Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Once or twice more unto the breach dear friends

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Mike Peterson Published: October 10, 2011 1 minute 3 comments

You may wish to put a dishtowel under your computer to catch some of the dripping sarcasm in Matt Bors's current commentary. Or read it straight up and assume he's my age.

Sarcasm is a difficult tool because, to begin with, there are a great many people with no sense of irony, and, in addition, it's damned hard to come up with a statement so ridiculous that noone has said it with sincerity. Then, too, as Swift noted: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”

Which is to say, most people won't get it at all and those who do get it at all, won't get it all.

But what the hell. Swift also said, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

I've struggled with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations since they began, sometimes publicly but almost constantly privately. And that second quote is probably about as central to my thoughts as anything.

We need to stop and correct the direction the country has been headed, but I'm not sure I like the new leaderless leaders or find them any less Orwellian than the leadery leaders we've already got.

Matt's blog post begins "I wish AdBusters told everyone to meet on Wall Street a long time ago," and I wish he had said something like "suggested" rather than "told."

It has to start somewhere, yes. These things don't just happen. But, while comparing the current movement to movements of the past seems to have been declared an offshoot of Godwin's Law, there is a difference between Adbusters and the SDS.

I wasn't that crazy about the SDS, but at least you could tell who was represented there, and they also had what may have been a naive belief in the democratic system. Adbusters seems more self-appointed, kind of pre-fabricated, the Monkees to the SDS Beatles.

But, as said, I wasn't that crazy about the SDS, either. I constantly kicked back against True Believers throughout the Sixties, even as I attended their rallies and supported their causes. And one thing I learned was that, when you kick back against a True Believer, they immediately assume you are not being equally critical of their opponents, because they see the world in a binary, black-and-white manner.

To see nuance is to hesitate, and when everyone hesitates, nothing happens.

We need our True Believers.

And so I wish Adbusters had invited everyone to meet on Wall Street a long time ago.

Here's what else I wish:

I wish for some honest dialogue.

The continuing lie that the media is not covering the demonstrations is just that, a lie. It may be a misapprehension at some level, but it is being furthered by True Believers who are admitted liars, on the pretense that a lie in the service of justice is not evil.

For example, this photo, which has been posted all over Facebook, is a fraud. And I don't mean that I've come up with my own opinion of it. It's a fake, and you can see the takedown on it here.

Don't miss the comments, because, not only does a faker emerge, but then he is apparently unmasked as a faker of fakes … and it's all a lovely distraction from the fact that, as soon as the demonstrations grew beyond "local news" size, they did begin to get coverage in the national media.

As you can see in this timeline.

But honesty goes both ways, and, if I'm going to condemn "The media won't cover us," I also have to condemn "They have no plan."

They have a plan, at least to the extent that a leaderless movement can agree on anything, and it's pretty well stated and well reasoned. And while some of the comments that follow are moronic, a great number of them are thoughtful and constructive.

Now, back to our cartoon: A plan nobody wants to listen to is the tree falling in the desert. This leaderless group needs to begin to project a coherent face to the world, and, unfortunately, the fourth panel speaks an eternal truth about mass media.

Not everybody who goes to a Tea Party rally dresses like a colonial jackass. And not everyone who marches through Wall Street looks like the spokesmodel for "Crunchy Granola — Now with Extra Hemp!"

But I promise you that, if a photographer shoots 1,000 pictures of normal, average-looking people at a rally for any group, and then takes one shot of a screwball in face paint, the screwball is going to make Page One.

You can call it a conspiracy, but, if it's a conspiracy, it's the same conspiracy that causes cameras at ball games to focus on the screwballs in facepaint, and it's the same conspiracy that has left people with the idea that everyone at Woodstock had hair to their butts and no clothes on.

This creates two issues: One is that people will think the demonstrators are all screwballs and they won't want to listen to them. The other is that people will think the demonstrators are all screwballs and so the ones who do go to demonstrations will feel compelled to act like screwballs.

In other words, it would be nice if people would try not to be screwballs, because it's hopeless to think the media won't focus on the screwballs.

And since there will always be a few screwballs at any public gathering, that might as well have been a sarcastic recommendation on my part.

So let's pretend it was.

But I still don't like True Believers, in anything.

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.