We'll let Kirk Walters start the conversation with a joke, and I not only laughed because it's funny but because I had been tossing a similar gag around in my head.
In my version, New Orleans Saints protest the results of their game against the Broncos on the basis that there shouldn't be a rule allowing the other team to return a blocked extra point, the added dimension being that the rule was in place and known to both teams before the game.
I suppose the Saints may go into the post-season owners' meetings hoping to change that rule, but I'd be surprised.
I'd be even more surprised if they demanded the results of the Denver game be overturned.
It's not how you play the game.
And don't tell me it's not a game. This is Metaphor Central and I didn't even invent the overall metaphor.
But, no, it's not funny, though Walters' cartoon still is.
On a less hilarious note, Ann Telnaes redid the title and cover of a Sinclair Lewis semi-classic; semi-classic because, while the author is well-known and well-respected (Nobel Prize and all that), the book is not considered one of his better literary works.
But neither does it have to be, having been written in the 1930s after his wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, had interviewed Adolph Hitler but while the world was still wondering what the fellow was really all about.
Sometimes a polemic is more appropriate to the moment than a finely crafted literary masterpiece, particularly since the more sharp edges you smooth away, the greater the number of people who won't get it.
Being obvious and plain and a little didactic in the speeches can be the result of writing with passionate haste, but it can also be a matter of simply wanting to make your message clear.
What, after all, is the literary value of "Animal Farm," which I read as a small child thinking it was a book about some animals who take over the farm? Which, on that level, it is.
But anyone over the age of 10 who doesn't see Orwell's deeper intent is being deliberately thick.
And, it should be noted, nobody praises Orwell as a great writer, only as an influential one.
If I were forced to choose between the two, I'd take influential.
So far, the choice hasn't even been offered, much less mandated.
I was offered the opportunity, however, to see a good production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros in college, which was a bit of luck.
Theater of the Absurd is closer to "Animal Farm" than "It Can't Happen Here" because it is, by its nature, as absurd as animals running a farm.
However, it is also apt to be mistaken for humor, which Lewis's tome won't be. (In fact, there is an unwatchable movie version with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, who apparently thought it was "Theatre of the Curiously Wacky." Avoid it. Read the script.)
The play begins with the hungover protagonist and his friend sitting at a sidewalk cafe discussing life, when, in the distance, a rhinoceros charges by. Everyone is confused and intrigued but the townfolk mostly say "Well, what do you think about that?" to each other while the two village intellectuals quarrel over whether it had two horns or one, assured of the significance of that distinction.
Later, there is a brief flurry of fear, after a few more rhinos race through and one of them tramples a beloved cat, and when one turns out to have previously been a local resident and someone's husband.
But then she gets over her initial horror and rides off on his back.
And the others get over their initial horror, too: It quickly becomes an okay thing to be a rhinoceros and not so scary after all. In fact, it's a good thing, once you think it over a bit.
Ionesco wrote it after the Second World War, having seen rhinoceroses pop up in his native Romania, at first a curiosity, then something frightening, then not so frightening, then a normal part of lfe.
As with Lewis's novel, it's not a literary gem and most theater companies trim a good deal from the script, but the message is there for those who want to hear it.
I don't think a lot of people want to hear it, or it wouldn't be necessary.
So never mind. Head over to Existential Comics for a game of Anarchist Monopoly and, before you tell me that Monopoly was, in fact, created as a critique of unbridled capitalism, let me assure you that I know that, but that this is an unbridled critique of capitalism which is something quite different.
And as Emma says, it's way more fun.
Really. In fact, at the risk of suggesting an elitist heirarchy, it's the best game of Monopoly I've ever seen.
On a brighter note
I brought up Doc and Raider the other day when it raised an issue of same-sex parenting. It turns out to have been the beginning of a story arc, and I'm including the current episode because of the parenting in the final panel, which is the perfect, upbeat way to have such meetings.
It also turns out to be the perfect segue to one of my favorite songs, which is by the Aussie rock-and-rebellion group Redgum and which I will leave as a moment of zen for parents everywhere.
Recorded in 1984.
Well, of course.
I read "It Can't Happen Here" when I was on a Sinclair Lewis kick in high school. Thanks for the reminder.
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 11/16/2016 at 06:01 PM