Forget it, Jake. It's all juxtapositions

We'll start out with the most basic of our Juxtapositions of the Day, and this one goes out to Brian Williams, who -- aside from presenting duplication-without-elaboration on major stories -- seems to be under the impression that presenting a segment on whatever crap has gone viral on Facebook that day makes the NBC Nightly News relevant.

The theory,I guess, is that people who need assurance that they are trendy will tune in and see that, yes, Brian also digs that video of the cute baby animal or courageous cripple or teary-eyed hero.

(Editor's note: You're allowed to use the term "cripple" in this context.)

The question, Brian, is "Who are you trying to reassure?"

Because reassurance for that young, hip demographic comes from Shares and Likes and barely that anymore either (see "ringtones" discussion, below).

Whatever it does come from, it certainly doesn't come from Geezer Mentions in Other Media.

Meanwhile, the best thing about Big Nate is that he is almost always wrong, and, as someone who works with middle-school journalists, I'm really enjoying the current arc, in which class brainiac Gina has challenged him to run the school paper. As it turns out, "into the ground."

Big Nate normally operates in a middle-school context, but truth-in-humor is not age-specific and today's strip is a wink to consumers of mainstream media as well.

At which point I'd like to digress enough to point out that the dumbing down and jollying up of newspapers began before the Internet was a factor for anyone beyond early adopters.

In which opinion I am unexpectedly confirmed by the blurb to Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which I only intended to link to because it was published in 1985, before all that on-line jazz.

I left the newsroom in 1992, so my experience of being pulled off stories of significance and reassigned to piffle predates the explosion of on-line media.

So we get sob stories about somebody whose store is being torn down for urban renewal, only we have no idea why, or how the decision was made or who supported it, because "meeting stories are boring" and so don't merit coverage.

But we're blaming the Internet for the death of newspapers, because somebody said that's what's killing newspapers and so it would be unhip to think otherwise.

When Ben Bradlee died, I was sorry to see the old guy go, but I didn't join in the general boohoohoo because the fact that Ben Bradlee had died wasn't what we needed to be mourning.

The guy was 93 years old: Hadn't anybody looked around and thought that maybe it was time to start grooming a replacement?

Talk about coming late to the funeral: What Bradlee stood for died a good long time before he did.

"Oh, boohoohoo, Grandma's dead! Who's going to cook dinner for us now? Oh, wait, we've been living on Hot Pockets and Toaster Strudels for the past quarter century anyway ... "

Now juxtapose this one

Betty is a very under-appreciated strip, and what struck me today is that a strip that seems geared towards the middle-aged knocked one over the wall with a gag that showed -- gasp! -- actual awareness of how young people live.

Today's strip did not delight me simply because I had just been thinking about pathetically unhip Brian Williams.

I had also just plowed through several strips in which the gag was based on those lazy, slouching, ignorant slackers with their saggy pants who live at home and sponge off their parents.

To which I would say (A) they're only pants for god's sake and (B) if your kid is ignorant, maybe it's from hanging around with you all his life.

Not to mention that (C) if he's living on your couch, maybe it's because you were a lazy slacker who thought politics didn't matter and "they're all the same," back when you were his age and all the entry-level jobs in America were being outsourced to Bangladesh.

Anyway, the kid is right. That's not a punchline, it's a fact, and I'm not praising Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen for knowing it so much as I'm calling out other cartoonists for not knowing anything more about kids than what they see in other cartoonist's lame strips.

I'm also not patting myself on the back for being hip. There are all sorts of things I don't get.

But I don't talk about those things. The trick to seeming intelligent is to take advantage of opportunities to shut up.

Then again, it's easier to sell a strip to an editor if it contains things he knows he's supposed to laugh at, like those slacker, slouching teens with their saggy pants.

Which somehow brings us to

An oasis in a sea of lame, formulaic election-wrap cartoons, from the pen of Signe Wilkinson.

Speaking, as we were several hundred words ago, of things everybody was following on Facebook, we already know that the Republicans made significant gains in this off-year election.

Whether we should be astonished when the out-of-power party picks up support in an off-year to the point where we need graphic confirmation of it is one question.

I'm kind of inclined to file those cartoons under "Bland-and-Obvious Pagemarkers," alongside "Look! The leaves fell off the tree this autumn and require raking!" and "Our team won the championship!"

What Tuesday's voting actually means for the next two years is, however, a question of more importance. I mentioned the other day that I don't think the Republicans have "gained control of the Senate" because the Democrats have the same 60-vote-pro-forma filibuster option the GOP has used for the past six years, and I also yawn over it because they sure don't have the votes to override a veto.

So all the squashed and exploded and steamrollered donkeys in the world don't explain anything.

Wilkinson's cartoon does.

Now let's juxtapose some variations on "Lame"

The term "lame duck" applies to a person who has been defeated for reelection and is in office with a negative mandate for the period between election day and the start of the new legislative session, which was once from November to March but is now only until January.

A "lame cartoon" is one which depicts a president in his second term as a "lame duck."

To which the answer is, "Well, these days, that's what it also means."

To which the riposte is, "Well, if we're going by frequency of use, your and you're mean the same thing these days, too."

Lame also means this

Looks like Medium Cool Large and I have the same high expectations.
Brian Williams, on the other hand, will feature interviews
and extended red carpet coverage.

Comments

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Three things:

1) Medium *Cool*?

2) Darren Bleuel's Nukees strip just embedded some TV news coverage in a larger arc about a giant robot ant attack on a congressional hearing. Four strips starting here: http://www.nukees.com/d/20141027.html

3) [Long] Postman also made a brief, prescient remark about computers. This is from my post to the Computers and Society email digest in 1987:

'. . .let me note your closing comment: "The major question: Who
does the computerization of society benefit, and why?" Neil
Postman, in /Amusing Ourselves to Death/, has this to say:

"Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated
technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have
accorded it their customary inattention; which means they will
use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central
thesis of computer technology--that the principal difficulty we
have in solving problems stems from insufficient data--will go
unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that
the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have
been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved
very little of importance to most people and have created at
least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

'Now clearly there is a lot to argue with here (I believe, for
example, that the general inability of humans to form effective,
humane organizations on a large scale is an enormous problem for
*everyone*), but I assume that each of us who reads this digest
sees *some* such outcome as a possibility, and is interested in
avoiding that eventuality if possible.'

Yes, I was overoptimistic.

Posted by: Mark Jackson | 11/07/2014 at 10:12 AM