CSotD: Reading the lines, and between them
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I'm starting off with Paolo Lombardi's obituary cartoon for Mikhael Kalashnihov because it's exceptional in the true meaning of the word: It's the exception to the rule that Pearly Gates cartoons are crap.
This is actually brilliant, including the fact that he simply shows the closed gates and the sign. No Saint Peter, no God, no speeches and no emotional response from Kalishnikov himself.
Less is more, and this is a whole lot.
That link (here it is again) is worth following because Mikhail Timofeyevich had mixed feelings about his invention, which perhaps come more into focus if you understand the overall Russian attitude towards war.
In the last days of the Soviet Union, I was invited to a dinner of visiting Soviet timber-industry executives because I had been reporting on them and was also known to be a folksinger.
So we had a nice dinner and I got out my guitar and started with a song I thought they would find interesting: A darkly comic song about an Irish rustic going off to the Crimean War.
As I sang, and the translator translated, I didn't need Natasha to translate the faces: Stunned discomfort.
Dark irony about politics and bureaucracy are a mainstay of Russian humor, but, I learned, there are no comic war songs, dark or otherwise, in the Russian song book.
It wasn't that they were "offended." That would be too easy, too superficial, like dropping an F-bomb in front of your maiden aunt.
They simply had no basis on which to process the concept that one could laugh about the subject.
Fortunately, they are also good partiers. We moved on and ended up having a really fun evening in which they sang songs from their respective countries and there was good music, good laughter and much camaraderie.
But I'd learned a profound lesson about a people whose literature I had already studied for a quarter of a century and about whom I thought I knew quite a bit.
Theirs is a culture deeply rooted in "the rich dark earth of Mother Russia," or, put another way, one that straddles Europe and Asia in more than a geographic sense, delightfully modern and Western in some respects and almost medievally bound to the soil and inured to sacrifice in others.
Kalashnikov's ambivalence is, then, more than a shrug of the shoulders.
As is his nation's regret over the economic and personal waste of their adventure in Afghanistan.
(For English subtitles, hit play, then hover over video and toggle CC in lower margin)
Meanwhile, back at the First Amendment
Matt Bors puts into words the absurdity of the people screaming about Phil Robertson's "free speech" rights.
I find it profoundly weird that the same people who whine that Democratic legislators didn't read the entire text of the Affordable Care Act — brushing away as a liberal smokescreen any discussion of "legislative staff" or that the Republicans who opposed it hadn't read the entire thing either — will turn around and insist that we need to follow the Constitution, a document they clearly haven't read.
In one particularly ridiculous god-why-do-I-even-try online discussion, some fellow was complaining about the ACA and said you don't need all that verbiage, that the unamended Constitution was only X-number of words. To which I noted that, in order to get the "unamended Constitution" ratified, the founders had to add amendments to clarify their intent.
And that we were still, 225 years or so later, arguing over the meaning and intent of that very concise Second Amendment.
I would, of course, have gotten just as far explaining all this to the dog.
In any case, the founders indeed thought of "guns" as one-shot muzzle-loading flintlocks, not as Kalashnikovs, but they also thought of a "press" as a "press," not as a radio or a TV or an online computer.
I suspect even these educated elitists would have been delighted by the number of ways a person can get his opinions out in front of the public today.
And that their response to the whole A&E/Duck Dynasty kerfuffle would have been a shrug and a suggestion that he exercise the Freedom of the Press they'd given him: Either take his opinions elsewhere, or set up a web site and publicize them himself.
But here's another approach, and one I've heard: A&E recruited these faux "common folks" to play the roles of hillbilly millionaires knowing they were, even in real life, part of a very conservative bible-thumping sect. They even asked them to tone down the on-camera praying.
Which means that they should have known Phil was apt to say something like this.
Though it also means that Phil answered the question knowing A&E would not be happy with his response.
Slow fade to 2014
Tom Tomorrow with the first half of his annual wrap-up.
Juxtaposition of the Day
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