Just yesterday afternoon, someone with a rapid-fire weapon sprayed bullets into a graveside funeral service in my hometown, at a cemetery I used to pass by every day on my way to and from school. Three bursts of gunfire over the space of about a minute injured two mourners; as of this morning, it seems no one was killed.
I guess our town is lucky today.
So far.
"Do you think we would require stiffer background checks?" Cavuto asked RoJo.
“You know, no matter what you do, people fall through the cracks,” Johnson shot back. “You can’t identify all these problems. You can’t arrest somebody for a crime they haven’t committed yet. These are difficult issues.”
Reiterating his belief that the solution lies in “renewed faith” and “strong families, Johnson then quickly leaned into the latest right-wing moral panic.
“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness,” the senator fumed. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”
Pushing back, Cavuto interjected: “But school shootings have been happening long before CRT.”
Undeterred, Johnson asserted that “CRT’s been going on under the radar for quite some time as well,” declaring that “wokeness” and “liberal indoctrination” have also been going on for a long time.
“This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law’s going to, it’s not going to solve it, it’s not going to solve it,” he concluded.
If I shared Wisconsin's senior senator's confidence that banning "wokeness" was going to solve our gun problem, and if I thought that Critical Race Theory had the slightest relevance to any of this, I'd be right RoJo's pushing for a return to teaching heterosexual white male supremacy.
But I don't.
Nor do I think that it's at all practical to post guards armed as if for World War III at every entrance to every school building, grocery store, hospital, movie theater, house of worship, fast food diner, office holiday party, and open-air garlic / music festival.
When Ted Cruz responded to the massacre at Robb Elementary School by saying schools need to be limited to a single entrance, I thought of my own elementary school. Four entry doors used by students, plus another to the gymnasium that was only used by staff and when the school was used as a polling place.
Locking four of those entrances doesn't seem too unreasonable, and has probably been done ever since Columbine 23 years ago.
Then I thought of my high school.
Washington Park High School is a sprawling complex, from the John Burns Park Theater to the fieldhouse (the dark building at the southeast end). Every one of the sidewalks in this satellite photo, including the one hidden by the "pin" over the theater building, leads to a door. There are at least two doors into the building from the parking lot on the west side of the building and another in that nearly enclosed area north of the fieldhouse. (That used to be a gated area where we could park bicycles and was a popular area for students who smoked. If there's still a gate, I can't see it in this photo.)
There are also doors to those enclosed courtyards, and there could well be other exterior doors I never needed, say, perhaps by the racetrack.
Point is, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that official policy is for only one of those doors to remain open during the school day.
I'd also be immensely surprised if everybody walked around the building to get to it every time they stepped out to their car, had outdoor gym class, or sneaked out for a smoke.
In last Saturday's cavalcade of cartoons about kiddies in May 1922, I left off with this one, which I have assumed in spite of the lack of a signature, to be the work of Charles H. "Bill" Sykes, the daily editorial cartoonist at the Philadelphia Evening Ledger.
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| "Whoa, Bill" by Charles "Bill" Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Ledger, May 24, 1922 |
So we start off today's thrilling episode with a discussion of whether or not the Harding administration would recognize the communist government of Russia five years after the Revolution. (Whether the Russian Civil War was over yet depends whom you ask.)
While it was a minority opinion, Senator William Borah (R-ID) wasn't the only one urging the U.S. to recognize Lenin's government in Moscow. Cartoonists who saw commercial opportunity in trade with Russia even before its trade agreement with Germany hammered out at Rapallo included Winsor McCay (which set him apart from the hardline isolationists at Hearst's Star Publishing) plus a smattering of leftists such as Callaghan.
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| "What If It Isn't a 'Vacuum'" by Michael Callaghan in Minneapolis Daily Star, May 5, 1922 |
The Harding administration line, however, was that Soviet Russia was, in Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes's words in a letter to Samuel Gompers, "an economic vacuum."
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| "He'll Have to Quiet Down" by Charles Kuhn in Indianapolis News, May 19, 1922 |
Most Americans wanted nothing to do with communists, anarchists, or any of the other hot-headed bombers of recent memory, economic vacuum or not. As illustrated by Callaghan, however, Europeans had other considerations to weigh.
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| "The End of the Rainbow" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, by May 23, 1922 |
Prime Minister David Lloyd George was very interested in reintegrating Russia into the European community. Four commissions were set up at Genoa to figure out how to lend Russia money to aid its recovery from the German invasion, the communist revolution, and its Civil War.
But Russia was deep in debt to other European countries, primarily France and Belgium, which demanded restitution for properties confiscated by the Bolsheviks. Ted Brown's cartoon sums up the communiqué spelling out the Genoa Convention's terms for Russian aid, which was rejected by Lenin's government as insulting and "stupid."
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| "Adding Fuel to the Fire" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1922 |
Further complicating matters, the issue of Russian oil loomed as large in European consideration then as it has in light of Putin's invasion of Ukraine 100 years later.
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| "Traces of Oil" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 18, 1922 |
I get tired of editorial cartoons that portray some issue as a question mark; it's like journalism's hackneyed cliché (is there any other kind?) of concluding, "Time will tell." But I'll give Nelson Harding's cartoon a pass, because the oil slick reference works better than most.
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| "The Spree Befire the Headache" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, ca. May 13, 1922 |
The Genoa Conference continued to unravel. At France's insistence, Germany was booted out of the Genoa negotiations on account of Germany's separate peace deal with Russia. By mid-May, the French delegates announced, seconded by Poland and Romania, that there was no point in continuing negotiations at all.
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| "Not to Be Entrapped Again" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, ca. May 15, 1922 |
So France withdrew from the conference, followed by Belgium. The conference collapsed on May 19.
And the stage was set for the next big war.
The Party of Small Government is in charge in Idaho, where the statehouse passed a bill in March to criminalize medical care for transgender youth.
It is only one of over a dozen anti-transgender bills authored by Republicans this year:
In each of these states, the bills would either criminalize health care providers who provide gender-affirming care to minors or subject them to discipline from state licensing boards. Bills in ten states would also allow individuals to file civil suits for damages against medical providers who violate these laws. Bills in six states provide penalties for parents who facilitate minors’ access to gender-affirming medical care.
About half of these bills would further limit access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth by barring certain insurance providers from offering coverage for gender-affirming care, by placing restrictions on the use of state funds or state facilities to provide this care, or by excluding gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense. Bills in seven states would prohibit certain health insurance plans from offering coverage for gender-affirming care. In eight states, bills would prohibit the use of state funds for gender-affirming care or more broadly prohibit distribution of state funds to any organization or individual that provides gender-affirming care to minors, seemingly regardless of what the funding is used for. In five states, bills would prohibit gender-affirming care by or in government-owned or operated facilities, and by individual providers employed by government entities. In four states, bills would exclude gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense.
Finally, a bill proposed in Missouri would attempt to limit access to gender-affirming care by classifying it as child abuse similar to the order recently issued in Texas.
Republicans are simultaneously charging full speed ahead with their assault on reproductive rights. 22 states are set to criminalize abortion providers and/or patients, often with no exception for rape, incest, or any consideration of the health of the mother.
An Alabama OB-GYN writing in Slate last week warned that her experience, seeing doctors refuse to treat women suffering a miscarriage for fear of being charged with a crime, will go nationwide as soon as Samuel Alito's draft ruling becomes the Law Of The Land.
...I saw a patient in active miscarriage (bleeding, passing clots, cramping) who had just had an office visit with her primary physician. She was forced to wait more than 48 hours in order to get the results of her bloodwork. Doctors will sometimes check a patient’s levels of HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, to help distinguish miscarriages from ongoing pregnancies or ectopic pregnancies. I could not understand why someone with all of the clinical signs of a miscarriage in progress was required to wait for much-needed intervention, all the while bleeding and cramping and suffering.
I was angry that the patient’s doctor did not just provide the standard medical treatment for a miscarriage: surgically removing the contents of her uterus, which would stop her pain and bleeding. Then I saw a different patient who was actively miscarrying, and a light bulb clicked on: The doctors were afraid of being attacked by the state of Alabama.
Suffice it to say that Red State women who can afford plane fare to Illinois or Ireland, or perhaps a zealous malpractice attorney, won't be faced with this grim scenario. But for the woman barely making ends within shouting distance of each other at a minimum wage job, or the girl still living under the roof of her rapist... well, we know which lives matter to the GOP, and it isn't yours.
100 years ago this month in America:
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| "Some Things You Can't Buy Without a Doctor's Prescription" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, May 31, 1922 |
Update: This cartoon originally appeared in the Des Moines Register on May 29, 1922.
