A Metamorphosis as Interesting as the Mob’s Reaction to It

The Pete Evans Kristallnacht that occurred this week, almost exactly 82 years after the original, was instructive and informative, don’t you think?

The torching of the man’s reputation and smashing of his business an episode of ugly mob-rule the type of which the thugs and goons that composed Mrs Hitler’s boy’s Brownshirt brigade would be proud of. Performed in the relative anonymity of cyberspace the wreckers had little to fear from repercussions, just as the Sturmabteilung were not afraid given the safety of numbers and cover of darkness.

Pete’s too-clever-for-his-own-good cartoon post caused the uproar, apparently, enraging the high-and-mighty just as David Low enraged the sensitive German Chancellor of the time with his published drawings. I’m not enraged or outraged by Pete’s post, nor do I intend to fight his corner, being, as it is, an offensive slur on Trump supporters which, by way of the bent mental trajectory beloved of the left, became offensive for use of millenia-old ‘imagery’ championed by the awful pagan regime of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The cartoon’s metamorphosis is as interesting as the mob’s reaction. Beginning life as just another new-age oversimplified self-help slogan we see, in its original form, a slightly vacuous interchange between the caterpillar and its grown-up companion over a glass of wine:

In version two we see the cartoon watered down and washed-out, the butterfly’s eyelids now drooping, eyeballs raised as if rolling, becoming a parody of the orginal, a statement on the unoriginality of new-age self-help speak so popular from the nineteen eighties. On the butterfly’s wings is photoshopped one of NASA’s excellent Whirlpool Galaxy images so dreamy and favoured by the esoteric, representing the sum of assorted modern quasi-religious ‘philosophy’. The grown-up is bored by it all. It’s quite good.

For version three, Pete’s post, there has been added the MAGA cap of the youngster and the ‘offensive’ sonnenrad at the centre of the galaxy, the picture has become the young, enthusiastic Trump supporter, think Nicholas Sandmann, evolving inevitably into a full-blown totalitarian arch-white-supremacist, (Pete’s only apparent input the additional icons of peace, love, and the rainbow of diversity to the post header).

By all means, be offended if you want to, but please, grow up, you’re supposed to.