them in, because that's how it's done.

How I wish these two — or someone! — would start the trend: I'm running on my record and I'm not denigrating my opponent. Vote for me if you think I can do job.

Candidates need to run ads like this, the world I want to live in come every election time.

Instead, candidates show they don't think much of their constituents' intelligence.

Shame on these two. Shame on us.

On 9/11

Mood level: Smoldering bright orange
for a while now …

No superlatives can ever contain the horror and shock and sadness and disbelief of Sept. 11, 2001 — though we all will try in many and varied ways as the tenth anniversary approaches this weekend.

In the news media, the effort has already begun in earnest. News anchors introduce the myriad angles on the anniversary, their chins pointed slightly lower to their chests, their eyebrows arranged just so, conveying a calculated look of somber observation.

But we never truly grieved that impossible horror, never got a chance, even though the innumerable tributes under way say that we did. The Bush administration, helped by the mainstream media's lack of backbone, co-opted that day as a symbol to make us afraid of one another.

Our leaders used it to incite two protracted, misguided and ruinous wars we still wage against dubious enemies, begun on the basis of outright lies. Instead of having nothing to fear but fear itself, we have accepted the offer of fear by itself, which at first did frighten us but now has dulled and callused us, enabling the puppet masters of big oil, banking and military industry to profit mightily in our torpor.

Mission accomplished.

All the while, we still send women and men into the teeth of these wars — and will still, for years — yet barely receive them when they return damaged or dead, and the nation has fragmented.

The redemption and healing that should have followed those terrible events have been tainted by what followed instead. I can't consume any of the 9/11 remembrances and never-before-heard audiotapes, can't stop for a moment to regard that day for its own sake, without immediately linking it to the bloody horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are WTF? funhouse-mirror countermeasures in search of phantom WMDs. It's impossible to mourn because it's impossible not to be angry — at this absurd sequence of events, at myself for succumbing to indifference and impotence.

Those people who fell from the World Trade Center towers to their doom — such nightmarish visions! — might as well have disappeared into the desert sands around Fallujah, for all that we got to consider their horror and loss, to themselves, their families, their employers, their communities. They became fodder for what I still believe is George W. Bush's intent to salvage the legacy of his father.

Since 9/11/2001, we have become Lord of the Flies, reduced to our baser selves. Psychiatrist Justin Frank of Washington, D.C. holds a similar view, that we have become babies, viewing the world in black and white and Us versus Them.

Opposition to our nation's response — to war, to torture, to degradation, to community-endorsed hatred of Muslims, even to this strange semantic casting of ourselves as The Homeland — means being unpatriotic.

And patriots, as we know through the doublespeaky Patriot Act, willingly give up many of our freedoms in exchange for what we want to think is our comfort and safety. Air traveler with a Middle Eastern kinda name? Sure, haul him away without benefit of a doubt, just so long as I can stop feeling the fear you keep waving in front of me.

You can trace all of this to obvious outcomes, such as a divided, uncompromising Congress, and to the accepted notion now that compromise is bad (when in fact compromise is the nature of action in a representative government).

You can trace it to our economic crisis, to jobs lost at a bewildering rate, to the banks that took our money to stay in business despite being criminally bad at it, to us no longer having the money to teach our children well or keep our bridges up and pay people to do all of that.

Hand in glove, you can trace it to the artless propaganda that divides us. I'm not so naive as to believe propaganda hasn't always bedeviled us, but it used to be sophisticated. Now it's an open wound. Even before an idea rises into public view, haters of that idea create words to kill it and replace it with new ideas that make us afraid.

Propagandists repeat that simple anti-idea ad infinitum until the idea wilts in its dense shadow. So we have "Obamacare," "death panels," and the anti-ideas that President Obama is a "socialist" with designs to ruin this country, that he is Muslim (with the presumption that this is a bad thing), that he is not a citizen, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and on and on. Just shouted and bellowed over and over again, without regard to merit, until the shouts and bellows become the new normal.

Tell lies often enough, and they become the truth. 

If not for the path down the rabbit hole that we took after 9/11, we wouldn't have the Tea Party, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Fox News. Hey, you say, those are all right-leaning people and entities! Don't you like right-wingers? Love 'em, actually. We should be a people of diverse ideas working toward the pursuit of happiness. I hate that they exist solely because of the artless propaganda that the fallout from 9/11 made fashionable.

It has begotten the abysmal meanness in which our governments still deny and delay needed medical care to those who suffered from environmental toxins as they rescued the people from the World Trade Center collapse.

I trace it farther, to reality TV shows where we get to watch people re-enact Lord of the Flies in all manner of novel ways — on supposedly deserted islands, fashion runways, celebrity kitchens, New Jersey, wherever the Kardashians are.

I trace it even to last week's Fox Sports' idea of a funny bit in which a reporter interviewed only Asian students — preferably students still learning English — from USC (because that's the entire student body, right?) to have them give a "good old-fashioned, all-American" welcome to two universities that had joined the expanded Pac 12 football conference. They talk funny, get it? Some of them don't even know what the Pac 12 is — hilarious, right? Because all of us normal people do, or should. It's football, and that's American, see? Those people are different from Us, so we get to mock them.

Fox canceled that show, saying it resulted from a "breakdown in our internal processes," which I suspect is doublespeak for, "We couldn't possibly have envisioned, in the current cultural climate, this could be offensive." As is the custom in public apologies these days, Fox apologized only to those who found offense, rather than for its base cruelty.

I'm looking for signs — glimmers — that we still may truly heal from 9/11/2001. Maybe this show's cancellation is one glimmer, that time will come when all divisions cease, and our tragedy against ourselves and the world dim in memory.

When?

Joe, we know ye too well

Last week Vice President Joe Biden was caught napping (or at least closing his eyes for a long period) at President Obama's here's-how-we-fix-our-budget-mess news conference. It was much ado about very little, the kind of thing the news media converge on because the real issues are too hard to understand and report.

Joe was sleeping way back when too, when he was caught plagiarizing, word for word, a speech by British Labour politician Neil Kinnock during his run for the presidency; that was the end of Biden's campaign. I drew Joe Biden borrowing from Nixon as his parting shot, thinking that was the last of him. But politicians never do quite go away, do they?

This is one of a bunch of cartoons that I drew in a square format. I must have been shopping the cartoons to a publication with a square hole in its editorial page, but I can't remember which.

You spell Gaddafi, I spell Khadafy, you spell Qaddhafi …

The more things change …

Twenty-five years ago this week, The U.S. was preparing to war with Libyan leader Khadafy …

Hmm. Not entirely sure the message I was trying to send. Police dog to the World, the United States,
might be sniffing around a number of countries, but then found motivation with the crazy Libyan leader.

These cartoons were for The Hanford Sentinel, when I was just getting started on what an editorial cartoon should be.

Three days before the cartoon above, U.S. and Libyan aircraft had clashed in the Gulf of Sidra on Libya's coast, and four Libyan attack boats were sunk. This was another in a simmering sequence of tense clashes with Libya, tied to terrorist attacks against U.S. and British targets. In April, terrorists bombed a Berlin nightclub, killing a U.S. serviceman and injuring some 50 more among 200 people hurt in the blast. The United States unleashed Operation El Dorado Canyon, bombing Libyan targets.

(Before we go on, could the United Nations or someone organize a standardization of Khadafy's name? Virtually every other world leader's name is spelled the same across the news media. Why not his? It's not just his last name, sometimes spelled with the prefix al-, as in al-Qaddafi; his first name has almost as many variations, including Moammar and Muammar . Maybe this is a part of the chronic problem: He's not getting the world's tea cards asking him please to stop brutalizing his people.)

Again, my meaning is unclear, though the name, Tommy Tonkin, alludes to the United States' penchant for
manufacturing provocations for war or violent "nation building" (as in Gulf of Tonkin incident). Though not alone in this practice, the United States is especially good at it. The same with warring in the name of idealistic principles when in truth it's almost always for business. The new "no-fly zone" looks and feels like more of the same.

President Obama just went to the airwaves to explain this generation's bombing of Libya, dubbed Operation Odyssey Dawn (which Jon Stewart described as a Yes album, Stephen Colbert called a Carnival Cruise ship, and Lily Tomlin said was a bad name for a drag queen.)

As with his predecessors, President Obama has aspired to irony. I give him no argument about stopping a brutal leader from harming his own people, but as with the others who have made the same justification for war, I say, "Yes, but …" As in "Yes, but the people of Yemen are suffering in a similar fashion. Why aren't we stopping its government? Or Syria's? Why aren't we bombing hell out of those who massacre in Congo, Somalia and, for that matter, Mexico?"

It can't be just because we can't stand to see a government harm its own people, because quite clearly we can. It would be refreshing if our leader said, "Look, we can't intervene in Yemen because we have a military base there and we've got it pretty good with the government . Libya provides oil with fairly close access to our European allies, and we don't really have anything cozy going on with Mr. Khadafy, or however you spell it." Or something like that.

It would be depressing, but I'd prefer it to the same stirring rhetoric that belies its true aim. Then again, what would have cartoonists have to draw?

President Obama says action against Libya should eventually force Khadafy out because "history is not on his side." The guy's been in power for 40-some years; I think he's got the history racket worked out.

Get ready for another long, painful entrenchment.

Lord, I was wordy in the early days. That's a lot of ink to point out that the U.S. was practically alone
in this attack and President Reagan was less than skillful in getting help. One difference this time — apparently — is that France and Britain are taking more of a lead.