Comic Strip of the Day.com

Juxtaposition of Perception

 

Last weekend, I wrote about satire and how nobody really wanted to defend Hustler Magazine but they recognized the need to defend the First Amendment.

This weekend, we have a more complex issue at hand, as exemplified here by the contrasting responses of Ann Telnaes and Steve Kelley to Michelle Wolf's monologue at the WCHA dinner.

And if you wonder how a professional journalism organization could blunder into such a predictably ghastly mess year after year, perhaps this message from the president of the White House Correspondents Association to its membership will demonstrate the problem:

 I also have heard from members expressing dismay with the entertainer’s monologue and concerns about how it reflects on our mission. Olivier Knox, who will take over this summer as our president, and I, recognize these concerns and are committed to hearing from members on your views on the format of the dinner going forward. Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.

This pretty much sums up the WHCA's combination of self-importance and irresponsibility.

Maybe something went wrong, maybe nothing went wrong, but the idea that a group which is accustomed to editorial oversight would simply hire and turn loose a comedian without any vetting is mindboggling.

I'm not suggesting anyone should have gone over her actual script, but some conversation about overall tone might have been appropriate.

If nothing else, I think there are rules about working blue, starting with the difference between a business banquet and a nightclub.

When people kinda hafta show up, you kinda hafta stay within certain boundaries.

The other issue in working blue is that you can't make a lame joke hilarious by adding f-bombs, genitalia and graphic references to sexual intercourse.

And a joke should make sense: I suppose some women may stash coins in their vaginas -- though I've never seen anyone reach under her skirt to make exact change -- but I'm quite certain you can't circumsize someone's neck.

It's not the vulgarity so much as the lack of meaning. I also found this G-rated joke to be a head-scratcher:

You guys gotta stop putting Kellyanne on your shows. All she does is lie. If you don't give her a platform, she has nowhere to lie. It's like that old saying: If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree? I'm not suggesting she gets hurt; just stuck. Stuck under a tree.

She had a good point about Conway being a useless, dishonest guest. But then she wandered off into an unintelligible morass, because it's only vaguely like that old saying and she didn't actually have a joke about that old saying.

Wolf did that constantly: She'd start down a potentially interesting alley and then lose focus, veer off and make no point beyond the introductory gag.

The occasion demanded more.

It may be unfair to compare every WCHA speaker to Colbert's landmark 2006 appearance, but he didn't just toss insults. He plunged the knife all the way in, with critical analysis of his targets. Colbert invented "truthiness" well before anyone started bleating about "fake news."

The piggies squealed then, too, but it was easy to defend his piece, in part because it was brilliant and insightful, and in part because, a dozen years ago, the piggies didn't invent things about which to be offended.

If you haven't been following this trend, defending Sarah Huckabee Sanders against insults about her appearance is something of a cottage industry for the rightwing troll factory, and they've gone viral on some pretty innocent observations, including one in which the writer simply pointed out that, unlike most of the supermodels Trump surrounds himself with, Sanders looks like somebody's mom.

And, though you'd never know it from the squealing of the wounded piggies, Wolf's targets included not just Trump and his crew but the Democrats, Rachel Maddow, print journalism, MSNBC and the media in general. 

The closest thing to an insult about Sarah Huckabee Sanders' appearance was this bewildering gag:

Every time Sarah steps up to the podium, I get excited because I'm not really sure what we're going to get: you know, a press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. “It's shirts and skins, and this time, don't be such a little bitch, Jim Acosta.” 

Maybe that means she looks like a gym teacher. Or a lesbian.

Or that she should get stuck. Stuck under a tree.

Anyway, the Washington Post helpfully compiled an annotated text of the monologue in which they explain the gags, using dashes to avoid the naughty words.

And nothing makes a joke funnier than an explanation.

 

Mike Norton predicts that things will get back to normal, after poor Sarah takes a personal day to get over the trauma of having been called a liar with beautiful eye makeup.

My takeaway is that I agree with Telnaes that the damage done to our country by the blatant, repeated dishonesty emanating from the White House Press Room far outweighs any perceived insults in Wolf's monologue.

I've certainly heard White House flaks mouth the company line over the past half century or so, but I've never seen the sneers she adds, and I think that, most times, when a bare-faced lie is challenged, the response has been "I'll get back to you" and not a flagrant doubling-down.

Sanders reminds me of the classroom prig who not only reminds the teacher to collect the homework but volunteers the information on who had a cigarette behind the bus garage. And I'll bet she was.

Which has nothing to do with her looks.

But the fact is, feeding the conservatives' irrational, selective view of news coverage -- as exemplified in Kelley's cartoon -- is, in my mind, a bad idea.  

So what is the mission of the WCHA? To defend journalism, or to be celebrities?

Look, the piggies are going to squeal regardless of what you say or do, and so, if the WCHA feels the need to apologize for Saturday night, it's less about Michelle Wolf than it is about them.

Time for the White House Concubines Award dinner to come to a halt, or go private.

Step off the red carpet and adopt the ethics of real journalists.

Meanwhile, I'm starting a GoFundMe to buy Sarah a supply of Pantene.

 

Sunday Short Takes

I find most generational/technical-gap gags pretty lame, but I really like today's Zits, and would be curious to know how postcard sales have been impacted, first by digital cameras and second by the Internet.

According to Wikipedia, there was a craze for postcards touched off by the Columbian Exhibition, which opened 125 years ago this coming Tuesday and touched off all sorts of things.

Obviously the immediate impetus for postcards was the ability to send photographs in an age before Kodak put photography in the hands of the people.

Even later, when we all carried film cameras, the advantages of a postcard were, first of all, that the pictures were taken on days when the weather and lighting were perfect, and, second, you could see the quality of the photo right there at the moment instead of a week after you got home and turned in your film.

It's a little more subjective to suggest that another advantage was that the people making postcards understood that the goal was to show the great place where you had been and not what your big fat face looked like blocking out the great place where you had been.

Unless you are Brian Fies, in which case it's intentionally funny.

This is one time when I'm going to go with Jeremy: I think the postcard has largely served its purpose, which is kind of too bad, but then so has the phone book and I'm not gonna get too sentimental over either of them.

 

Plus, I can balance it by going with the old folks in today's Arlo and Janis, because the couch on the front lawn brings back some wonderful memories of youth, but, then again, I'm not sure how the neighbors survived having us around.

I'm also not sure how the couch made it even through the summer, much less the months it was out there before, though Boulder is a semidesert climate and it was somewhat tucked under the eaves. 

As for the difference between Arlo and Janis, I remember sitting out on the couch Sunday mornings with a cup of coffee, watching Mom and Dad and Bud and Sis cruise by in the station wagon, and it was Dad, not Mom, who would be looking out the window with a wistful sense of longing.

The poor ol' sod.

 

Now on to more weighty matters

David Fitzsimmons explores the deplorables who cannot be converted into facing reality.

One thing that occurs to me is that, when the nation was first set up, the founders not only expected voting to be limited to people with some grounding in how things work, but backstopped the predictable foolishness of the masses by having a Senate that would, like the House of Lords, act as a restraint on temporary folly and unexamined concepts.

The Senate's own website has an interesting if perhaps self-interested analysis of why we went from having state legislatures appoint Senators to voting directly on them. I'm certainly willing to concede that there were problems and shortcomings in the original system, but I kind of wonder, had we reformed it instead of overturning it, if the Senate today might be a more effective body.

New Hampshire only has two congressional districts, so the difference between our two Reps and our two Senators is a little less that it might be elsewhere, but I think that, in most states, you know your Representative better than you know either of your Senators. That was certainly true in Northern New York, where I'm not really sure our Senators knew anybody even lived north of Kingston, never mind north of Albany.

Though I must admit that, while both Bobby Kennedy and Hillary Clinton used the Empire State as a carpetbagger's launching pad, Hillary did wander off into the countryside and have a look around, which set her apart from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom I admired for many reasons but who was, in effect, a national Senator and didn't do jack for most of New York State.

I think our state legislature might have done better than the people ever did in selecting Senators who would represent our interests.

The other thing about Fitz's cartoon is that it brings to mind the fact that only half of Trump's basket was deplorables and the other half could presumably be reached, and I suspect many of them have been.

I keep seeing articles about what percentage of Republicans believe this or that, and it seems to be presented as if half our nation were Republican and half Democrat. We're a two-party system, yes, but only about a quarter of voters identify with either party, which means that, if 60% of Republicans or Democrats believe something, it filters down to just over half of a quarter.

Not insignificant, but, then again, no landslide.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Kevin Siers)

(Tom Toles)

I'm not sure how shocked or surprised we should be that Paul Ryan fired the House of Representative's Chaplain for preaching the word of Jesus in a place where Jesus would have been kicking over the tables and beating people with a rope end.

But I do kind of suspect that, had he gotten up there and offered a prayer that rejected birth control or abortion, there would have been a lineup of legislators prepared to go to the mattresses to preserve his Freedom of Religion.

I'm not sure why we even have chaplains wandering around the halls of Congress, where they'd probably be a violation of the First Amendment's ban on established religions if they weren't pretty much content to be fishes' tits.

Though maybe if they weren't willing to act as tits on a fish, we'd have fewer elected legislators boastfully claiming to worship the fellow the chaplain would stand up and quote accurately every morning.

Well, perhaps better to back off and let the professionals continue to exchange the full bottle for the empty bottle until the Man in White stops needing either.

 

No excuses

I held back a few days on the Bill Cosby conviction because I wanted to see the cartoons that would emerge. Steve Breen has, I think, the best take.

Attempts to be humorous -- to cite Jell-O pudding pops or contrast his flamboyant sweaters with prison garb -- seem to fall flat. Had he been convicted of tax fraud or something similar, there could be room for jokes, but I don't think a light touch plays well, given the appalling nature of his offenses.

I also passed by the #MeToo cartoons because this wasn't a #MeToo phenomenon.

Women -- many too many -- have been accusing Cosby of sexual assault for at least 15 years and while it's possible, even likely, that the awareness raised by the #MeToo movement helped sway the jury away from forgiving him, it's almost coincidental.

#MeToo is far more nuanced and varied, and we are all being educated through it.

The accusations within the movement have included everything from forcible penetration to clumsy passes to bad dates, and I think women and men are using it as a needed opportunity to talk about consent issues, about workplace and power matters and even about simple etiquette.

There is no nuance in what Cosby was convicted of, nor in the similar pattern of the other assaults of which he has been accused.  They don't even have the fig leaf of "we were both drunk."

It was purposeful, deliberate, pre-planned rape, using drugs instead of ropes. You can't sugar-coat it or offer explanations or mitigation.

I would suggest that it is so clearly an issue of forcible rape that it's not a particularly good example of all but a few cases within the #MeToo fold. Most of those cases, even some of appallingly creepy behavior, have some element of not understanding the rules. 

The rules against drugging and raping women are impossible to misunderstand.

But what has emerged in the days since the verdict have been some attempts at mitigation, some discussion of separating his private life from his body of work. 

Well, Jerry Sandusky was a terrific football coach, Jesse James loved his mother and Hitler was an affectionate dog owner. I'm not denying it, but I'm not buying it as something that excuses appalling, criminal behavior.

It's not unusual for artists -- in fact, for powerful people in any endeavor -- to be deeply flawed, and it's possible to argue that their drive for the top may be a subconscious attempt to compensate for their shortcomings.

You have to choose. Byron is something of a poster child for perverted artistry, and Lady Caroline Lamb was not joking when she described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know." 

But she went ahead and had an affair with him, and his poetry seems, for the most part, to stand apart from his horrific personality

Response to Woody Allen is more tangled. I still consider "Annie Hall" a masterpiece, but I can't watch "Manhattan" for the obvious signalling it contains, while a friend who is a survivor of child sexual abuse cannot watch anything with his name attached.

Understood.

How people respond to Cosby's work will be similarly divided, I suppose, but I was a fervent fan beginning with his debut album in 1963, which I memorized, and "I Spy" was appointment television. I even saw him in concert in '68.

But gradually a certain hostility in his humor began to put me off, beginning when he added a tagline supposedly addressed to his kids: "I brought you into this world and I can take you out."

I saw it, too, in loveable ol' Cliff Huxtable's sarcasm with his kids and his wife and in his inability to ever be wrong.

I stopped liking him before there was any reason to hate him. That's probably just me.

Anyway, I'm with John Deering: Justice can take a break with a pair of welcome victories under her belt.

Though she shouldn't snooze too long.

 

Juxtaposition of the Favorite Prop

(Ann Telnaes)

(Steve Sack)

(RJ Matson)

Jack Ohman)

Ann Telnaes wins the "Best Use of the Red Tie" again. She has used Trump's too-long tie as a specific prop several times, but other cartoonists use it as a signifier and it makes you wonder.

Of course, I quoted Telnaes the other day as saying editorial cartoons don't bother Trump because he doesn't read and so never sees them, so that's part of it, though he did see the Vanity Fair profile years ago in which his hands were described as small, and he reacted to it violently enough to make it part of how he is depicted.

I don't know that his hands are actually any smaller than anyone else's, but that kite tail around his neck is definitely his own fault.

Started right out on the first day in office.

 

And it is quite a contrast with a pair of considerably more natty heads of state.

A couple of observations: First is that, however many of these things he owns, they look garish and cheap. They may be pure silk and hand-loomed, but they look like they came off the rack at K-Mart, which is part of his appeal to the Common Man. 

Second is that they didn't come off the rack because -- and I say this as a robust fellow myself -- for someone with his gut, an off-the-rack tie would end about mid-chest.

It's a fat-guy tie, and he could afford one the right size but this appears a little longer than necessary. Or he doesn't know how to tie it, which is certainly possible. A Windsor knot would help cinch it up.

But here's the critical factor: It's not that much longer. It's the garishness and the fact that he never buttons his jacket.

Perhaps vanity keeps him from ordering jackets that fit.

But it's sad that there is no fashion-conscious woman in his life who cares about him enough to lean over and say, "Button up, honey. Cameras."

 

Friday Funnies

Okay, now I'm completely confused. Just as Judge Parker was getting somewhere in the business of tying up any loose ends it couldn't simply eliminate, semi-celebrity Godiva Danube has reappeared, Neddy is freaking out over being seen waiting tables and her fellow-waitron suddenly drops a wall-shattering piece of patented Marciuliano dialogue on us.

Careful, fellas. It is indeed possibly she just said it because she's creative and feels Neddy is leaning too hard on her, but let's leave the bizarre self-awareness to Ted and Sally Forth.

And Nancy. Still waiting for "Olivia Jaimes" to find her legs with the strip -- always a process, nothing personal -- but in the meantime, the unaccustomed weirdness is almost as much fun in itself as watching the audience freak out over it.

As noted here before, I find that a little dada goes a long way, but Zippy is popular, so maybe it's just me.

She's on my daily feed for now, anyway.

 

Speaking of self-consciously weird, Deflocked is in a good story arc, and I say "good" because it both freshens a frequent storyline of Mamet and cookie-selling Girl Scouts and offers an unusual bitcoin gag.

There are a lot of bitcoin gags going around lately and it's hard to break out of the pack, but this'll do. And this particular punchline cracked me up because I did have a publisher who, bless her heart, put a strict limit on parental peddlers in the workplace: An order sheet in the break room and that was it.

I was exempt for a few years anyway. When some kid came to the door or a parent approached me at work, I just said, "My son plays hockey," and they'd back off, knowing they were outgunned.

 

This Baby Blues hit me harder than usual because it came up earlier this week just as I was back in town, having spent a day and a half with my son and his family after the Satire Symposium wrapped up.

His house didn't have much to say, but his Alexa piped up unbidden two or three times while I was there and I remarked that, if she says anything on her own at my place, it's not more often than maybe every couple of weeks.

He pointed out that, since I live alone, there's probably a lot less talk for her to mistakenly respond to, which explanation I accepted until my ex remarked, in a totally unrelated conversation, that her Alexa keeps speaking at random intervals, and she is, like me, down to herself and a dog.

Only thing I can figure out is that I was an early adapter. Maybe the first generation of Alexas were less blabby.

By the way, I tried an experiment where I purposely mentioned corn starch several times aloud over the course of a week, to see if I'd start getting Amazon prompts to purchase it from them. I didn't.

I wasn't paranoid about it in the first place, but I'm less so now.

 

Today's Arctic Circle got a good laugh. I wonder if we could devise some way to cycle all the plastic up there to form an anthropocenic polar cap? The polar bears could just walk across the laundry bottles.

I'd be satisfied, by the way, if we could all agree on whether the plastics problem is actually a large mass of bottles and Big Wheels or a widespread soup of microbeads. I've heard both and, when I say "both" I mean I've heard the problem is one, and I've heard the problem is the other, and, if we're going to quarrel over that, I doubt we'll solve either.

I do know that microbeads go through the filters in our water systems and shampoo bottles don't. After that, it all starts to get a little less clear.

 

And while Alex Hallatt's gags at Arctic Circle are aimed at environmental awareness, I'm taking this evolution gag in Free Range as one that is intentionally silly but perhaps more thought-provoking than intended.

The assumption that we're the end product of evolution is a strange mix of religion and science: God works slowly through natural processes in order to create his masterpiece.

Which then leads to "Manifest Destiny" and the idea that the more technologically advanced forms of humankind are what God actually had in mind, which is today called "white privilege" but has long been a root cause of imperialism, colonialism and cultural hegemony: The assumption that less technologically advanced cultures are less worthy and that it is "our" (using the word advisedly) mission on Earth to help them become more perfect, which is to say, more like "us."

I did a project on the early history of New York State, which is necessarily deeply involved with the Iroquois, whose metaphorical Longhouse dominated the map. Their interactions with other Indian nations aside, the way the Big Three European nations approached them was fascinating.

The Dutch accepted them as a nation, if not precisely at parity, at least on the level of "you have furs that we want and we have metal tools and other things that you want." Their trade meetings were conducted very much along Iroquois cultural lines, which is to say that getting together involved long speeches, some gifts, several dinners and perhaps a week, not counting travel time.

The English had no such patience: Here are some knives and kettles and guns. Give us some furs. Now. We're busy people!

And the French wanted them to convert to Catholicism, move to suburban Montreal and make themselves useful. Or else.

Sadly, you don't have to know a lot of history to recognize which of those three European empires faded first.

 

And speaking of how we treat each other on all sorts of levels, this Dog Eat Doug is a lovely illustration of one of my favorite columns, which I've probably served up before but which I'm serving up again:

 

 

(My dad, his dog, that fence)

Thursday Short-Takes

We'll warm up with this bit of gallows humor from On the Fastrack, which happens to coincide with a spate of layoffs from McClatchy papers in the West, primarily at the Sacramento Bee, where 15 newsroom employees and 8 production types are being cut.

But, of course, it could have run any time and coincided with layoffs somewhere in an industry that has been taken over by stock swappers to the point where it seems nobody in charge has ever actually gotten printers' ink on their hands, including, I suspect, from actually reading a newspaper.

The nice thing about being an incompetent executive at a newspaper company is that you can blame the Internet for your failures. It's like living next to a busy highway, but not fencing your yard or keeping your dog on a leash and then blaming the highway when he gets run over.

It's true, but only to the extent that you let it happen.

Here's a story about going-away cake: At one place, they wanted to replace me with a part-timer, so they loaded me with irrelevant work and took away most of the fun stuff I did and basically ground me down until I quit so they didn't have to fire me and pay unemployment.

I told my fellow workers I didn't want any last-day celebration, but they got a cake anyway. I told them to go enjoy it but that I wasn't coming, until the editor assured me that the publisher was out of town and wouldn't stand there thanking me out of the smiley side of his face for my years of service.

It was pretty good cake.

And here's another: A school I worked with had a teacher retiring and the staff and faculty threw her a big last-day party, not to honor her years of service but because she was a foot-dragging burned-out crabpatch and they couldn't wait to get her out of the place. So they had a big cake and some punch and she packed her stuff into the car and drove home.

Where she found a message on her answering machine from the district business office, informing her that someone had miscounted and she had to teach one more year.

 

Not Funny Newspaper Story

In my recent coverage of the Satire Symposium, I reported that the cartoonists were particularly pleased that Hustler v Falwell had confirmed their First Amendment protection in light of what their fellow cartoonists face in other countries.

Yesterday, a Turkish Court completed a show trial of staff members from Cumhuriyet, a newspaper charged with complicity in the 2016 (alleged) coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

The 14 staffers got an average sentence of six years, with cartoonist Musa Kart receiving three years and nine months. An attorney for the defendants pointed out that the actual coup participants had received lighter sentences than the journalists.

Musa Kart accepted the inevitable, but told the court sentencing him,

I’ve been drawing cartoons for over 40 years. I have witnessed different political eras and leaders in these years. In terms of law and justice this is the worst period of all. Since my release I have talked to many people, not one described this as a non-political trial. During this trial these rooms have witnessed the dignity of honourable and honest people. Those who tried to victimize us in a smear campaign did not know that our fabric does not stain. I have no further demand for myself here in this final hearing. I have to say again, the picture that shows opposition journalists, politicians, academics, and students in prison does not suit my beautiful country.

 

Juxtaposition du jour

(Dave Brown)

(Christian Adams)

An interesting pair of commentaries on the Macron/Trump meeting, which came out after the "breauxmance" began but before Macron spoke his mind before Congress, though I'm not sure that speech would change either piece very much, my interest being more in the differing targets of their hostility.

Not that the meeting got any less critical treatment over here.

 

And then there's this

Walt Handelsman offers a view of the DNC's lawsuit that surprised me, though I certainly don't disagree with him.

I like the idea of the lawsuit primarily because it will force some discovery that, while Mueller is likely turning over the same rocks, may well become more public. I think the lawsuit is credible if not winnable, and I also think there is plenty that the Democrats should be careful of rehashing.

I was frustrated by the freeze-out, not just of my man Sanders but of an entire field of candidates you might have expected to vie for the nomination. It was clear that the Establishment had chosen their candidate and, if a few people like Martin O'Malley didn't pick up on the word, most Democrats got the message and backed off.

But I was less dismayed by the fix than by the aftermath. The boil over on social media was distressing, and, in any other election, Sanders' clear call for his followers to support Hillary Clinton would have been trumpeted rather than ignored and often denied.

I'm convinced that the "Bernie Bros" were Russian trolls and would like to know how many of the screams of misogyny that followed any criticism of Clinton were also issuing from Petrograd.

If digging into the record can shine a little light on the mess, I'm all for it.

But ain't nobody gonna come out looking good.

 

And then this

If Trump furnishes cartoonists with more material than they can use, he's not the only nitwit in the country, and Keith Knight picked up on this ludicrous incident. 

The good news was that the cops handled it sensibly, declaring it not their job and walking away.

The bad news is, this is just one more example of how things are. This one made the news, most of them don't.

 

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

 

 

The Critics Raved. (Not in the good way.)

I could start and end with this Tom Toles piece, which not only summarizes our incoherent, solipsistic foreign relations stance but also captures the same tendencies in Dear Leader.

It's no surprise that a man who lies incessantly about things a third-grader could prove were false -- like claiming not to have spent the night in Moscow when records prove he did -- would simply trim his sails to whatever wind blows at the moment.

We want a deal with North Korea? Any concession becomes a major victory, even if it's only a lukewarm pledge to quit testing.

We want to spark a war with Iran? Any treaty, no matter how comprehensive, no matter how well-crafted, no matter how many allies have signed on, is a horrible failure.

I've said before that, if Trump tells you it's raining, you should look out the window. But it really is a mystery how even his most faithful deplorables can continue to believe in him. I guess Elvis has reassured them, while he was showing them around the set where the moon landings were faked.

And why shouldn't they trust in Trump, if, as Bob Englehart notes, they can ignore the clear teachings of Jesus in favor of living the permanently forgiven life?

I could understand it if they would periodically prostrate themselves and admit their shortcomings, but they honestly swallow the notion that calling yourself "Christian" requires no further action -- that "accepting Jesus" doesn't demand living according to what he preached.

Trump was raised on the gospel of prosperity, in which material success is both the result of and the proof of being seen as righteous in the eyes of the Lord. It's the opposite of a religion in which you must struggle to imitate the Lord, but it's genuinely a real thing.

Of course, accepting Trump as your earthly savior also involves pure faith, which means paying no attention to the news or to the niggling little voice that says, "How could he say that when the facts are so clearly the opposite?"

It's the same mindset that can explain lipstick on a collar, or assurances that he'll never raise his hand to you again.

Love is blind. Willfully so, in too many cases.

 

The creative urge

Zits is supposed to send old empty-nesters into a reverie of nostalgia, and the arc that actually began yesterday is doing just that.

Probably not the nostalgia that Scott and Borgman had in mind.

There was a brief, odd moment in the 60s when everybody seemed to be making movies. Or, to be more specific, getting stoned and making movies.

It somewhat preceded hand-held video, though "200 Motels" was notable for being one of the first, if not the first, video-to-big-screen production, and also for being the most stoned-appearing movie despite Zappa's rejection of drugs (which apparently didn't diminish the chaos.).

But you could walk into the theater completely straight and come out tripping.

And also find out that the guys from the Turtles were a whole lot more strange -- in a good way -- than you had suspected.

Other efforts were more coherent if not any less strange: "Candy," Terry Southern's semi-pornographic takeoff on "Candide" (which was, of course, semi-pornographic to begin with) featured a shopping list of well-known actors (including Ringo Starr, who was also in "200 Motels") seemingly all totally stoned and a screenplay that may have been written on an index card.

And I don't know what the studio heads insisted on doing to "Easy Rider" before they allowed it to be released, aside from apparently adding everything after "We blew it, man," because you couldn't just end a road trip with a philosophical conversation around a campfire contemplating the meaning of freedom.

Tacking on that "Murderous Crackers" ending raises the question of whether a movie is worse when everyone is stoned or when everyone is cynically pragmatic.

And I don't know if everyone shooting Norman Mailer's "Beyond the Law" was drunk rather than stoned when they filmed it, but they sure were well over .08 when they debuted the rough cut at Notre Dame's Sophomore Literary Festival.

Most of these flicks made "The Blair Witch Project" look like "Citizen Kane," but I still like the idea that you could get really stoned and pretend to be Eric Rohmer or Francois Truffault.

I like the idea more than most of the resulting footage, mind you, but watching those movies is like going through your old files, including the things nobody would publish but which are milestones of their moments.

I'm in a student film somewhere, as a chap flipping a coin in the air and catching it until the protagonist walks past and snatches it out of the air. I wasn't even sure it had ever been edited until two years later when someone said they'd seen me in it.

Anyway, good luck, Pierce. See you in Cannes.

 

This leads quite naturally to the current xkcd, which should be blown up and mounted over a whole lot of computers.

I took a fiction-writing class every semester, less to learn anything than to ease my workload and get academic credit for what I was going to be doing anyway.

What I accidentally learned, however, was valuable. We'd submit our (mimeographed!) stories anonymously, each I think getting two shots a semester. We'd all take these handouts home, read them and then the class would critique and discuss each while the author sat quietly and unknown (except for being the strangely quiet one).

What you learned, or should have, was that, if one or two people didn't get it, that was on them. If more than a couple of people didn't get it, that was on you.

It may have been the most valuable thing I learned in college. 

And I sure know a lot of people who didn't.

(Want a look? Here's what "good but not good enough" looks like.)

 

We also wrote poetry

 

Meanwhile, back in the world ...

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Prickly City)

(Ann Telnaes)

Bring it on, Dear Leader.

Scott Stantis, who wasn't at the Satire Symposium but whose name came up, and Ann Telnaes, who was at work on the above piece even as things went on around her, both pull the nose of our would-be dictator. 

Let's point out that Hustler v Falwell not only upheld the First Amendment but was unanimous, making it very unlikely to be overturned.

But let's also point out that Brown v Board of Education was a unanimous decision and yet our schools remain segregated even without specific laws requiring it.

Making America Great Again requires both protecting the system -- like getting the Senate out of Mitch McConnell's hands before Ginsburg steps down -- and not relying on the system alone to protect us.

Because pulling Dear Leader's nose is not simply fun. It's a way of reminding each other that he's just one of us despite his bluster, and that one of the best days of childhood came when some daring classmate pantsed the schoolyard bully and made him cry.

(By the way, did you know that Trump is barely computer literate and has a ghost-Twitterer? Even @TheRealDonaldTrump is a sham.)

 

Juxtaposition of Himself

 

(Candorville, yesterday and today)

(Darrin Bell's latest editorial cartoon)

Darrin Bell needs to slow down, but I'm glad he doesn't, because he represents a critical voice.

Starbucks appears to be making an honest attempt to reconcile a corporate policy of not being racist jackasses with a local practice of doing just that, and I'm fascinated by his ability to get a strip onto the page with such little lead time, as well as his keeping up with the second example of a local manager screwing up.

Part of the issue with Starbucks is its phony-baloney fancy-pants elitist identity, which adds to the insult in a way that this happening at a 7-11 would not.

If Starbucks really were the chummy little coffeeshop it pretends to be, the owner would be right there to either take the heat or fix the problem, not sitting in some corporate tower a thousand miles away.

Meanwhile, Bell nails the situation in Flint, where the issue of clean water appears to be more rooted in public relations than in public safety and a federal judge has upheld the right of the state to stop providing people with bottled water. 

This revives a rant of mine, which is that, while the old anti-bottled-water claim that public water tests clean and safe is technically accurate, it's being tested at the plant, not after it has passed through ancient, decayed, contaminated water mains to individual homes. I hauled spring water 10 miles for a year because I lived in an area where the tap water was clean when it left and disgusting when it arrived, but I'm sure most Flint residents in the most affected neighborhoods don't have that option.

And damn well shouldn't have to, anyway.

Is it racial or a matter of class or a matter of not giving a damn? Well, what it is is unsafe water. That's what it is.

 

Meanwhile, Marty Two Bulls notes yet another broken treaty, or, in this case, basketful of broken treaties, and this really is racism.

The deliberate despoiling of Bear Ears is at least an insult delivered in full view of the public. Two Bulls is protesting a more insidious violation of tribal sovereignty, America's honesty as a treaty partner and some basic tenets of human decency in noting the cutting of treaty benefits to Indian nations in the GOP budget, a betrayal that reminds us of the days of rancid flour and spoiled meat being delivered to reserves. 

At least that was being done to skim profits for individual crooks, rather than as a matter of national policy.

What is happening in Flint, and in Indian Country, is not just wrong for those people. It's a "canaries in the coal mine" indicator of where the government's sense of responsibility towards all of us lies.

 

To which I would say thank god Scott Pruitt hasn't the sense to stop digging when he finds himself in a hole, and thank god Mike Luckovich can provide us with a laugh as the nation implodes.

(And Marty Two Bulls would point out that the metaphor is based on Hollywood's largely historical myth of Indian attacks against settlers in wagon trains. Here's a somewhat encouraging article on that sort of thing.)

 

Make America Giggle Again

Willie 'n Ethel is one of those strips done in what I refer to as Bob Newhart Show style, where you know what's coming and that's part of why you laugh when it does. The mystery is why, when some strips telegraph their predictable gags it is completely lame and when others do, it's hilarious.

But, yeah, Bob Newhart not only got away with it but made it the defining feature of the show. Ditto with this strip.

 

On a similar note, with all the depressing stuff that's going on in the world, it's good that Scott Hilburn has time for some clever dumb humor in the Argyle Sweater.

Clever-Dumb is not an oxymoron -- people like Albert Einstein and Isaac Asimov relished silly jokes. Though I'm sure that, if you're smarter than either of them, you're probably above all that.

In fact, I'd bet on it. But to collect, you'll have to prove the first part.

 

I'm not afraid of having to pay off -- though I doubt I'd have to -- because, like Earl and Opal in Pickles, I'm currently working on my third million. Maybe my fourth.

I was doing some financial planning in my head the other day and I think I can afford to be 84, by which time Soylent Green will be cheaper than cat food, so I can probably even stretch it a little farther.

Or become part of the solution.

 

Now here's your not at all oxymoronic moment of zen

 

Satire and the rest of the story

In his introduction to the event, Pat Bagley, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, demonstrated both the theme of "The State of Our Satirical Union" symposium and the passion behind the mission of those cartoonists who attended it. 

The reason the gathering mattered, he said, was that "the American people decided to elect a malignant clown leader of the most powerful nation in the free world."

As to what therefore seemed like the futility of the effort and why political cartoonists continue their work, he explained that they seem to cling to a Platonic Ideal, believing "that the perfect cartoon is out there somewhere," and that, if someone can only find it, they will succeed in bringing down Trump and restoring order to the world.

As it happened, one of the least academically intense presentations of the day provided some backup to that hopeful thought. Sophia McClennen, a professor and author on the topic of satire (as well as a Salon contributor) brought in a high-energy piece, "Why Satire is Good for Our Democracy," that argued against a widespread feeling that satire did more to comfort the afflicted than it did to afflict the comfortable.

Her concept of "Satirical Intervention" included the way Tina Fey had ended Sarah Palin's political credibility simply by portraying her on Saturday Night Live with an accuracy that put her folly into focus. Similarly, she said, Colbert had turned his sharp satire against a lazy, indulgent media at the White House Correspondents Dinner and introduced the term "Truthiness" before anyone thought to make a claim of "Fake News."

And John Stewart, through a storm of mockery on the Daily Show, shamed Congress into passing legislation restoring benefits to first responders harmed in the September 11 attacks.

Satire, she suggested, sharpens critical thinking skills, and, while she didn't show strong evidence that a fool could be made wise through satire, she did list a number of attributes that satire brings out in its consumers. To boil it down, the effort to understand the joke requires that you analyze and question the premise being spoofed.

And she cited a 2007 study showing that steady viewers of The Daily Show and Colbert were better informed than average, while Fox News viewers scored near the bottom of tests on current events.

Again, she didn't offer the conclusion that these were causual, only that they were indicative, but with the clear message that satire has impact.

What I found most persuasive was her argument that SNL, Stewart and Colbert, and the flood of satirical programs and publications surrounding them, had made not just iconoclastic humor popular, but had spurred political activism particularly among young people, with a fun piece of proof being the satiric nature of the signs being carried at the Women's March, the March 24 turnout and other demonstrations.

As a veteran of the anti-war years, my personal reaction is that these signs are more angry and less winsome than "War Is Not Healthy For Children And Other Living Things," but more constructive and less anarchic and nihilistic than the Yuppie activism whose satire seemed to reject solutions rather than proposing them.

In another deceptively light moment, Jack Ohman's keynote address brought that heritage of the Sixties into the current milieu, as he explained how John Kennedy's assassination had impressed him as a boy, and how Bobby and Martin's deaths had hit him again in adolescence as he formed his worldview, and he became a news junky.

Not only did this hunger inform his political opinions, he said, but propelled him into a cartooning job as a student at U Minn when he was the only applicant who could identify William F. Buckley and discuss his books and views in depth, much less do a spot-on, hilarious impression of the man.

It's not clear when he added the ability to caricature the ah-ah-ah-ah wisest ah-ah man in the world so well, but he did tell of a brutal critique of his undergraduate cartoons at the U by an established political cartoonist who charged him with wasting the platform he had been given by drawing cartoons that had no substantive point of view, of, as Jack concluded, "drawing X, Y or Z instead of saying something."

(He added that lengthy and generous criticism from his predecessor at the campus daily, Steve Sack, had helped sharpen and focus his efforts.)

Saying something, and protecting purposeful efforts, was the subject of a panel that explored the third-rail issues of religious and cultural sensitivities. One pair of presenters lumped the Falwell spoof in with more direct attacks on religion, though they didn't dwell on the interface wherein political efforts and religious belief become muddled to the point of being indistinguishable, and an attack on one appears to be an attack on the other, or both.

A more problematic factor was raised by Ritu Khanduri, a scholar of Indian culture who has written on the topic of cartooning.

Khanduri raised the issue of icons and the issues which arise when cartoons once confined to their own homelands begin crossing cultural borders, such that elephants and tigers seen by their creators as Western symbols of India become offensive colonialist stereotypes in South Asia.

She used the example of a Heng Kim Song cartoon the NY Times Syndicate ran as India entered the Space Age, in which a primitive Indian with a cow was seen trying to enter the Elite Space Club, a depiction that provoked a storm of objections from Indians and apologies from Heng and the Times, for focusing on the idea that it was unlikely, when, in fact, not only does India have advanced engineering, but many NASA engineers are South Asian as well.

The answering cartoon came some years later as India became a commercial launcher of satellites for Western nations.

Libertarian Chip Bok noted the dangers of repressing unpopular views, but also the difficulty of evaluating fair and unfair commentary, including mocking the idea that, in his testimony before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg could not identify hate speech himself but was sure that Facebook could use AI to spot it.

Joel Pett, who is active in the Cartoonists Rights Network International, then brought the symposium into an important focus on behalf of cartoonists who do not live in places where Hustler v Fallwell has any bearing. 

He cited the case of Musa Cart, the Turkish cartoonist jailed for his work, as well as Eaten Fish, Zunar and other cartoonists whose views have earned them imprisonment, torture and/or death threats.

It was a powerful reminder of the privileged position American cartoonists are in, thanks to Huster v Falwell and the continued strength of the First Amendment, a rare factor in world media.

At the start of this three-part report, I said I wouldn't include everything and everyone, and I haven't. Watch in particular for a roundup of sketches the cartoonists did throughout the symposium, which AAEC has promised to put on-line.

My plane home is boarding. I'll revisit this to add links and fix typos later.

Thanks for reading!

Sigh. Yes, an immutable law of cartooning.

 

Satire, the case and background

The one criticism of the "State of Our Satirical Union" symposium I heard from several people was that it was too short, that another half day would have helped spread out the vast amount of information, and, while I don't intend to quote every word here, I think I'll take the time we didn't have and break it down into two more days.

The above Pat Oliphant cartoon depicts a central issue, which was that, if there were a case upon which to stage a landmark fight over free expression, Falwell v Hustler was hardly the one anyone would have hand-picked. But there it was, and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists felt it couldn't go undefended or the precedent would kill the profession.

The old bromide about politics making strange bedfellows being, in this case, as appalling an image as the parody being defended.

This is one of a series of nudge-nudge-wink-wink ads that Campari had been running in a variety of magazines, though probably not Hustler -- a magazine almost entirely noted for being more explicit than other "men's magazines" in gynecological detail -- which created this parody for its November 1983 issue: The Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of a powerful rightwing group called "The Moral Majority," had the option of ignoring the whole thing, but chose to sue for Invasion of Privacy, Libel and Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.

The jury rejected all but the libel claim, awarding damages, and a state supreme court upheld the verdict, which Hustler brought to the Supreme Court, and which brings us to the Saturday's first panel. 

Roslyn Mazer was the attorney who provided an amicus brief in the case on behalf of the AAEC, of which Ben Sargent was then president, with Mike Peters having been a recent Pulitzer winner for his editorial work.

The AAEC had not previously been active in this sort of way, but felt the case could not go unchallenged, according to Sargent, who was then the cartoonist for the Austin American-Statesman and, he said, "proudly a life-long enemy of the people."

Meanwhile, a senior partner in Mazer's office was the father of editorial cartoonist Jim Morin, and so she was cut loose to represent the AAEC pro bono.

There was, she says, a temptation to let the case go and hope it would be a one-off decision and would never come up again, but, if Falwell prevailed, the resulting scenario could be ruinous, with cartoonists continually called upon to defend their work at a cost that would destroy them even if they prevailed.

In her amicus brief, she focused her attention on persuading Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, a pair of conservatives known to have senses of humor and an appetite for American history, and her exhibits included a number of examples of cartoons lampooning various public figures.

Though not this Paul Conrad piece, which had gone after Rehnquist when, in his confirmation hearings as Chief Justice, it emerged that he owned a home with a restrictive deed prohibiting sale to Jews and POC (a fairly common bit of boilerplate most homeowners never noticed).

Mazer says that, a few years later, she found herself sitting next to Rehnquist at a dinner and confessed the missing cartoon, which he remembered from when it ran in papers.

He laughed, and told her she should have included it, which is something of a key to how things went.

It turned out that Rehnquist not only had both a sense of humor and of history, but had been a cartoonist in high school.

 

And, in oral arguments, it emerged that Scalia, too, appeared to be on the side of the satirists, as he eviscerated Falwell's counsel, raising a point that Pat Oliphant, acting as unofficial courtroom artist, captured in this sketch lampooning the attorney.

 

The result was not simply a victory for Hustler, free speech and satire, but an unanimous decision, creating a precedent that it would be hard for anyone to challenge today.

The critical point in Rehnquist's decision is at bottom in that slide, that allowing juries to decide what is and what isn't outrageous would be disastrously subjective for free speech.

Though, as Peters somewhat inadvertently showed in his presentation, it's not as if the decision forever banished religious hypocrisy but only made it legal to point it out. He couldn't find a cartoon he had originally drawn about the Moral Majority in its heyday, so recreated it, upon which his wife pointed out that things hadn't changed much and encouraged him to update it and post it again.

The only change -- besides color, which was rare three decades ago -- was changing "Moral Majority" to the more generic "Christian right."

And Sargent noted the decline of editorial cartoons generally, not in failing to make solid points but in standing out amid the clutter of social media.

We are no longer sitting around a media campfire sharing stories, he said, and having the right to be heard is no guarantee that you will be heard, or that, even if you are, you'll have any real impact.

 

In a later panel, a variety of political cartoons were presented to show the long tradition in which they follow, notably this piece Signe Wilkinson offered, that was commissioned by Martin Luther and shows the disregard of Protestants for the authority of the Pope and, I would add, raises the interesting question of whether the Pythons were aware of it when they penned the immortal line, "I fart in your general direction."

Wilkinson also offered this much more recent Pat Oliphant cartoon, a strong attack on the pederasty scandal in the Catholic church, though she added a caveat that arcs back to Ben Sargent's earlier qualification: Of roughly 200 newspapers that subscribed to Oliphant's work, only "four or five" chose to run this particular piece.

"The Church complains of bias," she said, "but the evidence is that most newspapers protect the Church."

Nor are cartoons the only source of cutting satire, as Cullum Rogers noted in his presentation, offering, for example, a full-page parody of a newspaper page of which the above was only a tiny fragment of the whole, mocking a familiar boot polish ad but substituting a prominent politician as a rat rather than the original cat fascinated by his reflection.

 

And Bastiaan Vanacker, a professor at Loyola Chicago, noted that Twitter allows fake accounts, as long as they are clearly marked, though policing of this rule seems a bit theoretical.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ignored an outrageous fake account in his name and likely made a wise choice, Vanacker said, in contrast with Peoria's Jim Ardis, who, in fighting back, only drew more eyes to the page, which became an issue in his ultimately unsuccessful re-election campaign.

We'll discuss this sort of non-professional spoofery tomorrow. 

Go grab some lunch and we'll see you back here later.
Meanwhile, here are the oral arguments from the
case that you can listen to, as well as the
announcement of the decision. 

Satire Conference, Opening Night

The two-day symposium on satire in political cartooning at the University of Minnesota began last night with a meet-and-greet and a short panel presentation, including local cartoonist Steve Sack, seen here with fellow panelists Ann Telnaes and comics historian and attorney Michael Kahn.

The cartoons are fun, but the topic is serious and the occasion, the 30th anniversary of the Falwell/Hustler decision, is extraordinarily relevant, given both the repression of political cartoons and cartoonists elsewhere in the world and our current president's professed willingness to sue or shut down unfriendly media.

And the gathering of talent is such that, as a group of 10 or 12 of us sat around afterwards, my son leaned over to quietly ask me if we were the only two there without Pulitzers, which I'm pretty sure we were.

Satirical cartoons, Kahn pointed out in his presentation, go back a long way, at least to Martin Luther's attacks on the corrupt church of his era, and operate largely on the principle encapsulated in Tweed's famous rant about Thomas Nast that he didn't care what was written about him because his constituents didn't read but they could look at those damned pictures.

And, as Telnaes noted, while Trump hasn't lashed out at cartoonists in particular, it may only be because he doesn't see the cartoons, since he doesn't read, either, and gets his news from television.

Still, his accusations of "fake media" and even "enemy of the people" is evidence that the Falwell/Hustler decision matters a great deal in the current climate. Both she and Sack spoke of going to France in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings and speaking with cartoonists who, though defiant, face prison and worse for their work.

"I have developed a really deep respect for the Justices and what they did for our profession," she said, saying that, had the decision gone the other way, "this could be a very different atmosphere."

Sack pointed out that, before the Internet and in the days when there were 350 political cartoonists on staffs around the country, rather than the current 50, political cartooning was more local, in that you had to either find a newsstand with out-of-town papers or wait for Newsweek to see what other people were doing.

Now, he said, he sees more cartoons in a week than he used to see in months, but the feedback by phone calls and mail has dropped and comments now are attached to on-line postings and are largely vitriol.

However, on a hopeful note, he added that the feedback, both in complaints and in people calling with ideas for cartoons (which cartoonists don't use, by the way) would normally peak during a presidential campaign.

Today, he said, it's more constant and people seem more engaged. He also reported, and Telnaes confirmed, getting more "Thank you for keeping me sane" notes from readers, which they agreed was the kind of feedback that matters.

"I don't know if we have that much power," he admitted. "Nast had the power to bring down the Tweed ring, but the media landscape has changed since those days."

He noted that "the satire military industrial complex" had hurled their best at Trump during the 2016 campaign, including conservatives until he gained the nomination, but he won the election.

However, he also said, events like the Women's March and the current activism by high school students are encouraging.

Both cartoonists said they didn't really expect to change minds, but rather to buoy up the spirits of those who resist, and perhaps to arm them with arguments they hadn't considered.

The real action begins today and you may expect an over-length piece tomorrow, given the number of panels and cartoonists yet to come.