CSotD: A global change in the tone of conversation
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Timing is everything in comedy, they say, and Tak Bui's timing with this PC & Pixel was pretty good.
Thursday I had to hang around for a conference call from another time zone and it didn't wrap up until a few minutes after four p.m. here, which meant I had to immediately throw the dog into the car and get to the park while there was still a shred of light left.
Or have a year-old 95 pound pup bouncing off the walls all evening for lack of exercise.
Once we got there, it being within two weeks of the longest night of the year, the topic came up. Morning is fine, but afternoons are getting problematic. On the other hand, one of the fellows down there is Icelandic and had a significant edge on the rest of us in terms of having experienced seasonal light change.
"Europe is farther north than most people realize" shifted the topic from light to the potential for chaos if the Gulf Stream gets either diverted or cooled down by the additional fresh water from global warming, which brings us to today's comic, albeit at the other end of the globe.
His family left Iceland when he was only 9 (I'd guess 35 or 40 years ago), but he goes back every year, and he told us that he has had occasion to fly over Greenland several times in those years. It was once ice right to the coastline. Now there are substantial expanses of green-gray rock.
One of the oddities of living in a community where the two major employers are an Ivy League university and a major medical center is that you can have the kind of conversation which ensued among people who have nothing in common beyond devotion to dogs and not have anyone pipe up to contradict the idea that the ice caps are melting, that some small South Pacific nations are already losing real estate to the ocean, that vintners in California are already planting vines in anticipation of having to change species and that alterations in the Gulf Stream could really mess with the climate in Northern Europe.
Don't get me wrong — the Upper Valley is not Berkeley or Northampton. I've also been in on a conversation with someone convinced that the president was born in Kenya. But that was at an American Legion event I was covering for the paper. (The American Legion Post is across the street from the Center for Cartoon Studies. There's some cultural diversity for yez.)
So there was plenty of potential for some naysaying and denial, but the half dozen of us chatted along on the assumption that, yeah, it's happening. That's not a statistically valid sample, but it does make me wonder if the climate deniers are starting to be out on a small desert island with the birthers and the truthers.
At least they won't lack for editorial cartoonists to trot out panels featuring guys shoveling snow while making dismissive quips about global warming. No shortage of them, or of editors eager to run their work.
(Which brings up the question, if you can lose your job for ripping off other people's cartoons, is there a point at which you need to stop running the same cartoon of your own with minute variations over and over and over again? Columnists have an ethical constraint against what is called "self-plagiarism." If that were enforced against all cartoonists, I can think of some zombie strips that would quickly disappear, but it does seem fair to me that we ask political cartoonists to come up with fresh ideas.)
But I digress.
PC & Pixel is hipper than the average syndicated strip, but it's hardly edgy. If this gag were from Bizarro, it wouldn't impress me as much because Dan Piraro keeps a soap box in his studio and steps up on it at least a couple of times a week. And I might expect something along these lines from Candorville or La Cucaracha, though the setting is hard to imagine.
But when climate change becomes fodder for humor not just among the Tom Tomorrows and Jen Sorensens of the cartoon world but for relatively sedate strips like this, and when the joke is about the phenomenon and about not the debate over it, it may be that the conversation has begun to be more universal and less the exclusive province of the left.
That's the kind of global change we should welcome.
And now for something completely different:
If you're still shopping and you're not only a comics fan but also one of those Heifer International sorts of people who like to give a gift that will do something extra, here's a suggestion.
A group of web cartoonists have put together a cookbook that they are selling as a fundraiser for food banks. If they're selling it in your area, that will keep the donation local. If you buy it online, the profits go to a national foodbank. You can learn more at the website.
You can see a couple of other samples there, but you can click on this one (which is particularly relevant to the season and comes from this elegant strip) to make it readable and it shows the general concept. There's some variety of recipes in the samples that I assume follows through in the book itself, and this seems a bit beyond the usual fundraiser cookbook with 40 variations on brownies and 100 ways to use cream of mushroom soup.
And it's only $15. Wotthehell, arch, wotthehell.
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