Main Street Madness
Somewhere between a street fair and a mid-summer night’s fever dream, America’s political theater has spilled into the open like an overfilled beer at a bad carnival. Furries with rifles, socialists with banners, and resistance fighters in Mardi Gras beads march together as if this is the logical next step in civic discourse. Meanwhile, the rest of us stand on the curb like confused tourists, wondering if we’ve stumbled into a costume contest or the opening skirmish of a second civil war.
When the Circus Comes to Town
It’s a strange new age where political activism wears fur suits and plastic fangs, yelling about fascists while clutching signs that look like they were made by a stoned 20-year-old in a college dorm at 3 a.m. The absurdity isn’t in the grievances themselves—real or imagined—but in the presentation. If politics is performance art, this is avant-garde theater with live ammunition, and the tickets are free to anyone walking down Main Street.
Watch Your Step
The cartoon’s (inked by the highly skilled and eminently clever Bob Lang) punchline lands because it feels close to the truth: the noise, the chaos, the sense that ordinary life now runs parallel to a bizarre parade of slogans and costumes. Maybe it’s protest, maybe it’s revolution, maybe it’s just Saturday afternoon with too much caffeine and not enough sleep nor perspective. Either way, it’s happening in broad daylight, right in front of the coffee shop.
Step carefully, America, because the line between satire and reality is thin—and sometimes, it’s wearing rabbit ears.
“I Don’t Need Your Civil War”
Being of a certain age, this cartoon and the cartoonish world surrounding us in general remind me of the 1991 Guns N’ Roses song, Civil War.
Civil War, by Guns N’ Roses
Lyrics by Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
Some men you just can’t reach…
So, you get what we had here last week,
which is the way he wants it!
Well, he gets it!
N’ I don’t like it any more than you men.
Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they’ve always done before
Look at the hate we’re breeding
Look at the fear we’re feeding
Look at the lives we’re leading
The way we’ve always done before
My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can’t deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars
D’you wear a black armband
When they shot the man
Who said “Peace could last forever”?
And in my first memories
They shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you can’t trust freedom
When it’s not in your hands
When everybody’s fightin’… For their promised land
And
I don’t need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh
I don’t need your civil war
Look at the shoes your filling
Look at the blood we’re spilling
Look at the world we’re killing
The way we’ve always done before
Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed
Look at the leaders we’ve followed
Look at the lies we’ve swallowed
And I don’t want to hear no more
My hands are tied
For all I’ve seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
‘Cause all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars
“We practice selective annihilation of mayors
And government officials
For example to create a vacuum
Then we fill that vacuum
As popular war advances
Peace is closer”
I don’t need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh
And I don’t need your civil war… I don’t need your civil war
I don’t need your civil war
Your power hungry sellin’ soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh
I don’t need your civil war
I don’t need one more war
I don’t need one more war
Whaz so civil ’bout war anyway?