Half A Carrot

I drew this cartoon sometime shortly before 9/11. It was apparent to me then that there was a growing divide between the American left and right. The chasm between them has only grown since then, to the point where it will be next to impossible to govern the nation as a whole.

Two recent incidents have pushed the envelope towards open rebellion. The alt-right maniac in Portland who killed two men for intervening in his verbal attack on two Muslim women and who now takes every opportunity to vent his hatred at his court hearings and the deranged Bernie supporter who shot Majority Whip Scalise and two of his security detail in Alexandria, Virginia.

Partisan media commentators on both sides are using these atrocities to further the division. We are constantly inundated with reasons why reconciliation is impossible.

Both sides will settle for nothing less than the whole carrot, and both believe their adversaries are on the short list for political extinction. Both have been repeating this fantasy since well before the turn of the century… Just one or two election cycles and it’s all ours! The people will rise up and…yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it all before, I’m sure.

An optimist might imagine that breaking up the country can be done through political means, but the same problems will persist. States themselves will implode as rural districts seek independence from the urban majorities. Natural resources will be coveted by both sides for different reasons.

I feel like a broken record. So many of my cartoons touch on this theme and yet I can’t stop, because to stop is to give up the hope that pragmatic heads on both sides will see that dissolving America is a bad idea. A really bad idea.

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24 Responses to Half A Carrot

  1. Chris Peterson says:

    “A really bad idea.”

    Agreed. But I truly believe…it’s gonna happen. Slowly; maybe over a decade or more…but the country is going to fracture; at least in ways never imaginable.

  2. rl crabb says:

    While the right has been pretty much taken over by the hardliners, the left is trying not to be outdone… https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-between-liberalism-and-leftism

  3. fish says:

    “Two recent incidents have pushed the envelope towards open rebellion. The alt-right maniac in Portland who killed two men for intervening in his verbal attack on two Muslim women and who now takes every opportunity to vent his hatred at his court hearings and the deranged Bernie supporter who shot Majority Whip Scalise and two of his security detail in Alexandria, Virginia.”

    Actually they’re both Bernie Bros!

    • Chris Peterson says:

      “Actually they’re both Bernie Bros!”

      When it comes to the insane, that’s totally irrelevant. According to his FaceBook posts, he was a passionate Bernie Sanders supporter who later supported, but did not vote for, President Trump. He was also adamantly anti-Semitic, which in Sanders’ case, makes absolutely no sense.

      Trying to lay blame at the feet of the political parties for these psychos is ludicrous. These people are flat-out diseased assbags who latch onto whatever excuse du jour their festered noggins assimilate at the moment.

      I don’t care if they claim their inspiration is religious, political, or as in the case of rightwing nutjob Timothy McVeigh, just plain American patriotism; any attempt to draw lines that blame whole swaths of people for the actions of the few only serves to deepen the chasm between us. If that was your purpose, fish…well done.

      Maybe you should start a leader board based on supposed ideologies. I can think of at least a couple TV and radio shows that live for that sort of thing, not to mention lesser-known blogs.

  4. fish says:

    When it comes to the insane, that’s totally irrelevant.

    Not for the left! It was SOP to connect any crime that could be connected to the right to the right! Particularly egregious examples were the Aurora Theater shooting where the media was in such a blame frenzy that they accused the wrong James Holmes instead of doing better verification.

    The right is just returning the favor Chris!

    Trying to lay blame at the feet of the political parties for these psychos is ludicrous. These people are flat-out diseased assbags who latch onto whatever excuse du jour their festered noggins assimilate at the moment.

    Again Chris…..this has been more a left thing than right thing. Spin it any way you want but you guys just do misplaced righteous indignation so much better!

    I do agree with your national fracturing premise though Chris. See you on the front lines baby!

    • Chris Peterson says:

      Sorry to disappoint, but I already did my hitch; you won’t find me on any “front line.” I’ll be way out here on my farm in the NW, keeping it real. But I can see you coming for quite a ways.

      Cheers.

  5. Steve Frisch says:

    “Again Chris…..this has been more a left thing than right thing. Spin it any way you want but you guys just do misplaced righteous indignation so much better!”

    That is just so much nonsense Fish….it is common for each “side” to blame rhetoric from the other “side” for political violence that is being perpetrated by what are simply violent people doing violent acts in the name of politics…regardless of persuasion. There is no excuse of nay kind for political violence.

    I am with Bob almost completely on ‘a really bad idea.’

    Hey, leftist friends, there is no fucking revolution coming, there wasn’t one in 1934, there wasn’t one in 1970 and there won’t be one in 2017. It didn’t come by not being televised, it’s not coming on-line; the Weathermen were full of shit, and the dream of a perfect utopian society is a chimera. There is only the path to perfection. If you want to advance you vision of future society do it every day, starting in your community, by making things better, and scale out from there.

    For my right wing friends, no President Obama was not a Muslim Kenyan married to a transexual who deserved to be graphically lynched (as seen by his young children.) There is no such thing as the “deep state” it is a ‘brand’ to exercise your passions created by anti-globalist conspiracy theorists and closeted white nationalists who profit from you reading their ridiculous on-line screeds at Brietbart, TownHall and Infowars. The rural separatist revolution of pretend nice people who just want to live with people of their own culture and values in nice little enclaves is never coming.

    To both of them I would say, you live in the world, not a fantasy land of pure ideological design. Get a fucking grip.

  6. fish says:

    That is just so much nonsense Fish….it is common for each “side” to blame rhetoric from the other “side” for political violence that is being perpetrated by what are simply violent people doing violent acts in the name of politics…regardless of persuasion. There is no excuse of nay kind for political violence.

    I’m embarrassed for you that you hew to the party line on this one! The left started, then perfected the political spin surrounding these types of events.

    There’s no dispute…it’s how you made such “progress” over the last 30 years.

    • rl crabb says:

      Yeah, Fishy, without all that activists from the left we could still have segregation, male-only voting, child labor and polluted air, water and soil. Those captains of industry sometimes had to be nudged into doing the right thing.
      It used to balance out, but all that’s in the dumpster now. Both sides will die before giving up that half a carrot.

  7. Steve Frisch says:

    “I’m embarrassed for you that you hew to the party line on this one! The left started, then perfected the political spin surrounding these types of events.”

    Seriously Fish where were you in the 90’s while people where saying the Clinton’s shot Vince Foster in the head?

    I ain’t hewing nor party line..when it comes to being willing to slime the other side both patties are equally guilty.

  8. Chris Peterson says:

    On the whole, it seems to be a bit lopsided battle going on. W starts an unnecessary war with an uninvolved nation, killing hundreds of thousands, and Obama is accused of being a Muslim. W crashes the world economy after allowing us to be attacked, and Obama is hung in effigy for being half black.

    One sides argument seems juuust a bit more concrete than the others’, wouldn’t ya’ say?

  9. rl crabb says:

    Nice sentiment, Peggy, but as usual all the blame is laid on one side. After all the hateful rhetoric and baiting by Trump in 2016, why is anyone surprised that the left is becoming unhinged? https://www.wsj.com/articles/rage-is-all-the-rage-and-its-dangerous-1497571401

  10. Brad Croul says:

    Shit, meet fan.

  11. Brad Croul says:

    “Only half the things my enemies say about me are true”

  12. Michael Anderson says:

    Mental illness is an STD (socially transmitted disease) and the Untied States is being swept away by such an epidemic. Every nation state is eventually so afflicted. Nazi Germany was transformed after a particularly virulent case of mass mental illness. As have gone Babylonia, Elba, the USSR, and illaudable Rough & Ready, so shall go the USofA. Our only hope is that a healthy dose of colonoscopic laudanum will staunch this STD infection and these virulent orange mites flushed from the tender inflamed walls of our discontent. Let us pray.

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