CSotD: Carpe diem before de man carpes you
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A departure from format today because of a bit of serendipitous synchronicity (as in the best it is). Two cartoons, not in opposition, not exactly in concert, but worth viewing together and not just in that NPR "on this hand but then again on the other hand" way.
Matt Bors has posted this observation …
… while over at his new blog, David Horsey posted this:
The two comics are kind of like this winter here in New Hampshire.
We've had almost no snow at all. For those who don't live in snow country, a primer: There are two ways to pay the fellow who plows your driveway, either a flat-rate for the season or by the trip.
Either way, if you have more than about eight inches of snow, he shows up. The economic gamble you take is on how often that's going to happen.
If you chose to pay by the season this year, you have been — at the risk of utilizing a highly technical accounting term — royally screwed.
While I've seen big plows on the Interstate a few times, they've mostly been scraping and salting to avoid ice build-up. We've only had one snowfall in which the private plow drivers could even marginally justify going out, and very few did.
We're now halfway through the time of year when we should be slogging through thigh-high drifts and it simply hasn't happened, which should be good news, except that my take on weather is more karmic than meteorological.
Instead of enjoying this unprecedented break from normal New England winter, I'm looking around at the bare ground and thinking, "Oh, man, we are so going to pay for this … "
Part of that comes from memories of the 1998 Ice Storm, for which I didn't just have a front row seat but a spot on the stage, and part of it comes from a tendency to channel Hardy Hyena.
That same combination of experience and dread comes into play in both these cartoons: Both give a degree of recognition to the concept of resilience and hope, while both predict that powerful forces will soon move to rise back up and stifle any permanent alteration of the power structure.
Knowing the work of both cartoonists, it's not surprising that Bors takes a pragmatic and utilitarian view of the moment while Horsey has a sardonic, philosophical take. A Bors cartoon typically expresses, "Here's what it is," while Horsey typically goes for "Here's what it's like."
While Bors is more direct — and more optimistic about the potential — both cartoonists are issuing a call for action, a suggestion that there is a moment to be seized if not entirely captured.
I like both cartoons. I don't need anyone to skip joyously through the daffodils, but there is good news once in awhile and political cartoonists should not be afraid of recognizing it, even if, as in Horsey's case, it is in a markedly dark tone.
You risk losing both your integrity and your impact when you are constantly on the attack. There are cartoonists on both the left and right whose entire vision is negative, who look at every news story only for a way to stretch it into an attack on their enemies.
This seriously limits them, because they are no longer capable of surprising the reader. They can, of course, whip their devoted followers into a froth on a regular basis, but they make few converts. Even when you agree with their general orientation on the liberal/conservative spectrum, the constant din of repetitious fearmongering and one-sided vitriol becomes off-puttingly monotonous.
Their knee-jerk pitbull partisanship also bothers me because I think there's enough stupidity and willful ignorance to go around as it is, and I see no reason for either side to reinforce that plentiful supply by grasping at threads in order to encourage their respective mobs to keep howling.
The thing is, opinion-makers should never allow themselves to be so firmly jammed into a pigeonhole that they can't sometimes look at the words or actions of a politician or pundit from the other side of the aisle and say, "Well, that was pretty cool."
Similarly, they should be able to look at a moment and see the positive in it, and call on people to seize it, to take advantage.
Even if you don't think the moment is going to last.
Especially if you don't think the moment is going to last.
Your reading assignment: The Columbia Journalism Review takes a realistic look at the current state of political cartooning. "Realistic" isn't "encouraging," but, then, even here there are moments to be seized and not a lot of time left for the seizing of them.
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