CSotD: Happy Doomed Nautical Metaphor Day!
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Jeff Danziger wins the day, perhaps the month, perhaps more, for knowing and properly applying the metaphor of rats leaving a sinking ship.
As noted here before, it's not that rats will leave a ship that is sinking rather than drowning along with it. Any damn fool would do that.
It's that one of the many odd beliefs sailors had was that rats could tell when a ship was doomed and would leave it while it was still in port, before it sailed.
And if that's what motivated Giuliani to decline a cabinet role, so much the better for the metaphor, because he's certainly a rat and perhaps — let us hope — a perceptive one.
After all, only the captain is required by tradition to go down with the ship, and even that simply suggests he not give up trying to keep it afloat until the last minute.
So it looks like Pence will have to go down with this one, because our captain doesn't seem particularly interested in actually running things even when they're going well.
Bob Gorrell is among some conservative cartoonists who are expressing doubts about Trumpvarich, who truly is beginning (beginning?) to look like a Russian stooge. There are even rumblings that some Republican legislators are having second thoughts about working for the Kremlin.
I remember when I assumed that Congress would never shake off partisan loyalty and deal with Watergate.
I was wrong then, and I would be delighted to be wrong again.
Meanwhile, La Cucaracha reminds me of the days when people who opposed the Vietnam War were told that, if they didn't like it here, they should move to Russia.
Well, we didn't, so the flag-waving children of those insult-shouting super-patriots have by-gawd brought Russia here.
That'll learn us. (Speaking of evil ships and working class resentments.)
In other news
Buckles brought less of a chuckle than a memory this morning. I dropped my print subscription to the paper I worked at — yes, employees were required to pay for their own papers, a tight-fisted breakthrough in those days — because the carrier decided he wouldn't bring it to the doorstep on snowy days and that I should come down to the curb at the bottom of the hill.
Instead, I took on a subscription to the electronic edition. And haven't had a print subscription in the decade since.
But then went about eight years without an electronic subscription, either, until a few months ago when I joined others on this sinking ship in subscribing to a paper in order to help support real journalism, not the phony kind which, as Dave Fitzsimmons suggests, punched the holes in our national hull.
However, the corporate owners of newspapers are correct: You can save money by refusing to deliver the paper to customers.
You can also save some money by dropping the features they like and shrinking the newspaper down to a pamphlet.
And then blame the Internet for their reluctance to shell out for a subscription.
The days are long since gone when a phone call to the local paper was local, and, while there are any number of businesses to which today's Bizarro might apply, the newspaper is a particularly striking one because we were once a connection between the community and the wider world outside.
When I was first a reporter, I got a lot of odd calls from readers, because, as the business writer, I worked 9 to 5 rather than 1 to 9 like the other reporters. Judy, the human being who took the calls, put them through to me and I had some nice conversations and got some very good news tips from folks who had noticed something or wondered about something and so simply picked up the phone and called their local paper.
Then we got voice mail and those people got frustrated from being forced into Touch-Tone Hell and stopped calling.
But, yes, for those who bothered, their calls were recorded for training purposes.
Training middle management on how to fire anyone who chatted with customers rather than simply taking their orders and hanging up on them and going to the next call.
Now here's your moment of nautical Irish zen
Also on the topic of sinking ships full of Nazis, tomorrow is the anniversary of the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, which is significant because it was the first time most of us had seen Anthony Quayle, and also because it spurred an odd little song that was popular in Ulster among the shipbuilding British patriots there.
Which is to say, not my people, who were barred from shipyard work by their religion and, perhaps as a consequence, weren't that fond of Mother England, but anyway, it's a funny little song and an odd little battle and not a bad movie, if you can find it.
And even if you can't.
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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