CSotD: Lifestyles of the Rich and Fatuous
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It's Fathers Day and Pajama Diaries departs from the usual burnt barbecue jokes and bad-necktie gags to something insightful, and a rare Father's Day piece in which Father comes out on top, neither a clueless doofus nor someone with no interests beyond golf.
The other day, I mentioned my sense of guilt over using a couple of political cartoonists over and over, and I feel that way about the frequency with which I use Terri Libenson's work, but maybe it's the same reason: She, too, appears to be working from thoughtful reality, not from stereotypes.
I'm not talking about arcane, password-protected secrets here. Today's strip could be taken straight from Deborah Tannen's "That's Not What I Meant," a bible of male/female communication issues that came out in 1986, which is to say, just over 30 years ago, and made Tannen a media presence that you would have to work hard to avoid.
Carol Gilligan you might have to have taken a course in sexual politics to have encountered. Tannen was all over your television set.
And one of the fundamentals Tannen noted in the opening chapters of that short, easy-to-read book was that men live in a hypercompetitive world in which home is a safe place where you can let down your guard, retreat and regroup, and do nothing, while women, who have a stronger instinct for collaboration than for confrontation, respond to the workplace experience by coming home and, also feeling safe, letting down their guards and wanting to share and to do things together.
There's more, but for today's strip, it's enough that Libenson portrays Rob's preference for just laying back and doing nothing in the comfort of his home, and Jill having trouble understanding that — and she puts the onus, affectionately, on Jill and the girls.
Rob will come out on the short end another day for his occasional lack of engagement, but it's Fathers Day, after all.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I'm gonna give you a minute to figure out how these two panels are related.
Got it? No?
Look, Breen is right: The world has changed. But you'd be wrong to suggest that the difference is those dang kids today with their dang phones.
What's changed is that most kids are lucky today if they can get enough pals together after school for a game of monkey-in-the-middle, never mind touch football or baseball.
Part of the problem is our increased paranoia: When I was a kid, we knew about Bobby Greenlease and we'd been told not to take candy from strangers, but we were still given a set of boundaries that left us with a substantial amount of real estate upon which to roam. And, if we wandered off from Mom in a store, we'd get yelled at for not keeping close, but she wouldn't melt down, sound an alarm and insist the place be put on lockdown.
But here's the other part of that: We weren't nearly as likely to be coming home to an empty house and so we were less likely to have rules about staying home and not having friends over.
Obviously, some of that was sexism and repression, because it's not like very many of our mothers quit designing airplanes when we were born and went back to it when we got into high school. Few women had those jobs in the first place.
Plenty of women were, by choice and tradition, "housewives," long after industrialization had made keeping house a less than fulltime endeavor.
What I would contend was less common a half century ago were two-parent families with small children in which the choice of both parents to work was driven by economics.
That is, I had friends whose single moms worked, of course, but it was common, both in working-class families and among professionals, to live on one income while the kids were young.
That choice is still on the table, though it's not always assumed that the mother will be the one who stays at home.
But it seems much more common for economics to intrude on preference: It's simply harder to live on one salary. And, given the cost of child care, that second income needs to be relatively substantial as well.
This before we get into the issue of having your free-range, organic eggs delivered by drone.
Or having your McDonald's delivered, which is even more ridiculous: When I buy that stuff, I eat it in the car. By the time you get it home, the fries are cold and the hamburgers are soggy and why in hell would you pay another five bucks for that?
Though I'm learning that the answer to "Are you nuts?" is generally, "No. We're average."
This Atlantic article on the Whole Foods takeover, and this Bloomberg piece on changing housing costs, suggest that wretched excess is the new baseline.
It's long been an issue that, as companies move to the suburbs, the urban poor have less access to decent jobs.
But now, those articles contend, even middleclass workers are being cut off from the economy, as Yuppie communities congregate around the public transit that allows suburbanites to keep their commuting costs down.
And business is catering to those Yuppies, not to the peasantry.
Out here in the sticks, we're relatively exempt, though the corporate behemoths have nearly eliminated our local grocers and local bookstores, and have completely shut down our local pharmacies.
Still, it'll likely be some time before anyone offers us fiber cable, much less cold fries and soggy burgers delivered to our doorsteps.
Meanwhile, if I want free-range eggs, I can drive down the road until I come to a cooler and an honesty-box at the end of some farmer's driveway, and it's a beautiful drive.
Sometimes I even see a couple of kids playing along the way.
Though, no, not nearly as often as in the old days.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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