CSotD: Only enough to win
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There have been more than a few cartoons about Kim Jong Un and his odd threats against the United States, but none of them seemed to quite hit the mark until I came across this one at Cartoon Movement.
It probably helps that the cartoonist, Miguel Villalba Sanchez ("elchicotriste"), is Spanish and so doesn't really have a dog in the fight, no pun intended. And I like his bio at Cartoon Movement, in which he states, "My only goal is to report power's abuse, and if possible, by doing so paying the rent."
Not the first Spaniard to dream the impossible dream.
In general, I've been put off by cartoons making fun of Kim because I think it's easy to dismiss his absurd rhetoric if you assume a shared culture, and we kind of dug ourselves into a hole the last time we did that, and we're in the midst of digging an even deeper hole in the same part of the world.
Which is to say, all the "mother of all battles" rhetoric that came out of Saddam and the bombastic claims of "Baghdad Bob" were very funny, except for all the unnecessary dead people on both sides. And now we've got sabre-rattlers and war-mongers and those willing to sacrifice other people's children's lives because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shares Saddam's predilection for making ridiculous, bombastic claims.
Fact is, there are cultures in which bombastic threats are simply part of the rhetoric and nobody takes them seriously. That is, a bunch of posturing goes on, everyone applauds and then they go home. Nothing actually happens, nor was anyone expecting anything to happen. The rooster's crowing does more to make the sun come up than this crowing does to determine the course of world affairs.
I'm not saying it's not funny. In fact, there seems to be a contest of the absurd going on between the two leaders that involves a lot more Photoshop than actual weaponry.
And, okay, yeah, I do kind of wonder if Ahmadinejad's magical no-exhaust-ports jet could be deployed and guided from Kim Jong Un's TRS-80 command center.
(The plane on the sidewalk outside the grocery store has a larger cockpit, and it only costs 25 cents to take a ride in it!)
(Jon Stewart dismissed this as "a harpsichord with a panic button."
I can't top that.)
However, as much derisive laughter as their hot air and fakery provoke, let's remember how funny the last couple of years in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven to be.
I don't know how his own people view Kim, but Ahmadinejad has plenty of opposition. And, whatever a despot's domestic standing may be, the quickest route to uniting a country is an external threat, as we've just demonstrated.
Twice.
Derisive laughter, however, can be a peacemaker, properly applied, and that doesn't mean borderline-racist jokes about how quickly we could, in fact, destroy a country if we chose to. The "proper application" is not to insult the people, but to simply dismiss the seriousness of the threat.
Here's a story I've certainly never told before, but it seems to fit the moment:
One evening when I was in college, I overindulged to the point where I mostly know this story from other people telling me about it later. But apparently, at some point in the evening, I lurched across the room to where I saw an empty chair at a table of football players I knew, and plopped my Woody-Allen ass down in it.
Shortly thereafter, a 6'4", 240-pound defensive tackle who I didn't happen to know — but who the NY Giants apparently did, since they drafted him in the seventh round — came back to the table with a pitcher of beer and told me to get out of his chair. And I told him to go do something impossible.
The outraged behemoth came very close to squashing me like a bug, except that everyone else at the table had instantly burst into such peals of laughter that, after a split second in which my life hung in the balance, he joined them and thus tragedy was averted.
Which brings us to today's cartoon, and the headline above it, which references an old, very crude joke about a little boy whose mother sees him with a lot of cash, suspects he has been in a contest, and asks if he has broken the rule against showing anyone his outsized accoutrement, to which he answers as written above.
Go thou and do likewise, Mr. President.
Or, better yet, just join in the general laughter and pull up another chair.
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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