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Friday Funnies

Let's start things off with the Serendipity Award, as Rhymes With Orange drops this gag smack in the middle of a massive heat wave at least for those of us in the Northeast, which includes RWOHQ in Massachusetts.

I suspect that, if you had a wax museum without AC, you could set up a pretty impressive Raiders of the Lost Ark display about now.

At the risk of mentioning politics on a Friday, I did see one editorial cartoon putting the heat wave up as proof of climate change, which seems like the opposite of using a snowstorm to disprove it. 

Frequent extremes -- hot or cold -- are indeed part of the phenomenon, but that doesn't negate the issue of confusing weather with climate.

Climate change is easy to track on a chart, but its impact on specific weather patterns is more complex and involves things like La Niña and El Niño and I can't remember which one we're in right now.

So I was thinking it would be easier to remember if, instead of switching from male to female and back -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- they would call one of them "La Niña" and then the other one "La Piñta," saving "La Santa Maria" for something really apocalyptic.

Then it occurred to me that one of those ships was a dud and didn't make the journey, which I thought I could cleverly work into the discussion.

This belief was based on the fact that I'm a dumbass and was thinking of the Speedwell, which set sail with the Mayflower but had to turn back.

However, my delicate ego was saved when I was Googling Columbus's ships and saw that one of the potential searches apparently spurred by user frequency is for "Nino Pinto and April Stevens," which means I'm not the biggest dumbass out there.

It also planted a pleasant earworm that I hope sticks for awhile and which I will share here:

 

Speaking of Environmental Matters

Betty has had a funny sequence this week which started when her son insisted on bottled water until she told him they were paying extra for upgraded tap water.

We've just seen the dismissal of the Greatest Environmental Meathead since James Watt, but I take some comfort in the fact that, since Flint, we haven't heard the other end of the foolish claims spectrum, that tap water is just as clean as bottled spring water.

Then again, we also haven't seen a lot of leaping to change out the crappy old pipes that pollute water while delivering it to houses in poor neighborhoods, and you can't blame that entirely on Trump because the foot-dragging began two years before he was elected.

Which, in my ADD mind, triggered a comparison with something I came across about how proud somebody was to be in the shiny new buildings at the World Trade Center site and made me wonder what if we'd reacted to that the same way we've responded to Flint?

Which then pinged some current discussion about the Marshall Plan which made me think about the fact that we helped rebuild Berlin at a point when we really hated those sumsabitches, which suggests that either we hate the folks in Flint even more or we've just degenerated into a nation of a-holes.

Perhaps a combination of ingredients.

Adam Huber is a relatively new father, "relatively new" in that paternity has begun turning up regularly as a theme in Bug Martini, and here he ponders something that makes me feel old and semi-wise.

When we had our first, in 1972, we used cloth diapers for the same reason we were still buying milk in glass, returnable bottles: The alternatives had recently come on the market but we had some kind of leftover Earth Day awareness going on. 

Time Capsule: One of the traditional gifts for new parents in those days was diaper service for the first month or so. You'd rinse the poopy diaper in the toilet, stick it in a bag and, once a week, someone would haul the poopies away and leave you a bundle of fresh, clean diapers.

I guess they still exist for city folks, but a search for "diaper service" out here simply yields companies that deliver disposables, which is funny because we're not so isolated that we don't have stores. 

What I really remember was that the disposable people went into high gear explaining why washing cloth diapers was not as environmentally friendly as having disposables pile up in the landfills.

Now, there's a load of poop.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day Week

(Pearls Before Swine)

(The Duplex)

Had a recent conversation recently that involved my mom, my son and one of his teenage daughters, in which we explained pre-cable, pre-Internet television to her.

Growing up in the Adirondacks, I was lucky to be within (potential) range of Kingston, Ottawa and Montreal, as well as Watertown, Plattsburgh and Syracuse, but I don't think we had eight choices of content. It was mostly a matter of which station came in best on a particular day.

The real fun came in explaining our tall, rotary antenna, since she is tech-savvy and mechanically knowledgeable but had never contemplated such a contraption.

Nor had it occurred to her that it wasn't just that we couldn't get other channels but that they simply didn't exist.

I honestly think "Tech History" would be a very popular Voc-Tech subject. She was both horrified and fascinated.

As for Eno, the real joke is that most cable companies no longer offer a tightwad package. What used to be called "Basic Local" is still mid-range in price, but loaded mostly with filler crap they get for free, like shopping channels and HGTV.

I'm experimenting with YouTubeTV which, for the price of Comcast's "Basic" service, provides local stations as well as a strong selection of highly desirable channels.

There's your tip of the week. Invest it wisely.

 

Same Earworm, Classic Version:

 

Further thoughts on a divisive issue

David Horsey avoided the two obvious approaches to Fourth of July cartoons: Those simply waving the flag and cheering, and those pointing out the various hypocrisies of celebrating at all.

It's almost as if he walks around actually talking to people instead of sitting in his cubbyhole absorbing and illustrating political rhetoric.

The two little kids in the foreground are a hope of sorts. I live next to an affordable apartment complex that has somehow acquired an enormous contingent of under-12s -- there are only six units but at least 16 little kids and one of the apartments has no kids at all. 

It's a racially diverse group but the kids are all so young that, as they run around playing, the parents are mostly just talking parent-talk and not politics and I suspect that's a very good thing, because the parents are diverse in that other way, the way Horsey draws them.

Having grown up in a blue-collar community, I lost a few Facebook friends during the last elections just as I lost a few in person during Vietnam but, in both cases, the ones who walked away were hardly the closest in the first place.

Before we had talk radio and divisive politicians and limitless cable channels pouring political crap into our ears night and day, O Best Beloved, we differed on specific topics, but we didn't identify ourselves half as strongly by political divisions, and the liberal/conservative balances of political parties tended to shift back and forth over time.

Meanwhile, there were Good People and Assholes, and politics was only a very small part of how you identified them. In fact, over in Blue Collar Land, "He's good people" means that you should ignore his politics and the other stupid shit he says, because he's, well, good people.

And there was the opposite: Back then, the traditional uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner might not bring up politics at all, but, once he got a few drinks in him, would still find a way to somehow demonstrate the fact that he was, despite being your mother's much-loved little brother, an Asshole.

Anyway, the Good Old Days weren't all that good, but they sure were a lot more innocent.

"MAGA" simply yearns for a time when we didn't have to think so much about unpleasant things.

For those who missed yesterday's collection of July 4, 1954 cartoons, "the way it used to be" was that we -- the majority -- were the only faces on the limited media of the time, or at least the only ones with speaking roles.

We weren't yet aware of the CIA's underground operations and were only on the brink of things like the Montgomery bus boycott (1955) and the Feminine Mystique (1963).

History was a list of inventors and presidents and great movements with an assumption that we were progressing towards some great cosmic goal. 

And, as part of that process, women had the vote and the slaves were free so that, as far as "we" could tell, everything was just rolling along as it should.

Point being that people very rarely decide to be Assholes.

The vast majority are simply divided between "aware" and "unaware," and so the struggle to create Good People has always been to push people out of their comfort zone a bit so that they will become, in the current parlance, "woke."

The innocent, isolated ignorance we had before the coming of "The Global Village" is no longer acceptable.

The question is, how do you overcome a natural tendency towards clannishness, when powerful political forces depend on exploiting it?

Jen Sorensen explores the way the hard-right both covers its racism, which nobody wants to subsidize, and exploits misconceptions about "socialism," which you can always find funding to do.

What makes this work is that she casts her antagonist in the role of an opinion-maker rather than a man-on-the-street.

This would be a pointless, divisive pissing-match if it were posed as a conversation between average people, because blame only forces people into a more hardened defensive position. 

And if it were as simple as telling people the facts, we'd have freed the slaves and extended women the vote back in the 1840s when their movements first emerged. 

But "Do the Right Thing" is a personal approach.

Political change is far more complex.

For instance, suffragists fought furiously to keep the word "male" out of the 14th Amendment, because it was the first time the rights of citizens were defined in the Constitution by gender.

But in 1870, the South was scared shitless over giving its newly-freed slaves the franchise at all, and cutting that new vote in half was the only way to get the Amendment ratified.

Theoretically, at least.

Suffrage and Abolition were, from the start, locked into the idea that you'd never get both at once.

That may have been true. Both movements were also divided between idealists and pragmatists. 

It would be surprising if it had been otherwise.

Or if the idealists had been able to carry the day.

In this cartoon, Joel Pett explains the current partisan divide in terms that made me laugh despite my revulsion for his truth.

Nobody ever lays it out in such stark terms, and many of them don't even see it with that clarity themselves.

Passing laws takes a lot of what we learned about in eighth grade social studies: Log-rolling and back-patting. 

The process is often compared to making sausage in that you shouldn't watch it being done, and there are too many people who not only don't want to see the nasty bits going into the grinder but prefer a form of log-rolling where nobody has to get wet, and back-patting without unwelcome touching.

Which is as naive and unworkable as thinking that we had no problems back in 1954 because nobody complained loudly enough to be heard.

We've come a long way, but there's still plenty of work, and opening of hearts and minds, ahead.

 

 

When We Were Great

July 4, 1954, came just less than a month after Senator Welch spoke the famous lines at the Army/McCarthy hearings, "Have you no sense of decency?" 

All the talk about "Making America Great Again" makes it seem like a good time to take a look back at those Olden Days of Greatness on Independence Day, and this front page from the Oakland Tribune sets the stage: While Lou Grant's Uncle Sam extols the history and virtues of our nation, behind his back the French are being driven out of what will very soon be Vietnam, the US is insisting on barring "Red China" from the United Nations and Guatemala is cleaning up after a revolution toppled its government.

There is a signature on this cartoon but it's hardly legible. In any case, we were held up -- at least by ourselves -- as the shining light and hope for the world.  (Update: Brooklyn Eagle cartoonist Eugene Craig)

John Milton Morris doubled down on the notion: Not only were we a beacon of freedom, but one that stood out in a world in which people were losing their freedom regularly.

And Cargill, too, chose the theme of America as a source of comfort and inspiration for subjugated people everywhere, which, in the wake of Soviet post-war expansion and the recent bloody standoff in Korea, was not only understandable but inevitable. 

And, as Carey Orr pointed out, we were prepared to stand tall and keep the Communists from encroaching on our hemisphere, in Guatemala or anywhere else.

Let's be fair, both to the cartoonists and to the people reading those cartoons: It would be quite a few years before the facts about, for instance, that revolution in Guatemala surfaced and we found out how much adventuring John Foster Dulles and the CIA were doing in the affairs of other nations.

And, in our own backyard, we were still about a year from when the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP refused to give up her seat on a bus, touching off a boycott and a whole re-examination of that word "we." (Oh, did you think she was just a "tired seamstress"?)

We were a nation on the verge of being wised up.

Or of refusing to wise up, and it was quite a while before we figured out who was fighting the science on this one, also commented upon by Cargill.

Meanwhile, Reg Manning was probably not the first cartoonist to pen this gag for July 4, but he was surely, surely not the last.

For a more in-depth look at America's self-image in 1954, perhaps you can click, embiggen and read this full page from the Brooklyn Eagle, a feature sent out by an ad agency to client newspapers, many of whom published it on July 4.

As for me, I'm gonna turn to the funny pages, it being a Sunday and all:

And now, this word from our sponsor:


Thanks for coming by. Drive safely.

 

Now Here's Your Moment of Patriotic Zen:

Lean Freedom, Fat Slavery or Neither

Rob Rogers finally tells the whole story over at the Nib, and it's both fascinating and unsurprising. Go read the rest of it.

There are elements of the story that should seem familiar, but it was, on the whole, outrageous enough that it's a lesson in Where We're At.

Any time you have a change in management, you see changes down the line. I was at a paper where the publisher took "early retirement," which may have meant that they were trimming senior positions to save money and made her an offer she couldn't refuse, or it may have meant that she could see the trend ahead and didn't fancy playing the role of Lord High Executioner.

Machs nix. She was leaving, and I realized that, as one of her pet projects, my ass was grass the minute she was out the door.

She had appointed me "Readership Representative," which primarily meant that I ran the paper's educational programs, but it also meant I was on the United Way Board, the 4H Board and the board of the local historical museum, and staffed booths at trade shows and country fairs and was the person who got the odd phone calls from people asking bizarre questions that would send me into the microfilm from decades past.

If I had any doubts about the impact of her retirement, they vanished at the cake-and-punch reception for the new publisher, who shook my hand and told me how important he thought educational outreach programs were. 

Thus began a program of harassment designed to force my resignation so they could hire a part-timer to do the bare minimum for very little pay and no benefits.

It took about six months because I refused to quit until I had a new gig lined up, and I certainly wasn't the only person over that period to either jump or be pushed overboard.

Rob's story, then, sounds very familiar, except that he was such a fixture that it's not surprising that they'd try to lure him over to the Dark Side, and I'm sure they'd have rather accomplished that than forced him out.

As said, it's a lesson in Where We're At, and, if my story is sad and familiar, Rob's is far more chilling.

My situation was simply cost-cutting and the abandonment of community service most papers have adopted over the past two decades.

Rob's is part of the shift towards propaganda in place of fair coverage.

Here's a critical factor in it all: Thomas Nast was a partisan pit bull with a lot of prejudices and a taste for the jugular. 

He not only worked for publishers who reveled in his excesses but who often built pages of opinionating around his work, whether it was a case of them writing to expand on his views or of him creating cartoons to further illustrate their planned essays.

But if you didn't like their Johnny One-Note political tone, if you found his anti-Irish-Catholic harangues unpleasant (like this 1872 attack on NY gubernatorial candidate Francis Kernan), you simply bought your town's Democratic paper and skipped Harper's Weekly entirely.

It wasn't just cartoons and commentary: You would see the governor's speech bannered across Page One of one paper in your town, and tucked away in a single column on Page Five of the other.

However, as newspapers began to merge around the turn of the 20th century, their first hyphenated issues invariably pledged an end to divisive coverage and commentary, and a promise of fairness to both sides.

Then, throughout that century, most editorial pages offered a variety of opinions, with the exception of a few notable rightwing journals like the Orange County Register, the Manchester (NH) Union Leader and the Chicago Tribune.

Now we're headed back, with the difference being that, while you can choose between Fox News and MSNBC, you probably only have one newspaper. (See yesterday's discussion of newspapers as public utilities.)

Rob is now free to express his opinions, but the key word here is "free" because he'll have to figure out things like rent and groceries on his own.

Still, lean freedom is preferable to fat slavery, which brings us to our

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Joe Heller)

(Jimmy Margulies)

What I don't understand is the growing appetite for lean slavery, but it falls under the heading of both the Big Lie and a sort of Triumph of the Will approach to governing.

Trump promised that his trade war would quickly bring back jobs and, as Heller and Margulies and any literate, thoughtful person who reads the news can see, it has instead choked off a lot of important trade and will cost even more jobs than his much-ballyhooed Carrier deal that fell apart before it touched ground.

If you don't like comparisons to Goebbels, how about a comparison to OJ Simpson? You simply deny the obvious, over and over, and count on your fan base to be so loyal that it falls under that well-known expression, "Who are you gonna believe -- me or your own lying eyes?"

And the comparison that won't go away is that between his constant electioneering and the speeches Leni Riefenstahl memorably caught on film.

Trump can, of course, draw a crowd, and whether his cheering fans are wise and well-informed or gullible tools doesn't matter: They are a self-selected crowd, not a cross-section.

Their cheering projects a message of popularity that may not represent the average American, but, if you show it often enough, eventually it will.

 

The Glorious Fourth

I'm seeing a lot of dogs-and-fireworks cartoons this year, but I like Bob Englehart's because he turns it into a political point.

I've had dogs that cowered at fireworks, but my current boy just turns to me at the first bang to inquire, "Do we care about this?" and, if I don't act alarmed, he doesn't, either. 

So we're cool on fireworks, but I'm hesitant to discuss politics with him.

 

Now here's one for Rob ...

Monday Short Takes

The best part of the 2018 World Cup is that the US team didn't make it, so we haven't had a lot of coverage and, thus, we haven't had a lot of handwringing by Old Farts^tm who feel compelled to hate the world's most popular sport.

It also means that I accidentally watched a really good game the other day without realizing it had been played two days earlier. No coverage, no spoilers. Better than back in the Nagano Olympics when I assiduously avoided the Gold Medal Women's Hockey Game so I could watch it when I got home, only to have those bastards at AOL post the final score on their splash page.

Dav Andrew is South African and therefore knows that the world's foremost sports tournament is on, but is somewhat over 4,000 miles from the nearest qualifying nation, so, like Americans, had to just pick a country or two or three and pretend.

My niece, whose mother is from Spain, stayed engaged until yesterday, while I was able to hang in for another two or three hours on the basis of my 25% Danish stock, but she's only at 12.5% of that and her kids only pan out at 6.25%, so it would have mattered about that much to them if the Danish keeper had stoned the Croatian PKs.

At the end, I would add, of what may have been the least beautiful example of the Beautiful Game I've ever watched that involved anyone older than 11.

At least the Spain/Russia match was well-played.

Ah well, it's like going fishing and not catching anything.

That's not why you went, or, at least, it shouldn't have been.

Which is equally impossible to explain to people who don't already get it.

The Return of the Native

This May, after six years of exile in LA, David Horsey returned to Seattle where he had grown up.

I'm lying in this subhed for the sake of the allusion, because he's not a native: Wikipedia reports that he was three when his family moved there, but given the boom nature of the Pacific Northwest, I suspect his roots are a lot deeper than those of most of his neighbors.

And he's just produced this short, insightful animation about the changes since he left, which you should go watch.

Having had a few Rip Van Winkle moments in the times I've gone back to Colorado, I can identify with his sense of wonder.

I'm glad he has landed in a place he loves, because he's a good guy with a lot of talent, but that's only a portion of why I'm sharing this.

 

I've also recently stumbled across Chan Lowe's new home in Western Massachusetts, where he became editorial page editor a few months ago, and I happen to know that intersection, but I certainly wouldn't if I hadn't gone to summer camp for several years, about eight miles away.

The point being that this is a cartoon for people who know that intersection and that old landmark inn, because the Berkshire Eagle does not expect, or particularly try, to sell a lot of papers or get a lot of hits in Wisconsin or Nevada except perhaps to homesick natives.

Lowe still does nationally syndicated cartoons, but this local stuff is priceless, exactly what local papers should be doing but which very few have done since they were mostly bought out by dimwitted Wall Street turds, a descriptor I only use in the interest of accuracy.

Like David Horsey, the Berkshire Eagle was gone briefly, a family-owned paper sold to a chain in 1995 but re-purchased by local investors in 2016 and turned back into a local paper.

Which brings up the difference between newspaper style and magazine style that I discussed in yesterday's posting: Newspaper "style" is mechanical, a matter of capitalization and spelling, while magazine "style" is the sound and feel of the stories, a much more subjective and creative factor.

Here's the reason: Newspapers are a utility, while magazines are a commercial product.

A properly-run newspaper is like the water works or the electric company or the highway department. It's the Local Information Department that tells you what city hall is doing about the budget, when the fireworks display at the park will begin Wednesday, who died, and when the traffic light will be installed at that troublesome intersection.

And it has some funnies and an advice column and a few other fun things to amuse you while you're soaking in all that local information.

The newspaper might not matter to you if you're just renting while you go to school, but, when you settle in and buy a house, you'll get the water and electricity and gas put in your name and you'll subscribe to the local paper.

Or, at least, you would back when local papers were run by people who knew how local papers operate.

Back then, the publisher often owned the paper and was a long-standing pillar of the community. He might be an autocrat who sledgehammered his vision of the community or a kindly elder who reflected its tone, but what he was not was the interchangeable button-down drone of a far-distant corporate leech.

The publisher understood the community and the editor understood the publisher.

The publisher set the tone of the publication while the critical job of the editor was to avoid having the paper make a goddam fool of itself with pointless errors and inaccurate reporting.

However, these Wall Street nincompoops have installed automatons in the publishers' seats, shifting them around so that they never get to know a community but are simply there to impose cookie-cutter creative concepts from HQ so that every paper in the chain looks exactly alike.

Which means that their papers fail to serve as local utilities, but, unlike magazines, neither do they distinguish themselves as more desirable than other publications in their category.

They have made themselves neither necessary nor attractive.

That's a poor strategy.

 

This is not a substitute for having gone in person

Yesterday was the opening of the "Cartoons from the New Yorker" exhibit at the Laumeister Art Center at Southern Vermont College in Bennington, and you really should have been there, because Bob Mankoff is extremely funny and wise and, in the space I've got, I'll only be able to skim over a bit of what he had to say, plus my photos of the cartoons from the exhibit are not nearly as sharp as the cartoons themselves.

To start with the exhibit, it consists of 100 cartoons by 20 frequent New Yorker contributors, plus a handful of covers from 1925, the first year the magazine was in business, and I'll make a somewhat negative critical comment here by wishing it were being held longer than September 9, because it would make a lovely stopover during leaf-peeping season.  

I'd also note that Mankoff is rather famously no longer with the New Yorker, but speaks eloquently about the process and discreetly about his having left for a job at Esquire.

Which means I don't know how much longer he can speak to the topic, and it's a little bit like Peyton Manning talking about the Colts and I have no idea how many New Yorker readers understood that reference at all, but a true Renaissance person can identify both Andrew Luck and Andrew Wyeth.

In any case, the New Yorker remains the New Yorker, which we'll get to in a moment, and Mankoff does understand the underpinnings.

That in turn makes this a good point at which to add that I'm aware a lot of people hate New Yorker cartoons, and that it's too easy to simply dismiss them as people who prefer humor that involves pie.

But it's not entirely inaccurate, either, and comes down to the idea that, while there's nothing wrong with Robin Williams, there's also nothing wrong with Tom Lehrer, and pity the person who, whichever his preference, cannot appreciate both.

And, since I find both Mark Russell and Prairie Home Companion unbearably smug, I'm not judging, just observing.

Thing is, social satire is like editorial cartoons: It's not required to be funny, only humorous, the humor coming from exaggeration and observation.

For instance, there's nothing funny in this Emily Flake cartoon, which is part of the exhibit, the caption reading "Are we gonna have to scrape the Daddy decal off the minivan?" 

The observation is that little kids tend to gloss over the major issues and focus on small, concrete ones. As Fred Rogers said, a little kid doesn't want to know what he's going to learn in kindergarten; he wants to know what will happen if he has to go to the bathroom.

So there is some humor in the parents having girded themselves for this agonizing discussion with their children only to be met by a ridiculous question, and there is even more humor in the underlying idea that those stupid decals can signal a family that is trying way too hard to project a public image of unalloyed joy.

And we never had those stickers, but we had that conversation and so I find this cartoon agonizingly humorous without being in the least bit funny. 

The day consisted of Mankoff's live presentation, a screening of the 2015 HBO documentary "Very Semi-Serious," about him and the New Yorker process (streamable at Prime), and a discussion with New Yorker regulars Danny Shanahan and Tom Toro, led by Jessica Ziegler, the daughter of another New Yorker regular, and the person who spearheaded the exhibit.

Here's the too-short trailer for that Oscar-nominated documentary:

A point that Mankoff makes in the film and made several times in his presentation is that he doesn't laugh when he reads submissions, because he is analyzing them.

Which makes an impression the times in the film when he chuckles a bit and then puts the cartoon in the rejection pile. 

Two things I hadn't connected until yesterday:

The first is that Charles Schulz used to advise young cartoonists to do a strip every day for a year, 365 episodes as if on deadline, and then, at the end of the year, throw them all out and start over. His point was that it takes that long to develop characters and become comfortable drawing them, as well as to develop the discipline to show up at the drawing board with the necessary regularity.

I was a little surprised, and then not at all, to hear Mankoff advise a young cartoonist in the documentary to send him 10 ideas a week for the next year, so that "you can figure out what you want to say."

The point being that, even though you don't have continuing characters, you do need to develop a continuing voice.

And, in the interview segment, Toro told of submitting by mail from California, but then traveling to New York for one of Mankoff's famous face-to-face sessions, because, he said, "Bob couldn't mentor me by email." 

His cartoons weren't selling and they weren't very good, because he was, as he said, just riffing on the Far Side and had not learned to recognize his own point of view.  (For those keeping score at home, he finally sold a cartoon to the New Yorker. It was his 610th submission.)

The other point came in connection with some questions that were asked about the editors Mankoff had worked with, and was then amplified by scenes with his boss, David Remnick, in the film.

At a newspaper, "style" means, almost entirely, objective things like whether you capitalize job titles, use "Mr." and "Mrs." and "Ms." and write numbers out or use digits.

However, magazine style includes a distinctive voice, sometimes as easy to spot as Cosmopolitan, but not hard to identify in any case: Someone who knows the trade can identify the source of an article by its sound, regardless of who wrote it.

I once faxed an article by a Sports Illustrated writer from Colorado Springs to New York and was astonished at how little of the rough copy appeared in the final issue. I think the only thing they didn't change was the name of the writer, which struck me as kind of humorous.

Not funny. Just humorous.

Point being that the Powers That Be at the New Yorker hire an overall editor who will recognize and preserve that voice, and that editor then hires a cartoon editor who shares the vision and that cartoon editor buys cartoons that fit the style of the magazine.

That's true at every magazine, but particularly relevant when you have a magazine in which the cartoons are central to the identity of the publication, and so definitely in tune with its voice and vision and style, and, thus, the New Yorker remains the New Yorker, or at least it better if it wants to stick around.

Now, I see by the word counter on my blogging software that I've already gone well overlength, so I'll call it a day, but I'm sure I'll return to this in future, and, if I had to stop short of telling it all, well, I guess that's why you should have been there.

But some of it is in this "60 Minutes" feature:

 And here's a 2013 version of his talk, about a third of which was also in yesterday's talk: 

All of which makes this even longer than I wanted it to be, but I still left out a lot of cool stuff.

It was worth being there.

What if they gave a war on truth and nobody came?

There have been a flood of cartoons about the Capital Gazette murders, but Marshal Ramsey offers the sentiment that matters to me.

I also like Liza Donnelly's quiet, controlled tribute, because she didn't overplay it, though she added a commentary that spoke of sorrow, which I appreciate, saying, in part:

 We don’t know yet the motive for the murders at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. But we do know that anger in this country is at an all-time high. We have to find a way to stop it. I drew this image on my phone as a tribute to the lives lost. 

Her sorrowful restraint touched me because she didn't claim a special status for her grief. She saluted them as hard-working people, but as victims, not as superheroes.

Yeah, we're sad, but, on the other hand, people at UPS are probably sad when someone shoots things up at their workplace, only they don't have the means of saying so as publicly as we do.

I do agree that, while this was apparently the work of a lone screwball with no political agenda, the fact that we have a fascist wannabe in the White House encouraging people to act out against the media was likely a contributing factor.

So I appreciate Clay Bennett's commentary and, like others in the industry, I hope this doesn't turn into a trend.

But here's why I like Marshall Ramsey's piece:

I was, needless to say, not working in the newsroom of the Plattsburgh Republican in September, 1814, when invading British soldiers smashed up the office.

But it is part of the history of the Press-Republican, where I did work some 175 years later, that they simply gathered up the scattered type and by-gawd published on schedule.

And, in 1997, when Grand Forks, ND, was flooded and the downtown in flames, the Herald, bless their hearts, placed their reporters on a hillside at the local university and by-gawd got the paper out on schedule.

They won a special Pulitzer, not because they were "heroes," but because they maintained focus on the mission of keeping the public informed.

And, yes, the Capital Gazette by-gawd got the paper out the other day.

Because that's the mission.

These days, it's not all print. I got a kick out of my former assistant editor who had become editor of a nearby weekly, and, when Hurricane Irene was tearing us apart, not only kept up a constant on-line listing of what roads were closed and where the fire departments wanted help and where they wanted people to stay away, but was leaning out the office window snapping photos of the raging Ottauquechee River as it swept away the pilings of the newspaper building.

Maybe you need to have ink in your blood to understand it, but the bottom line is this: Get the goddam paper out.

So, yes, I would rest more easily, knowing that they got the paper out.

But I am an old man and the things I believe in don't matter any more.

It used to be that every paper had an agreement with a rival, or a corporate partner, or someone, such that, if your presses broke down, you could get your pages over to them and they would print your paper for you and it would, perhaps late, but by-gawd, be on the streets.

Well, when an ice storm shut things down in 1998, my own paper got the paper out, not to very many subscribers because the roads were impassible, but within the city, by-gawd. But our rival on the other side of Northern New York did not, because ... well, I don't know why not. 'Cause it was hard?

And as Gwen was hanging out the window shooting into the storm, the daily in our market was calling things off because their press room was flooded. They have corporate partners within a two-hour drive, but, well, it was just too much of a hassle, I guess.

That scares me one helluva lot more than Donald Trump's War on Truth, because what if they gave that war and nobody came?

 

The Final Word

I've often shown this astonishing rejection letter, written pseudonymously by Hunter Thompson in response to one of my first submissions to a major publication.

The original is framed over my desk, because, after I picked myself up and resumed breathing, it tickled me a great deal more than a standard "does not meet our needs" letter possibly could have.

A few years ago, the story of the letter went a little viral and I blogged about it, including a copy of the story it was in response to, which, by the way, drew a lot of jeers from humorless hipsters who apparently never heard of Donald Barthelme or read John Lennon.

But, because Dr. Thompson's response made such big waves, I've only mentioned in passing that, a year earlier, when I submitted it with my samples for a writing workshop, Harlan Ellison praised it, calling it a "Marx Brothers landscape" and saying some other nice things I wish that I could remember, then concluding "The man has talent."

If you wanted to stage a curmudgeon contest, Harlan Ellison and Hunter Thompson would make a damn good cage match, but, while the furious humor of Thompson's response provided the most astonishing moment, it was Ellison's more serious, thoughtful encouragement that really made a difference to me.

I'm not a science-fiction fan and was never a reader of his work, but I've always kept a warm spot in my heart for a guy who gave a 20-year-old hack a bit of encouragement right at the moment I needed to decide if this writing thing was worth going all in on.

Harlan Ellison died yesterday. He was 84, so it was okay for him to tirer le rideau.

Thanks for the kind words, man. I'm doing my best to get the paper out.

 

Friday Funnies

Friday Funnies were never so welcome. For those just joining us, I've been posting humor-only on Friday, which not only gives me an excuse to use strips from the past week that didn't fit into that day's narrative, but provides one day a week when I do not have to gaze into the void in horror.

Never so welcome as this particular week, and let's hope we hold onto that record for a bit.

However, just because I'm laughing doesn't mean I'm not horrified, and Harry Bliss not only touches on something infuriating, but brings back the first time I saw one of these damn things, which, happily, contains a comic strip reference.

Granddaughter and I had just been to Hilary Price's Open Studio (each November, not to be missed) and stopped by a chowder place for lunch. We'd been there before, and the portions are a bit small but the chowder is quite good. 

This time, something new had been added, and after we had stood at the counter to give our order, preparing to carry our food back to our table ourselves, and I had provided my debit card, the hipster at the register flipped this screen around.

I said, "What's this?" and he all-but-sneered as he told the old hayseed that it was so I could enter my tip.

Which I did not.

I have seen the things since and I still don't tip counter help, at restaurants, at coffee shops, at the 7-11 or at Walgreen's, either.

Like most people who have worked the trenches, I tip rather well for service, but, goddammitall, I not only don't tip when I'm the one doing all the toting, but I sure as hell don't tip at any place that would pay to install these things so they can justify not paying a decent wage to the skeleton staff that simply rings things up.

If you can't remedy the policy, playing along is collaboration.

Is this political? No.

 

But maybe having Karl Marx do a standup routine explaining it is political, and, if so, I "sort of" apologize just like that guy "sort of" waited on me -- i.e., not at all -- and I recommend we take a break while you enjoy the rest of Karl's comedy stylings over at Existential Comics.

He's right. The proletariat jokes aren't as funny.

 

And speaking of Hilary, Rhymes With Orange scored twice this week and I'll lead with this one because it's also in the Horrible Things Companies Do, along with soliciting tips for people who have performed no service and generally sucking the blood from their workers, which is to pester you for feedback after you've given them money.

And not just then.

Last spring, I was looking for something in the grocery store that wasn't where it logically might be, and I asked a young stock clerk where it was, only wanting a suggestion, not to interrupt him and send him on a mission. But off he went and he had to really search the place before he came back with what I wanted.

When I got home, I went to the store's website to give him some positive feedback, only to discover that I couldn't just say this kid Jordan had been very helpful and is a good employee.

First, I had to provide multi-level evaluations of every freaking department in the store. (I didn't.)

A few weeks ago, I saw that Jordan has been promoted to checkout and told him of my experience, which made him laugh. 

However, three or four years ago, the manager there had told me that, if you do go through all that, and say that while everything is a 10 except only a 9 for the canned goods because there's a brand of beans you wish they carried, corporate would call the manager, scream at him, and possibly fire him for not getting all 10s on a survey.

That manager is no longer at the store. I guess he got a 9, probably for something over which he had no control, such as what brands they stock.

 

And here's the other RWO, and it doesn't set off too much of a rant because I like baby chicks and I also like business incubators.

My favorite business incubator of all time is The Flax Trust, which, at the height of the Troubles, helped young Catholics and Protestants in the ghettoes of Belfast start their own small businesses, as an alternative to sitting around idle in a place with no jobs and getting into the kind of political mischief that made headlines around the world.

I see they've grown a lot since I learned about them in one of the most transformative encounters of my life.

What was to be an interview turned into a full afternoon of sitting around digesting the world's woes, swapping jokes and absorbing wisdom from an extraordinary man.

Which tends to make me think of business incubators with perhaps more sentiment than they deserve, since most are just cubby holes that share a copy machine and a receptionist.

But speaking of incubation, I think the partnership between Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo has found its groove. It takes a while for new strips to find their feet, and a transformation like this can also wobble a bit at first, but lately RWO has been making me laff with consistency.

 

I like Fowl Language, but Brian Gordon often just riffs on minor parenting annoyances. Well, here is a major issue, and good for him.

You want your kids to get along in life, but you really need to help them learn where to draw the line on all that "fitting in" business, because one of the things they're apt to learn later in life is that there were people all that time who dug the way they did things nobody else was doing.

As for those who got along, that often turns out to be all they ever got.

 

Sometimes weird is a cool hand

I read the news today ... oh boy

Deflocked sure won the Serendipitous Timing Award this morning.

I was at the park yesterday with about a dozen dogowners and our pooches.

Somebody had brought ice cream to celebrate a birthday and we were having a lot of fun until a woman showed up who had just heard the news of Kennedy's retirement as she pulled in.

You'd think it would be hard to be somber with a choice of ice cream flavors and a dozen dogs of all sizes cavorting around, but the place just went quiet.

Now, it's true we're a college town, but the college is Dartmouth, hardly a leftwing bastion. I think it's more that people who can be at the park with their dogs at three in the afternoon are mostly old enough to understand the system, and what's at stake.

It's not that I don't want to see the editorial section ever again, but I'm certainly going to take a break from Facebook and Twitter for a bit, and I wish editorial sections -- whether left or right -- would discuss the situation in well-informed, thoughtful ways.

I wish we could have ice cream at the park every day, too, but that ain't gonna happen either.

 

Ann Telnaes comments, and it's nothing we don't know and, more important, it's nothing we didn't foresee and warn people about.

McConnell blocked the President's nomination from March 16 until Trump took office the following January, almost a full year, during which people warned that the next president would change the face of the Supreme Court.

During which the GOP nominated an unqualified fascist clown and We The People elected him president.

McConnell may indeed be a devil, but he isn't presiding over a majority of the Senate by happenstance, nor is he serving under an intelligent, reasonable conservative president.

By commission or omission, we did this.

 

Darrin Bell predicts all the things that will be retiring along with Kennedy and there isn't a surprise on the list.

Here's what seems depressing to someone of my age:

Lyndon Johnson promised that he wouldn't send American boys to fight an Asian war, so we voted for him and the son of a bitch sent American boys to Asia.

And then Richard Nixon promised to end the war and bring them home -- we didn't know he'd sabotaged LBJ's peace plan -- and so we voted for him and then the son of a bitch continued the war and as many names on the Wall died under his leadership as had died under Johnson's.

This time around, however, nobody lied. 

This time, the son of a bitch told us exactly what he was going to do, and we voted for him anyway and here we are.

And, no, I didn't vote for him. But I voted for a candidate I wasn't wild about, mostly because she wasn't him, and she certainly wouldn't have ...

Well, never mind. The fact is, America voted and this is what we chose.

And those who were too pure or too wise to vote agreed to let the others decide, which was, in itself, a decision.

 

As Jim Morin suggests, Osama bin Laden, in the afterlife, is celebrating his success.

While the Deplorables fret over paranoid, racist fantasies of MS13 gangmembers flooding America as unaccompanied minors or by posing as the asylum-seeking parents of small children, out in the real world ISIS and the Taliban are seeing concrete proof of their claim of an American War on Islam.

 

Here's a portrait of the fascist oligarchy we've built for ourselves, courtesy of Ruben Bolling.

Zero Tolerance for them. Unlimited tolerance for the oligarchs.

 

And Robert Ariail finds dark humor in the story of how Dear Leader's habit of tearing up memos and letters conflicted with the law about preserving records.

The joke being that Ariail drew this before Kennedy retired and insured that we'd no longer have to waste Scotch tape and glue trying to keep this old liberal anachronism in one piece.

 

While, as Tim Eagan notes, the editorial board of the Washington Post and a number of other progressive commentators remind us to be polite as we watch the bits of our system swirl around the drain.

Pinkies up, everyone!

 

Well, perhaps Mike Luckovich will get his wish, as the Parkland kids and their allies join with HeadCount in an effort to register young voters.

I've told the story too often but you're gonna hear it again: A decade ago, I sat a booth at the Washington County Fair, across from a booth for Visa credit cards and next to one for the Army National Guard, and, for a week, got to watch young people flood the Visa booth to sign up for a card and get an American Flag beach towel, then not just walk past but actively steer wide of the National Guard's display.

Though I oppose military adventuring, I have nothing against joining the armed forces, and, in fact, I wish we'd bring back the draft for both sexes with few deferments, but offer other choices of national service, like Peace Corps and VISTA, or providing teaching or medical services in under-served communities. 

Honestly, if you don't mind.

Other countries require national service, after all, though Dear Leader's grandfather was deported from Bavaria for draft-dodging, and apparently passed along his sense of patriotic duty.

But Step One in a functioning democracy is that people vote, and, while the Parkland kids focus on gun control, I don't care, because we were focused on ending the Vietnam War, but still somehow walked away with some serious environmental laws, educational funding and other social benefits that went well beyond that initial purpose.

And, of course, before the Antiwar Movement there was the Civil Rights Movement, in which desegregating buses, lunch counters and schools took the headlines, but registering voters formed the base.

One of the great lies of history is that the activists of the 60s did not love America, but America's enemy was always apathy. 

Wednesday Rants

I wasn't planning to revisit the topic of civility so quickly, but here we are and I like Joe Heller's commentary for a number of reasons, the first one being that the owner of the Red Hen is its owner, not its caretaker. So there's a contrast right there.

Another is that Heller distinguishes between denying people because of their race, sex or ethnicity, and denying individuals. 

Not every commentator does, so that, in their view, asking a table of loud drunks to leave is the same as refusing to serve black people. Either they haven't thought it through, or they are racists, or they are liars.

The other thing I'm seeing is a form of whataboutism that equates Maxine Waters with Donald Trump.

With all due respect to her long service, Waters has said some damn silly things over the years, no doubt. But she is hardly a powerful force in Congress. The Democrats have Waters, the Republicans have Ted Cruz, not to mention Steve King.

Sometimes a Waters quote leaps into the headlines, just as Santorum quotes did, in his days. There seems no particular reason except that you get clicks, which is okay for the daily news but I'm not sure we need to drag it out into a major issue among the commentariat.

Bottom line being, if Republicans don't have to justify Steve King or Ted Cruz, Democrats surely don't have to justify Maxine Waters.

Anyway, I said my piece yesterday.

Clay Jones has a most excellent rant on the topic today, to go with this cartoon, and, if you get more laughter than horrific sense of dread from reading his thoughts, I'd suggest you go here and read what Fintan O'Toole thinks of it all, because I promise you won't chuckle over that.

In fact, it might make you need your teddy to sleep with tonight.

 

On a much lighter matter

July marks the 50th Anniversary of the release of "Yellow Submarine" in Britain, and, while the animation makes it somewhat relevant here, I wouldn't have mentioned it if I hadn't stumbled across this absolutely brilliant article in the New Statesman.

I enjoyed the film, but, as noted in that article, it came along well after the Beatles had moved on from light-hearted piffle into more heady work and were, in any case, on the brink of breaking up anyway.

Boy, weren't we all?

I've always thought the British Invasion was wonderfully well-timed, coming along as I was turning 14 and thus in the target zone for the jangly fun rock of the early Beatles, Kinks and Dave Clark Five, and just turning self-important enough for the snarling blue-collar attitudes of the Animals, Yardbirds and Stones.

Which, as Tom the Dancing Bug declared in 2007, means that this is the best music that ever there was, though he was two years off. It's 14, not 12.

I can prove it, because I was 14.

However, by the time Yellow Submarine came out over here, I was on the verge of 19 and, like the Beatles, had put the days of piffle behind me. 

Wikipedia describes it as a children's film and that was how we saw it: As a children's film that was fun to watch if you were really stoned. 

And I will confess that the phrase "My little glovey-dovey" has remained in my repertoire of things to say to the dog when no-one else is around.

The New Statesman piece, however, tracks some cultural references that resonated in Britain but went over our heads in the USA.

It makes the film more impressive, but the bottom line, in my mind, is that it was a fun, frothy light show and a lot of people thought Peter Max was somehow involved but he wasn't.

My major problem with the film not being its lack of substance but the way it turned a reasonably thoughtful song, "Nowhere Man," into the theme of a Jar-Jar Binks level character such that, like Opus, a song I once liked now drums up some really stupid, irrelevant images.

Oh well. The Beatles have not aged as well as those other groups anyway. I think you had to be there.

And 14.  

 

As long as I'm in "Old Man Reminiscing" mode, it seems Wal-Mart has made an agreement to sell affordable comics to small people, and it's causing some uproar in the industry, as I've been watching at ComicsBeat, here and also here, and that DD Degg has tracked in even more places.

First of all, let me say that Superman looks really stupid in this cover. I don't mean it's a stupid way to depict him. I mean he looks like he'd turn to Wonder Woman and ask her to tell him about the rabbits again. 

Beyond that, I think putting comics in the hands of young readers is an excellent idea, particularly since these are apparently "best of" compilations, so that, when the kids are hooked and want to spend more money on the real stuff, they'll have to go to the comics stores.

Anyway, I grew up on cheap comics from the spinner rack, dagnabbit, and it did me good!

 

Finally, now that we're older than in the days of Yellow Submarine and spinner racks, we can go to the Hays-Adams Hotel in Washington, DC, and order a "Mueller's Trump Card," a trendy new drink (they say) that is "a combination of a Moscow mule and a Dark and Stormy," proving that bartenders like to come up with clever names and that their customers will drink anything.

Well, I gave the kids next door 50 cents for a small glass of Country Time Lemonade yesterday, and that's my limit in terms of overpaying for bad drinks. 

But it comes on this coaster by Kal Kallaugher, and I'd happily ask the bartender to set a Manhattan atop one of those.

And then I'd explain how to make a Manhattan.

Damn kids.