Coprotaureanism in action

Sally Forth starts us off non-politically with a cartoon that brings back memories of, if not harsh suppression, certainly insensitive idiocy. 

So pardon my descent once more into nostalgia, but back in the day not of junior high as here but of college, we had a rule about vacations: If you missed the last class before a vacation or the first class after one, you failed the course. Boom.

It was neither Dickensian nor Orwellian, but it was Draconian and, like most Draconian rules, it was better in theory than it played out in practice.

And I'll concede that I have seen how campuses now, in these less Dickensian/Orwellian/Draconian times, empty out days before an actual vacation, so there was a good reason for the rule.

In practice, O Best Beloved, what would happen is this: You would have, let us say, a 9 am, 11 am and 2 pm class the day before vacation. Early in the week, the professors for your 9 and 11 would each tell you that class for that day was cancelled. Which gave you more time to pack, but you still had to hang around for that 2 pm.

And then, when you dutifully showed up, the dumb son of a bitch would bullshit around for about 15 minutes, then wish you a happy holiday and dismiss "early."

How about "coprotaurean"? On accounta that's what that was. Down-right coprotaurean.

Best change in college scheduling, by the way, came when they shifted the calendar so first semester ended at the holidays rather than two weeks after. It cost us a semester break at the end of January, but meant we didn't have to haul home all those massive texts we were never going to open anyway.

 

The Day The New World Stood Still

I'm braced for the flood of identical "illegal alien" gags that editorial cartoonists submit at Thanksgiving so they can get off work early, but John Deering caught me unbraced with today's Strange Brew, in which the Indians Native Americans Indigenous People Aboriginal Inhabitants Indians comment from some unhinged time perspective on a scene pretty much copped from "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

And he's right on several levels beyond the technological mismatch, because the original Thanksgiving was a pretty normal harvest festival, and, as has been pointed out by Social Justice Warriors Activists for decades with limited effect, the friendship between Pilgrim and Indian didn't last very long.

But a lot of the corrective history has been massively coprotaurean, too, and I'm afraid stems from a condescending "Noble Savage" concept in which the red man is a gentle, earth-hugging infant, helpless without the aid of his more advanced white brothers supporters.

I don't just mean back then, either.

But we'll get into that another time, because, I promise you, any treaties about pipelines negotiated by Duck Who Limps are going to last only until the third week of January anyway.

Which is partisanship, not racism.

A final thought, however: I read an interesting pamphlet by a Tuscarora historian who noted that, as brutal as the 17th century Beaver Wars were, what Europeans were doing to each other back home in that period was equally appalling.

Both sides had been practicing long before they met.

 

And the beat goes on

The Duplex takes a non-conspiratorial look at media shortcomings, and I wish I had an argument against this view but I really don't.

I just wrote a piece for kids about the Kennedy assassination, which has its 53rd anniversary Tuesday, and invited them to figure out which of their relatives were their age in 1963, then, at Thanksgiving, ask them what it was like.

The relevance here being that I had to tell them that, not only was there no Internet, but there were no cable channels, and things ground right down to a halt on the three networks and handful of independents.

I added that we didn't have recorded music in our cars, either, so people were more apt to pick up the news on radio than they might be today.

(Personal note: My brother was news director at Georgetown's radio station at the time and read the same sparse news bulletins endlessly, well-aware than anyone who stumbled across his broadcast was going to immediately switch to a "real" station. That's a combination of public service and modest futility I always found oddly heroic.)

In any case, the dog wagged the TV tail back then, and Cronkite famously snapped the head off a woman who called to complain about her soap operas not being broadcast.

Today, you'd have the same twaddle on a good 75% of cable in a national emergency, because television is no longer about communications, and even at the stations and services that still have news, they're more obsessed with ratings than with the quality of their work.

We watch network news to see how they will, in small, bite-sized nuggets, confirm the news we already know, including that darling video of the kitten.

 

And, as Wiley notes in Non Sequitur, we find the rest of our wisdom right there in the palms of our hands.

 

Given that I'm old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination, it's obvious I'm old enough to remember Watergate, in which the central, enduring question was "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

Stuart Carlson suggests a similar question, and I'm particularly delighted that each of his innocently detached GOP bigwigs are sipping punch from the bowl while denying what floats therein.

We'll see how this turns out, but if everyone can sip the coprotaurean punch and smile, it's not a hopeful sign.

And they'd sure better hope nobody ever convenes an inquiry in which "What did you know and when did you know it?" becomes central.

Ah, well. C'est le weekend, and I've got a date with Watson & Hobbes.

Only Hobbes wandered off and didn't come back.

Don't you do that. There's a world back here in need of support.

Ah, quit yer whinin'

 

Comments

[Mary in Ohio]

I thought the term was "coprophageous."

[vppeterson]

I decided to google coprotaurean before I even finished reading today's post...and, Lo! there were three references already there - all pointing to today's CSOTD. How about that. Right up to date...

[Mike Peterson]

The coprotaureans hope the rest of us are coprophageous.