Culture war of incivility has no place in America
If I were a cartoonist ... I would often say to my friend Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who died 11 years ago. He’d listen patiently as I described my vision for his work, whereupon, he’d occasionally say, “Not bad.”
Today’s inescapable image shows pugilists Donald Trump and Maxine Waters facing off in the boxer’s ring. “Too on the nose,” Marlette would surely say. That is, too obvious to be clever. It would need something else to work.
Cartooning, he often said, isn’t about drawing. It’s about writing, and, as in most good writing, less is better. Distilling an idea to its essence, after all, requires more thinking than doodling. The wordless cartoon was always his goal.
Marlette intruded upon my thoughts this column day because a cartoon seemed the only way to properly treat today’s news. The leading story today is the so-called culture war of incivility.
A war is, indeed, on.
But this one surpasses the usual political partisanship and concerns the very idea of America. Will we unite in decency or tear ourselves asunder?
The contemporaneous equivalent of the shot fired on Fort Sumter was Trump’s policy, now ended, of separating children from their migrating parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The second shot came last week in Lexington, Virginia. There, the owner of The Red Hen restaurant asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave because of her defense of Trump’s policies.
Other administration officials and Republicans have recently been met with similar, public disapproval. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left a Mexican restaurant in Washington after being harassed by members of a socialist organization. In Tampa, Florida, state Attorney General Pam Bondi was approached by protesters at a film screening. And White House adviser Stephen Miller was also heckled while eating at a Mexican restaurant in Washington. (Note to Trump officials: French.)
Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Waters of California leapt to the microphone over the weekend and urged Democrats to confront “anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station — you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Trump responded characteristically, firing volleys from his Twitter bunker to defend Sanders, critique The Red Hen, and taunt Waters, all while the White House — get ready — lamented the decline of civility in public discourse. Such hypocrisy may not make you want to throw a punch, but it might make you go insane.
And, yet. The stakes are not small. At times, protest is essential, isn’t it? Absolutely. So is free speech. But condemning language that is inciteful is also essential — not to abridge anyone’s freedom but to protect everyone’s. Once the rhetoric finds expression through action, as last year when some hothead decided to shoot at Republican congressmen playing baseball, seriously wounding Majority Whip Steve Scalise, then enhanced greater security and crackdowns follow.
The next steps are familiar to anyone with a sense of history. The last stand isn’t between Trump and Waters. It is between us. I see the cartoon perfectly — Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty embrace each other, weeping.
No words.