A Historiann family member has questions about Thursday’s Mallard Fillmore.  (Click here to see it–there are copyright issues if I pasted a copy in here, I believe.)

• Why are compact fluorescent bulbs linked to Senator Obama rather than any other presidential candidate here?  (I am unaware that CFL’s are a particular advocacy issue for Obama.)
• Does the way the bulb is drawn make it look like a turban?
• Is this reading of the cartoon just as nutty as the insinuations about Hillary Clinton’s “Kitchen” ad, which never mentioned Obama at all and briefly featured a still photo of Osama bin Laden as part of a montage of problems that will face the next President.  (See the comments to the previous post.)
• Or, is there something to the interpretation that the troubled Bruce Tinsley is trying to link Obama to scary turban-wearing men?  (And isn’t it pathetic and juvenille, if this is what he intended to do?)
• Which scares you more:  turbaned men walking around, or drunk men driving cars?

The anti-Mallard Fillmore blog Duck and Cover commented this week on the randomness of the connections in this cartoon, and one of the commenters suggests that his drawing of the light bulb resembled a turban.  By the way, here’s a photo of a real compact fluorescent bulb.  It doesn’t look droopy or turban-like at all now, does it?

Shhhh. . . don’t tell anyone that a secret society with highly placed white, Protestant male members everywhere for two-hundred years now still openly parades around in turbans and fezzes, freely engages in Orientalist mysticism, and occasionally, drives tiny cars.  The image at left is from a Detroit News article describing the 1937 arrival of 100,000 shriners in Detroit, where they held three massive parades (at least one of which was led by a “Moslem Drill Team”), and turned Washington Boulevard into the “Garden of Allah.”  The parades featured “potentates [shrine officers], bands and platoons with pantaloons and turbans. . . . They marched to the music of 75 large bands dressed in bright satin costumes.”

Historiann had not just one but two grandfathers (Zenobia Shrine, Scottish rite) who were Shriners, and one of whom drove a tiny car in parades.  Who knew that they might have been the vanguard of the “Moslem” takeover of America!  Imagine an invading army, 100,000 strong, every man driving one of these into your town.

 Be afraid, America.  Be very afraid.  And remember:  they go after the children first,  with their parades and pediatric burn hospitals.  They’re very sneaky, those Shriners–watch out!