CSotD: Grave intentions
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While everyone is obsessing over the potential for an openly gay person to play football, little angels tap-dancing their way into heaven and the president using the same executive powers every president since Benjamin Harrison has used at a higher rate than he has but without being, y'know, uppity or Kenyan about it, Jim Morin picks up the legalized murder thread ongoing in his home state of Florida.
Now, you tell me which cartoonists are wasting their talent, because the difference I see is that he's right and he's talking about something that matters.
But wasting their time is a different matter. There are cartoonists doing commentary about the harsh winter, and I haven't noticed it getting any warmer as a result.
Question about stupid, senseless killings is, are we going to just talk about it, or are we going to do something about it?
As has been noted by others, one goofball tries unsuccessfully to light a bomb in his shoe and everybody has to take off their shoes before boarding an airplane. Another guy successfully slaughters little children in an elementary school and we get candles, teddy bears and … crickets.
There are any number of reasons. Here are three:
1. We've ramped up the cop shows on TV and the violent kill-the-bad-guy movies to the point where we've whipped the booboisie into a state of constant fear wildly out of proportion to the hazards of daily life.
2. The pistol-packin' paranoids have organized such that, though they are nothing more than a loud minority, they are able to make the Congressmen dance to their off-key tunes.
3. We are a bunch of idiots whose well-considered views on firearms line up exactly with our well-considered views on how national budgets are created and our well-considered views on the terror posed by gay football players and our well-considered views on the relative merits of negotiating with Iran versus starting yet another war.
In other words, I wasted all but the first six words of that last paragraph.
But specifically to the "Stand Your Ground" issue: I don't know of any state in the union in which a person has ever been legally prevented from using force to counter an actual threat.
What "Stand Your Ground" allows is a defense based on perceived threat, which, as Morin's cartoon and any number of recent news stories attest, means that you can shoot someone because you think they are scary, even if you have no rational basis for that opinion.
And even if you are simply, honestly mistaken.
The blog has been a little too full of personal anecdotes lately, but here's one more anyway:
My sophomore year in college, I rented a room about two-and-a-half miles from campus. I had no car and the bus would require going all the way into the middle of town and transferring, which was silly and, besides, it was the Sixties.
It was the Sixties, but I wasn't a fool. South Bend isn't Aspen or South Beach and there was a little resentment of Domers, so I'd walk and hitch until I was about a mile from campus and then get up on the sidewalk and hoof it the rest of the way.
And, for my protection, I carried a switchblade. It didn't have a spring — that would have been illegal — but I could open it with one hand nonetheless, and it came in handy for opening packages or whatever. Scraping the residue from pipes, or poking small holes in slightly-crushed soft drink cans, for instance.
Early in the fall, there were a number of incidents in the area I had to walk through, in which Notre Dame students were robbed while walking or jogging by someone in a large, dark car who would spring out at them, hit them with a section of lead pipe and take their wallets.
So I stopped hitching after half a mile instead of a mile, and I kept my wits about me.
Sure enough, one evening as I walked home in the dark under trees that still had plenty of leaves to shut out the effect of the street lights, a large, dark car pulled up alongside me and slowed to match my pace.
I pretended to ignore it, but I took the knife from my pocket and one-handed it open, concealed in the darkness next to my far leg.
The car followed along a little while, then came to a stop. I kept walking, but a door opened and I wheeled as a form lept from the car and raced towards me.
I drew back my arm, low, as the person lept towards me, called my name and joyously threw her arms around my neck.
"Oh, hi, Patti! Glad I didn't just stab you."
When I got home, I put that goddam stupid knife in a drawer where it belonged.
MERCUTIO: Thou art like one of those fellows that when he enters the confines of a tavern claps me his sword upon the table and says 'God send me no need of thee!' and by the operation of the second cup draws it on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.
****
MERCUTIO (moments later): 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough,'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o' both your houses! 'Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.
ROMEO I thought all for the best.
Indeed. They always think it was all for the best.
The law, after all, is based on what they think is all for the best.
See you later, gang. Maybe.
Garry Trudeau has announced that Doonesbury is going on an open-ended hiatus, beginning February 24. Mike Cavna has the best write-up.
I really like Alpha House and am delighted there will be a second season.
That said, I'll be interested to see if he comes back to the strip. Foxtrot went Sundays-only several years ago, so it's not unprecedented, and it will be fun to see the old Doonesbury strips.
For awhile.
I read all sorts of old strips on-line, but print real estate is too precious these days to waste it on reruns. And, honestly, the decision will be made by a lot of young whippersnappers who don't remember half of what the Doonesbury gang riffed on back in the Olden Days.
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