CSotD: We’ve got a right to pick a little fight
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I'm going for the award for Most Obscure Headline. If you got it right away, you got an earworm with it. If not, we'll get you one at the end.
The reference is that, on days when I have nothing, I get nothing. On a morning like this, when I'm trying to get ready to split town and have something already in the can ready to go, the cartoonists decide to delight me with a multitude of good things.
Actually, it started yesterday when John Cole posted this example of how a good political cartoonist does a two-story mash-up and turns it into apt, trenchant commentary:
I might have swallowed hard and let that brilliant display of the art and science pass by, but then this morning I woke up to this clipworthy, collectible Sherman's Lagoon:
My own father happened to be quite good on the phone, but despite his having called his own father every Sunday morning for about a 20 minute chat, Grandpa never learned to love telephones and calling him was, well, an exercise in tooth-pulling, which I think is more the norm.
Not that Dad's advice is necessarily that helpful to begin with, as Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal points out. Dude, I think you're just supposed to say "plastics" and maybe something about condoms:
And, now, having made all the fathers feel bad, we'll let Retail distribute the remaining guilt:
I check labels and try to buy clothing made in nations whose ruthless exploitation of workers has not yet come to light. But always with the accompanying little devil-on-the-shoulder nagging in my ear, "Well, the fact that you know about it means that somebody is trying to do something about Bangladesh …"
And the thing is, it's all interconnected: If we had real jobs, we wouldn't be quite so intent on finding bargains. And if American companies hadn't sent all the jobs overseas …
It was so much easier when JP Stevens was the Great Satan and you could buy pretty much anything else in fabric with a clear conscience.
You could even pinpoint the retailers who needed a slap upside the head. Safeway was kind of militant about selling non-union table grapes and lettuce, so we were kind of militant about not shopping at Safeway.
Now it's come to this, but I don't carry a smartphone, and I'm not going to research every spool of thread and tube of toothpaste.
Hard enough keeping up with the big questions. I haven't shopped at WalMart in quite a while, but I'm not clear on where I can shop.
I know WalMart owns Sam's Club, and that Costco is one of the good guys, but we don't have Costco. We have BJ's. I have no idea whether going to BJs or Kmart instead of WalMart is righteous. And if they're bad guys, well, it's nearly 100 miles to Costco. I get about 26 mpg, and — the additional $25 aside — it also involves killing dinosaurs.
I don't even really know if anyone other than the localvores and tree huggers are on board, now that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy has turned people against the unions and the unions have merged into faceless corporate hacks themselves.
There was a time, the old man remembered, when beef prices suddenly skyrocketed, and shoppers launched a genuinely grassroots (back when such a concept existed) boycott. (That's an awesome site, by the way.)
It didn't have the spiritual heft of the Birmingham bus boycott, certainly, but not everything has to. Especially when it works: The boycott got their attention, or at least the attention of some of them. Safeway maintained their scab cred throughout, but King Soopers started offering free coffee and attempting to lure shoppers back by — check this out — actually responding to their objections and their desires.
And when I say "actually responding," I don't mean with deceptive spin, setting up bogus certifications to make them look good without making them actually change anything. I mean they really did a lot of what we asked them to do.
Never mind. It was a long time ago. Here, I'll put your mother on.
But first, this message:
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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