CSotD: Saturday short-takes
Skip to comments
A fascinating pair of commentaries from a couple of my favorite commentors.
I'm having trouble figuring out why we seem so reluctant to take Karzai at his word when he tells us to get out.
Maybe we're expected to ignore it; Maybe the State Department recognizes it as some of that same posing we in the West have never quite been able to interpret from the Iraqis and Iranians, either.
I don't mean that in an insulting way, but Hussein and Ahmadinejad played into the hands of the American chickenhawks with what to Western ears sounded like bombastic threats and outrageous, ridiculous chest-beating, but which, as I understand it, is simply normal rhetoric in their own culture and discounted as such by native listeners.
It could well be that when Karzai tells us to get out, he is simply pitching a rhetorical hissy-fit for his followers and doesn't mean it.
On the other hand, we've propped up people like Nguyen Van Thieu and Ferdinando Marcos in the past, and then accepted the chance to duck out when we realized it wasn't working anymore.
Maybe it's just me, but if I find my stuff on the doorstep, I'm gonna put it in the trunk of the car and drive away. Maybe it is only a bluff, but I'm willing to grab the excuse and pretend I thought it was sincere.
'Cause, whatever else it may have been, it was a very sincere invitation to play games.
Speaking of gamesmanship
Still waiting for the new art to settle in over at Rex Morgan, but, meanwhile, the storyline of Sarah the Artist/Writer has taken a fascinating turn.
This has been a continuing arc threaded over, under, around and through some shorter, more immediate storylines in which little Sarah Morgan has successfully sold the local hospital museum on publishing her children's book, which began as "isn't she cute?"
Well, over the course of the past few months, we're started getting an answer to that question, which is that little Sarah is kind of a spoiled, manipulative little egotist, and now her dream of doing whatever she wants with this project is beginning to unravel.
The interesting part is that I don't think the hospital museum is being reasonable, either. They've not only set her up with an editor (fair enough) but with a studio and, as seen here, some pretty manipulative working conditions of their own.
Kind of makes me wonder if they see her as an artist/writer of a book they actually care about, or as an elephant with a paint brush?
It would be very simple to set up a black/white, wrong/right scenario, but, unless they're planning to let this all fall apart, Wilson & Beatty are charting some pretty sophisticated storytelling ground for this strip.
Again, maybe it's just me.
I've been writing children's stories for over a dozen years and the current flood of condescending, cloying, cliche-ridden amateur drek in that category is disheartening, best described by one of my clients as "adults writing what they think kids want to read."
And for the past four years, I've worked with middle-school reporters, training gifted young writers to work in a professional manner.
One of our biggest challenges is to get the various organizations they cover to stop patting them on the head and treating them like babies.
For the most part, a good story or two from an frighteningly articulate little person does the job. The Colorado Ballet, for instance, loves us: This raw copy was turned in by the reporter four days before he turned 11.
But we've still got a few PR types who just can't unclench, which isn't entirely based on age: I remember when the local airbase lost a really good public affairs officer and picked up a really clueless one, and it caused great dismay in the newsroom because now we had to start working around him instead of with him.
In any case, I'm hoping for a resolution here that will somehow take little Sarah down a peg or two without actually forcing her to sacrifice her artistic integrity.
I mean, the advantage of fiction is that you can manufacture perfect endings, even if they're a bit implausible.
On Beyond Flatulence
Speaking of children's authors, which Harry Bliss is, he certainly crosses an interesting line with today's cartoon.
While an awful lot of syndicated cartoonists have in recent months been cavorting around the comics pages celebrating their new-found freedom to tell fart jokes, Bliss quietly drops in a pronoun and accompanying concept that I certainly haven't seen in the funny pages before.
I don't know how many newspapers carry this strip, but that's how many phones will be ringing Monday morning. Or may be ringing right now.
Assuming, of course, the readers even catch what he just said.
I'm a lot more impressed with this bit of barrier-breaking than with all the wind-breaking we've seen lately.
This song is going out tonight to Hamid, in Kabul …
Comments 5
Comments are closed.