Appealing to Trump Voters by Getting Tough on Immigration!
March 2nd, 2024 Barry Posted in Elections, Immigration | No Comments »
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. All of them feature the same character, who I’ll call “DEMOCRAT,” an older man with neatly combed, thick gray hair, rectangular glasses, and is usually wearing a suit and tie.
PANEL 1
Democrat is facing a big crowd of very angry people (mostly male, mostly white). They’re so crowded together that most of them seem like just a pile of faces. In the lead, a man wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt with a necktie shakes a fist in the air as he SCREAMS at Democrat. His face is a picture of rage.
Democrat listens calmly, rubbing his chin with a hand.
ANGRY MAN: SECURE THE BORDER YOU COWARDS!
DEMOCRAT (thought balloon): I want people like them to vote for Democrats, so I’ll give them what they want.
PANEL 2
Democrat is now in an office, seated behind a large and fancy desk. This looks like a pretty nice office. Democrat is on the phone, yelling at someone and pounding his fist on the desk.
DEMOCRAT: Forget helping the Dreamers! From now on Democrats support border security! Make it tougher! Send away asylum seekers! Hire more border guards!
PANEL 3
Democrat is now on stage, standing behind a podium with a microphone pointed at him, giving a speech. A spotlight shines on him. He’s grinning.
DEMOCRAT: Our new bill is the toughest border security bill ever!
PANEL 4
This panel, much like the first panel, shows Democrat facing a crowd of very angry people, with the same dude leading them. That dude is pointing a finger at Democrat and is yelling, his face just as furious as in panel 1. Democrat is talking to him with a smile, bent forward a little with his hands clasped together.
DEMOCRAT: So you like Democrats better now, right?
ANGRY MAN: SECURE THE BORDER YOU COWARDS!!!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is a cartoonist expression for fun but meaningless details slipped into a cartoon.
In panel one, the person in the foreground with his back to us is a self-portrait.
In panel two, there are a number of books on shelves in the backgrounds. Titles of these books include “Duck Soup,” “A Night At The Opera,” and “Horse Feathers” – for those of you who don’t know, those are all titles of Marx Brothers movies. Another book just has “TITLE” written on the spine in big letters. Another says “Covfefe! The Musical.” And two more, shelved next to each other, are titled “Tiny Lettering” and “Tiny Lettering 2.”
Also on the shelves is a bottle of booze and a decapitated head. Â Finally, in the tiny space under one of the shelves, a rat is reading a book.
In panel three, the seal on the front of the podium has the words “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which is a sentence “composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.” (There’s an entire wikipedia article about this sentence.)
The bird on the seal, which would usually be an eagle, is Opus the Penguin from Bloom County,
In panel four, there are two familiar faces seeded among the sea of angry faces: Bert from Sesame Street, and Frankenstein.
