A love letter

The face that launched a thousand thousands
and thousands of spams!

Dec. 8, 2015

Donald Trump
1 Trump Tower
Trump Town, NJ USA 11111

Dear Mr. Trump,

Thank God for you, sir! Thank God!

We at Amalgamated Spammer Services, LLC, can't thank you enough for saving us. You are a savior, sir! But I'm not telling you anything new.

Truth was, the spam industry had been running on fumes. Email users were ignoring more and more of our emails as the years went on — and believe you me, we were sending more and more email! Just phenomenal, what we've been able to do! I guess users got burned one too many times clicking on one of our links; infested hard drives will do that.

But even as consumers wised up, we still had a vast empire of sheep yet to fleece, and our shears were going 24/7. It'd been fantastic for a long while. New and naive folks were clicking on the garage floor sealant ads, the window treatment stuff, the walk-in tubs, the prostate hoohah. Hell, we weren't even trying.

When that group resisted and shrank, we didn't worry. Plenty of ammo left, my friend, plenty of ammo, and still plenty of sheep. We threw the erectile dysfunction stuff at 'em; people even crashed their hard drives clicking on the oogy one with the illustration of the clogged penile blood vessel! "That ain't sexy!" We said around the office. "No one's gonna go for that!" But damned if it wasn't click-a-palooza! Cha-ching!

Then we shotgunned the cheaters' anonymous stuff, the meet-your-neighborhood-MILF stuff, the Russian fø*k buddies, and people still clicked because, you know, the sex thing. We told folks Obama was the devil incarnate. Click click click click click! Those were gravy days, my friend, I'm telling you. We thought it'd last forever.

By mid-winter last year, we could see that wasn't gonna happen. Not even the sex stuff. And people just weren't going for the brain pills "endorsed" by that Elon Musk fella, you know, the Tesla car guy. Fewer people seemed to care that Bill Gates' daughter became a genius by taking the very same pills.

It's like they got knowledge, or something, if I may be ironic.

The end was near, and after this Christmas season, after we had doubled up on the 700-lumen flashlight powerful enough to take down hijacked airplanes, and doubled down on the Star Shower®™ Laser Light thing (it's legit! I've got one in my yard, just turning the creche into some kind of weird holy disco!), we were going to pack it up. A couple thousand more pitches per account of "get your child a letter from Santa," and that was gonna be it.

Tie it in a bow. The end. Finito!

Then you came along!

Do you believe in miracles?! Yes!

You are the godsend to our industry. Correct that: You are the god of our industry!

That's not over the top, is it! Of course not: That's not possible with you!

You prove it every day, Mr. Trump God. I don't know how you do it, but you do it — every day, you say some interesting things (that's industry talk for any lie — any stupid, insane, vile, hurtful, outrageous, divisive notion), and people believe you. Fact, schmacts!

They not only believe you, they follow you! They want more! The more — interesting — you get, the more they want. I mean, ban all Muslims from getting into the country, like you called for yesterday?! Anyone else says it, he steps down the next day — from his job, from his campaign, from the planet. He disappears in shame.

Not you, though! No, not you! On the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, after Japanese-Americans were rounded up in our fear and sent to prison camps, you tell your people what they want to hear — fear Muslims now! That is rich and bold, because you know so well, people never really learn, and if they do, it's certainly not about history! Bunch of old stuff! Who needs it, am I right?

You tell your people Mexicans are rapists! You congratulate followers for roughing up a "Black Lives Matter" protester at one of your rallies! You denigrate women! You flail your arms and buck your teeth in imitation of a reporter with disabilities, for daring question your interesting assertion that thousands and thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the fall of the World Trade Center. And your followers roar, "More!"

Genius, sir! Pure genius! You are the Genius' Genius! You should bottle and sell whatever it is you got!

That's a joke, Mr. God. I know you're already bottling and selling it.

We're doing the same. Your followers are our people!

We are reviving the spam industry on your back. Every day, dozens and dozens of times a day (maybe we should do it thousands and thousands of times a day, in honor of your interesting assertion about the cheering Muslims) we're spamming everyone on the planet with your "Trump Economic Plan" or your "Trump American Plan" that says they can double or triple their income by clicking on the email.

We've got another one, the Trump Financial Plan (doesn't matter the name of the thing, as long as it incudes "Trump," but I'm not telling you something you don't know, am I right?!), that guarantees $7,000 to $8,000 income per month.

Did you really promise that? Wait — don't tell me. It really doesn't matter. People are gonna believe. They are gonna click like they've never clicked before.

We slap a news network logo on it, coupla magazine logos (they're so easy to get off the Internet) and plaster your picture on it. Same picture each time, the one I attached at the top of the letter. Some in the office say it's not very flattering, but I say, "It's the Donald, being Donald."

It looks like you're really sticking it to someone in that photo, like you're condemning another minority. Atta boy, Mr. Trump!

People love it, and they love you! Thank God for you again!

The gang here at Amalgamated Spammers Services has dropped almost all our usual spam product lines and just wanna post the Trump Economic Plan ads. They don't wanna run the "Date Exotic Asian Women Now" emails any more, not even the "Buy a Yacht" ones (though we may wanna slap your photo on those and revive that line; we've got a lot of "yachts" to move, if you know what I mean. Now that I think of it, those 700-lumen terrorist-destroying flashlights could use the Trump treatment too).

All they want is Trump Trump Trump! We revamped the whole "genius pill" line by putting your pic and a network logo on it, too. Forget Gates and that Elon Musk! Coupla losers! It's Trump all the way.

We're trying to keep a level head about all this, but it's hard to keep from dreaming where the spam industry can go once you become President! Every spam will be Trump! The sheep won't be able to get enough! We could be the leading industry in this country you're making great again — optimum profit by the minimum investment of lies (interesting statements, I mean) to foment fear and confusion.

Needless to say we're pulling for you, Mr. Trump! You're our boy.

Just had an idea! That finger thing, where it looks like you're sticking it to some loser in the photo were using in our spam? Have you ever thought about making it into a salute? You know, you raise your finger, and all your followers — every patriotic spam-loving American — raise their fingers in response.

I understand a salute like that went over big in Germany and Italy, back in the day.

Keep doing what you do!

Yours,

s/Adolf Mussolini, Chairman
Amalgamated Spammer Services, LLC

What would Pat do?

After a while, I just stopped clicking …

Published after months' long absence, in response to the Paris killings …
from GoComics® Universal Uclick.com

Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, my favorite, was no longer drawing, it seemed. His weekly output had dried up at his syndicate's Website.

His last 'toon had been mid-August, a variation on the discord between Congress and President Obama, whom Oliphant often portrays as aloof, a human non sequitir.

Then, nothing. Click — nothing. Click — nothing, click — nothing.

Oliphant is 79. I figured he could be sick or have retired by design or default. I sincerely hoped not. More likely, as a painter and sculptor now ensconced in Santa Fe, N.M. and far from his old Washington, D.C., hunting grounds, he was taking a lengthy break to pursue his personal art.

After 50 years of cartooning in the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize (only one?!), Oliphant doesn't have to prove anything. I'm not the only one who regards him as the best in the business, eloquently savage, a master in black and white — ink and opinion — and the next true challenger may never come.

Then, in the after-madness of the killings at Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere in Paris last week, I wondered if the events had provoked Oliphant.

Click.

Jean Jullien's fast-trigger response

Up came the cartoon above. Dark and morose, unfunny, grim. Oliphant is great at dark and morose, at not needing to joke.

Is it the most striking response to the violence, the most memorable? No. My pick is Jean Jullien's (right):

The London-based French designer almost immediately produced the quintessential cartoon response, powerful and still somehow playful in its immediacy.

Both cartoonists commented viscerally to the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the controversial satirical weekly which seemed intent on offending everyone. The killers took deadly offense to cartoons lampooning Mohammad, Islam's prophet.

Jullien drew, by intent or instinct, from the 1967 photo of a Vietnam War protester placing flowers in the barrels of National Guard soldiers' rifles near the Pentagon.

Oliphant simply drew from his gut, speaking out as a cartoonist, leveraging his inking mastery. By dry-brushing the edges of the killers' black uniforms, Oliphant invoked an evil, ethereal tone — is this just a nightmare? — and signaled his jagged anger.

Oliphant followed up a couple of days later with this riff of Eugène Delacroix' 1830 masterwork, "Liberty Leading the People:"

From Universal Uclick.com

Eh.

More pencils.

As much as I love Oliphant, I think the world was by then already done with pencils as a metaphor for the unsinkability of free expression.

This vacuum of time after the killings has filled with eloquent written arguments pointing out not only (1) was this not really about an attack on free expression, but (2) this freedom we espouse is ephemeral at best and illusion at worst.

One had only to witness the world leaders who linked arms in Paris in (distant and symbolic)  solidarity with protesters elsewhere in that city, to know the hypocrisy of freedom.

Critics literally went down the line of leaders, pointing out who — whether directly or through their sovereign states — had quashed freedom of expression by jailing, torturing or killing journalists and critics. Who really knows why the United States did not send a high-level emissary, if not the president himself, but he or she would have fit right in that line.

At the same time Saudi Arabia was condemning the shootings as a "cowardly terrorist act" through its official news agency, it was beginning its weekly beating of a blogger jailed for criticizing Saudi rulers and the kingdom's strict application of Islam.

Raif Badawi was not given his second set of 50 cane lashings last week — a doctor decided he was not healthy enough from the first beating to bear up to the second, at least not yet. Badawi is supposed to receive 50 lashings each of the next 19 weeks.

I'm giving Oliphant a pass on the second 'toon, and waiting anxiously for what he, or any prominent cartoonist with a wide reach, may come up with this week.

No more pencils: Hammers.

Cartoonists need to hammer away at hypocrisy, to match the eloquent words with pointed pictures. One cartoon won't do. This hypocrisy over freedom is practically codified in our government and corporate structures — and absolved by virtue of world leaders marching in Paris. Cartoonists need to point out hypocrisy and lampoon away with both ink barrels.

They need to hammer away at those policies that create egregious plenty amid horrid want, and lead not only to the killings in Paris, but the slaughter of hundreds of Nigerians by the radical and violent Boko Haram (meaning: "Western education is forbidden"). The attention paid to Paris nearly obscured the holocaust in Nigeria.

Good cartoons can teach us, can lead us to the news that inspired the art. We need that.

We also need cartoonist to hammer away against the coming storm: The vacuum of time after Paris has exposed an undercurrent of tension over, if not hatred of, Muslims. I can't tell you how many times I've heard or read of people who equate the Charlie Hebdo or Boko Haram massacres with all Muslims, and I'm at a loss why reasoned people can't draw a distinction between a religion of 1.6 billion adherents, and a relatively small group who interpret their religion as violent tyranny.

Unless they aren't reasoned people, and their potential multitude scares me.

After intense pressure last week, for example, Duke University in North Carolina declined to allow campus Muslims to use its chapel tower to broadcast weekly calls to prayer. The university's ministerial staff had offered use of the tower as a friendly — I'll even say Christian — gesture. Duke is a private Methodist university.

But Franklin Graham, influential son of influential Christian evangelist Billy Graham, denounced the gesture, igniting a wave of complaints by Duke donors, and Duke quickly withdrew the gesture. Graham could have limited his argument to pointing out that Duke is a Christian-founded private school and within its rights to control use of the chapel. It would have been awkward to say so, but Graham went way beyond awkward and straight to hate.

He condemned Islam and its followers.

"We as Christians are being marginalized, and Islam … which is not a religion of peace," Graham told reporter Mark Becker of WSOC TV in Charlotte, North Carolina. "There's nothing peaceful about Islam at all. Just look at the Middle East and every country where Islam has the majority is in turmoil. They behead people, they rape women, they kill Christians, they burn churches."

Franklin said Muslims are taught violence in the Quran, have not denounced the killings in Paris — remarks that are remarkably easy to refute — and that American Muslims only denounced the killings because they're outnumbered.

"Violence is there and it's coming," said Graham. "And it's going to come to this country and it has nothing to do with what I say. I'm trying to warn America as to what's coming, warn Duke University. Islam is not a peaceful religion."

We are at war with Islam, he said.

Do you hear what I hear? The belltower clang of bigotry, trying to upraise one people by demonizing another? Is it not the same rhetoric that ingrained slavery into our American fabric, that laid waste to Native Americans in this country's founding and expanse, that tore Jews asunder in Nazi Germany, that imprisoned Japanese-American during World War II out of our baseless fear and sanctioned hatred?

People listen and follow this stuff, God help us.

It's past time to combat these words with pictures. Get out your hammers, cartoonists. You've got work to do. Are you free, Mr. Oliphant?