Fibs, lies and reasonable doubt

Sometimes, there is a coincidental theme running through the day's strips that calls out for exploitation. Today, everyone seemed to be making jokes about lies, or, well, basing their work on them.

Of course, dishonesty exists on several levels. We'll start with Dan Piraro's variation on a classic white lie:

A jaw-droppingly funny twist on a lie I heard as a kid, but it's kind of a lie on a Santa Claus/Tooth Fairy level, only more specific and personalized. When you're old enough to figure it out, you're also old enough to understand the good intentions behind it. 

That process is our first exposure to the truth behind Madame de Stael's "To know all is to forgive all," which, as you grow, begins to encompass more complicated levels of deception and become a little trickier to apply.

The next level is what is known in business law as "puffery," which is assertions of quality so vague as to be unenforceable:

Curtis, of course, is justified in being upset, but he'll learn to sniff out puffery and to become cynical and jaded like his father. 

My favorite "tell" on movie blurbs is to catch the source of the laudatory quotes, and that's not always easy in TV ads. If the New York Times or someone of Ebertesque stature likes it, they'll keep that one on the screen for several seconds, and they'll use the same size font for both the name of the source and the "One of the year's best!" quote.

When the glowing blurbs come from "The Hooterville Herald" or "Silver Screen Sychophant," you'll barely be able to read it, because,while the praise will be writ large, the source will be small and the image fleeting.

At least Curtis is getting wise to it. I'm beginning to think that may make the kid a "minority" in more ways than one.

I'm using Rob Rogers' cartoon in a sort of reverse-illustration of my point, because so many other cartoonists are either hesitating to point fingers or deliberately misstating the nature of the budget impasse and sequestration.

Given that the mission of this blog is to highlight good work, not point out the bad, you see here an exception to the trend: A political cartoonist with the cojones to make a defendable political point.

Even without the current flood of cheap, obvious cruise ship metaphors, there have just been too many cartoons taking the easy Will Rogers route and blaming "Congress" as a single, dysfunctional collection of fools and stooges. It's as lazy as a "Pearly Gates" cartoon but, unlike those silly things, this is a topic on which quality of commentary matters.

If Congress is just a bunch of do-nothing idiots, well, there's nothing to be done about it and we might as well give up and learn to adapt.

But that simply is not the case.

It's clear to any fair observer that the president has made significantly more concessions than the GOP, whose only substantial compromise has been to agree to an almost imperceptible rise in taxes on the wealthy, and that only after a long series of pathos-filled shrieks of "Please don't throw me in that briar patch!"

In the current financial crisis, blaming Congress as a single entity is not a neutral position.

Granted, it may not qualify as a bald-faced lie.

A bald-faced lie would be attacking Obama for taking too many vacation days, when he's taken a paltry fraction of the number his predecessor took.  

A bald-faced lie would be screaming "Scandal!" and "Cover up!" over intelligence failures that led to four deaths in Benghazi, while remaining silent over both the failure of the previous administration to heed intelligence about the 9/11 plans, and over its concoction of skewed intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion.

As the aforementioned Will Rogers might put it, "I wasn't never all that good at 'rithmetic, but I know that, if you add 2,996 and 4,486 together, whatever it comes out to has gotta be one helluva a lot more'n 4."

Compared to those examples, "It's everybody's fault" is more along the lines of puffery. But it's still not fair commentary.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Madam & Eve has for months been so tied up with Zuma and Malema and other regional stuff that the strip hasn't figured much here. 

Until recently. Earlier in the week, the strip even commented on the topic of honesty with some hands-across-the-ocean humor:

Fact is, the spin is coming so fast that even a political strip with no appreciable lag time to worry about can barely keep up. Here's today's up-to-the-minute commentary:

Actually, the transparent lie in my mind is his claim that he heard "an intruder" in the enclosed toilet area, reached under his bed for his gun and went to the outer bathroom, and, only after shooting four times, realized that his girlfriend was not in the bed beside him.

If I hear an intruder, the first thing I'm going to do is look over at my girlfriend/wife/concubine to see (A) if she's what I heard, (B) if she's okay, and (C) if she's awake and heard it, too.

Maybe he forgot he sleeps with a supermodel. Who thinks about that kind of stuff?

But, hey, I thought OJ did it, too, mostly because I didn't realize that, if one person's DNA got hot in the trunk of a car, it would turn, not into an indecipherable mess, but into someone else's DNA, and, by some amazing happenstance, the DNA of a person who would turn out to be the estranged husband of the victim.

It's the defense's job to create "reasonable doubt." And pray for an unreasonable jury.

Meanwhile, at the bail hearings, the defense said that Pistorius couldn't leave the country without being noticed, which I guess means that millionaires in South Africa have no access to private aircraft, boats or four-wheel drive automobiles capable of going over a border other than at a guarded crossing.

Their spin, and my own appetite for tasteless humor, brought to mind a classic panel by the late quadraplegic cartoonist John Callahan, a man noted for his exuberant, self-deprecating humor as much as for his complete lack of self-censorship:

But spin is not a lie, it's just puffery.

And, certainly, they are correct that Oscar Pistorius has appeared in so many advertisements that he would be likely to be recognized wherever he went.

Comments

[Bill R]

The most interesting thing about this (until this morning's revelations about one of the cops having been charged with murder) is that South Africa doesn't do Trial by a Jury of Your Peers. Apparently in its death throes the apartheid government did away with that bit of business, and trials are decided by a judge, with help from assistant judges. According to the news report I heard this in, the current government "is looking into" bringing back jury trials. Wow.

[Geoffrey Cubbage]

I don't know if it's conscious homage to an earlier generation of comics or just unconscious use of the discourse, but those depictions of Chinese military personnel seem awfully "Yellow Peril" to me -- no visible eyes, buck teeth, and grotesque head/body proportions.

Pretty weird to see in a 21st century cartoon.

[Sherwood Harrington]

I came down here to make a comment, but see that Geoffrey Cubbage has already made it. Never mind.

[Mat]

Bill: In the US, we don't have trials with a jury of one's peers. Rather, you have a jury of people in the district in which you're being tried. The 6th Amendment states that the jury shall be "impartial", but we know that can be subverted and has been in many cases against black people in the Deep South.

[Mike Peterson]

Racial exclusion of jurors is not permitted, though I'll grant you can finagle your way around it, especially with a defendant who can't access a fair appeals hearing. But you can also get away with robbing a bank -- that doesn't mean it's legal under our system to rob banks.

As for the depiction of Asians, I'd start by noting that the depiction of a nerd generally includes glasses and Rogers doesn't draw eyes on people with glasses. To my eye, that skinny guy with glasses and a bad haircut (but not really a bowl cut) is a "traditional" geek.

As for the general, while his eyes are not as round as if he were, say, a "round eyes," they aren't 45-degree angle slanty and he's not yellow. So I guess my challenge is, show me a cartoon depiction (and not in a Marvel-comics realistic style) of a Chinese person that you feel is more appropriate.

[Richard J. Marcej]

Having seen several of Rogers comics before, these character depictions seem more in his style than some racial stereotype (IMO). Much like what Mike stated above, Rogers doesn't draw pupils in his characters with glasses. I do the same thing with my drawings, most notably, Larson did it all the time in his panels. I think you can achieve a nice characterization without resorting to text when you go that route.

Gotta add, I love Piraro's facial expression he uses for the dog's reaction to the doctor. It's very simple but he really gets the gentile happiness the dog is feeling to the news.

[Lost in A**2]

On movie blurbs: Yesterday, I passed a billboard advertising a dental office. One of the statements was, "Voted #1 in the state," with an asterisk. The text of the footnote was smaller, but large enough to read at 70MPH: "by our staff."

[Mike Peterson]

Hey, that's as valid as most of those restaurant polls the weekly papers run.

A little more forthcoming, mind you, but more or less the same electorate stuffing the ballot box.

[Sherwood Harrington]

Challenge schmallenge. I'm goin' on 66 and will feel however I want to about somethin', whippersnapper.

More seriously, my point wasn't going to be (and I don't think Geoffrey Cubbage's point was) that the depiction wasn't "appropriate", but rather that the similarity to Yellow Peril images was startling -- and it was startling to me. Just a fact.

In fact, it's obvious that it wasn't Rogers' intent to identify the people as Chinese by facial stereotype -- otherwise he wouldn't have included the "China" sign on the geek's monitor any more than Nast felt a need to put "Paddy" nametags on his ape-faced Irishmen.

Your "challenge" does bring up an interesting topic, though: how to identify ethnicity by means other than exaggerating facial features (and, again, I don't think that was what Rogers was doing here.) One way is evidenced by depictions of Irish from Nast's time to ours, and that's by use of clothing or other ethnically-identifiable items instead of facial features. For example: http://content.sportslogos.net/logos/33/789/full/2554.gif . While the Irish facial features are evident, the visual impact comes more from other things.

[Mary in Ohio]

Glad to see the point I've been pondering acknowledged here. It's been quite awhile since I lived with anybody, but I can't remember EVER hearing a noise in the bathroom when I woke up and thinking "INTRUDER!" In fact, now I only have cats in the house with me, and I STILL don't think of intruders. I would when I heard the allergic sneezing or the cussing because they'd stepped in a litter box, but "noises off" not so much.

And the nummber one cause of death in pregnant women is : homicide.

[Mike Peterson]

Notre Dame's leprechaun is a sign of how far we Irish have come, Sherwood. If we were still feeling even slightly oppressed, we'd view that Steppin McFetchit mascot the way Indians view Cleveland's "Chief Knockahoma."

D'anam 'on diabhal! I'm going down to Dinty's for a little corned beef and cabbage, a few hands of poker and several mugs of beer. Don't tell Maggie.

[Sherwood Harrington]

Oh, I don't know about that, Mike. Alabama oppressed you up pretty good just a while ago.

[Dann]

"It's clear to any fair observer that the president has made significantly more concessions than the GOP,...."

You can now give up your day job for that long sought career in comedy.

B/R,
Dann

[Mike Peterson]

Sherwood: Haven't followed the team in years, though that game was embarrassing enough to even make me pity the fools.

Dann: Yeah, right. Oh, let's play link wars and I'll send you news reports and you can counter with Town Hall and Fox and Breibart.com analysis. No, wait. Let's not.

[Woodrowfan]

well, Mike did to to any "fair observer"

[Dann]

*chuckle*

That's what I left it at that.

B/R,
Dann

[Mary in Ohio]

As far as Chief Wahoo ("Nokahoma" was the Braves' mascot) I have to chip in with some cartoon-y info. The guy who originally drew Chief Wahoo was 17 when he did the first sketch, back in the 40's. Walt Goldbach grew up to run his own signage business, and I had his kids in school. He was a kid trying to make a few bucks, rather than a racist statement. Granted, times have changed and it may be past time to ditch The Chief. But as a person with a few drops of Amerind blood AND a long-suffering Indians fan, I must say that the protestors who came out in the 90's, when the team began to win after 43 years, gave me a laugh. The Tribe was more insulting to Indians in the years between 1960 and 1994, when they ought to have been named "The Cleveland Inept White Guys." Imagine THAT mascot. Oh, wait - you can see any number of them on MLB Blooper reels.

[Mike Peterson]

As I said in regards to the wee leprechaun (may the eel and the trout dine on his snout), much of the issue with these well-intentioned mascots is tied up in the status of their targets. I find the ND leprechaun and the entirety of St. Paddy's Day ephemera offensive, but I'm only half Irish and not very oppressed at all.

When I did a project with Sid Couchey some years ago (http://www.weeklystorybook.com/comic_strip_of_the_daycom/2012/03/my-friend-sid-couchey.html), I consulted the school superintendent by the Mohawk community and he agreed that, theoretically, the depictions were not racist, or at least no moreso than those of the Scots or French Canadians or anyone else in the series. But "offensive" is another issue, and we decided to forego distribution in his school district, unless someone, seeing the booklet in their paper that day, asked for additional copies. Nobody from the reserve ever did.

[Mary in Ohio]

On a related note (I am also Scots/Irish) a teacher friend always decorated for St. Pat's Day. My personal favorite was a flag saying "Erin Go Bragh" and, in teeny-tiny print: Made in Taiwan."