CSotD: Who did you think they were?
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Thank you, Wiley Miller.
After the incredible flood of lame, uninformed cartoons about the Facebook IPO, somebody finally points a finger in the right direction.
To use a sports analogy, the Facebook IPO has been similar to the drafting of Tim Tebow.
Prior to the draft, experts — that is, people who know how the game is played — said that, while he was an outstanding, even extraordinary, athlete, and a heckuva nice kid, Tebow was not prepared to be a starting quarterback in the NFL and might never develop into one. He could, they added, be a solid addition to a team, given some time to develop.
A reasonable third round, maybe even second round, choice.
Yet the Broncos snatched him up in the first round (by making trades to be sure to get an athlete who nobody else was going to take that early anyway) and then restructured their team around the idea that, if he didn't start in his rookie season, he'd certainly be their quarterback by his second.
And Tebow proved two things in his first year: (1) He is a superb athlete capable of doing amazing things and (2) the experts were right. He wasn't ready to be a starting quarterback and may never be.
The geniuses who drafted him were fired and he's been traded. But the debacle was certainly not his fault.
Unless you honestly feel that Tebow should have told the Broncos he didn't deserve first-round money and that they really shouldn't take him that early.
Okay, he said it was God's will.
But, hey, maybe he's right. Maybe God just wanted him to get all that money. And maybe God had something similar planned for Mark Zuckerberg.
Or maybe God just wanted to make a lot of sinful, greedy people look foolish.
Because, really, if you look at what happened in either case, the only explanation is that it was God's will.
Or, y'know, that even people in nice suits who have a lot of money can do really, really stupid things.
And we know it can't be that.
"I screwed up" is a hard sentence to get out. "He lied to me" is easier.
Or, in a pinch, "Hey, these things happen," which is a modern way of saying, "It was God's will."
There aren't a lot of people who are able to accept the fact that being in a position where you ought to know better, and even being in a position where you do know better, is not sufficient to protect you against a prideful lack of focus, discipline and effort:
But let's drop the sports analogies. This is, after all, a high-minded blog about the art of cartooning.
We'll leave the final word on speculation and speculators to one of the senior statesmen of editorial cartooning, Jan Brueghel the Younger, who provided this analysis of the Dutch tulip bubble:
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