CSotD: All The News Beyond Wuzzup
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Tom the Dancing Bug does a potential "Get off my lawn" cartoon, but it appeals to me for a number of reasons, only one of which is that I wish those damn kids would get off my lawn.
I don't really get Twitter, which seems less like pausing in the grocery store to chat for a few minutes with a friend than like just saying "Wuzzup?" as you pass. A perfunctory nod rather than any meaningful exchange.
I send out one tweet a day which just says that the new piece is up and ready and … yeah, that's it. I update every day around 8 or 8:30 Eastern Time, and it seems presumptuous to assume people are sitting around waiting to know exactly when, but, then, it's equally presumptuous to assume they don't need a reminder.
So, to my Twitter subscribers, thanks for coming, and I assume you get through the rest of your day without my tugging at your sleeve.
As for the more-verbose Facebook, I kind of like the weather updates and could do without the menu updates, but where we get into today's cartoon is in the all-about-me postings.
Enigmatic, passive-aggressive "Life is so unfair" posts are disconcerting because it's impossible at this distance to know whether it means someone ran out of Oreos or is sitting there with a bottle of sleeping pills. All you do know is that they want you to ask, and, while you don't want it to be the sleeping pills, you're gonna be pissed if it's just the damn Oreos.
More to TtDB's point are the "How can they do that?" non-message messages, which are based on the assumption that everyone on your Facebook feed is watching "Game of Thrones" or "Dancing with the Stars" or the Mets game, because, after all, that's what you're doing.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's trivia. But it's childish and unfair to be enigmatic and precious about something of actual significance.
I was a freelancer, at home, when the Challenger blew up. My girlfriend, a bookkeeper/dispatcher for an electrical company, called me, because one of the drivers had heard it on the radio and called it in to her.
I put the TV on and we talked about it while I watched, but we didn't discuss it in any terms other than "wow." We were aware of how many classrooms were watching and we had some compassion for the families of the astronauts, but it was happening to the Challenger, not to us.
In any case, when she called, she gave me credit for having a life, and didn't assume I already knew what had just happened.
One of the cartoons I used to show students was the obituary piece Thomas Nast did when James Garfield, weeks after his assassination, finally died, and I would point out that, back then, the paper came once a day and, the rest of the time, people were not obsessed with world events.
They lived their lives within their own families, within their own communities. Even the state capital was kind of remote and Washington, DC, was just … out there somewhere.
Still, there's nothing new under the sun, and we could, if we wanted, reclaim the power we've always had: 140 years before Twitter, there were plenty of hateful, self-centered jerks in the world, as Katharine Lee Bates recalled, but she places that hateful old biddy in the context of a more healthy social world:
A five-year old in a Cape Cod village, twenty miles from the rail,
Falmouth, Falmouth, loveliest Falmouth,
Wearing her silvery, pearl-embroidered ocean mist for a veil;
Her sweet God's Acre a windsome garden whither often would weepers bear
Their gifts of flowers, dear dooryard flowers,
To pale stones carved with a ship or anchor, though no mound was molded there;
For many a Falmouth man lay dreaming under seas of dazzling blue
Mid the rosewhite coral, the rosepink coral,
And some in the Arctic ice were shrouded, and the tomb of some none knew.
A five-year old on the side porch holding a fold of her mother's dress,
Mother, Mother, our fair young Mother,
Shaking the breakfast cloth with a flourish of her own gay gallantness.
And across the yard, in her narrow doorway, the neighbor I held in dread,
Venomous neighbor, witch of a neighbor,
Lean and gray, with a furtive pussy that the boys called Copperhead.
Yet I loved her grandson, a pygmy urchin with black eyes glittering sly,
Impish playmate, my earliest playmate,
Whose quick red mouth would snap at and swallow the bewildered buzz of a fly.
She shrilled across: "They've shot Abe Lincoln, He's dead and I'm glad he's dead."
Lincoln! Lincoln! Abraham Lincoln!
She stood and laughed, that terrible woman, and never a word God said.
Back into the kitchen my mother staggered, her face all strange and blanched,
Her deep eyes filling, filling and brimming
With tears that the tablecloth kept so sacred from childish weeping stanched.
"I will not believe it. I'll not believe it," she sobbed till with drooping head
An old sea-captain, a whaler captain
Off the stage-coach swung with a Boston paper that from house to house he read.
I heard it and hid me under the lilacs this mystery to prod.
Lincoln! Lincoln! Abraham Lincoln!
And not one angel to catch the bullet! What had become of God?
A robin beyond me hopped and chirruped where the April grasses blew,
As if Lincoln, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln
Were no more than the worm he tugged at and swallowed. I lamented that long worm, too.
Then our lonely village among the sand dunes with only its one scant store,
Yet part of a nation, a stricken nation,
Took thought how to honor our saint, our martyr, our hero forevermore.
Wonted to grief, the women of Falmouth hung the old church, pulpit and walls,
With a simple mourning, a sacred mourning,
Already steeped in uttermost anguish, hung it with widow's shawls.
The flag on the village green half-masted, bell tolling upon the air,
Lincoln, Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln,
The nation's sorrow I felt my sorrow, for my mother's shawl was there.
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