CSotD: Past performance is a pretty good guarantee
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Stuart Carlson offers a refreshing change from the Inkpot Generals who are inundating us with cartoons about how sanctions are for pantywaists and that real men send other people's children out to die.
There has been a thing floating around the Internet for a few years about how no two countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war.
It's a bit simple-minded on the surface, but Carlson taps into the grain of truth below that surface: The world's economy has become so entangled that it is extremely disadvantageous for major nations to jerk each other around.
In an immediate sense, this means that cartoons depicting sanctions as spineless and useless simply miss the way the world works, which falls in line with that old dictum about generals who persist in trying to re-fight the last war instead of the current one.
Coincidentally, I believe that idea gained prominence in the wake of the Crimean War, which featured old guys who remembered Napoleon and thought they could bring the same old tactics to a new war in a changed world.
Among other changes in that case was that Wellington and Soult got to muck about on the Iberian Peninsula on more-or-less independent commands, while, by the time the Crimea was contested, telegraphs and railroads were allowing the government to track what commanders were up to.
There was also the matter of the actual commanders from the Napoleonic Wars being dead or doddering, and the dodderers in the field as well as those back in London knowing nothing about Crimea's climate, or even its layout. We're seeing some of that currently as well.
Unfortunately, the difference in Carlson's left and right panels is that nuclear arms only work if you don't use them and sanctions only work if you do, while the mutual destruction facet is indeed very real: The very entanglement of our economies that makes sanctions potentially effective puts everyone in the position of the old Hollywood scene where the good guy and bad guy fight while someone with a gun helplessly looks for a moment to pull the trigger without either hitting both men or the wrong one.
And, if war now relies on accurately calculating the potential damage, the propaganda is equally paralyzing.
On the Media features a chilling analysis of Putin's war on truth — the scariest seven minutes of my past week — while, on this side, we're seeing how a fairly moderate and useful health care program can be effectively undermined, not by the purposeful lies of a hostile government but by the purposeful lies of a hostile coalition of corporate propagandists.
"Some of the Kremlin's representations are transparent lies … what's a Russian to think?" Bob Garfield asks in the OTM clip, adding "The Russian people … are not stupid. Can they not see through what is paraded before them?"
To which the Russian editor replies, pragmatically, "People don't tend to see through lies when lies support the biases they already hold. That's not only true for Russians; it's true for everyone."
Indeed it is. Indeed it is.
And I can't help but fear that ending communism simply means that, in addition to the number of plutocrat boardrooms in which the beancounters are bemoaning the potential costs of effective sanctions and trying to find ways to avoid their use, we now have an equal number of oligarch boardrooms in which beancounters are applauding the same costs in full confidence that effective sanctions therefore won't be rolled out.
Meanwhile, the amateur coaches on the sidelines continue to spin childish utopian fantasies: Someone on Facebook was urging FIFA to take the 2018 World Cup away from Russia.
That would be the FIFA whose agreement to allow Qatar to host the Cup in 2022 was predicated on that conservative Muslim nation changing its laws so that Budweiser could sell beer throughout the games.
Which brings us to the second Hollywood cliche: Terrified kid runs to the protection of a father figure, only to discover he is one of the conspirators.
(… or, today, your daughter)
On a considerably brighter note:
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal creator Zach Weinersmith has a book out, Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543, with several samples like this one available for your amusement over at The Nib.
And an even brighter Juxtaposition of the Day:
Parrot gags are always dependable, because, even when they're stupid, they make you giggle. Especially when they're stupid.
And they're always really, really stupid.
One fellow in the Irish ballad group I was in 30 years ago was a brilliant whistle and flute player and had a lovely tenor voice, but he was also an alcoholic. We usually knew when to start shouldering him away from the microphones, but there was one night when he got to one and began telling parrot jokes.
Fortunately, his lack of inhibition was because the drinks were being sent up to us at a rate at which the audience was also consuming them.
So you might say it was a case of no-harm-no-fowl and we were, against all our fears that evening, booked into the place again.
The real value in today's juxtaposition, however, is not the gags themselves but that the 1950 Buz Sawyer story arc just kicking off for subscribers to Comic Kingdom — in which Buz and his wife are about to be entrusted with a beloved parrot — sounds a lot like an absolutely classic version of an absolutely classic sitcom.
To wit:
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