CSotD: Facebook follies, not all humorous
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This Juxtaposition of the Day comes with a Grande serving of insider stuff, which is only "insider" if you haven't friended cartoonists:
Usually, these coincidences pop up as a shock over breakfast, but Margulies posted this on his Facebook page yesterday and Cole responded with a horrified-but-admiring "You've walked all over my cartoon for tomorrow. Good job!"
His was already drawn, colored and in the chute, too late to start over.
Which I wouldn't chuckle over if it were a lame, obvious joke, but the combination of (A) deriding the non-controversy, (B) focusing on Trump's attempt to capitalize on it and (C) using both the "whipped up" and "foam" puns plus the "shot of sanctimony" is such a bizarrely massive, wonderful pile-up of coincidence that it gives one pause.
Not only do "great minds think alike," but, given that they live and work only about 150 miles apart, there will be some doorsteps upon which both cartoons land.
Well, not so many as there used to be, but we'll get to that in a moment.
Meanwhile, the real laff is that, thanks to Facebook, these two friends knew enough in advance that they could sit back and watch rather than be surprised when it happened, yet not enough in advance to keep it from happening.
And if that's not enough reason to enjoy FB, Nick Anderson stepped in with this link to an explanation of the origin of the ridiculous Starbucks "controversy" and, wow, it's even more absurd and unsupported by anyone who matters than I thought.
This clause from that CNN article explains it all: "Joshua Feuerstein, a former pastor who calls himself a 'social media personality.'"
Well, there ya go. He's a "social media personality" which I think qualifies as an oxymoron, but, in any case, puts him in a league with the Divine Ms. Huffington for being able to blow up nothing into something simply by knowing how the game is played.
I have not done any actual analysis of the ratios of responses to the "controversy" on Facebook or counted up the score for the #MerryChristmasStarbucks hashtag at Twitter, but my rough estimate is that, like the bogus racial "controversy" over the new Star Wars movie, it comes out to about 0.005% people who are outraged and the rest is people who are outraged over the outrage.
Which means that all the cartoons and comments and memes responding to the issue are basically ramping it up rather than refuting it.
By contrast, these two cartoons are not boosting the fake controversy but making a perfectly legitimate point about the opportunistic clown who leaps aboard anything, even the obviously, patently ridiculous and mythical.
As weird as it is how many elements of their commentary are the same, it's even weirder how few other commentators have caught on to how an obscure "social media personality" has played them (and Trump. Nice company).
It's as if Tom Sawyer had been ordered to build a manure pile.
But Facebook isn't always funny
Much as I chuckled watching Cole and Margulies contemplate their converging trains, a posting by Bob Englehart this morning brought a sigh.
The rumors are true. I’m taking the buyout from the Hartford Courant. I’ve read the tea leaves and consulted smarter people than I inside and outside the company. The stars have aligned and it’s time to go.
He goes on to say that he'll still be cartooning at his own site and on cagle.com, and I don't know whether the real tragedy is his being forced out or the fact that I'm not particularly shocked.
As I've said before, it is a strange career field where it is perfectly polite, when you run into a former colleague, to say, "So, are you still working?"
I'm Facebook friends with some former colleagues and, when a familiar name from the same place comments on one of their pages, I often click on them to see what they're doing. And if they're now in another field, I hate the fact that my response is "Good for you!"
But that was what my boss at my last daily paper said when I told him I was leaving. And, when he was handed the cardboard box a few months later, he told me it came as a relief, despite his relatively new mortgage, his two daughters in high school, his family in the area, his wife's existing local job.
He bounced around a little, but then landed on his feet in commercial real estate, which puts him one up on me: I enjoy freelancing, but I'm still working for newspapers and so I can't — and don't — count on it lasting forever or even for another year.
And, goddammit, I feel like I spent 40 years learning to braid buggy whips.
On the other hand, better 40 years than 20, because my kids are grown and gone, I'm six weeks away from Social Security and my only debt is a $200 a month car payment.
It also helps to have a starving-artist mentality to begin with.
As I was saying even before the last ax fell, "It's just me and the dog, and he thinks sleeping in the park and eating out of Dumpsters would be a blast!"
If you can't make that claim, you'd better make some plans, because gallows humor only gets you so far.
Good luck, Bob. I'll bookmark your site, and check out the other ventures you've got up there, too.
Oh, and don't let the normalcy of your situation fool you.
Now here's your moment of zen:
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