This, Too, Shall Pass . . . Right? Gulp.

Hello.

Note the vintage Washington Post coffee cup above.

Hang on, I am going to rotate it so you can see the other side.

Got it? Okay.

When The Washington Post made these marketing mugs available to the public in 2004, I was worried about what the whole thing said about my newspaper. I was unaware that The Post had done it quadrennially, for both Democrat and Republican winners. So I remember thinking that it showed a troublesome lack of judgment by my employers, who were, by God, inheritors of a sacred public trust requiring them to be both unbiased and un-buyable, avoiding anything that might give even the appearance of unattractively kowtowing to power. In brief, I was very, very progressively concerned about a possible unseemly erosion of my newspaper’s hallowed professional ethics.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

What a naive doofus I was. I had no idea of the ugly vistas that lay ahead.

Today, The Washington Post newsroom is funereal; morale dangles as low and unsightly as Donald Trump’s neckties. We have watched the routine killing, by Post management, of negative pieces about Post management. We have watched the owner of the newspaper ending presidential endorsements altogether rather than face Donald Trump’s retribution for what would surely have been a measured and righteous and morally defensible editorial stance against him. We have watched the owner of the paper literally give Donald Trump two million dollars, just to say hi, boss. Just now, it was announced that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has contracted to do a documentary movie about Melania Trump.

We’ve recently watched some the paper’s most respected talents stampede away from it for jobs at more intellectually honest and hospitable places. Last week we saw the paper’s Pulitzer prizewinning editorial cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, resign after her boss spiked a cartoon that was fiercely critical of tech and media moguls for their obsequiousness, and grotesque financial generosity, to Trump; these moguls included Ann’s boss’s boss. Just today, other editorial cartoonists, at other media sites, re-drew her spiked cartoons in their style, advancing her outraged argument tenfold: Here’s the story about it, by Telnaes, in her Substack.

The new cartoons include this indelicate one by Barry Blitt, frequent cover artist for The New Yorker. And yes, that’s her Boss’, Boss’s Boss, Bezos, having assumed the official osculation position.

It’s all overwhelming — almost numbing — entangled with and inextricable from the foul Trumpian ethos. Trump’s casual plundering of democracy and decency is said to have desensitized us all to the full breath and brazenness of his actions, and to the awful echo of his personal emptiness. Consider: The instigator and cheerleader of the January 6 attempted putsch is also the man with the Albert Speer sense for displays of autocratic power who complained that no one want to see flags limply at half mast at his inauguration; they will be there honoring Jimmy Carter, an exponentially better man. Will Trump order them raised the instant the oath of office is administered? Can’t rule it out!

Consider: Trump is the guy who listened to this horrifically injured veteran movingly stammer and croak out The National Anthem, God Bless America, and then elaborately hugged him; then the president walked away and whispered this to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded,” and then ordered Milley to never let the injured soldier appear in public again.

To melodramatically explain the dangers of getting inured to all this — normalizing it — critics of Trump have once again hauled out the old Boiling Frog. That is the supposed “syndrome”that if a situation is very gradually made worse, over time, people will ignore its discomfort until it destroys them — just like the proverbial frog who is said to have very slowly boiled to death in a proverbial pot.

Untrue. The proverb has been tested and — forgive me — blown out of the water. However gradually the heat may be raised, the damned frog will get out of that pot any way he can and as soon as he can. (Also, the camel with his nose in the tent won’t inexorably ease himself further into the tent for warmth; Camelus Dromedarius is well-adapted to the cold and prefers it. Also, The Overton Window is highly overrated. Just for the record.)

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In short, I do not believe we have become inured to Trump, nor blind to his cornucopia of flaws. I believe we are appalled as a nation by Trump, even many, many people who, somehow, still voted for him. I believe the social architecture of what happened on November 5 is not yet completely clear, but most of his supporters are not idiots. They wanted him despite mostly knowing what he is.

What is he?

He is evil. He is supremely, thunderously, anagrammatically evil. He is vile. He is live (like a grenade in the hand, with its pin pulled.) He hides behind a veil of deceit and deception. Anagrammatically, he is even a proper noun, Levi — the treacherous biblical character who tricked the Shechemite men into getting circumcised, and then slaughtered them in their physical agony afterwards.

So, where do we go from here?

I think we go … on. Life goes on. Things change.

Take my George W. Bush mugs, the object of my premature, misinformed outrage two decades ago. I have two of the mugs. There’d been hundreds in a storeroom at The Post when the newspaper moved its offices in 2015, and invited staffers to swipe them as swag. (In Democratic Washington, for some reason, these mugs hadn’t proven nearly as popular as the Obama mugs that followed.)

I hid one of these mugs, unused, in a drawer like some goofy relic from a more primitive era. The other is the one that I’ve sipped from almost every day for the last nine years. Here they are, side by side. They were once identical.

My point is, things fade, in time. Even what we are all going through. I hope.

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Today’s extraneous Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Okay, we now enter the Question and Observation portion of the Gene Pool. You ask questions. You make observations. You gripe and chastise. All of these Q&Os came in before 9 p.m. Monday EST. Please keep sending more, to this Special Orange Button:

Also, speaking of pushing the Orange SOB, we do good work here in that regard, and hope to continue to do so into the next four years. We sure would appreciate your getting a subscription, or upgrading your existing one to “paid.” To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, this machine fights fascism.

Please note, every paid subscription to The Gene Pool automatically gives you a paid subscription to your main vicious alternative news site,

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Q: When you heard about the explosion inside a Tesla Cybertruck, did something occur to you — a video from the past — that you might not feel you can link to, out of matters of taste?

A: Possibly, but I would need a responsible pretext in order to proceed.

Q: Well, as I recall, the original video sparked a great deal of controversy over the issue of possible Islamophobia…

A: Perfect. So this could be an Instapoll! Then, it’s not ME speaking, it’s YOU all. It’s protected by the Fair Comment clause of the Constitution! Here is the video, which was a commercial for the VW Polo.

Q: Please assure me that you paid Trevor. Or let me know how *I* can pay Trevor for his work that you published for free and profited from. — Jeff Truesdell

A: This is in reference to the brilliant cartoons of Trevor Irvin, which I published here, in an interview with him.

I paid him nothing, nor did he ask me to. We were operating under long-held understandings among editors and artists. I realize this might seem ethically compromised to you, inasmuch as the whole subject of the Gene Pool that day was about whether artists are being ripped off.

Trevor initially emailed me, after reading something I had previously written about AI. He had some points he wanted to make. I interviewed him in an email exchange. It was excellent. I said I wanted to publish that interview with him, and asked if he would mind if I used some of his previous illustrations, to show the reader what he did. He said sure. We quibbled over which I would use. He had preferences, and I respected them.

Totally normal. We are each getting something from this interaction.

It would have been different if I had asked him to produce original artwork specifically for this interview. Then he would have a right to ask for compensation, though he wouldn’t have had to, because I would have offered it anyway. The key here is that if the article is an interview with him, then he is the subject of the story; it is not ordinarily considered ethical to pay a subject of a story.

There are complexities. When I did this Wapo magazine profile of Garry Trudeau, I used his past Doonesbury cartoons as illustrations for the story; no money changed hands. But then I decided to ask him to draw the cover for us, specifically for that story. We paid for that. This was the cover illustration. I wrote the words, Garry drew it.

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Q: Do you have any other coffee cups that are notable, and which no longer have functioning handles?

A: Yes, I do. I also wrote the question I am answering.

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Q: May I make a suggestion to the Gene Pool denizens? If you like the work of a particular illustrator or cartoonist, consider purchasing a signed print of a piece you really like. Over the past 20-plus years, I've purchased probably a couple dozen signed prints from Bill Griffith. I don't care if they ever appreciate in value. I've purchased them because I like them and I want to support Griffy's work. I've also purchased a few prints from Stephen Pastis and Dave Coverly. If Bill Watterson ever sold signed prints, you can bet I'd buy a few. — John K.

A: I’ll start you out here. You can contact Trevor Irvin for his art any of these three places:

FineArtAmerica: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/trevor-irvin
RedBubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/TrevorIrvin/explore

TPublic: https://www.teepublic.com/user/trevorsstore

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Q: Jimmy Carter was a good man, but I'm not on board with his canonization. Don't get me wrong -- there is much about him that I admire. He was a surprisingly progressive president for a Southern Baptist and pretty much single-handedly changed the norms of what senior government leaders could look like (as in, not all white men). His foreign policy was ambitious and surprisingly successful in many ways given that he arrived on the scene with no foreign policy experience. And he was honest to a degree that is rare in politicians. Other than on election day 1980, he handled his loss with grace and spent his decades of post-presidency doing truly good things. Overall, the balance sheet weighs heavily in his favor and if I shared his religious beliefs, I'd definitely believe he'd gone on to an eternal reward.

I'd also expect, though, that once he got to Heaven he'd waste little time telling God what He got wrong because, Lordy, Jimmy Carter had unshakeable confidence in his own opinion on pretty much everything. Like many people whose lives are guided by religion, he could be preachy, arrogant, and over-invested in projecting his own humility and goodness. (See "conceded the election before the polls closed in 1980," above.) I don't think he would have become President but for Watergate, and while the Iranian hostage crisis played a role in his 1980 defeat, I'm not sure it was as big a factor as people now say it was. Here's an anecdotal illustration of my feelings: I happened to be at the gym on the day of Nelson Mandela's funeral and watched an hour of it from a cardio machine. Jimmy Carter gave a eulogy that could have been titled "The role that I, Jimmy Carter, played in Mandela's life." It was remarkably tone-deaf and centered on how important Carter beleived he had been to Mandela. He was immediately followed by Bill Clinton, who spoke eloquently on the example Mandela had set for the world in general and the lessons that Clinton felt he'd learned in particular. I turned to the guy on the elliptical next to mine and said -- those speeches, right there, explain why Carter, for all his virtues, was a one-term president and Clinton, for all his flaws, won re-election. Carter was a good man, and he'd be the first to tell you so!

A: I think you have reached an important truth here: That Carter was human.

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Q: If Ms. Telnaes thinks it’s important enough to quit over, it’s important enough for her to quit over. What the hell difference does my opinion mean? I’m assuming that bald guy in the cartoon is Jeff B……has any other cartoonist ever taken such direct aim at their boss? Lots of professions require integrity, not just journalism. These professionals sometimes face hard decisions because of disagreements with their bosses; but they don’t generally think that they can hold those bosses up to public ridicule and manage to keep their jobs. Much less expect their boss to fund and enable the widespread broadcasting of that ridicule. If your boss is an insufferable ashore, go find another job. But you might want to dial back the sanctimony a tad, and perhaps take a sip of reality.

A: Yes, that was Jeff Bezos, the bald guy. You state this well. Your argument would make sense to me , but there IS a difference between journalism and virtually all other businesses: Journalism is an integral part of the Constitution. De facto, it is a fourth part of checks and balances: The fourth estate. It has a solemn responsibility to seek truth, without fear or favor, for the good of the country. No other corporation is so charged.

By the way, autocorrect obviously changed “asshole” to “ashore.” I love this, so I left it.

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Q: This blatant censorship is frightening and yet not surprising at all. Your blog (and Colbert and the Borowitz report) are all that is keeping me sane.

A: I get your point, and thank you, but I kinda need to reiterate something. What was done to Ann Telnaes is not “censorship.” It is chicken-shit editing out of fear and cowardice. A news organization is allowed to edit its own writers. Some do it better than others. Censorship is something else: It is control of the media by government.

We might be seeing efforts to achieve that by Trump and his lickspittles, actually.

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Q: I heard this joke, and I think it is great, like REALLY great, but my best friend, whose sense of humor is normally similar to mine, thinks it sucks. We have agreed to defer to your professional judgement to determine which one of us is right, and possibly to explain why he is a poopy head. Here it is:

What do Santa Claus and Bill Cosby have in common?

They both come when you're asleep.

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A: It’s both weak, as a joke, and also offensive! It does seem to be grammatically correct, but that’s about all that’s in its favor.

The offensiveness factor is that it is equating being drugged unconscious and raped with being “asleep.” It’s only step removed from when people used the term “having sex” in describing a rape. So it fails on taste. And on humor? The double use of “come” is an old trope and will never be better employed than in this joke:

A novice and the mother superior are returning to their convent on bicycles, through a back street. The novice says, “I’ve never come this way before,” and the M.S. says “It’s the cobblestones.”

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Okay, we are done. Please send in more thoughts and observations to the SOB button. I need them.

Oh, and, as always, you can comment.