2016 — What Barry Blitt’s New Yorker Covers Tell Us About the Year

Barry Blitt-The New Yorker

 

Let’s try something different. Let’s look at the year through the critical lens of one of the most profoundly effective and influential political cartoonists, Barry Blitt, whose dark humor is engaging, prophetic, and resolute. Blitt’s power is in his capacity to capture the essence of a person or a situation, while likewise describing the mood of the culture at-large.

Yes, I know, I’m talking about the elite New Yorker… but so, there’s something here.

At year’s end, we can conclude that 2016 has been harrowing, here in the USA and abroad — Iraq, Syria, Iran, still Afghanistan, Isis, nationalism on the rise, Brexit, the refugee crisis everywhere we look, walls on our southern border, rampant racism, violence, and the always ongoing disastrous confusion about guns, questions about cops, education in a crisis, the militarization and corporatizing of everything, a circus-like election, and, of course, president-elect Donald Trump pushing us kicking and screaming through the looking glass and into a potentially dark, parallel universe.

How did Blitt see the year? Let’s take a look, beginning with February….

continue reading here…

One Nation, Divided by Education & the 2016 Presidential Quagmire

Apartheid Education

Education — with a capital E — has effectively divided the nation. Education has been eating away at the fiber of this country for quite some time. This is quite obvious when examining the 2016 Presidential Election. Yet, Education is not being held accountable for the mess we’re in; it’s getting a pass.

We can get a sense of this by looking, first, at popular media. Second, we can see how obstructionist our Education system really is, and the consequences.

Bill Maher calls Trump supporters idiots. “What we learned,” Maher tells CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, “is that there’s a lot of vulgar, tacky, racist people in this country, more than I thought…A basket of deplorables.”

Read on …

How We Got Into The Mess We’re In : The Moon Illusion & the Question of Thermonuclear War

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1839-1840)

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We are more at home with illusion than we are with the reality before us. It seems quite natural for us to walk away from facts when they don’t support our illusions — and our emotional attachments to them. Our minds and our eyes always fool us. We even reject the notion that they do — a catch 22 if there ever was one.

Consider this: Why does the moon look so much bigger when it is near the horizon?

Most scientists agree that the reason the moon looks bigger is purely in our minds. Our mind interprets the things we see in interesting ways.

Like facts.

One theory about the moon illusion says that when the moon is near the horizon we perceive it to be farther away from us than when it is high in the sky. But since the moon is actually the same size, our minds make it look bigger when it is near the horizon to compensate for the increased distance.

Like danger.

Continue Reading …