Truth, mathematical and metaphorical

Let's ease into the day with a Nick Anderson cartoon pointing out something we all knew: The man is a pathological liar.

Permit me to elaborate:

There are people like OJ Simpson or Jeff MacDonald who, under the severe stress of horror, respond by creating an alternative reality. That's lying in the sense of telling a story that is counter to the facts, but it's involuntary and perhaps understandable.

It shouldn't get them off, but they can be pitied.

However, pathological liars don't have trauma to explain things, nor are their lies confined to a single event or topic. It's pure compulsive madness.

I once worked with a woman whose tall tales were the wonder of the rest of the staff, until one day I was talking about the concentrator at the mines in my old hometown, a speck on the map 2,000 miles from where we were standing. I said it was very tall, at which she piped up and volunteered a specific height for the thing, not even rounded to 10 feet.

Which was a stunning example of a senseless, groundless, compulsive lie, but, then, she didn't have access to the nuclear codes.

Or an army of devoted followers.

 

Or, as Darrin Bell suggests, an entire structure -- and even a second one -- to back up a bizarro version of reality.

I wasn't about to call home for verification of the concentrator's actual height, but Trump's brazen boast about his legislative record is an example of a lie much easier to track down and disprove.

Here's its latest iteration:

We got a lot of legislation passed… I believe—and you would have to ask those folks who will know the real answer—we have more legislation passed, including the record… was Harry Truman, a long time ago. And we broke that record, so we got a lot done.

Here's the count, from some people who know the real answer, of comparable legislation signed by every president in the past 65 years, except for Ford and Johnson because of the circumstances of their initial elevation.

That link is worth following, because they go over the topic in depth, discussing, for instance, numbers of significant bills as opposed to post office namings and so forth.

I don't suppose it matters if he is deliberately lying or simply pathological. It still leads back to the above video, and Bell's cartoon.

God help us all.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Betty)

 

(Non Sequitur)

I'd have laughed at both of these, but I'm not sure I'd have passed them on a month ago.

Millennial bashing is as uncool as as the bashing millennials do to others, while, as noted recently and not recently, I don't believe in these media constructions of Millennials and Baby Boomers.

But I recently had an epiphany that explains why so many of the graphic novels and graphic memoirs that I see on-line provoke little more than a shrug, and ditto with cartoons that expose societal shortcomings and political outrages.

Not "bashing."

Just sayin'

I'm glad there was no Internet when I was in my 20s, because I labored for more years than I like to confess over a pair of novels that, had it been possible, I would no doubt have posted for all to see.

Instead, they are in a box under my bed for my grandchildren to read, not as great literature, or even good literature, but simply for some sort of ancestral insight.

They don't suck. What feedback I got from publishers and professional authors was that it was clear I had talent and wrote well, but my novels just weren't compelling. They weren't about anything unusual or enlightening or interesting.

As one critique put it, "We all went to college."

Which, strictly speaking, isn't true: A lot of my high school friends never went to college.

But they don't give a rat's ass about what happens in college, and everyone else already knows what happens in college.

So you'd better come up with some majestic freakin' insights, and nobody ever does.

Until considerably later.

This isn't "college" but it's close enough and it makes the point: By the time JD Salinger wrote "Catcher in the Rye," he was 32 years old and a combat veteran who had had several successful and unsuccessful writing ventures and 16 years to process what being 16 was like and what it meant and how to comment on it insightfully.

There is a thing in astrology called the Saturn Return, and, while I don't believe planetary position can be causal, I do think that turning roughly 29 is a significant time of life.

It's roughly the time when JD Salinger's novel made him a major author, and roughly the time at which I shoved my novel manuscripts under the bed and turned my attention to types of writing for which I was more suited.

I'm not ashamed of anything I wrote as a young man, but I'm not eager to share it with the world because, as the critics said, it was well-written but not compelling.

So here's my point:

In these days of easy on-line self-publishing, there are a lot of very competent cartoons out there that I don't find compelling.

Look, we all went to college.

And those of us who aspired to the arts all got out of college and struggled to find jobs.

And we all looked around and discovered corruption and hypocrisy.

The economy is worse today, but nobody's being compelled to go die in a rice paddy. We all face challenges.

And I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't put them up there and see if they take off.

I'm just saying this:

Bourbon will get you high if you drink it straight out of the still.

But it loses no potency, and tastes a whole lot better, if you let it sit in a barrel for a few years.

Especially if that barrel has been a bit charred.

 

Moment of Zen (while waiting for Saturn to return)

Moment of Zen (after it's been and gone)

Comments

[Paul Berge]

But I was so much wiser then I'm wiser then than now.

[Brian Fies]

I am with you 100% on that sort of graphic novel, which is often all the rage with a certain set but rarely right for me. Sometimes people ask me for advice, and depending on the circumstances one of my standards lines is: Most creative people hit an age where they realize the universe is cold and indifferent, and has no particular interest in nurturing their special insights and talent. I'm not interested in what you have to say about that. I may be very interested in what you say AFTER that--what purpose do you give your purposeless life? That's where I find individuality, choices and quirks that are worth paying attention to. Some graphic novelists travel the world fighting injustice; others catalog the toads they find in their backyards. Depending on their skill, I can find both worthwhile.

As I age into the profession, I've noticed something else. Cartoonists who did quite well telling stories about wandering lost through life in their early twenties begin to look sad when they're still doing the same in their late thirties. A 25-year-old can wear shiftless ennui like a comfy overcoat, but a 35-year-old really should have figured a few things out.