Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter It felt as if we had stepped into the twilight zone last week. Unexpected and surreal—although not exactly frightening—events were happening, unusual even for these times. It’s been an unreal year, probably the most incredible of our lifetimes. Over 500,000 Americans died. Millions more became deathly ill. Our …
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Category:Politics
Profiles in (a Lack of) Courage
Photo by R. Michael Jenkins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Mark Mamerow The chaotic transfer of Presidential power is complete, and the new administration has settled into its legislative agenda. The ratio of tweets and outrages in the news from DC has diminished. Politics has settled into its familiar pattern of total polarization. So, with …
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The Money Badger
By Geoffrey Carter Wisconsin has a long and storied tradition of perseverance and courage that is reflected in our state animal, the badger. For decades, he’s been the symbol of Wisconsin toughness, integrity, and grit. In a state that has boasted leaders of courage and integrity like Bob LaFollette, Bill Proxmire, Gaylord Nelson, and Vel …
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The Enemy Within
By Geoff Carter Four of the participating terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were sentenced to life in prison. After bombing The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 2005, Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death. In 2010, for his role as mastermind in the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Liden was …
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Left Out in the Cold
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoffrey Carter A polar vortex descended upon the lower United States last week, bringing freezing temperatures across the South. While the entire region had to deal with shoveling snow, cold temperatures, and relearning how to drive, the great state of Texas found itself in a full-blown crisis. The extreme cold …
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Injustice For All
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem Finch, a young boy, is shocked when, in the face of overwhelming evidence proving his innocence, a white jury convicts a Black man of raping a white woman. It seems, however, as if nearly everyone else in the novel (with …
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Divine Intervention
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter During the Spike Lee movie Jungle Fever, the character Gator is so badly addicted to crack that he breaks into and robs his parents’ apartment. For his father, it is the last straw in a prolonged and agonizing struggle to wrest his son’s soul from the clutches of crack …
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MAGA Land
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoffrey Carter American culture has entered what might be called a fractured state, divided along splintered planes of competing realities. A majority of us are still living in the real world, but a substantial portion of our population is living in a carefully manipulated alternative existence—a sort of ideological twilight …
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The Politics of Paranoia
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoffrey Carter We’ve reached a strange crossroads in the American experience. Homegrown terrorists threatened to violently disrupt a presidential inauguration. As a result, over 25,000 National Guardsmen were stationed at the Capitol Building. The FBI is investigating possible collaboration between members of Congress and violent factions of the far-right, allegations …
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Conditional Love
By Geoffrey Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo It’s almost over. We’re just waiting for Donald Trump to be done with his tantrum. I’m sure he’ll file a couple more lawsuits, but that’s just posturing. He lost the election. Despite his promise that “you’ll have to drag me kicking and screaming” from the White House which—hopefully—won’t …
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Kickass Climbs a Mountain
Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that on that beautiful Saturday when the world celebrated freedom from the clutches of sadistic narcissism, the keeper and Phyllis escaped the confines of their coronavirus exposed-facility and more or less climbed a mountain. The “mountain” was an old one—at least 500 million …
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Bottom of the Basket
By Geoff Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo As future generations look back on this period in our history twenty or thirty years from now, I’m sure they’ll be scratching their heads and wondering what the hell happened. In four short years, we’ve gone from world leader to global laughingstock. We’ve watched over two hundred thousand …
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