Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Darkness at noon, or shortly thereafter

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Mike Peterson Published: November 2, 2015 1 minute 3 comments

This one (pleasantly) surprised me, because Francis is basically a papal fan-page, and I would expect silence on this topic rather than a slapdown. 

Here's the thing: Popes aren't expected to be perfect, but, dammit, saints are. That's why they are saints. 

Over the centuries, the Church built up a complicated, Rube Goldberg system of explanations that rivals DC Comics explanations for why Superman's invulnerable hair isn't down to his ankles, and part of that explanation was Purgatory as a kind of halfway house where nearly everybody who wasn't bound for Hell spent some time being tortured for the small sins we all commit.

Trust me: It made sense in the Middle Ages, and it kinda sorta still does.

You can't tell guys not to think about nekkid ladies if the consequence is eternal torment in the fires of Hell, because they're gonna do it anyway and you don't want them to start murdering people because they've got nothing left to lose.

So, for each lustful thought, you spend a few hundred or thousand years in Purgatory. You can expect to go there, but you'll get out. Eventually. And then you get the harp and wings.

And the deal with saints was that, while we cannot judge the actual piety of our fellow mortals, much less presume to know the mind of the Almighty, every once in a while somebody comes along who we are sure got the Golden Ticket.

It's not a perfect system: The Borgia popes and some others like them started handing out sainthood to major donors, but, well, the Borgias were pretty good proof of my earlier statement that popes aren't expected to be perfect. Even earlier, popes were selling "Get Out of Purgatory" cards, so no need to belabor the point.

This guy, however, was supposed to be different, and the problem is that neither he nor Junipero Serra are different enough. 

I'm perfectly willing to enter into the labyrinth of cosmological rationalization and accept that Serra, having not been nearly so bad as some others who oversaw the California mission system, escaped being consigned to Hell.

But if there is a Purgatory, and if you can get 200 years off your time there for making the Sign of the Cross when your school bus passes a Catholic Church, there is no freaking way the guy is not still there a mere 231 years after his death.

And if he is out, I'm betting he found Day and Merton standing in line in front of him at those gates.

Juxtaposition of Metaphorical Darkness and Light

(Pearls Before Swine)

(Frazz)

I've noted several times that Elizabeth Cady Stanton had strong opinions about voter qualifications, and advocated that voters have to pass a test to make sure they had enough sense to make wise choices.

However, the suffragists saw the flaw in this proposal well before Jim Crow states started using impossibly nit-picky "literacy tests" to exclude black voters, and Stanton was quietly eased out of the leadership of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association and off the podium.

There's no way to test voters that doesn't wind up qualifying those who think as you do and disqualifying those who don't.

In Fantasy Ideal World? Yes!

In this one? No.

Though I do wish pollsters would ask a few factual questions along with their sampling of opinion, so we could hear results like "Donald Trump is the choice of 73% of voters who do not know how many justices sit on the Supreme Court" and "Two-thirds of voters who believe that Brazil is the capital of Argentina favor Ben Carson in the upcoming primary."

Frazz sets me off on a different rant, because we gave 18-year-olds the vote before the Feds pressured state governments to raise the drinking age to 21, and I was astonished when there was no response from the campuses.

XXVI Amendment ratified — July 1, 1971
National Minimum Drinking Age signed into law — July 17, 1984

We didn't even need the franchise to pass that amendment, or to bring down LBJ's presidency, for that matter.

They couldn't even organize themselves enough to go get a beer.

So the answer is that nobody wants you little shits to drink or to vote, but it's pretty damn clear which one they need a law to keep you from doing.

(And for those keeping score of the imaginary teams, it was neither the Millennials or Gen Xers who dropped that ball: It was the tail-end charlies of the Baby Boom.) 

Juxtaposition of Literal Darkness and Light:

(The Buckets)

(Edge City)

There were a couple of strips picking up on the end of Daylight Saving Time, and, for those keeping score of that imaginary concept, I offer this handy guide:

Blue is "currently using it," Orange is "formerly used it," Red is "Y'all are crazy"

Note that the countries that never bothered with DST in the first place are mostly in the latitudes where it doesn't much matter anyway.

When I moved my boys from Colorado to the northeast corner of New York, I warned them that their lives of part-time winter on the Front Range were over: Once the snow was on the ground in December, it was going to be there until March.

But it didn't occur to me that I was also moving them from 38°50′N to 44°41′43″N, or roughly from Washington DC to Halifax, and they later remarked that the additional snow and cold were no big deal but it was very hard to adjust to both going to school and coming home in the dark.

'Cause that morning light won't last forever, Eddie.

Well, actually, it will, because Greg Cravens lives at 35°07′N. Never mind. They don't shovel a whole lot there, either.

But Terry Laban is at 40°05′34″N (I just know these things. Doesn't everybody?), and, while that's not exactly Yellowknife, it's far enough north that Abby's dismal ponderings are quite reasonable, and reminded me of this wonderful short film, which I offer as …

Today's Moment of Depressing Darkness

(Trivia note: "Sigfrid's" first movie)