CSotD: Hey! I know this guy! I used to work for him!
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Rico Schacherl, known in these parts as half the Madam & Eve team, has also been cartooning for Finweek, a business weekly in South Africa, where apparently management is just as hip as they are in the United States and elsewhere.
Rupert Murdoch doesn't have a computer on his desk either. I'll bet he doesn't even know how to tap a phone himself, and it's probably been years since he personally bribed an official, at least on a retail level.
I've certainly known clueless corporate gits who had their emails printed out and put on their desks, but until this moment I never thought through the next step: How do they respond to them?
I suppose they have Miss Khumalo do that.
(I just did us all a big favor by deleting a rant about clueless people making uninformed decisions. You're welcome.)
Instead, here is a picture of Theodore Roosevelt at his desk, most likely — according to the folks at Dickinson State's Theodore Roosevelt Center, whose collection it comes from — when he was on the police commission in New York, which would make it about 1896.
Within a decade, he would become the first president to fly in an airplane, the first president to go down in a submarine and the first president to install a personal telephone line in the White House. Clearly, he had no fear of technology.
Nor, apparently, was he a slave to it.
Check out what isn't on his desk. No computer, of course. But also no typewriter in view. And apparently no telephone, either.
The difference between him and Rupert Murdoch or the fellow in today's cartoon is that it doesn't look like he was delegating it all to Miss Khumalo, or at least she wasn't responsible for doing anything about the floor around his wastebasket.
And we have already observed that, in his various governmental positions, he was so productive that the exasperated Republicans finally made him vice-president just to stick him some place where he wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. He wasn't the type to decorate a desk, blow hot air and leave all the heavy lifting to someone else.
We also already knew that we could use a whole lot more of Teddy and a whole lot less of Rupert.
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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