The White Knight Delusion

Even before full details emerged of the string of rapes and sexual assaults in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve—perpetrated by men described as predominately African or Arab in appearance—the news was met with a heady mix of horror, pure outrage, and vigorous disgust across European media. Unlike in various other high-profile instances of sexual violence, public support for the white victims was near unanimous, with outpourings of fulsome concern.

Initial reports suggested most of the assailants were Syrian and Iraqi refugees, stoking tensions in a country that had committed to accepting more asylum seekers than any other European state. It was later found that only three of the fifty-eight men arrested were from these countries. Still, commentators professing to ask “difficult questions” in the wake of the attacks focused on the EU’s response to the ongoing refugee crisis and the issue of integrating Muslim migrants into European societies. Few people zeroed in on the victims’ clothing or asked whether the amount of alcohol they’d consumed or their flirtatious behavior might have given their attackers the wrong idea—questions that are routinely raised when white women are sexually assaulted by white men.

Allocating responsibility in those cases is traditionally seen as a far slipperier matter. In the United Kingdom, more than a third of people say they believe rape victims are at least partly to blame if they’d been flirting beforehand, and more than a quarter think they’re responsible if they were drunk. After British footballer Ched Evans was convicted of raping a near-comatose drunk girl while two of his friends watched through a window, his victim changed her identity five times to escape relentless harassment from Evans’s supporters, who blamed her for what happened to his glittering sporting career. Similar attitudes are prevalent across the continent. Almost half of Estonians agree with the statement that “women cause their victimization or rape by their clothing.”

Daily Bafflements

• How do the teen subcultures of high school map onto those of the Internet? “Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube,” writes Elspeth Reeve in the New Republic, “the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine . . . Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool.” Lucy Ellmann wrote about the lonely YouTube segment of the teen demographic in Baffler issue 29: “Sometimes a purse-dog or bunny rabbit joins her to be cuddled (bunnies are big in this world, though the bunny itself must be small).”

• Hillary Clinton represents “American politics at peak neoliberalism, where a distorted version of identity politics is used to defend an oligarchy and a national security state, celebrating diversity in the management of exploitation and warfare,” writes Daniel Denvir.

• U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron “is a Donut,” not least for wasting time on a referendum about whether to stay in the European Union in the middle of a refugee crisis. This confirms received wisdom that “the only good Tory is a suppository.” 

Daily Bafflements

• Rochester bafflers: don’t miss your chance to see contributing editor Jacob Silverman speaking at RIT’s MAGIC Center tonight! Jacob will be discussing privacy concerns in our digital age, the subject of his recent book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Connection. The mission of the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC) at RIT is to advance and expand the conversation surrounding digital media.

• Argentina’s Wildlife Foundation reports that at least one dolphin has been killed recently by beachgoers who held the animal on land in order to snap some inter-species selfies.

• Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center recently paid a roughly $17,000 ransom to hackers who had kidnapped its IT systems for over a week. The ransom was demanded in trendy bitcoin (this is Hollywood, after all). The hospital claims patient data has not been compromised.

Power to the Pixels

It sure was a short “end of history.” Back in 1992, with the Berlin Wall leveled and Russia abruptly abdicating its self-appointed role as bureaucratic overseer of the historical dialectic, Francis Fukuyama and his neoconservative confreres surveyed the reconfigured world order and saw that it was good. Free markets would rule, and liberal democracy would cover the globe, lifting humanity into an agreeable state of material well-being.

Now, with a quarter century’s worth of hindsight, we know that history wasn’t about to sit still for its embalming. The 2008 economic meltdown delivered but one among many rude countervailing verdicts; we’re also living with resurgent economic, ethnic, and religious nationalisms, looming climate catastrophe, and unpredictable new populist and anti-austerity movements, here and abroad.

Daily Bafflements

• Baffler founding editor Thomas Frank is gracing the pages of the Guardian with a few thoughts on what’s the matter with the Democratic Party. After all, Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street ties are hardly an anomaly. Even blaming the party’s finance-friendly stance on the “gracious” donations from bankers itching for a bonus is sort of missing the point. Frank writes: 

The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places. . . . The reason Democrats treat these professionals so respectfully in everything from trade deals to urban bike paths is because that is simply who the Democrats are today. 

• Meanwhile, Nathan Schneider of America talked with Baffler contributor Ann Neumann about her new book, The Good Death, and the ethics of dying in the modern world. Inspired by the passing of her own father, she tells Schneider:

Scalia at the Pearly Gates

Politics is hard, and we need some straightforward and literal way to handily process the ever-shifting alliances of power in an election season. To that end, The Baffler has employed expert comic mind David Rees to give a visual rendering of the day’s signature political controversies. The only problem is that David can’t draw, so his cartoons are word pictures—which is to say, words. He does, however, warmly urge Baffler readers to submit their own visual interpretations of the scenes he describes, so that we can get away with calling this a cartoon feature, and meet our quota of user-generated content on the Baffler website. 

Image submissions from last week’s cartoon: The Iowa Caucus.

Obituary cartoons are perhaps the most emotionally significant specimens on the op-ed page. When a beloved public figure dies, cartoonists can serve a vital role in our healing process. By drawing the deceased’s arrival at the pearly gates—usually rendered as golden, but artists can be forgiven this material inaccuracy in their moment of grief—cartoonists assure us that the public figure has found his or her heavenly reward. This profound image of ecclesiastical justice is often leavened with a bit of humor, often provided by that notorious cut-up Saint Peter, who stands watch among the clouds and sacred finery. Any cartoonist worth his or her salt will give Saint Peter a line or two of dialogue that calls to mind some well-known characteristic of the deceased, proving that a fisher of men can also be a fisher of pop-culture references. 

Here are some (actual) examples of the form, arranged in order of increasing semiotic complexity:

When Dick Clark died, I saw a cartoon of his arrival at the pearly gates that featured Saint Peter calling out to God: “I found someone to host judgment day.” (Dick Clark used to host televised events such as New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and the Miss USA pageant while he was alive, so Saint Peter’s comment makes sense—especially since Judgment Day sounds like a lot of fun.) 

When George Carlin died, I saw a cartoon of Saint Peter looking down at him from behind a great lectern, saying, “You can’t say those words here either, Mr. Carlin.” (George Carlin was a foul-mouthed comedian who delighted in using profanity. He was also an atheist, so this cartoon is doubly fantastic in its rejection of precisely those elements of the deceased’s career that made him worthy of an obituary cartoon to begin with.)

Finally, when Joan Rivers died, I saw an obituary cartoon that could serve as the obituary cartoon for the form of obituary cartoons itself. In it, Joan Rivers stands before Saint Peter and asks, “Can we talk?” Saint Peter responds: “Ha! Haha! Haw! Ha! Ha! Ha! Hoho! Hee! Hee ha! Haw! Ha! Hoho! Ho! Ho! Haw! Ha ha! Ho ho! Ha ha! Oh, yeah—eventually, after everybody quits laughing . . .” This is as inscrutable as any religious image in all of human history. Is Saint Peter laughing with glee at Joan Rivers’s death? At her assumption that, as a Jew, she would still be welcome in a demotically Christian afterlife? Or could it be that Saint Peter is such a Joan Rivers fan that the mere recitation of her catchphrase, regardless of context, is enough to make him double over with laughter? If it’s the latter, then Saint Peter is the worst kind of comedy fan and should be recused from the responsibilities of heavenly admittance, before Larry the Cable Guy winds up sitting at the right hand of the Father.

Here are two ideas I had for obituary cartoons about Antonin Scalia. (I would draw them myself, but I sprained my wrist making a key lime pie.)

1. We see Antonin Scalia in front of the pearly gates. He is being warmly embraced by Saint Peter, who whispers “NO HOMO.” (This cartoon is for your conservative uncle.)

2. We see Antonin Scalia in front of the pearly gates. He’s wearing a full S&M-style rubber suit labeled “Constitutional originalism fetish.” He asks, “Can we talk?” Saint Peter responds: “Ha! Haha! Haw! Ha! Ha! Ha! Hoho! Hee! Hee ha! Haw! Ha! Hoho! Ho! Ho! Haw! Ha ha! Ho ho! Ha ha! Oh, yeah—eventually, after everybody quits laughing . . . You see, God has no interest in talking to you. Take your selfish perversions somewhere else.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the pearly gates—which, for once, are correctly rendered as being made of a single pearl, as per Revelation 21:21, thank you very much—a crowd of gay angels, African American angels, and angels recruited from other formerly maligned populations, now all fully divine and haloed, cheer wildly, not in anticipation of the hellish punishment awaiting their former intellectual tormentor, but in celebration of the slowly widening scope of human decency. At the bottom of the cartoon is the legend: “Antonin Scalia, 1936–2016.” (This cartoon is for your liberal uncle.)

Can someone please draw these cartoons for me?

Submit your breathtaking illustrations—preferably before a Supreme Court nominee is announced—to DrawForRees@thebaffler.com.

Update: A repeat cartoonist, Catie West, has submitted two visuals commemorating Antonin Scalia—one for your conservative uncle, and one for your liberal uncle:

Daily Bafflements

• Here’s Baffler contributing editor Susan Faludi on the feminist case against Bernie in the New York Times:

More seasoned voters may rightly consider a romantic Democratic insurrection the height of elitist privilege when what’s at stake are the lives of underprivileged women of all ages and races, women who will be the prime victims when social welfare programs are laid waste, Roe v. Wade overturned, Social Security gutted, and national health care shredded by whoever beats Mr. Sanders in November.

• The frontman of Eagles of Death Metal, the band that was performing at the Bataclan when it was attacked in December, is calling for universal access to guns. Chase Madar wrote about the way gun sales spike after massacres in his salvo in issue 28. Meanwhile, “Most Americans favor stricter gun control, but women want it more: Sixty-two percent of women want stricter laws governing gun sales, versus 54 percent of men.” 

This Is Not a Simulation

Here’s what Gregory Merritt, a supervisor at the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services knew.

He knew that eight-year old Gabriel Fernandez had a BB gun bullet lodged in his chest but that he never received medical care. He knew that the first grader had written a suicide note but his family did not access mental health services that were available to young Gabriel. He knew that Gabriel’s mother, Pearl Sinthia Fernandez, had been investigated DCFS six times for alleged abuse against her son.

Merritt also knew that his subordinate, Patricia Clement, the social worker charged with looking after Gabriel’s well being, had a tendency to avoid doing her job. According to testimony and Merritt’s performance review of Clement, the social worker had a habit of closing child abuse inquiries prematurely, not properly documenting her investigations, and growing easily frustrated with difficult clients.