CSotD: Humor for those too old to get fooled again
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Arlo and Janis once more taps into my life.
While I sit here praying that, as the newspaper industry implodes around me, my skill set will get me through just a couple of more years until Social Security kicks in, Arlo notes that, yeah, most of what we know seems to be fading into oblivion.
Fortunately, our generation — or at least our little corner of it — still has a penchant for gallows humor, or this wouldn't be funny at all.
Especially since we were apparently right when we started asking questions.
Yeah, I've run this one before. Maybe when someone comes up with an answer, I'll stop running it. Meanwhile, when can we have our economy back?
And don't talk about the deficit. We both know (A) that it's not really the central issue and (B) that it is in large part based on all those other things that, when we ask about them, you get mad.
I wanted to watch the GOP Convention last night, mostly because, like Liza Donnelly, I'm old enough to remember when these things mattered. Liza asks, "Are Political Conventions More Than Just Expensive Infomercials?" and the answer is, well, they used to be, but, no, they're not.
And I guess Liza and Jimmy Johnson and I have to take some of the blame. Back when we were young and knew everything, we objected to conventions where last minute deals in smoke-filled rooms meant the nomination of machine candidates instead of those favored by the people, even if it required throwing entire delegate blocs out on their ears.
So the parties responded by instituting a system of more binding primaries that insured that the candidates would be chosen by the people, and then the various states moved their primaries back, back, back to give themselves more prominence and to insure that the candidates would be chosen well before anyone knew who the hell they were, and so the rest of the campaign would be spent posturing for November instead.
David Horsey had a pretty funny take on this recently. I don't feature him here very often because he explains his cartoons better than I probably would.
As Horsey suggests, Romney didn't so much "win" the nomination so much as he failed to lose it, but, as we old folks remember from one of our more iconic movies, "Sometimes nothing is a cool hand."
If that's true, this sumbitch should be treated for frostbite.
But, anyway, I tuned in the Convention last night — which meant I had to look for it, because now that we don't have just three gatekeepers, we don't have grown-up priorities anymore — and it really was just a glorified pep rally. Which means I'm glad we're not forced to watch it anymore because there's no there there anyway.
What was there was a panel basically coaxing talking points out of various guests and it really was, as Liza suggested, an infomercial, not just in terms of the (expected) triumphalist speeches, but in terms of the spokesmodel-pretending-to-be-a-journalist factor, too.
And then some guy spoke who basically did a stand-up in which he mocked Obama for taking too many vacations and said the only jobs he created were for golf caddies, which puzzled me because Obama has taken far fewer vacations than either George W, George HW or St. Ronald, and I wondered why anyone would even bring up the topic, given how easily the truth can be found.
So I switched it off and apparently what I missed was Ryan bringing the convention to its feet with a speech that not only skirted the facts in some predictably partisan ways, but that showed that, for all his claim to be young and hip, Ryan apparently doesn't monitor YouTube or Politico very efficiently, because he dredged up once more the lie that cunningly suggests that Obama closed the auto plant in his hometown, which was slated for closure before Obama was even the candidate and shut its doors in the last weeks of the Bush Administration.
(Obama did say in Janesville that he would fight for funding to help re-train workers and re-purpose manufacturing plants in the area, so that the factory would still be there in the future. This is not the same as promising to keep it open as it was, and, of course, it is a promise that presupposes cooperation in bipartisan support for that funding. In any case, it was already deceased and had shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and gone to sing with the choir invisible. Ryan apologists' insistence that it was "merely shagged out" not withstanding, it would not have "voomed" if Obama had put four million volts through it.)
In any case, I'm feeling too old to cope with a world in which, like Arlo, the jobs I would have thought were viable and interesting no longer even exist.
I remember that, when I was Gene's age, my then-wife and I briefly toyed with the idea of farming and rejected it as way too labor-intensive and uncertain, given that we wanted to make enough to live on, not in any particular "comfort" but in a way that would let us pursue the things we loved and cared about.
In researching what it actually takes to run a small farm, we learned that, if you don't truly, deeply, madly love and care about farming, you'd better not try it, because you won't have time for anything else.
And the older I get, the more I value finding time for the things I truly, deeply, madly love and care about, rather than fretting over making money.
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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