DMZ America Podcast #139: Mitch McConnell and the Biden Age Question, Death to the Death Penalty, Gen Z Hates Dating Apps

Award-winning political cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis take on the week’s news and current events on the DMZ America podcast.

The world of politics shifted dramatically with the announcement by longtime Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that he would step aside from his position as minority leader, but stay in the Senate. A succession battle has already begun. What Ted and Scott are more interested in the message being sent by an 81-year-old politician, who has been seeing struggling with aging in public, to the president.

Idaho botched the attempted execution of a high-profile serial killer at the same time as Texas successfully executed an inmate who was probably innocent. Meanwhile, Alabama and Ohio say they will continue to use the bizarre and torturous nitrogen method to kill more inmates, despite the fiasco in Alabama a few weeks ago. How can it be, Ted and Scott ask, that the United States continues to deploy capital punishment? As an added bonus: a discussion of Christianity!

Finally, Bumble and other dating apps are having major financial issues as Generation Z turns against the idea of finding true love online in favor of doing it the old-fashioned way.

Watch the Video Version: here.

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Love, American Racist Style

Is it racist not to be attracted to members of a certain race or to be attracted to members of one race more than another? Of course it is. Nothing could be more racist. So why do dating apps allow people to select by race?

The Year of Loving Dangerously

This autobiographical graphic novel is a collaboration between me (my story, my writing) and Bluesman cartoonist Pablo G. Callejo. Travel with me to 1984, the year I lost everything. The place is New York City. In the space of a few months, I got expelled from Columbia University, fired from my job, arrested for drugs that weren’t even mine, dumped by the girl I thought was The One, and evicted. I hit the streets with $8 and the clothes on my back.

Desperate and prepared to succumb to homelessness, I invested a third of my worldly savings on pizza. There I met a girl who took me home for the night…and so began my “Year of Loving Dangerously.”

Year, currently in development to become a feature film, is a personal account about the commodification of sex and the ends to which anyone will go to survive, seen through the lens of a cruel Reaganism where the safety net is all but gone. As life becomes even tougher for America’s has-nots — most of whom don’t have my advantages as a white, Ivy-educated male — Year is a metaphor for the class war between the 1% and the 99%.

“Ted Rall is fearless. In The Year of Loving Dangerously, he turns his formidable journalistic skills on a very rich subject—himself. The memoir is not just a revealing and entertaining account of Rall’s misspent youth, but a gritty, alternative take on Manhattan in the boom years of the 1980s.”
—Alison Bechdel, “Fun Home”

Graphic Memoir, 2009
NBM Hardback, 6″x9″, 128 pp., Price $18.95

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