This Week's Troubletown

It's interesting that shantytowns, tent cities, Hoovervilles, Bushburgs, Obamalands, neckbone cities, etc. are popping up all over these days according to a storm of recent articles sparked by a report on the Oprah Show. Amazing how Oprah runs the world, makes books into bestsellers, and makes the news happen. After Oprah, the NY Times followed, McClatchy, and then, well, everybody.

Two classes of homeless now emerging in these tent cities, they say, and the new ones are kind of the cocky, yuppie homeless because they consider their situation to be temporary, whereas many of the long-term homeless don't ever expect to get back into society due to mental problems and drug addiction. I read some contrary viewpoints about the tent cities that says that there has been no surge in people living in tent cities, that the numbers have actually declined over the past decade.

I wondered how many people in these tent cities were vets of Iraq and Afghanistan, and how many of them perceive a difference in status depending on which war they were in, the popular one that Barak Obama likes or the bad one that Bush started and Barack Obama doesn't like, but is letting it roll on for a while. Mixing metaphors is what we're all about here at Troubletown, that and mixing unrelated threads of stories, so I had enough stuff here for my cartoon.

There's not much reporting on the suicide rates of returning vets, but it's alarming. Those men and women are coming back seriously f'ed up, and it's just going to to keep getting worse. The chimpy NY Post disputes the statistics. So are the print journalists who don't have any newspapers to work for anymore. Joke that didn't make it: I wanted to make the "face of new homelessness" be a cocky print journalist who expects to be rehired really soon, but you only get so many inches. Oh, yeah, and a house on the next block that sold at the top of the market, one that a contractor had bought in disrepair, fixed up and flipped, is on the market again. My wife said, that house must be under water. Bing! I oughta use that in my tent city cartoon! God, I'm so funny.