The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, February 17, 2025

Notably: Here’s an account that sounds familiar in our beleaguered democracy: “I arrived in Monterey and the fight began. My sisters are still Republicans. Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement and venomous. I can discuss politics coldly and analytically with strangers. That was not possible with my sisters. We ended each session panting and spent with rage. On no point was there any compromise. No quarter was asked or given. […] It was awful. A stranger hearing us would have called the police to prevent bloodshed. And I don’t think we were the only ones. I believe this was going on all over the country in private. It must have been only publicly that the nation was tongue-tied.” So. Where is this excerpt from? Last Sunday’s OpEd in the Times? A lament on NPR? By a guest on the Colbert show? Something I overheard and illegally recorded at Brown Dog? No. Travels with Charley, published in 1962, sixty-three years ago. Go back more than two hundred years: “It was an age of invectives, and few paid particular attention when a Federalist denounced opponents as ‘blind, positive, conceited sons of bitches.’” (From historian James MacGregor Burns). And wasn’t it Pat Robertson who, I’m not sure when but it was before 1996, sent a fund-raising letter saying feminists encouraged women “to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians”? (The quote is reported in Daniel Balz’s and Ronald Brownstein’s Storming the Gates, published in 1996). We have a false idea of courteous political discourse in this country. Maybe it’s become more vulgar, but I’m not even sure it has. The key is in Steinbeck’s last two lines: “I believe this was going on all over the country in private. It must have been only publicly that the nation was tongue-tied.” The private has vanished. Social media has not only over-democratized and leveled all opinions, but it has been the projectile to the vomiting. Our rage hasn’t changed, except in venue. We have lost the art of self-control. That’s no small loss. But the bile is as old as gallbladders. 

—P.T.

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening.  In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised.  In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly.  In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs.  In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’ as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns.  But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.  The stranger, who follows in the track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington.  And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent.  The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

—From Charles Dickens’s  American Notes (1842). 

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