CSotD: Short takes
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One of my favorite kinds of joke is the kind that plants a naughty, inescapable giggle, almost like an ear worm, so that it pops up every time you see the trigger.
I don't find the stick-figure families on the back windows of cars all that obnoxious. It's not bragging, like the honor-role kid stickers, or suggesting against all experience and rational thought that, if I hadn't known there was a baby in the car, I would have decided to smash into it.
But it does contain an element of "Why are you telling me this? Don't you have any real friends?" I don't care how many kids you have or their genders, and I assume that anyone who did care would already know.
Now, thanks to Rabbits Against Magic, I understand why people put those stickers on their cars, and I'll remember, each time I pull up behind one of them.
As the father of a pair of varsity goalkeepers, I am aware that there are two schools of thought when it comes to selecting a jersey. The keeper's jersey has to be a different color than both his and the opposition team's field jerseys, so that the referees can pick him out, since there are special rules for keepers, beginning with the obvious one of being able to use hands to control the ball.
So the philosophical, psychological choices are a dull jersey that blends in and makes it harder for opposition players to track the keeper in their peripheral vision, or a very bright jersey that will tend to make them shoot at, rather than past, the keeper.
I didn't realize until today's Pardon My Planet that superheroes face the same choice.
It does occur to me that, unless you can deflect bullets, there's no particular advantage in luring bad guys into shooting right at you.
But I will say the design of the majority of Superhero Spandex onesies does seem to be based on the notion that drawing direct fire is a very good thing.
Finally, I will confess to having written yesterday's CSOTD the morning before, since I was heading out for an overnight Mother's Day visit, so I missed the start of this arc at Candorville. Here are the first two strips and it looks to me like something worth following.
"The Greatest Generation" won the war against the Axis, but the untold story is that some of them devoted themselves at the same time to a second battle.
Those purposeful, organized efforts notwithstanding, the war also had the effect of building support for civil rights by forcing a degree of integration that hadn't existed before:
When Cpl. Rupert Trimingham wrote a letter to Yank about being forced, while traveling in uniform, to get his lunch from the back door of a Texas diner while German POWs ate at the counter, it touched off a firestorm of supportive letters from white GIs, was fictionalized with a short story in the New Yorker and became a radio drama by Orson Welles. It has since appeared several times in historic fiction such as "The Tuskegee Airmen." (Trimingham was not in that unit.)
I spoke with Trimingham's daughter a few years ago and she said she barely knew anything about it, except that she'd heard he once wrote this letter that got a lot of response. She told me that he was not, in the years that followed, particularly active in the Civil Rights Movement or a rebel of any sort.
But that's the small, daily sort of contribution that broke the back of Jim Crow, and the fact that Trimingham's letter went viral is secondary, in many ways, to the fact that he wrote it. We don't know how many other letters were written and didn't get such attention; that was the one that did.
There's a whole passle of stories being written now, in the wake of the release of "42," the new Jackie Robinson biopic, about Wendell Smith, the sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier, and I've heard interviews in which his role is "revealed."
Piffle.
His role has long been known to anyone who cared to look into the story of Jackie Robinson, anyone willing to go beyond the Accepted Notion that white America just suddenly realized there was injustice going on and so of course moved quickly to fix it. That's the "please let us off the hook" school of history and it's a load of self-serving hogwash.
It is true that Wendell Smith promoted Robinson to Branch Rickey, and became Robinson's press agent on behalf of the Dodgers, to help ease the transition to an integrated game.
But Smith didn't pull Rickey's name out of a hat. Branch Rickey was on an existing committee to study the integration of Major League Baseball, a committee formed at the behest of another black sportswriter, Sam Lacy, whose influence in changing perceptions within his profession is exemplified by an incident in covering a pre-season game in New Orleans where, as a Negro, he was forced to sit on the roof of the pressbox rather than inside. Several of the white writers grabbed their typewriters and folding chairs and joined him.
The important message is that social progress does not "just happen," nor do the Rosa Parkses and the Jackie Robinsons and the Martin Luther Kings rise up from unplowed, unplanted, uncultivated soil.
Not only does it take the groundwork of the Wendell Smiths and Sam Laceys and the Thurgood Marshalls and James Farmers, but it relies on the small daily affirmations of dignity and the small daily demands for respect and the small daily statements of "not any more" depicted in today's Candorville and that I hope we're going to see in the rest of this arc.
I'm trusting Darrin on this one.
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