CSotD: Kidding on the Square
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Pat Bagley is hardly the first, let alone the only, one to mock the logical gymnastics required of Trump loyalists lately, but he did it well and that's an important part of the task: Not just to have an idea, but to convey it.
There is, after all, a "tree falling in the desert" element to a good idea, which basically comes down to this: It's not a good idea if nobody gets it.
As Cranly says to Dedalus in Portrait, "Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”
Even a simple idea needs to be executed properly, which leads us to the …
Juxtaposition of the Day
Several cartoonists have built gags around the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, but I prefer the starkness of this pair of depictions, including the fact that neither one makes a reference to Trump, except by implication.
Letting the viewer fill in the blanks is how you make them invest in the piece, and it takes a deft touch. If you make the connection too obscure, they simply won't get it, but, if you lay it out too plainly, they gloss over it and move on without becoming involved.
In both these cases, the assassination, and the "just kidding" remark, lead the viewer where the cartoonist wants them, without taking them there by the nose.
A reference to Teapot Dome or the Missouri Compromise might be too obscure to use without explanation, but Booth is a well-known name in history, and Bob Jackson's iconic photo of Oswald's murder is burned into even the dullest of American minds.
At some point, you have to trust your viewers.
A more subtle element is knowing your audience and accepting the limitations you'll encounter. Many people were shocked by Trump's call for murder and are not so gullible as to shrug it off as kidding, or as a call for voter turnout.
As this piece from the Washington Post notes, there is really no credible way to mistake what Trump intended, particularly since he was speaking about what to do after the election, when voter turnout has become irrelevant.
There is also an element — though one would hope a small one — who know exactly what Trump meant, whether or not they have the decency to pretend to accept his "just kidding" explanation.
They probably won't act on his words, but, as Gabby Giffords said, and as David Rowe illustrates in this cartoon, there are also those unbalanced souls who will take it seriously, and you can't shrug off responsibility for stirring up people whom you know are out there.
But, in the middle, are those in Bagley's cartoon, who see no inconsistency with their love of his straightforward style and are willing to be selective in giving him the most favorable possible interpretation.
Those are the voters who may yet be up for grabs, the ones who could, with some prompting, reach a point at which they can no longer justify their willingness to cut him slack.
And let's not be too snobbish about that element.
Let's not pretend that moral blindness and lack of empathy are exclusive to conservatives, or those with limited education, or those who can be dismissed as "white trash."
There's more than one kind of insensitive, thoughtless white trash, after all. "Some in rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns."
National Lampoon in general and Animal House specifically ushered in an era of cruel, white-privilege humor under the guise not so much of "telling it like it is" but of being bold enough to make tasteless jokes because they're funny. And because we were only kidding.
And those jokes always got a big laugh in prep school, and at the frat house.
So the movie could mock international students, as long as the preppy, privileged writers put the mockery in the mouths of the bad, snobbish fraternity.
Note, however, that it wasn't necessary that the iconoclastic Deltas — the good guys of the movie — take in any of those foreign students. The point wasn't that the Omegas rejected them. The point was that the Omegas had the nerve to equate two white freshmen with those socially unacceptable brown people.
And it was okay for our heroes to take some naive white college girls to a bar full of Negroes and leave them in the clutches of those scary, scary people, because racing off without them was … funny.
Not racist. Not misogynistic. Not cruel.
Funny.
Because we were, after all, just kidding.
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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