CSotD: When the odd play the odds
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So many of the characters in Pros & Cons appear totally demented that it's interesting to see how rational Kieran Meehan decided to make this fellow appear.
It's really the only way the gag could work: He has to appear completely rational or the focus of his madness becomes irrelevant and he might as well just be one more cartoon cuckoo in a Napoleon costume.
And the point of the gag is that he isn't foreseeing a flood. He's simply playing the odds, and he's no more irrational than a person who plays the lottery.
It's not crazy to think that something unlikely is going to happen. It's only crazy to think that it's going to happen to you.
So he is a loony, but we don't lock people up for buying scratch-off tickets, do we?
Incidentally, I don't know if there really are any people out there who are convinced that they are Napoleon, but I've heard that, if you go to the Holy Lands, you can meet all the Jesus Christs and John the Baptists you'd care to.
I'd be less interested in meeting them in Jerusalem than I would be in watching them obtain their passports in Columbus.
But, come to think of it, John the Baptist used to hang out on the street in Boulder, and he'd come into the bar, sit down with you and have a beer and explain the whole thing. He didn't pull off the "appear completely rational" part very convincingly, but, fortunately for him, the way you would stand out as someone to be carefully monitored in Boulder back in 1970 would have been to appear completely rational.
As it was, he managed to blend in pretty well.
Meanwhile, a girl (now a woman) I went to school with started a Facebook page for alumni that has gone relatively viral, given the small-town background of our little K-12.
It's touched off a lot of reminiscences, although, in a small town, you have to couch the more humorous memories in careful language. When I moved my boys back to Northern New York, I warned them, "Be careful what you say about anyone, because you're talking to his cousin." I wasn't kidding.
This cartoon puts me in mind of a mother/daughter teaching team that was in our town for a few years and, not having any cousins anyone knew of, touched off some wonderful rumors.
Aside from some deliciously loopy things one or the other of them would say in class, and a report that they preferred their popcorn charred, it was widely said that they believed the ice caps were going to melt.
Which, considering we're talking about the late 1950s, could make them prophets.
Except that their view of the matter was more apocalyptic than climatological: They expected it to happen all at once, and kept the trunk of their car packed with supplies in anticipation of the resulting floodwaters.
I suppose they'd have been crazy not to.
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