CSotD: Several jackasses, one mule and a bunch of bull
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There are plenty of serious issues out there and plenty of depressing cartoons addressing them, and to hell with it. Drew Sheneman and Clay Bennett go for the chuckles, proving that even silliness can be used as a weapon.
I addressed the "presidential dignity" strawman two days ago and wouldn't have come back to it except that Sheneman made me laugh, while making a fairly serious point about the distinction between "silly" and "foolish."
I like silly: It doesn't involve lying or deliberately harming people.
And, besides the pie-in-the-face for Fox, Bennett raises the important media issue of "so what?"
I mean, I understand that the families of the people aboard are in a horrific position, and I also recognize that airline safety is an issue and … yeah, okay. But with all that is going on in the world, what's with the 24/7 obsession over this?
Flight MH370 is still missing and General Francisco Franco is still dead.
The gag, of course, is that, while updates-for-the-sake-of-updates is simply about corporate greed and the TV equivalent of click-bait, Bennett does a mashup with the True Believer determination to bend all news to a hardline agenda.
Obama murdered Franco, by the way. You knew that, right? Same gun Hilary used to whack Vince Foster.
Which — at the risk of making a serious point — brings up some excellent coverage of Crimea at On the Media last week, specifically about "Russia Today," the propaganda tool that has been polishing the image of the invasion.
As part of their report, Bob Garfield interviewed an American reporter at RT who explained her vision of journalistic integrity and truth.
Ironically, the interview was sparked by her on-air denunciation of the invasion. I say "ironically" because, while she has not been fired, I can't help but suspect there is a rather large shoe dangling in the air.
Her earnest explanation of why she works for the company reminded me of the early 80s, when that wonderfully inane but as it turned out a bit murderous spokesperson for the Rajneeshee cult that was taking over Antelope, Oregon, would appear on Nightline regularly, declaring all criticism of the baghwan to be "boolsheet," a term the network censors apparently thought was Hindi, since it went unbleeped.
Abby Martin is not simply a journalist for a transparently bogus "news" service, but is also a full-out political activist — a former Occupy member and a 9/11 Truther — and listening to her explain her position at the Ministry of Truth gave me flashbacks not just to the baghwan but to the Vinceremos Brigade, those earnest True Believers of the 1960s who would go cut cane in Cuba for a week or two and come home imbued with the facts, dammit.
That Vinceremos Brigade entry from Wikipedia notes that the FBI took only the most cursory interest in them, and I remember that people in the antiwar movement who were a little more grounded also kind of brushed them off as harmless, because if you knew anything at all about what was going on in the world, the absurdity of their hardline views was transparent.
Those may well have qualified as the Good Old Days, however, because current technology has made it a great deal easier for insanely delusional people to find each other and make common cause, and I'm not sure there is any worldview so patently, transparently ridiculous anymore that it can't prosper.
Which brings us to Derf's salute to the 25th Anniversary of the Intertubes, and of course he's already caught flak for not saying "Interwebs" because, goddammit, the Internet has been around since blahdeblah-Arpanet-blahdeblah-Usenet-blahdeblah and it's only the World Wide Web that is turning 25.
Granted, these true believers at least have the raw facts on their side, even if they do see a sunset in terms of refraction of light rather than as pretty colors.
The truth is out there.
And it's boolsheet.
Okay, that got kinda serious. Sorry.
Sherman's Lagoon just concluded (I assume, though you never know) an arc that I think is clear from today's installment: He only went to the hardware store to buy a rake.
A fun arc in itself, but, given the date which fast approaches, it reminds me of a story. Just permit me a moment to do a reverse-Fred-Rogers and change from my comfy shoes into my brogues:
So Sheila gets up in the morning and Sean isn't home yet but that's nothing unusual of a Saturday. And, sure enough, as she's making the tea, she looks out the window and here he comes down the road, only he's leading a mule on a rope.
And so as he comes in at the gate, she meets him at the open door and says, "What's that you've got?" and he says, "As you can plainly see, woman, it's a mule."
And she says, "Well, I can see it's a mule. What is it doing at the end of a rope coming in our garden?" and he says, "I won it last night playing at cards."
She says, "And what do we want a mule for?"
And he says, "It's years since we've had more than a small patch of vegetables. I mean to get out the old plow from the shed and use this mule to bring the farm back to its glory."
To which Sheila asks him, "And what is all this glory going to cost us?"
And he replies, "Not a thing. We've got the harness and the plow already and the mule can grow his own food. Not only will it cost us nothing, but we'll make money besides."
And she says, "See that you do."
Well, what to her surprise the next morning but Sean is up early and she finds him sitting on the doorstep with a file, rasping the rust from the old plow and the mule tied to a stake nearby eating grass.
Then after the plow is shining and sharpened once more, he gets out the oil and begins to polish up the old harness.
And the morning after, isn't he out in the field with the mule, turning over the soil? And Sheila says to herself that perhaps she was too harsh on the man and he's making a fresh start of things.
This goes on for the better part of a week and she's beginning to believe in the old mule, and even in Sean himself, until the next Saturday morning when she looks out the window and he and the mule are not in the field but here they are coming up the road with the old wagon and it loaded with fresh lumber.
Out to the door she goes and "What is that?" she asks him.
"Well, woman, as you can plainly see, it's lumber."
"And did it cost us money, this lumber?"
"It did that, but I had no choice in the matter. You see, I noticed the other day while I was walking behind the mule plowing that he had blood on the tips of his ears, and the flies was swarming on it and making him miserable.
"Well, I couldn't figure out where he was getting cut like that, only it was getting worse the next day, and again the next.
"Then last night, I led him into his stall in the shed as I always do, and I took off his harness as I always do, and he shook his head as he always does and there! I saw that the tips of his ears was hitting on the roof over his head. That's what was cutting them and making them bleed!
"You see, my father never had a mule, and the shed was built for a donkey. A mule is taller, and so the poor beast's ears hit on the roof over his head. Now, you wouldn't have the poor beast suffer, would you?"
"No," she answers, but her sympathy is all with the mule and not any of it with the man.
"So as you can plainly tell, I had no choice but to go into town this morning and get some lumber so I can build up the roof another foot and a half so the poor ol' mule's ears won't hit on it anymore."
"Sean," she says, "Sean, the floor in the shed is dirt, is it not?"
"It is that," he agrees.
"Then why couldn't you simply take the shovel and dig it down another foot and a half deeper?" she asks him.
And Sean sighs with impatience. "Woman, do you never listen to me at all?" he asks. "It's not his feet that are hitting, but his ears!"
And that, dear friends, is not boolsheet, but good, genuine Irish bool.
(1983, after the band broke up and I didn't have to play anymore for eejits every St. Pat's.)
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