I try not to get too political only because I’m non-confrontational, and when you publish anything vaguely political in a public forum, people see that as an invitation to publicly attack you. But when a comic comes to me, I draw it. For later in the week I have some really great stuff about puberty and also one about popcorn, but today it’s the Republican nominee.
Let me say that I don’t believe he is the antichrist or the next Hitler. I do believe he is a racist rabble rouser who couldn’t define the word diplomacy if his life depended on it and who certainly cannot be trusted with the military capabilities of the United States, and that it would be better for political discourse and the fate of mankind if he had never been born.
Originally, I envisioned Fred as more receptive to Dr. Morimoto’s message, but I do research this stuff (note my sketchy interpretation of a Tudor revival home) and I guess the Donald learned hatred at home. Fred Trump was sued for refusing to rent his low-income housing to black people, a policy that continued years after the courts ordered him to cut that out. According to the Justice Department, “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents has occurred with such frequency that it has created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.”
In this comic, Fred uses the phrase “colored folks,” which was a polite term at the time, but I’m guessing in reality he would have used the word that I only say out loud if I’m discussing Huck Finn and hip hop lyrics, or possibly the German equivalent (his parents were German immigrants), which I’m guessing is quite similar to the Yiddish one my grandmother used.
Speaking of immigrants, Fred’s wife, Mary Anne, was one of those destitute human beings who came to America to escape poverty and take crappy jobs that natural-born Americans don’t want. She was Scottish, which I tried to impart via dialog. The line “What’s for ye’ll not go by ye,” is a Scottish saying that means, “If it’s meant to happen, it will.” But who knows. Maybe Donald thought his mom was a parasite, too.
It also occurred to me, while writing, that in 1945, a Japanese woman shouting on someone’s lawn would be subject to racist interpretation. Japanese American internment camps weren’t closed until 1946, although the majority of mainland Japanese Americans lived on the west coast in the ’40s. When I first created this character, I just wanted to pick a name that was fun to say and sounded like it could belong to a postmodern superhero/scientists. I didn’t even think about the fact that, traveling through time, she might lose credibility with some targets due to her ethnicity.
Another fun fact I learned in the course of writing this comic: Fred Trump died of Alzheimer’s. So it’s entirely possible that all this unfiltered hatred coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth is early stage senile dementia, in which case, his nomination makes perfect sense, because the Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan for a long time.
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