CSotD: Whoa! A non-ignorant cartoon!
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Okay, check this out: It's almost as if Marshall Ramsey actually bothered to find out what "Hunger Games" was about before trying to work it into a cartoon!
At this point, that comes as a double delight.
First of all, it's been an annoyance, since the blockbuster movie opened, to see lazy cartoonists, as well as some lazy columnists and other lazy pundits, sum it up as being "about kids killing kids."
Yes. Yes, it is.
And "Fahrenheit 451" is about a guy whose wife likes to watch television.
And "Brave New World" is about a country boy trying to adapt to life in the city.
And "Animal Farm" is about talking pigs.
Now, I know about "Hunger Games" because I edit a youth-written publication and the books were being written about by some of our more perceptive middle-school writers.
At first, I knew only that it was a dystopian fantasy, but their reviews of each book were thoughtful enough that I bought the first in the series and read it out of a professional sense of obligation to know what smart kids were finding of interest.
I was about a quarter of the way into it when I said, "This is actually quite good!"
By contrast, I got about that far into "Twilight" before I said, "Okay, okay, I get it. Lemme out!"
My point is not that I'm a hip guy (which is, in any case, self-evident).
But, while I might have paid attention because I have grandkids in that demographic, and I certainly would have when my own kids were that age, I paid attention because it was professionally necessary.
And, whether they work with kids or not, people in the media do have some professional obligation to find out what they're talking about before voicing an opinion on anything.
Or at least they used to.
Judging from the political cartoons I'm seeing at this early stage in the campaign season, I seem to hold a minority opinion on this ethical concept, in a country that — if you believe its punditry — increasingly hates and distrusts minorities. There are some staggeringly fact-free cartoons hitting the pages and web sites, and it's getting to the point where even "truthiness" is being stretched to unrecognizable proportions.
On the other hand, I might be missing something: Maybe the cartoonists who are slagging "Hunger Games" despite not having bothered to find out anything about it are voicing an honest opinion, which is "If this is popular with kids, it must be stupid and pointless."
In their minds, "kids" are those dim, lazy little parasites who have saggy pants and giant backpacks and who punctuate every sentence with "like" and who have iPhones with apps and who wear their baseball caps backwards.
Nothing new in that. There were plenty of cartoonists back in my youth who continued to depict the Beatles as mop-tops singing "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" long after Sgt. Pepper.
But, having segued into the promised second point about Ramsey's cartoon, I would note that he has used the "Hunger Games" motif to make a cogent observation about young people and the economy, and, with student debt in the news at the moment, I'd include that as an implied theme in his commentary.
The idea that the Power Structure is forcing young people into deadly competition to survive, while not an exact reading of the "Theseus and the Minotaur" theme behind "Hunger Games," is a close enough parallel to make this a solid piece of commentary.
In the book — as in the myth — young people are chosen to be sacrificed in order to placate a merciless tyrant. In this case, it is neither King Minos nor the dictators of Panem who demand this blood, but the beneficiaries of a system that relies on the coerced overspending of its citizen wage-slaves.
We tell our kids "You must go to college or we won't even look at your applications."
And we then make the finances for this all-but-mandatory requirement their problem and not ours, the first piles in the mountain of debt that will dominate their working lives.
Yes, we have Pell Grants, the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down, in a most delightful way.
BFD
The bright spot in all this has been institution of some substantial reforms in the system, the largest piece of which had to be bundled with "Obamacare" in order to get past the banking lobby. But it was a sneak, and, if the entire health care reform act is thrown out, this could be endangered as well.
More immediately, administration attempts to keep interest rates low are running into opposition, with opponents saying that, while it's a good idea, we can't afford it without raising taxes.
We can afford to send our young people off to wage war in Southwest Asia without a tax increase, mind you.
Come to think of it, I'll bet the average Taliban fighter is of an age where we could, indeed, sum up the plot of the war in Afghanistan as being "about kids killing kids."
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