CSotD: Goodgamegoodgamegoodgamegoodgame
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Glenn McCoy is one of those conservatives whom I like when he's not being political — the Duplex is often featured here — but whose politics make me swallow hard and move on.
Not today, and he's not the only conservative cartoonist who seems to be taking a more insightful view of the supposed secession movement than those on the progressive side of the spectrum, most of whom are doing tie-ins with Spielberg's Lincoln movie.
Statues and posters of Lincoln looking dubious are really not much of a commentary, except in the long, long run. That is, if the disloyalty grows, well, okay.
But the secession "movement" is no real sign of that, as Scott Stantis notes in a comparison between 1861 and the current kerfuffle that is more derisive than cautionary:
No, secession sure ain't, Scott, and it's interesting to me that the conservatives seem to have a more pragmatic perspective on this, dismissing it as a ridiculous hissy fit of isolated losers rather than some kind of genuine political outcry. Gary Varvel's take isn't particularly memorable, but it does indicate the perspective that seems to be emanating from that side of the aisle.
(Besides, any Disney gag these days that doesn't involve Darth Vader in Mouseketeer ears is welcome.)
Progressives are treating this thing as a movement, while conservatives are treating it as an exhibit of individual stupidity and pique.
As McCoy suggests, there are plenty of people who would love to live in this country, whatever its faults, and building a "wall" — physical or conceptual — at the border is to seal out the intruders, not keep our own citizens from leaving.
Collecting the signatures of 25,000 screwballs and sore losers is not evidence that an entire state wants much of anything, and this may be a fun story to attract viewers but it's not something you need to "refute."
In fact, I put a little graphic graffiti on Facebook the other day because I had seen a highlight from an NFL game where one player was fussing and yelling over something or other and the player he was screaming at gave the traditional response of the winner to the loser: He simply pointed up at the scoreboard.
Secede all you want, man. But check out the final score and don't expect the rest of your state to go with you.
Pack up, move out, don't forget to write. Love it or leave it. We'll struggle on somehow.
Meanwhile, another set of sore losers is moving to the forefront, and this one, I think, deserves more of a slapdown: The selfish plutocrats who are weeping into their martinis over the Affordable Care Act and getting us into another of those "Are they idiots or do they think we are?" confrontations.
Some major Denny's restaurant franchisee announced that, rather than raise prices silently, he was going to add a surtax to bills labeled "Obamacare" so customers could see the cost of health care for workers.
This would be a change in strategy for Denny's, which didn't point out the increased cost incurred back in 1994 when, faced with a Department of Justice lawsuit, they agreed to pay a $54.4 million fine. Apparently adding a surtax so that customers would see what it cost them to offer black customers decent service didn't seem like a good move.
And apparently this also didn't actually seem like a good move to that guy, because he has amended the threat and announced that he's simply going to cut most of his workers to part time so he doesn't have to give them benefits at all.
This reliance on corporate welfare — keeping hours and pay low enough that the government has to step in and support your workforce at taxpayer expense — is the same strategy being followed by Papa John's Pizza, whose owner claims it would cost him 10 to 14 cents per pizza to pay for health care coverage, a figure apparently inflated by his partisan hissy fit, since a more dispassionate analysis pegs the cost at more like a nickel a pie.
It's nice to note that — in keeping with the numbers on the scoreboard — there may be as many people vowing to boycott Papa John's as there are threatening to secede from the Union, and Mad Magazine has stepped up where I suspect cartoonists will soon follow:
In my last management position, I was ordered to (A) get far more work out of my subordinates than I thought was reasonable to expect while (B) making sure they didn't file for overtime.
I brought this up in conversation before a management meeting and was quickly hushed by other department heads who pointed out the danger of saying things like "Essentially, we're requiring them to falsify their time sheets if they want to keep their jobs."
It's okay to do it. But for god's sake don't admit that you're doing it.
Anyway, there's no Papa John's around here to boycott, which is a shame, but I can still laugh in his face and point up at the scoreboard.
And maybe sing him a little song.
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