Comic Strip of the Day.com

Boy am I old

Zits brought a bit of a sigh this morning. 

When I moved from Colorado to the East Coast in '87, I was driving a red 1971 VW van. Mine was a camper, but Jeremy's is close enough that I always get a kick out of the strips featuring it.

I've had good cars and not-so-good cars over the past 40-some years, but the VW is the only one I really miss.

But I was moving from the part-time winter on the Front Range to the OMG world of everlasting snow in Northern New York, and while Hector says they need to "fix the heater," there's really nothing to fix, at least nothing stock.

The "heater" on those old classic VWs was pretty much a tube that took some of the hot air from the engine and sort of nudged it up towards the front, if it wanted to go, at whatever pace it thought might be nice. It certainly wouldn't move fast enough to melt much more off your windshield than a light frost, and then only in the corner where the tube came out.

You can retrofit a blower, however, and I tried to do that.

The shadetree VW fellow said, "That's expensive."

"How much?"

"I'd have to special order it."

"Yes, I know. It's May now. How much?"

It finally dawned on me that he just didn't want to do it, and I wasn't making enough money to have a "summer car," so I sold the VW and bought another car.

A Ford Escort.

 
Oh well, Having a blower would not have turned it into a four-season vehicle anyway, as this November, 2009, strip reminds us.

 

I bear glad tidings

Bob the Squirrel announces the dreaded Glitter Season, but I will, in turn, unleash the latest bit of really good environmental news: We need to get rid of that crap.

Or at least convert it to something that doesn't add to the microplastics disaster. 

There would be some serious pushback, if 11-year-old girls had a more well-organized union. As it is, glitter is either going to become biodegradable, in which case the "all over everything" element will be somewhat addressed, or it will become something they can tell their children used to exist.

Maybe both: Biodegradable glitter would probably be like actual, non-carcinogenic root beer, where you can tell your kids that there used to be a kind that didn't suck, but, since you can't have it anymore, they'll never experience the good stuff.

Though glitter will still fall out of the box every Christmas for the next century or so.

I wish a bottle of real root beer would.

 

Killing the fatted goose

Tank McNamara has been having fun this week with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the ongoing drop in ratings for the NFL, which Jerry seems to attribute to the existence of the NFL Commissioner and President Trump is pretty sure is due to people wanting civil rights, but which Mark Cuban and I attribute to watering down the product.

You would think the fact that team owners are millionaires would mean they'd understand "supply and demand," but somehow they've got the idea that adding more games will magically increase audience and thus profits.

Mind you, they also seem to think that people will tune in on Thursday night if the players all wear Day-Glo pajamas instead of their regular uniforms, so it's probably futile to try to understand how they make decisions.

And I'm too old and cranky to have an opinion, because I'm still wishing the NHL had stuck to six teams whose games all mattered.

 

Speaking of me being a very old person ...

Pajama Diaries often does a nice job of reminding me of what it was like to have kids in the house, but it also often does a nice job of reminding me that these folks live in a different era, mostly because Terri/Jill is the age of my kids and her kids are the ages of my grandchildren.

When I was growing up, we had to make arrangements from home, and then, once we were out the door, we had stepped into a black hole.

However, where I was growing up, it was binary: You were there or you weren't. There weren't any places large enough that anybody had to do more than look around to see who was there, and not many other places for a person to be. 

When I had kids, by contrast, we lived in the city, so they were often at the mall but there were plenty of other places to be as well.

I used to give them a wrapped-in-paper quarter which was free if it was used to call for a ride but cost them $1 if they used it for something else.

For the most part, as Jill says, we'd agree on a meet-up, and, for the most part, everyone stayed within five or ten minutes of the appointed time. 

I'd be interested in knowing if being able to micromanage arrangements by cellphone has made people less aware of time in that regard, in the same way that we used to know each other's phone numbers but don't anymore, and used to be better seat-of-the-pants navigators before we had apps to do it for us.

Mostly, though, what I remember is that the two "come get me" incidents I can recall happened when the kid had gotten stuck out in the woods once and (seriously) in a cornfield the other, and both had to hoof it a significant distance to find a phone.

It built character, dammit.

Meanwhile, there's a whole lot of pop culture references that must make no sense at all to kids.

For instance, Mrs. Avery can't just intercept Sylvia's calls anymore, and operators don't interrupt you:

 Though sometimes getting the girl on the phone is the least of your challenges. 

 

Nothing either true or false, but thinking makes it so

When Willie sets the standard for intellectual caution and rigor, we're all in trouble.

Here, he goes against the well-known Forrest Gump Principle, which is that "Life is like a box of chocolates and if you don't know the code of shapes and squiggles chocolatiers use and are too busy, too proud or just too plain dumb to look at the diagram on the box lid ..."

Well, I may not have the saying right, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works out in real life. 

I hated that movie, in part because I'm not a huge fan of movies that use disabilities to draw sympathy rather than employing sharp writing and three-dimensional characters to carry their messages, but also because I was uncomfortable with the technical trickery.

I said this in 1994, which, in terms of technology and deceit and propaganda, was a very, very long time ago, when bogosity beyond the supermarket tabloids was confined to a color/contrast correction to OJ Simpson's mugshot that made him look darker than he was in real life, and a cloned shot Newsday ran to make it look as if Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding were skating on the same ice.

This was back before newspaper publishers learned how to surround their own staff's reporting with fraudulent, semi-pornographic garbage for readers to click on.

And before foreign governments learned to use the Internet to get us to fight amongst ourselves.

All of which is to say, I had a valid point but I wasn't expecting it to get this far out of control, and yet here we are. 

xkcd has a little fun with things we all know are true except that they aren't.

Common wisdom notwithstanding, you can't see the Great Wall of China from the Moon, which is harmless enough except that we've had photos of the Earth from space for nearly half a century and you'd think by now we'd have wised up.

You'd be wrong.

Which is why the whole Forrest Gump thing is so dangerous. Here's a picture of two conmen who are notorious for their blatant, self-serving falsehoods, and yet one is a successful TV host and the other is President of the United States.

We believe what we want to believe, and the more comforting, the better.

"Little Big Man" -- a far better movie than "Forrest Gump" -- featured a landscape of liars and cheats, with Allardyce T. Merriweather the only one who admitted what he was, though that speech is shortly followed by him being yet again tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

If we really wanted to Make America Great Again, we'd be keeping chicken processing here, or at least making them return the feathers, we'd be producing more tar, not more coal, and we'd scrap our softwood lumber agreement with Canada in order to be sure that our rails were made from good American lumber.

 

And the mention of Old Lodge Skins leads us to the latest bit of lying racism from the fetid swamps of the Potomac.

Lalo Alcaraz gets the cartooning honors because he takes a clear stance but does not impose upon the people he claims to defend.

F'rinstance, something that has popped up both in Facebook and in some cartoons is the notion of making up funny, insulting "Indian names" for Trump.

Stop it. You wouldn't criticize his Asia policy with a Charlie Chan accent and jokes about "flied lice," would you? 

(That's a rhetorical question, dammit.)

The issue over Elizabeth Warren's claim of native heritage is a mix of carefully cultivated misunderstandings and outright lies. The story has been told enough times, however, that anyone who wants to know the truth can find it in less than 10 minutes.

As for the claim that calling someone "Pocahontas" is not racist, that's transparent nonsense and does not need to be argued, though Michael Cavna has an interesting column on how much Indians hated that movie.  

And, by the way, native culture is as diverse as European culture, and anything you say about Indians needs to either be very general or carefully vetted. Which takes very little time and is kind of fun: You go on-line and find the tribal government, then pick up the phone and call the tribal historian or cultural director.

For instance, this current-events piece on the death of Lori Piestawa involved a 15-minute call to the Hopi Nation to confirm the place of women in their culture. Most tribes are matrilinear, but the Iroquois are also matriarchal while others are not and the place of women can vary from one culture to the next. It was a pleasant conversation because people appreciate the effort to get things right.

Though not every instance of fact-checking is free of embarrassment.

In a story set during the War of 1812, I had a young boy whipped in the presence of a Mohawk trapper, so I emailed a historian at Akwesasne to check the commonly-accepted idea that Indians never spanked their children and to ask how the trapper might have responded.

Her answer:

By 1813, we had over two hundred years of contact with Europeans, so they were not an unknown to us, even when we did not agree with them. Some would choose to speak up, others wouldn't. We also have the traditional viewpoint that kids shouldn't be hit indiscriminately, but were also heavily impacted by non-native views by this time, so spanking would have been practiced by Mohawks also.

Gee, nice to know we've enriched your lives.

And I was editing some Indian stories which were collected on a reserve in the US but had originated in Canada, so I asked a Saginaw source if I should use the US spelling "Chippewa" or the Canadian term "Ojibwe." 

He replied, "It doesn't really matter. The only time anyone puts it on paper is when you're taking something else away from us."

 

Indian humor is kinda droll.

 

Tuesday Short Takes

I'm going to start with the heavy lifting and work my way to more fun stuff, and I'm grateful for Jeff Stahler for this one because it helps illustrate something that struck me yesterday.

Some panelists and guests on "OMIGOD! THIS JUST IN! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" -- or whatever Wolf Blitzer calls his regular daily news roundup -- were suggesting that Al Franken and John Conyers resign, and I thought, first of all, that I needed to throttle back and try to look past the whole Democrat/Republican aspect.

And then I thought, yeah, but if the Democrats are the only ones pushing that solution, what's Congress going to end up looking like? 'Cause the GOP sure isn't insisting that their creepy guys resign.

And I agree with Rob Rogers that people who would vote for a pederast are despicable, particularly when they come from the party that continually touts "family values" and religious beliefs and so forth.

But they also were saying how sad it was that private industry is so much more decisive, that the Harvey Weinsteins and Charlie Roses get fired, gone, while Congress natters on about apologies and losing committee positions.

And this insight hit me: Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose were fired by their employers, not their colleagues.

Article I, section 5 says "Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member."

But, boy, that needs to be a rare and very transparent process. And I would suggest that it should be reserved for current and potentially relevant faults.

Beyond that, if the people of a particular district want to be represented by a racist or a sexist or a nudist or a homophobe or a guy who burned his draft card 50 years ago or a guy who has a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald over the fireplace in his den, well, that's how democracy works.

We're allowed to vote for assholes and we're allowed to define "asshole" based on our own criteria.

And if the people of Minnesota feel strongly enough about it, they ought to be able to vote to recall Al Franken right now instead of waiting to vote against him in 2020.

But it's their deal: They are his employers.

Meanwhile, what I particularly like about Stahler's piece is that we've seen several cartoons about men searching their memories for things they shouldn't have done, but when the Ghost of Christmas Past came to visit Scrooge, it was not to punish him but to awaken him.

Scrooge was still behaving badly, and the ghosts came to make him search himself not in order to cast blame and guilt but to illuminate his behavior and to help him reform.

And note that he didn't close down the house of Scrooge and Marley, but, rather, turned it into a good place to work.

 

Which brings us to Tom Toles' take on the classic psychological test, as posed by the GOP Congress, and don't miss the fine print at the bottom.

While his immediate target is the GOP tax plan, there's a wider significance that can hark back to the aforementioned power of the people to make wise and responsible choices.

It echoes Jefferson's position that, while the people's opinions will generally keep government headed in the right direction, it's important that those opinions be well-informed. 

We've never found a way to limit voting to intelligent, responsible people, and most purported attempts to do so have actually been attempts to make sure only those who agree with us get to vote, "us" being the folks already in power. 

Still, if Congress is going to start casting members out because of stupid, sophomoric jokes they made a decade ago, how about also holding them accountable for calling something "the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" when they know damn well that trickle-down has not only never worked to create jobs but has on occasion been responsible for cratering the economy.

Maybe we should refer people to the Ethics Committee or urge them to resign for trying to peddle toxic codswallop to voters.

  

Arts Section and required Canadian Content:

Bado passes along a small collection of "artists painting dogs" by Swedish cartoonist Riber Hansson, who has been doing this unbeknownest to me for 25 years.

Which is why it is good to check in with Bado regularly. He knows about stuff you didn't.

 

And as long as we're looking at art gags in Quebec, let's catch up with Doc and Raider, who are riffing on the recent sale of the da Vinci painting.

When the actual auction happened, I heard a piece on NPR in which someone said that authenticating art is dodgy stuff because the expert is often offered a percentage of the sale, which poses an obvious conflict of interest.

Which immediately made me think of this jaw-droppingly bizarre episode from a generation or two ago.

If you click on nothing else this month, click on that article, which ends with this quote:

We should all realise that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls. -- Theodore Rousseau

As it happens, I first learned about it on the CBC, from Peter Gzowski.

Now there was a master!

 

Hep Happenings

Over at Comics Kingdom's Vintage section, Johnny Hazard is starting up a new adventure, this one from April, 1948. 

During the war, Johnny used his skills as a pilot to fight the obvious bad guys, but peace put him into a bind where he had to find villains whose evil required he at least get there by air, even if he ended up doing most of his battling on terra firma.

I like the strip because the action is well-staged, the art is painless and the Runyonesque 40s slang is totally ridic.

Plus I've always had a crush on Ann Sheridan and I think maybe Frank Robbins did, too.

 

Parallel Lives

Pros and Cons puts a spin on the idea of parallel universes, and it's actually helpful, though I think most people prefer to think of utopian alternatives. 

I think the first time I encountered this concept -- and I'm not calling it a "theory" because I don't want to confuse fantasy with science -- was either a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits story about astronauts who returned from their flight and found small things in their personal lives had changed.

At first they chalked it up to some mental aberration caused by the flight, but eventually they figured out that they'd cracked their way into a parallel Earth upon re-entry. It was one of those sci-fi pieces where the concept was more interesting than the execution, and I don't remember much except the idea.

Not to be confused with "Flatland," which is about other dimensions.

I don't remember how old I was when I stumbled over that story, but it totally freaked me out, as opposed to the idea of parallel universes, which was more intriguing than disturbing.

 

"Other Worlds" being a third concept, since they aren't parallel or, at least, aren't supposed to be. Tom the Dancing Bug celebrates one of the best known, turning it, for satiric purposes, from another world into a parallel universe.

But then John Deering comes along to deny both the Other World and the Parallel Universe approaches.

The ending of Planet of the Apes has been used several times recently to make the point that it isn't some other dystopia, but I particularly like this one, and I like it even more in partnership rather than in juxtaposition with Tom the Dancing Bug.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a humbug, and whatever fantasy and magic existed in Oz, he was not part of it. He was simply a conman who had stumbled into the kingdom and usurped power.

L. Frank Baum's Oz is not a dream as it's portrayed in the movie. It's a real place where unreal things happen.

I can relate to that.

(Company Man)

(Bill Day)

Dorothy's wizard was benevolent, and even tried to help her. The rest of us are not so fortunate, and TTDB's view is more realistic, as are the depictions in Company Man and in Bill Day's cartoon.

This combination is particularly good, because Company Man's scornful corrections meld nicely with Day's forked tongue to ask the question, "Why would you lie about something so easily refuted?"

Perhaps Trump didn't think Time Magazine would respond to his falsehood, or, at least, so quickly.

It's also possible, I suppose, that a fellow who never seems to sleep dreamt the exchange in a nocturnal semi-nap and didn't realize it hadn't actually happened.

The latter suggesting that we could restore order to the nation with a CPAP machine, though I don't think it's that easy. And, besides, if he is actually delusional, we might want to let it flow unimpeded until it triggers the 25th Amendment.

Simply being a deliberate liar would not. We'd have to get him to lie under oath, and then bring him before an unsympathetic Congress.

And let's be fair: There is such a thing as being too persnickety about the facts.

I had a friend who applied for a job in Japan and stated that he had graduated from college in June, when, in fact, the ceremony was in early June but, according to his transcript, the degree had actually been conferred in late May.

The prospective employer's response to this was that "a man who would lie about something so inconsequential would lie about anything."

That seems a bit of a fine line.

By contrast, when you tweet something like this, you ought not to simultaneously be bragging about how well the economy is doing, or at least you should know in your own mind which thing you say is the truth and which is the lie.

Though I'd be curious to know how you expect to be able to say both without someone catching on, particularly when the one news outlet you depend on for Truth is reporting that financial institutions have never been stronger.

But, of course, it's not about telling the truth.

It's about knowing your audience.

I watched "Merchants of Doubt" this weekend, a documentary about how phony experts are recruited to create alternative views on topics that, viewed through the lens of actual science, are clear. 

The movie is scary and depressing as hell, but what stuck with me was a framing technique that uses a magician to explain things.

He notes that, while a particularly astonishing card trick seems inexplicable, if you slow down the video, you'll be able to see how he does it, and then, once you know the trick, you'd never be able to un-see it, you'd always know what you were looking at.

Later on, moreover, he points out that nobody ever wins at three-card monte except for the shills, and that the reason suckers always lose is that they think the dealer is moving the cards around with extraordinary skill when, in fact, he's simply cheating them.

The trick to running a con is to play upon hope and greed, not by setting up improbable odds, though state lotteries are based on this technique, which stays just a hair on the legal side of the fraud line.

Rather, the real profits come when you make the mark think there is a technique at work when there is no technique and it is simply a con.

For instance, you play upon his naive assumption that there once was a Wonderful America, a parallel universe or perhaps another world, in which everyone had plenty and everything was swell.

And you tell him that you know how to reverse time and get back there.

And that you want nothing more than to take him along!

Which happens to be the truth, though even Roy Moore would be loathe to say why.

 

 

The Power of Storytelling

Jordanian cartoonist Osama Hajjaj offers this commentary following the bombing of a Sufi mosque in the Sinai this past Friday.

The futility of thinking militant terrorism can be confined to one place is part of the tragedy, though it is also part of the solution, given that public resistance to ISIS and similar groups can only increase if there is no veneer of safety to allow for indifference.

That's human nature: I remember talking to an Irish woman during the Troubles in the Six Counties. She was from the south and said, "There was never any trouble like that when I was growing up," to which I responded, "Well, there were the border raids in the '50s. Sean South and all that."

Her response was "Well, that wasn't where we were," which seemed a silly statement given that the whole of Ireland is only the size of Indiana.

Later, I recounted her remark to Tomas Cardinal O'Fiaich, who was from Ulster, and he shook his head in sorrow that so many people could shelter themselves from the ongoing death in the North, while getting upset over the kidnapping and death of a racehorse.

If people can be so indifferent in such a confined space, we ought to cut Muslims a little slack if some of them have been able to compartmentalize the terror within the Arab world.

But that may be ending: This response from Afghan cartoonist Shahid Atiqullah is from well beyond Arabia.

Atiqullah's cartoon is particularly apt in combining the murder in Egypt with the destruction of statues, since the hostility towards Sufis from the Wahabbists of ISIS is, like that of the Taliban, as much directed at their symbols and culture as at the practitioners themselves.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but the conflict appears to be between the humorless practitioners and those who preach tolerance, and between those whose religion is based on taking up a harsh burden and those whose religious practices turn mindful discipline into a source of joyful release.

And I'll never take the side of those who equate joy and laughter with superficiality and a lack of spiritual rigor.

In fact, my opinion is that the more your spirituality requires you to keep your head down and obey, the more superficial it must surely be.

Meanwhile, I'm drawn to one particular aspect of Sufism, the storytelling tradition that mirrors that of Jesus and Confucius and all the zen masters who teach and perplex and amuse and challenge with parables and koans and, yes, jokes.

I first encountered Nasreddin Hodja, the legendary Sufi character, in a Reader's Digest piece when I was quite young.

The story was of a quarrel which broke out between a food merchant and a beggar. The beggar had been standing by the merchant's stall, smelling the soup, and the merchant was demanding payment, saying that the beggar had enjoyed his talent as a cook and he deserved compensation.

Nasreddin held up his purse and shook it three times, saying, "Let the sound of coins pay for the smell of soup."

He was also good at playing the fool, as in a story where he confesses that he lost a coin somewhere else, but is looking for it here "because the light is better."

An old joke perhaps even then, but, within the context of his overall philosophy, more of a koan than a gag: Why do we search for things where they might be easy to find, rather than where we know they are?

Perhaps the best response to the attack in Egypt is to overturn their joylessness, and the news sent me back to Sufi Comics, which I wrote about here five years ago.

As I said then, they don't offer quite the same rollicking humor of Nasreddin, but it is in there, and, even in more pensive pieces, they  provide a gentle form of teaching with stories and parables like this one:

And I like this next story, because, while the Great Man Disguised appears in many cultures, he's more often seeking to learn how people feel about him, than to do penance for it:

There are many others in the free book they offer for download, and more beyond that in the ones they sell.

I particularly like this next one because it's a good riposte to those objectivists who are equally as humorless and fundamentalistic as those who hate Sufi practices.

As an agnostic, I have no conflict either with the idea that thought and attitude matter, nor with the belief that there are things we can't put to double-blind experimentation, or, at least, not with what we know so far. But we do know this much:

It's not that we don't need science and medicine.

But we certainly need fools, in the classic sense.

It also reminds me of a story Frank Linderman, who collected authentic Blackfoot, Cree and Ojibwe stories, told of sitting around a fire listening to an old Blackfoot storyteller in the early days of the 20th century:

     He was telling tales of (creator-trickster-fool) Old-man, and while all the company laughed, I remained silent.
     "Why does not my brother laugh with us?" asked the old warrior.
     I had feared to laugh at the stories lest the Indian believe that I was not serious in my desire to leam of this strange, mythical character, and I told him that.
     "We always laugh when we speak of Old-man,'' he said. "You should laugh aloud with us when we speak of him. He expects it and always laughs with us from the past."

If you want to thwart ISIS, pursue the wise, comforting, challenging humor they wish to destroy.

 

Auction Update:

There are a little over four days left in the NCS Hurricane Relief Auction, and, while I assume there will be a rush of bids at the deadline, there's quite a bit of stuff up there still at a very reasonable price. A little original art will brighten up your place, especially knowing you helped people who needed it.

And, if you can afford to go after one of the major pieces, knock yourself out. It's a worthy cause, after all.

 

Now here's your moment of ... Sufism:

Jokes you can't tell, jokes we can't get

Dogs of C Kennel offers a thought in the midst of all the #MeToo controversy, and it's one that I suspect a lot of cartoonists are pondering.

At least male gag cartoonists who seek a laff and can't claim to be using sexism "ironically," which can be either a technique or a dodge for editorial cartoonists, depending on their skill and intent.

Which is to say, it hasn't taken long for a valid concern to degenerate into partisan sniping in some hands. That's a commentary on what we've become. 

There have also been a couple of Neanderthals making jokes about sexual assault on turkeys. That's a commentary on what we've always been.

Here's my take: There will always be a rich vein of humor to be mined in relationships and courtship and the "battle of the sexes." 

But this is a good time for a lot of cartoonists to shut up and listen, because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

And, as always, the guys who most need to listen are the ones least likely to, and that's not "sexism" but simple insensitivity.

They assume that they're playing to a room full of other guys. 

They're the same ones who make jokes on the assumption that they're playing to a room full of other white folks, but they've at least learned that they'll get in trouble for that, if they haven't figured out why.

In the words of Christopher Titus:

If you're telling a joke and the group of people that you're telling that joke to are all the exact same color as you, you just let that joke fly, no matter what it is, right? But if one person in that group happens to be a photo-negative of the rest of you, you gotta run that joke through some filters, don't you?

Well, pal, you better learn to run your jokes through some gender-based filters, because I think the days of polite lady-like laughter have about come to a close.

Doesn't mean we'll never again be able to tell jokes about sex, and about each other, but it's time to recalibrate.

We're not changing the definition of humor, just the definition of "each other."

 

On a related topic

One of the more depressing, embarrassing things I've seen this week is international cartoons, like this one by Spanish cartoonist Pedripol, revealing that Black Friday is not just an American event.

I like his take on it, by the way. I just hate the fact that it's apparently spread around the globe, and, no, it's not just Spain. Black Friday is all over the place, like a social disease.

I could understand if we'd successfully exported shopping on Easter Monday or Boxing Day or something, but The Day after American Thanksgiving is not a likely demi-holiday anywhere but right here.

I suppose it's a testimony to the idea that the US is the only place where the middle-class are chained to their oars. Anywhere else, those who can afford the wretched excess of Black Friday can slip away from the workplace without getting written up.

It's always instructive to see what the rest of the world knows about us. They also know about the Kardashians.

It's like finding out there's a webcam in your bedroom ceiling.

Yeah, you wish that would reveal something to brag about.

 

On the other hand

As Americans, we only know about the Kardashians, which means we've missed the goings-on in Zimbabwe, which also contain greed and ambition, but are twice as sordid because they involve a whole nation, and a whole region, such that you don't have to be a nitwit to care about them: They really do matter.

Because we watch "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" rather than anything going on in any other country, we're not entitled to comment on "Keeping Up With The Mugabes," but it's a lively discussion in more well-informed places, particularly in Africa, which is not only regionally involved but which has one of the liveliest cartooning movements in the world.

Africartoons has presented a very mixed response, with Yalo's triumphalist cartoon being a large part of the immediate reaction: Mugabe is gone, his greedy wife's ambitions are thwarted and Zimbabwe rejoices.

But Gado notes that it's not like Bishop Tutu has taken over the government.

For all the huzzahs and celebrations, the new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is known as "the Crocodile" for a reason, and, if it's a good thing that the military restored the proper rule of accession, we ought not to forget that Mnangagwa was vice-president because he got along with Mugabe. Things may not change that much.

And, as Dr. Jack and Curtis note, any tears are simply, well, you know.

It's not like he didn't want the gig.

 

While Zapiro simply observes that Zimbabwe is right next door to South Africa, and when one of them sneezes, the other is apt to catch cold.

One facet of all this that we shouldn't overlook is that the US -- for all its fascination with Black Friday shopping sprees and the lives of the Kardashians -- can no longer look down on other countries as banana republics in the hands of ridiculous, egocentric, tin-pot dictators.

Our own official reality show is the rival of any nation anywhere in the world and we haven't half the excuses.

 

In fact, while "Is it a triumph to be rid of Mugabe if the result is Mnangagwa?" may not be a question we're talking about, it's not all that far off from a question Tom Toles addressed last October, when the concept of "President Trump" was still theoretical.

And the thing is, even if we suddenly discovered that Pence had been taking kickbacks as governor, I don't know where you'd find a Jerry Ford to slip into that chair in his place.

That's a commentary on what we've become.

 

It's a small world after all

 

Fun with Frailty

Between mandatory holiday gags and editorial cartoonists either pointing out that Charles Manson was a bad person or reprising opinions on sexual assault, there's not a lot of freshness on the comics sites this morning.

However, this Real Life Adventures stands out because, while it references shopping, it's not specific to the flood of Black Friday cartoons, and I can relate to it any day of the year.

If there's any justice in this world, the guy is gonna walk.

But let's be compassionate, in honor of the season.

Imagine if, rather than getting stuck behind this person one day at the checkstand, you were, rather, locked together in holy matrimony, or, worse, the child of this person, such that you'd never ever be able to get away.

Bearing in mind that people like this are like that all the time, not just when they shop.

Don't get me wrong: I laughed. 

But I have a friend who is obsessive-compulsive and, while she'd never get in the express lane with one item over the limit, it does dominate her life.

She gets treated for it and you can call her on it and she doesn't get offended. She wants to know when she's stepping over the line and she'd laugh at this gag.

Anyway, I wouldn't want to be in line behind her at a checkstand, but my point is about annoying behavior in general, because people don't set out to be unpopular or unreasonable, and a person who infuriates you is only a passing cloud in your world, but a constant presence in their own.

As part of my Stoicism, I try to see the world through other people's eyes, and that is not based on Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus but on the words of Kid Shelleen.

Granted, my compassionate attitude doesn't often kick in until well after I've considered spontaneous homicide. I'm working on it.

 

I could almost have run that Real Life Adventure as a Juxtaposition with today's Pardon My Planet, because, as the folksy saying goes, "Every pot has its lid," and it's hard to be so dysfunctional that there isn't someone somewhere whose own frailties and failings cause them to want a person like you.

Another bit of common wisdom is not to buy a puppy unless you can see the parents, but that's not always possible either with puppies or with prospective spouses, and it's a lot easier to spot the flaws in a dog anyway.

Your intended's parents are not likely to crap on the floor or try to bite you upon first meeting, though they may whine or bark.

In this cartoon, the joke is that nobody would ever be this out-front about her sense of self-worth and what she feels she deserves.

She'll pass on the guy she can trust because he's dull and so, as she says, she's just not that into him. Instead she'll find a sense of adventure and romance in a guy she can't trust and who therefore keeps her perpetually on edge.

This attitude, I hasten to point out, is not a trait exclusive to either sex.

In fact, I just finished re-reading Turgenev's "Home of the Gentry" or "Nest of Gentlefolk," -- the title depending on the translation -- and had forgotten how incredibly sad it is, given that the lead character is a fellow who, in the first flower of youth, marries an exciting, vivacious, totally unfaithful woman, and only years later meets someone far more appropriate and appealing, at a time in history when divorce was not an option.

The moral of which, I suppose, is contained in yet another bit of imperishable folk wisdom:

"Marry in haste, repent at leisure."

 

Juxtaposition of the Day:

(Daddy's Home)

(Non Sequitur)

As we explore frailties, this Juxtaposition forms a double-barreled tribute to Attention Deficit Disability.

I remain unsure of my feelings about growing up in an era before ADD was recognized, when kids like me were simply spoiled, disorganized and not living up to our potential, even though I got to see a son go through the same thing. We were both well out of school before getting diagnosed.

Certainly, life is easier when you're not being punished and screamed at for who you are, but, then again, where I've landed is the end product of that struggle.

I'm pretty sure my life would have been much less interesting and exciting without all the sturm und drang, and, to quote myself as a commenter did recently, "If you like where you're at, you ought not to despise the road that brought you there." 

I didn't do my homework until, as young Elliott says, I was "totally freaked out," but at that point, the hyperfocus that often accompanies ADD would kick in and I could burn through a term paper, including the research, in 12 hours and get at least a B. 

(Alas, it only worked for major projects. Daily homework didn't freak me out and thus rarely happened.)

As an adult, I was a good reporter because the combination of being able to -- hell, being compelled to -- think of a dozen things at once and then bear down and produce quickly meant that, while my brain had to nag a little about the routine stuff, I kicked right into action over the fast-breaking stories.

I could figure out who to call and what to ask, hammer out a piece and still be home in time to make dinner.

A lot of news reporters are ADD, while writers whose brains function normally have to work for magazines or write books, poor sods.

Meanwhile, Sonny Boy was a firefighter and did VBSS in the Gulf, and is now a trauma nurse. When all hell breaks loose, the world finally moves at his pace.

It would be a lovely world indeed if all disabilities could thus be turned into virtues.

Maybe we just need to look more closely, through their eyes.

 

'Til then, there's this:

Old Turkeys and Original Art

I had planned to do a look back to Thanksgiving 1967 today, a half century ago, but I would be remiss if I did not help publicize a fundraising effort by the National Cartoonists Society to raise money for hurricane victims, not only because it's a good cause but because it's an opportunity for my readers to score some original cartoon art.

It's an interesting collection of contemporary and vintage originals and you should go have a look. As a sample, here's today's Zits as it appeared in the paper (computer colorized) and the original B&W artwork that's up for bid.

There's a whole lot more to see there, and, as said, it's a good cause. We'll check in a few days from now and see how it's going.

But now, step into my time machine:

 

 And a pair of scene setters for political junkies:

Mauldin's national piece

And one from Dick Wallmeyer of the Independent Press-Telegram, Long Beach CA

Sgt Mike ran in Stars and Stripes for the GIs alongside him, but had some stateside clients

I've mentioned Berry's World a few times before, and newspapers got six cartoons a week but rarely used them all, since it generally ran on the editorial page. This one was set for Thanksgiving ...

... but a paper less willing to get into the political side chose to run this one on Turkey Day.

On the positive side, this is a joke. We wouldn't get to that point for several more years.

And speaking of setting the scene, here's what the geeks were asking for in 1967.

So how about some comic strips, eh?

(Tater Smiff makes his entrance -- almost!)

Now here's your moment of holiday zen ...

 

An Early Weekend, But With Homework

Mr Fitz signals the start of a four-day weekend for the majority of folks. 

Or five, if the day before a major holiday is a blow-off, and while some offices go into overdrive to make up for the short week, an awful lot are like schools, where you have to show up but you don't have to be productive.

I never minded if a teacher held a for-real class before a holiday. Once you were out of bed, dressed, on the bus and in the building, whatever else happened was immaterial.

And that hasn't changed.

Speaking of school, I recently posted an Existential Comics with the comment that sometimes the gags there are more accessible to philosophy majors than other readers.

Now there's a new one up, and, while I'm not sure where the concept of "Sherlock Hume" fits on the scale, it's so ridiculous on so many levels that I'm passing it along. Go read the rest.

I was not a philosophy major and I might have switched majors if I had been, and thus required to take Hume and Berkeley seriously.

We were very interested in the concept of being "naturally stoned," however, and their theories were things that, to come from other people, would have required psychedelics, but they were also things that, as the psychedelics began to wear off, remained valuable chiefly as a measure of how good the stuff had been.

Hume had scored some dynamite stuff.

 

Similarly, today's Rudy Park assures me that the whole superhero thing has morphed into something so inbred and complex that it's like coming home after class and finding out that everyone else dropped acid about an hour and a half ago.

You could try to join them, but you'd never catch up. Better maybe to just roll a joint and go get a pizza.

 

Jen Sorensen sparks a less hilarious, non-chemical memory of college, when this kettling theory was applied to a demonstration at the campus recruiting office in the '69-'70 academic year. 

The Dean of Students ordered it stopped and sent the head of security out to collect names, from which they made a list of people who were to be enjoined from gathering under the Dome.

However, as Jen points out, "everybody present" is not the same as "everybody demonstrating."

I had taken off by the time it got to that point, mostly from a conviction that the overwrought sound bites in the local news would do more to pump up yahoo loyalists than the whole speeches would do to convert anybody at the scene.

I'd said something to that effect to the vice-president of the student body, who encouraged me to get up and say so before I left, which I did, and so I found myself a few months later subpoenaed to testify on behalf of him, and on behalf of the overall principle Sorensen points out. 

It pretty much solidified the contention that not only was the SBVP there ex officio, but that he had encouraged opposition to violent demonstration, and there were several such witnesses for nearly everyone on the list, except one guy who had not only said, "Maybe we need to break some windows" but had said it in front of the news cameras.

Not that any windows were broken, anyway, mind you. But the result was that the university spent its money for an injunction that kept that one guy from gathering in the area. 

The difference between Jen's cartoon and my memory being that, back in 1970, we were still a nation of laws.

And that, while making David Hume a detective is funny, making Jeff Sessions Attorney General is not.

And Joel Pett's cartoon fits in with the not-so-brave new world in which being heard and being believed is not the same as having anyone give a damn about you.

The GOP's "if it proves true" thing does sound like a defense of "innocent until proven guilty" except that it isn't, nor is it applied to anyone who doesn't represent a vote in favor of screwing the peasants.

 

Nor, as Tom Toles points out, is it even being whispered in connection with the fellow who stands poised to sign that new peasant-screwing law.

Meanwhile, the rightwingers are accusing Democrats of hypocrisy because they didn't believe the accusations flying against Clinton 20 years ago.

And they have a point, but, then again, they were the ones crying "Wolf!" with the endless, nonsensical stories of Vince Foster's murder and the nefarious dealings of Whitewater, and who finally settled for a case based on the fact that, if you ask a married man if he's having an affair, he'll deny it, particularly if he can get away with interpreting "sex" and "intercourse" to mean the same thing.

That's not much of a point, and the case of Roy Moore and the case of Bill Clinton are different things in different times.

As Francis Wilkinson points out

 (W)atching devoted Democrats rationalize the past does put the sight of Alabama Republicans rationalizing the present in context. White Christians in Alabama are busy triangulating the basis of their vote for skeevy Roy Moore, just as last year they rationalized their support for skeevy Donald Trump. No doubt they would prefer an honest senator who didn't molest teenagers. But they're going to the culture war with the candidate they've got, not the candidate they wish they had.

Democrats in the 1990s did the same, albeit with a man, unlike Moore, who had intellectual and political gifts that paid dividends for the whole nation. 

 

Mike Lester notes the flood of news, with the implication that it's becoming normal.

A friend suggested that powerful men will be afraid to hire women, but I think if a few more "ladies' men" are put out to pasture, there may have to be holes punched in the glass ceiling simply to keep the seats around the table filled.

 

Here's what we knew in 1967

(Note to the Satire Impaired: Mr. Zappa is not expressing approval)

A Tale of Two Charlies

Here's a cheesy cartoon I did before I went through the lineup this morning, in anticipation of the flood of cheesy Charlie and the Devil cartoons I suspected would arise.

And, sure enough, there were some of those, though there were other commentaries on his death that didn't use the Hell's Gates cliche but which still touched on two aspects that bother me.

The main one is that declaring Charles Manson a bad person is not exactly going out on a limb. There might be a few people who think he was some kind of anti-hero, but that leads to Issue #2, which is ...

Whether Charlie is dead or alive is immaterial. He was locked up for about half a century and, while it might serve some interest to occasionally remember him -- mostly when one of his family members came up for parole, or when he did -- there was never any real reason to go back and interview him or do much more than say "Manson is still in the joint."

If he'd gotten paroled, that would have been pretty interesting, yes, but it sure wasn't in the cards.

There were a lot of sketchy people hanging around in the Sixties, because the ethos of acceptance drew them in, and I'm grateful, because, as a future journalist, I got to know a lot of people I would never have met in a less open-handed era.

But even in those nonjudgmental days, there were limits.

Tom Wolfe may wax rhapsodic over the Hell's Angels in "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test," but Wolfe was a tourist.

Contrast that with how Peter Coyote, who ran with the Angels, describes them in "Sleeping Where I Fall," his insider memoir of the era: They were his friends, but only to the degree someone like that is anybody's friend, and he had his head on a swivel the whole time, knowing that these were dangerous people.

What was interesting about Charlie was not that he existed, but that there were people so damaged and sad and vulnerable that they weren't frightened and repelled by him.

And it would be nice and neat and simple to explain, if they were all Squeaky Fromme and nearly as nuts as he was.

But if you look beyond, and consider some of his other followers, it stops being so easy to make judgments, because they could have been your friends or your kids.

They were bright, reasonably normal-seeming people who somehow got drawn into his scene.

How? 

My take on it all is this: If a bunch of unprepared hikers went up Mt. Washington in February and were found frozen, we might ponder at length why they didn't take the right equipment or what impelled them to try such a hare-brained adventure in the first place.

But I don't think we'd spend a lot of time debating whether minus-40 Fahrenheit qualifies as "cold."

Yeah, Charles Manson was a bad guy. You don't win anything for pointing that out.

In fact, dismissing Manson as evil is missing his significance entirely.

 

The revelations about Charlie Rose are far more interesting and, unlike the cartoonists who simply pour out hostility and scorn on Manson, Steve Breen asks the right question about Rose.

Though I'd switch it around: "How do so many men who behave like pigs amass such power?"

Obviously, Rose didn't order anyone to commit murder and, while lives were disrupted and soured by his behavior, it seems everyone pretty much survived, albeit with some significant scars.

But Charlie Manson couldn't function in society and guys like Charlie Rose flourish in it, and it's not just because one guy orders murders and the other guy simply walks around naked in front of the young women who work for him.

Well, they probably both walked around naked in front of the young women in their circle, but maybe that's part of my point: The pair of them would make one helluvan interesting Venn diagram.

I addressed, at least in part, one aspect of this a few days ago: There are guys who devote too much time to amassing credentials and not enough time learning how to relate to other people.

But that's superficial and silly.

Behind it, however, are all the reasons some people need power and some people don't, and there's one helluvan interesting Venn diagram in that, as well.

My freshman year roomie was the only child of blue-collar immigrants who focused on getting him through private school and into a prestigious university and he didn't let them down: He got good grades and became a renowned surgeon, and, while I still chuckle over how clumsy he was with women, he was a good guy.

But there are far less healthy ways to be motivated towards achievement, and the pressures and misadventures that drive one person to the top of the hill may drive another into the penitentiary. (And, yes, sometimes both.)

Reading about Charlie Rose made me wonder about the young women who didn't just GTFO when he started in on his creepy routine.

One of them, however, explained it rather well. She didn't just want the job, but desperately needed it.

And his trick of trapping them at his remote house overnight with no way home is scary enough that I'll cut them all some slack.

Not sure how much slack I'd cut his assistant, though. She apparently was in charge of deflecting and covering up. Charlie has a lot to answer for, but so does she.

Bottom Line: For all their differences, with either Charlie, we miss the point entirely if we put too much energy into building hate against them rather than asking the question Breen asked, perhaps turned as I suggested.

And while I realize this is a far more acceptable question in the former case than the latter, the truly interesting issue is why do guys like this have any followers at all?

How do we fail our own children, that they could be vulnerable to either Charlie?