Two enormous, steaming piles

Greg Evans has brought in his daughter Karen to breathe a little new life into Luann, and now we see what Jim Horwitz's daughter can do for Watson.

The big difference being that Karen is grown and has become wise and that's what she brings to the (drawing) table, while, for this partnership to work, Horwitz would need to hope his daughter retains her five-year-old sensibility for a couple of decades.

That might prove better for the strip than for the Horwitz household, though, since I read the strip and don't have to live in the household, you can guess where my hopes would lie.

As to the gag itself, I lived with my son's family for a little over half a year after the Cheney Administration tanked the economy, and was often the breakfast person.

The kids were allowed to watch the small TV on the breakfast bar, and Clifford was one of the acceptable choices, though I preferred Martha Speaks, which was a bit more inventive. 

A lot of the humor of Clifford consists of what a hassle it would be to have a dog that size, which is right in the wheelhouse for five-year-olds, which is why Clifford is so popular with them.

And I have to admit that, as I was scrambling eggs and dishing out fruit and watching Clifford, the issue depicted here occurred to me.

I guess we don't outgrow our five-year-old sensibilities so much as we learn to suppress them. 

Which is a pretty good reason for keeping a five-year-old handy: So you can pretend not to be joining in the inappropriate giggling.

 

Meanwhile, under the desks

Ed Stein brings back another level of childish thinking with the latest episode of Sleeper Ave. 

The duck-and-cover phenomenon has proven a rich source of mockery for the generations that came after me and Ed, but it was not particularly humorous at the time.

I've heard from other people in our demographic that they were frightened, if not actually "traumatized," by the drills, but I remember taking them matter-of-factly: The Cold War was in full bloom by the time I was old enough to reflect upon it, and so I didn't reflect upon it.

That's also part of a five-year-old's sensibilities.

For instance, I'm also not quite old enough to remember the polio epidemic itself, but I'm old enough to remember a little girl named Candy in my first grade class who had big clunky metal leg braces from it. And to remember that I just saw it as something that happened to some people.

There was, to use a highly technical term, some scary shit happening in those days, and so Candy had those braces and nuclear annihilation was out there somewhere, too.

Ed remembers it as a small child whose hometown had recently been devastated by a tornado, so I'm willing to defer to him on the fear issue, and maybe his having seen what a tornado does to a city is also what made him, even at that young age, perceive the futility of it all.

For my part, the first time I remember being concerned was slightly later, when people began to build fallout shelters, and just about the time I was wondering if we should have one, there was a Playhouse 90 broadcast, "Alas, Babylon" that raised the question in stark images that, as that link will tell you, made one helluvan impression on young minds.

So look: It's one thing for later generations to willfully misinterpret "Leave it to Beaver" and snicker over the G-rated sexual etiquette of the time, but, if they find duck-and-cover funny, that's on them, not us.

The nice thing is, by the time my kids were of that age, the sense that nuclear war was utterly inevitable had faded, but the idea of surviving a nuclear attack was also nearly abandoned and, until Gipper The Big Anti-Red Dog came along, the government had pretty much quit dealing with it by bullshitting the public.

As it happens, when my kids were about duck-and-cover age, I was doing a radio talkshow and had as a guest an official of whatever agency was tasked with promoting the Reagan solution of digging a hole, laying a door across it and covering it with dirt.

You are permitted to laugh at this excerpt from TK Jones' interview with Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times, because we sure did:

You can make very good sheltering by taking the doors off your house, digging a trench, stacking the doors about two deep over that, covering it with plastic so that rainwater or something doesn’t screw up the glue in the door, then pile dirt over it.

When I interviewed the regional spokesperson for the Department of Don't Worry Be Happy by phone, I remarked that I was looking out the studio window at Cheyenne Mountain, and suggested that, for those of us in Colorado Springs, there were not enough goddam doors in the world to prevent us from becoming a cloud of glowing vapor in the first strike, unless they decided to go for Omaha first and hit us second, which might buy us another 45 minutes or so.

(Well, maybe a couple of these doors.)

His response was that the doors thing was kind of a desperation idea and that the real solution would be to get out of town before the missiles arrived.

Then, when I suggested that (A) once the birds were in the air, you couldn't drive fast enough even on a clear road to get out of their reach, and that (B) there weren't going to be any clear roads under those circumstances anyway, he conceded that the real real solution was to get the hell out of town some days before things got to that point.

Which seemed like a large, steaming pile of equally futile advice.

 

My kids really enjoyed this movie, which came out about a year later.

 

Now here's your moment of cheerful perspective:

 

 

Comments

[MaggieZ]

When I was reading the Clifford books to my children, I had the same thought. I don't know if they did, perhaps because we didn't have a dog.

"Alas, Babylon" --I read that in high school, actually read it over and over. A few years ago I found an anniversary edition, and re-read it. Still impressive, and so much was familiar! I didn't know there was a television play of it (1960, I was 10).

[Dave from Phila]

When I was 11 and did the duck-and-cover under the desk in case of a nuclear attack, I argued vehemently with my teacher that I should be allowed to go to the roof of the school so I could see the explosion before we were all vaporized. (I lived outside of Philadelphia close to a Naval Air Base. I figured in the even of a nuclear war - it was only a matter of time.) I recall the teacher having the look of "Yea, I know your are right ... just get under the damn desk!" My parents got a note telling them to get me to obey instructions better.

[Mary in Ohio]

I was way older than your kids when "War Games" came out - and it is still one of my all-time favorites. With my all-time-go-to-favorite movie quote, when (the character of ) Dabney Coleman says to Barry Corbin's General "...you pig-eyed sack of..."exactly what you are talking about. And believe me, I had already met several of those before then but just didn't have the right term!

[Mike Peterson]

I'll admit I'm not sure "Alas, Babylon" is the one that included the father of the family with the fallout shelter being forced to hold off his friends and neighbors at gunpoint as they locked down, but I do remember discussing that with my father: That you didn't really want to be the ones who survived.

I was 10 when "Alas, Babylon" aired, and it seems like a young age to have that conversation, but my dad was an honest guy and would not have lied to me on a point of honor and morality, no matter what age at which I broached the topic.

Whatever specific program sparked that specific conversation, it was one worth having, and it's the sort of moral pragmatism, or pragmatic morality, that my father instilled in us. He had little use for ivory towers, and firmly believed that doing the right thing was not only "right" but objectively sensible.

However silly and futile crouching on the floor was, at least it sparked some good conversations.