CSotD: Penalty for excessive celebration
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In today's Non Sequitur, Wiley Miller manages to combine a nagging annoyance with a serious problem. One of the basic tools in the cartoonist's bag of tricks, well-applied.
I cannot begin to express how sick I am of hearing about chocolate.
And bacon.
And zombies.
But at least nobody claims to have found health benefits in bacon or zombies.
Now, there is a certain chicken-or-egg factor in the various claims about health benefits and chocolate, because, whenever a fad emerges, there are always experts who flock to the spotlight, more often decrying the fad, but sometimes in support.
So when the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean turned surfing from a cult activity to a teenage obsession, some doctor announced that he had been treating "surfer's knob."
Does it exist? Well, apparently, yeah. Is it a significant health issue? Who you kidding?
And, as Wiley points out, whatever the validity of the study on chocolate, it hasn't shown that "if a little is good, a lot will be even better."
After all, Warfarin is effective as both a blood thinner and as rat poison, depending on the amount ingested.
Whenever I start to go into Andy Rooney mode over something I've read in the news, I remind myself of how we used to read TIME Magazine in college and roll on the floor over their reports on our lives.
I also remind myself of the way features editors send reporters out to confirm, rather than examine, the latest fad. When I was a reporter, I was even sent out to do more "research" if I dared to come back to the newsroom and say, "It doesn't seem to be happening here."
I've never met a features editor who wouldn't rather be editing "People" or possibly "Tiger Beat," and hasn't Ariana Huffington managed to fulfill her champagne dreams and caviar wishes on that count?
It's the editors who push this stuff. You can't really fault the "experts," who, even if they sound all the proper cautions and conditions, are going to have that edited out of the final piece, partly because it doesn't fit the narrative and largely because reporters are as lost when faced with sophomore-level math and statistics as they would be in some highly technical discussion of advanced astrophysics.
And from there it goes from the fad-obsessed features department to the equally fad-obsessed wire service and thus into the hands of readers who believe what they want to believe and who now firmly believe that chocolate cures heart disease just as surely as a full moon signals extra traffic in the emergency room and the Super Bowl triggers domestic violence.
Which brings us to economic theories, where the Wall Street Journal operates on roughly the same system as TIME Magazine, the Huffington Post or the features department of your local newspaper: "All the news that's hip, we print."
There is a difference at WSJ, or, at least, there was back when I was reading it daily, before it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch: The news department is traditionally independent of the editorial page and has traditionally reported what actually occurs in the world.
The editorial page would opine on things based on insane, right-wing economic and political fantasies so devoid of fact that it was not uncommon to have an editorial whose basis was contradicted by news reports on the front page.
But, again, people hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe.
And if "trickle down" suits their needs, then "trickle down" is just as valid as "chocolate cures heart disease."
All of which reminds me of a David Horsey cartoon from 2001, which wasn't funny then and isn't funny now and yet still makes me laugh:
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