How Dare He, He Beauty

If you read my last post, (you can read it here) you know how freaked out I was by the Kansas raid on the Marion Record newspaper. The possibility of police seizing an entire news service because they “must have” committed a crime…without evidence…

Well that was the main thread of the last story. Like most humans while working something out, like a thrift store sweater: the threads kept coming out to limit my clarity of intent.

1) I could teach, like, an improv history class about Freedom of speech but don’t make it too boring or preachy. Plus, I’m a high-class paint smearer at best.

2) Maybe debate the personal vs private vs media. Is someone’s DUI our business? What if they are applying for a liquor license?

3) The biggie, the source of this entry: What if the emotions I feel in disagreeing with someone cause me to forfeit, in my mind, their humanity?

I started drawing this piece of work one night. I thought about great political cartoonists. How they could encapsulate the depravity of a person.

This former chief of police is ‘allegedly’ accused of making hostile work environments and sexual allegations. They endorsed and led the raid on the news business after getting bad press from them. He looked like bullies I went to school with. People that threatened me, reminded me of my flaws every day when I was too small and scared to defend myself.

I looked at his thick neck-to-head ratio and smug smirk and in context I hated this man. My face twisted up getting the details of his face, rendering the details of the beach behind him, copying his pose. But damn, he looked like he was dreaming.

He looked genuinely happy to be on the coast. I thought about my behavior pre-pandemic. No matter how busy I was in work, if it was only for a day, every summer I needed to see the ocean. I thought about my my family’s yearly trip to VA Beach or OBX when I was a boy.

Sometimes pooling resources with my grandparents, we rented a house and I thought we were millionaires. Sometimes we didn’t plan at all, and the summers were tight for the family, and the only place to stayed was a VA Beach motel with a cigarette still burning on the dresser. The sheets were too damp to seem clean, or so chemically dry somehow with bits of someone else’s sandy past remaining. Well those times we did not always stay. The family would be arguing and we would have one, good, long day at the beach.

I connected myself to this person all of a sudden, and between that and the peace in the picture I saw his humanity. We do this all the time, especially on the internet. We make people non-human, or not with us. This doesn’t mean I like this person. But it also makes me say out loud “I do not completely know this person”. I hope they take care of a relative, or learn big lessons from this terrible abuse of power and despicable ‘alleged’ behavior.

It also doesn’t mean I can’t have fun with this cheesy picture. I realized they looked sweet, but I still think they looked goofy and we can have fun with my picture.