Sunday Funnies & Arts

As always, click to enlarge. For more Tom the Dancing Bug, Pat Oliphant, Calvin & Hobbes, Tony Auth, and Tom Toles, go here, here, here, here, and here...

Leonard Pitts thinks that Americans look at each other across a great spiritual divide:

Our challenge is less geographical than spiritual, less a question of the distance between Honolulu and New York than between you and the person right next to you. Such as when you look at a guy who thought it a good idea to bring a "gun" to a presidential speech and find yourself stunned by incomprehension. On paper, he is your fellow American, but you absolutely do not know him, recognize nothing of yourself in him. You keep asking yourself: Who "is" this guy?

Maybe, although it's hard to recognize the spirituality in the racism underlying the opposition to President Obama. Pitts is closer to the mark when he writes that "...this isn't conservative vs. liberal, it is yesterday vs. tomorrow, the stress of profound demographic and cultural change that will leave none of us as we were..."

The question, then, becomes this: What is a legitimate form of grievance? Shouting down Congressmen at Town Hall meetings and the open display of firearms all egged on by the maniacal right-wing media and cozened by Republican politicians is not it. That way lies another Oklahoma City. David Sirota believes that the First Amendment must trump the Second, that

The First Amendment ethos guarantees people — whatever their politics — a fundamental right to participate in their democracy without concern for physical retribution. It is the primary amendment because America was first and foremost created not as a gun-owners' haven, but as a place to shelter citizens from oppression.

Of course, none of this addresses the looming issue of how reasonable debate is possible when one side refuses to be reasonable, indeed, takes pride in being a mob. There's simply no place for that in the democratic process...

The Aran Islands of Ireland have 7,000 miles of stone wall, almost enough to stretch from Seattle to Miami and back again. I took these detailed studies during our visit there last week:

Chocolate-praline cheesecake and zydeco dip...Before you dig in to that, you might want to try some Cajun shrimp jambalaya...