CSotD: The Devil is in the Irrelevant Details
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I’ve had to put on a sweatshirt lately in the wee hours when I write this stuff, though it’s warm when I hit the dog park a few hours later. We’re even seeing a few leaves begin to turn.
Meanwhile, our national and international situations are wheeling way out of whack, and the fellow in Weyant’s piece is right. Even the comics on the funny pages reflect it.
I identify with the woman in this morning’s Bliss. There’s a spot on the river, surrounded by woods, that we call the K9 Beach. We’ve brought in some chairs and the dogs have their choice of wading in the water or rustling through the brush while a light, cooling breeze wafts down the river valley.
But I often feel privileged and guilty that we can sit there untouched by what’s happening elsewhere. Several of the dog park people know Mohsen Mahdawi, a local man who was seized by ICE, but we’re largely untouched by the chaos that seems to be happening in the Big City.
However, it makes me think back to 1965, when I was in England as the Watts Riots were breaking out. We pictured the city of LA in flames until some American tourists arrived later and said you wouldn’t know anything was wrong unless you were right in the neighborhood where it was happening.
Yes, you don’t have to be tucked away in the woods to avoid things, but we’re morally obligated to give a damn and to speak up even if we’re not being personally impacted.
I’m also reminded of my interview with Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich, at the height of the Troubles:
One thing that strikes me is that the Catholics of the South of Ireland, the southern part of my own diocese even, they want to distance themselves from the violence of the North. They’re inclined to say ‘God, keep it up there, as long as it stays away from us, we’re OK.’ … I mean, it’s not a thousand miles away, it’s not in Afghanistan or Iran or Iraq. We shouldn’t distance ourselves from any suffering, but at least it should be easier to distance ourselves from those than from something in Ireland. Yet they do try, even from something which I think Christian charity demands that we try to be helpful with.
Juxtaposition of the Day
You don’t have to march in the streets, though it’s good to show up for local demonstrations to indicate the number of people who refuse to accept bland assurances we know are not true.
But you aren’t required to pull up paving stones and erect barricades; it’s enough to remain well-informed and to talk with your friends and neighbors about what’s going on.
I’ve seen several people on-line ask why such-and-such a statement or event was not covered by the media, but they are being covered.
The problem is that your on-line feed is largely compiled based on what you and others are reading. If your feed is mostly about Sydney Sweeney’s blue jeans and the Cracker Barrel logo, you can’t blame the Guardian or the NYTimes.
If more important matters are not coming to the surface, perhaps it’s because you’ve established yourself as not caring about those things, or, possibly, you are only looking at the surface. If you start digging down, they’ll start emerging.
As for soul searching, that’s also a case of maybe having to look for it rather than assuming it will pop out by itself. Take a moment to read Paul Berge’s memoir about a minister and friend from Kenosha who bucked the church and resigned his position in order to say what he needed to say.
I don’t envy teachers these days, having to choose between risking their jobs or risking their souls in order to provide young people with both truth and hope at a time when the two seem incompatible.
Things have gotten better in the past and they’ll get better in the future, but maybe not right away and surely not just by hunkering down and waiting for it to happen.
I’d like to assure that kid that things will be better in his lifetime. Maybe they might, or he might be like the man who plants a cherry tree, not expecting to sample its fruit himself but knowing that someone in the future will be grateful he made the effort.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Here’s where we’re at: In 1936, Stephen Vincent Benét portrayed Satan as evil and anti-American in The Devil and Daniel Webster, and, in 1954, Douglass Wallop still made him a bad, disruptive spirit in The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the musical Damn Yankees.
Though if people still feared the Devil then, I doubt they’d have accepted the posters accenting Gwen Verdon in her dainties, much less her getting top billing over both the would-be ballplayer and the Devil himself.
Fact is, Satan is losing his grip, according to a 2023 Gallup Poll reported in the Baptist Press.
And so, in our Juxtaposition, Speed Bump treats him as a sort of suburban nebbish, while Tom the Dancing Bug suggests that earthly greed has a better grip on the souls of sinners than old Dan Patch once traditionally mustered.
Satan’s gone from a figure of terror to one of fear to a somewhat earthly villain and now to an ineffectual nobody.
But humor isn’t funny unless it contains an element of truth, and even Coverly’s depiction of Satan at a garden party makes the suggestion that we’re all on some level subject to temptation. You may choose whether you see the message as that we’re now immune to the idea or that, since we all give in to some extent, it’s become routine.
However, there’s no doubt about Tom the Dancing Bug’s clear intention, which is that, evil as Satan may be, we’ve got plenty of people whose innate evil makes him superfluous.
I’ve little remedy for all this, but Telnaes’ modern riff on Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 The Great Dictator does suggest that, if you have HBO Max or Amazon Prime, you should watch the original.
Or at least the final speech:
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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