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This cartoon has four panels. All the panels show a gritty commercial doorway – the kind that’s recessed a few feet into the building – on a city sidewalk. There’s litter and graffiti here.
There are two characters in the comic strip. The first character is a homeless man sleeping in the doorway, wearing a zip-up sweatshirt over a t-shirt and a dull red knit cap, and with a full beard. The other character is a muscular-looking cop dressed in a police uniform and carrying a baton. In defiance of tradition, he is cleanshaven. I’ll call these two characters KNITCAP and COP.
PANEL 1
Knitcap, covered by a brown blanket and with his head pillowed on some rolled-up clothes, is lying in a doorway, apparently asleep. The cop is using his baton to poke knitcap in the side. The cop has a somewhat sadistic grin.
COP: Hey, you! Get up! We’ve outlawed sleeping in public! You’re not allowed anymore!
PANEL 2
Knitcap is sitting up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with one hand. He speaks calmly. The cop watches, smirking, arms akimbo.
KNITCAP: In that case, I guess I’ll sleep in a hotel tonight.
PANEL 3
A close-up of Knitcap. He’s stroking his chin with a hand, as if thinking through his options.
KNITCAP: Or should I sleep in my townhouse instead? Or my Hamptons place? I’ll call my butler and ask what he thinks!
PANEL 4
Knitcap, grinning, is now holding a hand next to his face, thumb and pinky finger extended, pretending it’s a phone as he talks. The cop is glaring and slapping his baton against his palm.
KNITCAP: Smithers? Smithers old boy! My super fun street sleeping holiday is done. Which of my mansions shall I sleep in tonight.
COP (thought): Next step: Outlaw sarcasm.
Thanks for introducing me to this great comic and especially the source! Here’s another great one from there:
I’ve seen this comic a few times and ma just now noticing the mouse and cat scene playing out on the corner lol
Background details rulz!
Edit: Any idea what his shirt is supposed to say?
Looks like “No, you’re Spartacus”
No idea what that’s a reference to though.
HG: “What’s that? You’re going to put me in a nice warm cell and be required to give me three hots and a cot?”
PO: .oO(Next step. Outlaw human rights.)
The constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery in the US provided one exception: anyone convicted of a crime.
This was a tool of Jim Crow to maintain a sizeable black slave labor force via disproportionate criminalization of black people and poverty (newly-freed previous slaves were very poor, often illiterate). It was and is a tool of modern racialized hyper-exploited labor via the prison system. And it is likely a tool that US authorities are keeping in their back pocket for the mass criminalization of the homeless.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France
![[Lefty Cartoons] Let’s Outlaw Being Homeless! That’ll Work!(feddit.org)](https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/30c824c8-ccf8-4951-b2d5-d26038e65f12.png){kind=link}
Honestly, right wingers and elites have the short sighted and sick obsession with simply jailing whoever they don’t like for various reasons.
This obsession with controlling the masses has already created the largest Prison Population per capita in the US. The result? Prisons give US capitalists a ready source of slave labor, and gives them complete control over the population at large.
This control is exerted via forcing compliance to societal norms through threat of incarceration, as well as the more obvious form of control via stripping of the autonomy of those already incarcerated.
Ultimately only narcicists and megalomaniacs and their most sycophantic bootlickers would remain free if these sick fascists had their way, and they (and the rest of us) would find themselves residing within a hell of their own creation: a truly fucked world where only the most power hungry are free…and truthfully they wouldn’t actually be free.
Their lust for power would innevitably become their fetters.