CSotD: Monday Short Takes
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A really disconnected grouping today, so let's start easy with Edge City, in which the grandparents have been exploring the concept of retirement communities.
I can be objective about this because, though I am approaching retirement age, I won't ever be able to afford to retire and writers don't "retire" anyway. I came to grips some years ago with the fact that, as a young man, I said that money didn't matter and now I'm able to test that belief system.
So far, so good.
I quit going into the office five years ago and I suspect that, if I still were still doing 9-to-whatever and then retired from it, I'd want to do pretty much what I'm doing now. So I guess I retired early, to the extent I ever will.
But today's strip reminded me of a moment from about 20 years ago, when I wasn't looking at my Golden Years yet, or even my Silver ones. The local Senior Citizens Council had a big gathering, and the newspaper had a booth there.
We brought some bound volumes from a half-century before and people enjoyed going through them and talking, not so much about the news stories, but about the advertisements and the comics and some of the wedding announcements and so forth.
It was fun, and, as I talked to people and looked around, I thought, "You know, there are some pretty sharp old ladies here, and not a lot of guys. Boy, things are pretty cool when you get to this stage of life."
And then realized I meant "if."
Not "when." "If."
And a cold breeze wafted through the room …
And now here's one for the younger folks:
Deflocked cracked me up this morning with an acerbic commentary of the "more is better" school of educational reform.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks that the solution to something that isn't working is more of the thing that isn't working, but at least there is still a lively discussion of homework going on, which is more than can be said of similar reformist concepts that seem to sail through unquestioned.
As we speak, there is a conference of privatizers going on in the Adirondacks while educators protest outside.
Meanwhile — speaking not simply about education but the US in general — I am also knee-deep in a private conversation with someone about how on earth you can hope to reform a system in which the problem is money-as-speech, when money-as-speech is so effective at persuading people that things are just fine.
With education, it's a little the opposite: Money-as-speech is busily convincing people that education is not just fine, that it's in dire straits and needs some hedge fund managers to take it over and make it better.
And so the same people who scream about individual rights and local control are clamoring to see their tax money go to charter schools where boards are not elected and budgets are not voter-approved.
It is a puzzlement.
As for "Horace Mann for the win," my memory is that, while most games of Tic-Tac-Toe end up in stalemate, Hollywood Squares broke the tie by awarding victory to whoever had the most squares at the end.
Making the analogy even more apt and disquieting.
And then there's this:
If you keep saying it, it becomes true, or so the Republicans hope. Steve Sack isn't the only cartoonist pouring derision on the latest unearthing of this lame old warhorse, but, then, there are also cartoonists who are working to promote it.
I was in the supermarket the other day and saw a National Enquirer that flogged some ridiculous story about the Obama marriage that obviously and clearly had not the slightest anchor in truth, and I thought back to when Carol Burnett took them to court and skinned them alive for publishing a deliberate lie about her.
However, I guess as long as they don't lie about something they claim the Obamas did in California, and given the number of larger fish the Prez has to fry anyway, the Enquirer is probably safe.
But it seems kind of … wierd … that supermarkets sell this crap but won't carry Playboy. I don't mean they should carry Playboy, but I'm sure they'd sell plenty of copies of that, too, and so, if the profit motive is off the table, I wonder what the criterion is.
It apparently has something to do with nipples, and the fact that people who hate nipples are more apt to organize protests than are people who hate malicious falsehoods.
Anyway, I worry about the number of people who are dumb enough to believe this idiotic garbage and yet smart enough to find the polling place on election day. It's not as thin a demographic slice as I'd like to hope.
Oh, sorry. I had stopped talking about the Enquirer and was back on the Benghazi thing. Or did that matter?
Language notes:
The classic Mandrake strips in the Vintage section of Comics Kingdom are currently from 1942, and I'd say that either language has gone through a change or else gangsters were a lot more open back then in the way they discussed large, well-muscled black men in skimpy leopardskin outfits.
On the other hand, I'm kind of impressed that this 1944 Johnny Hazard strip, also at Comics Kingdom today, includes a quick gagline in which an enlisted man uses, however mangled, the term "billet doux."
Or maybe I'm not.
I've always suspected that Damon Runyon made up the bulk of his tough-guy street talk and then was successful enough in pushing it that the street began to echo it, much as the real Mafia began to talk like the characters in "the Godfather" after they learned that was what they were supposed to sound like.
Which is to say once again that, if you keep repeating something, no matter how transparently silly and improbable, it will eventually become the truth.
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