Tom and Harry's Resistance in Gozaimasu, Ohio

I started to post my feelings about the current evolving state of affairs through  dialogue between Tom and Harry.  I soon decided that was not a useful  approach for a couple reasons.  For one, the nature of Tom Duck and Harry was intentionally benign, to showcase a "kinder, gentler" humor with  the same sort of relationships among the characters.  Also, the political zeitgeist of the strip had been centrist, pox on both your houses.  (See the section titled The Middle of the "Road Not Taken" farther down this page.)   So the two panels following immediately might remain the near totality of resistance statements in the strip for the time being.  Instead, I have focused my efforts  into traditional political cartoons unrelated to TD&H and located other than in Gozaimasu, Ohio. 

Artificial intelligence is just one more existential threat on the horizon.  Assume it will remain so for a long time, at least until it perceives that humans are an existential threat to AI.

At first this scandal seemed likely to be a short-term threat to the Administration, but their desperate attempt to bury the issue, even to the extent of shutting down congress and the government for an unprecedented period, belies that, perhaps as well as all claims of non involvement by the president. 

On a hopeful note, I'm seeing more and more nationally syndicated comic strips posting occasional political jabs at the administration.  Chicago Tribune political cartoonist Scott Stantis has gone farther.  He has turned his daily comic strip Prickly City, which seems to have always been a conservative-leaning commentary on politics, but definitely in defense of traditional American values, into a beacon for the resistance.  Trump appears often, as a heartless skunk, with one classic strip showing him editing "We, the People" to "Me, the People" in the Preamble to the Constitution.  His minions in battle gear run rampant through the desert landscape carrying out his whims.  Similarly to TD&H, the strip features a fond friendship between its main characters, Carmen, a conservative little girl, and Winslow, a liberal coyote pup, who have abandoned any political differences in a desperate search for protection against existential threats.  I think Prickly City is also a nod to George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which has also been acknowledged in TD&H.  My strip also has references to and some roots in Walt Kelly's Pogo, although I'm not suggesting TD&H is anywhere near that level.

Tom Duck and Harry has a long history of middle-of-the-road political cartoons, starting with this 1969 strip published in the University of Maryland's student newspaper, The Diamondback, and perhaps best stated by this 2006 strip.  The remaining cartoons below are just a handful taken from the Tom Duck and Harry Sampler elsewhere in this website, where you can find many more of their political ilk.