The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, February 14, 2022

Today at the Editor’s glance: Weather: Cooler, sunny. Highs in the mid 50s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Monday Night: Mostly clear. Lows around 40.

The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. It will also sit as the city’s CRA board at 6:30 p.m. See the full agenda here. Commissioners will get a presentation from MetroNet, the company now wiring Palm Coast for broadband, to do the same in Bunnell. The city’s interim chief, Brannon Snead, will present a strategic plan for the police department. The commission will also consider amending the city charter to create residency districts for commissioners.

Notably: It is Frederick Douglass’ birthday (1818). Today, this American, one of the nation’s greatest for his social-justice campaigns, his oratory, his voice, and his resilience, would be called the essence of “woke” by the likes of Ron DeSantis or his equivalent dust mites on Fox and the shout show circuit. In “Fighting Rebels With One Hand,” Douglass had spoken words that, disturbingly, have lot lost their relevance today: “What upon earth is the matter with the American government and people? Do they really covet the world’s ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin? What are they thinking about, or don’t they condescend to think at all? So, indeed, it would seem from their blindness in dealing with the tremendous issue now upon them. Was there ever anything like it before?” Oddly, today is also the anniversary of the very first recording of a Black singer in America. Okeh Records on this day in 1920 released “That Thing Called Love,” sung by Mamie Smith. You can catch it in full in the video below the grim democracy report.




The The State of Democracy, from Statista’s Daily Infographics: “The Economist Democracy Index rates countries on the state of their governing system each year. In the latest installment published, 21 countries in the world were rated as “full democracies”, including all Scandinavian countries, several Western European nations as well as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Uruguay, Mauritius, Costa Rica, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. France and Portugal went back to flawed status in 2020 after having spent just one year in the highest section, and there they remained in 2021. Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Haiti were also demoted in the latest index, exiting the “hybrid regime” category and becoming authoritarian. The EIU stated that overall, democracy around the world hit an all-time low with the average score of countries sinking to 5.28 from 5.37 the previous year – an even larger drop than that recorded between 2019 and 2020. The countries rated most poorly were Afghanistan, Myanmar and North Korea.

”

Now this:

“Please do not attempt to find any consistency or try to uncover any buried significance in the kind of utterances I heard. Sometimes they were prophetic, at other times either genuinely profound or crudely sententious. Sometimes they were amusing, even joshing. They were exactly like the voices you remember hearing–unless, of course, you happen to be one of the number who have forgotten childhood and who think that a child is merely an immature man or woman. If that is the case, you will already have decided that I was an abnormal child and that I have never quite got over it. I can assure you that I have completely got over it–if abnormal I was. I move about the world like anyone else and enjoy a reasonable success in my chosen profession. And I abhor mystics. I shall not be making references to myself as an adult after this, but it may interest you to learn that I now have two adolescent children who already know next to nothing about what it was like to be a child. Further, like yourself, perhaps, I have been married not once but several times, and in each instance–But, no, I have said enough to convince you that my adult life has not been so very different from yours, or at any rate not too different from that of a certain number of your friends. No more about any of that.”

–From “Demons,” by Peter Taylor, first published in The New Yorker, August 16, 1963.

Previously: Maupassant's illusions | Music of the woods | Better lie than doubt | John Cheever's premature eulogy of John Updike | Updike's daily death of selves | Old age and habit according to Wharton | Marmontel's Belisaire's truth | The typical ancient Roman | Salman Rushdie realizes some people will never like him | Uncle Willy's Republicans and Democrats | Cicero on not knowing | A tyrant's culture | American regression | Bernard Rustin's Spokesmen of the Confederacy | Aged relic | Barthelme's alternative to intelligent conversation | On drunkenness | Bastards and sons of bitches | Junot Diaz's trauma |  Loyalty to a dream country | Sorrow for the Levant | Nixon resigns | Cross Creek | To die laughing | America's Hiroshima experiment | Aged beyond repair | Virtue without self-glorification | Adrift | James Baldwin dares everything | GOP menace to society | Human misery | Inflexibility as death | | Kant's Enlightenment | Belhumeur's ethics | Israel's bigoted nation-state law | More tolerant empires | American weather | Red Smith on dismal Olympics | Louis Brandeis on clear and present freedom of speech | Ishmael Reed | Don't tread on me | Wicker on LBJ's presidency | Marxist reality check | | Nelson Mandela invokes MLK | Fishermen's honor | Nuclear dawn in Almogorodo | Eric Hobsbawm's Enlightenment | | Ritchie Robertson's Enlightenment | When you don't know what you don't know | Leaving Lebanon | Rheumatic fever's side-effect | | Risk of becoming imbeciles | The blubbering of America | Why Vidal hates good citizenship history | An Elsa Morante bit | Woke aesthetics | Let America Be America Again | American artist | Custer's enduring myths | Orwellian politics | History as a weapon | Political correctness improved America Archives: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.