Taika Waititi is a genius

One of the defining marks of the MAGA personality (whatever country you live in) is extreme narcissism. Everything is always about them.

Gun violence in your country slaughtering 40,000 people a year? Normals ask questions that are Other-centered. What can we do to lower those numbers? How can we prevent those deaths? How can we help save the lives of those people?

The MAGA personality is always about himself. Don’t touch my gun. Don’t blame me. I didn’t shoot anybody!

Even if you manage to pry them off of selfishly focusing their gun or the notion that they are to blame and try to get them to think about the people who are being shot, maimed, crippled, and killed by gunfire, they still put themselves at the center: “I need my gun because I am the Good Guy with the Gun who is going to star in the Action Hero Fantasy in my mind where I blow the Bad Guy away and save the day!”

Same with Pandemic. Normals are thinking about other people. So even if they are feeling well, they wear the mask and do social distancing and observe common courtesy for the sake of those who may be at risk. It’s not All About Them.

For the MAGA Cult this, like all things, is All About Them. They are the persecuted victim of an imaginary fantasy. The mask is a pink triangle, a yellow star, the Mark of the Beast and they are heroes standing up to Big Brother and infecting everyone in their path while posing as the Patriot Hero and Victim Martyr.

And with racism, it’s the same thing. Normals are Other-centered and show some consideration for the victims of racism. The MAGA Personality sees everything as All About Them. Somehow, taking down Jim Crow statuary set up to keep black people in their place is a personal affront to them. if they have not personally put a noose on somebody’s neck, then when a POC tells them they are rude and thoughtless for cheering for one of Trump’s bigoted words or deeds, they are the victims. All things orbit around them at all times.

And satires like this are met with both denial, sighs of weariness, and complaints that the *real* racism is “being mean to whites” who are the true victims in the everlasting drama starring Themselves.

This cartoon nearly gets it right. The only correction I would offer is, instead of “Left Wing” put “Normals”. It is not “Left Wing” but Normal to show some elementary courtesy to other people. Indeed, it is just the Golden Rule we learned in Sunday School. It is the triumph of the Right Wing Freak Show to turn “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” into some kind of wild-eyed radical Leftist plot and not simply common decency.