CSotD: Despair: The Reboot
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Tom Tomorrow provides a roundup of the current political circus, and, while I'm still burned out on "bland restatement" cartoons, in this case, bland restatement is probably the best way to sum it all up, because we're in a cycle of same-old-same-old.
And then, in that last panel, he breaks mood, and that non-bland shift neatly lifts it above the genre.
With everyone remaking classics, perhaps the way to approach this election cycle is to imagine it as a reboot of Despair, though the original, of course, would be darker and more insightful and all around better than the new version, because that's how reboots work.
I don't know what Crumb thought his comic was about, but I know that I got hold of it roughly between the time when:
One idealistic attempt to "work within the system" had ended in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in LA, while another ended up with delegates being refused credentials inside the convention hall and their candidate watching in horror from his hotel window as those who rejected the idea of working within the system got the hell beaten out of them in the streets and the Establishment Powers nominated their Establishment Candidate (who promptly lost, despite a third party contender siphoning off votes from his opponent)…
… and the time where it became clear that there was no "secret plan" to end the war and that, in fact, we were going to double down on it. Regardless of the cost.
It seemed like a damn fine comic at the moment.
Anyway, as Jack Ohman points out, things just kind of went downhill from there.
Or maybe there was just a blip in our history, when we dug out of the Depression, beat back Hitler and Tojo, then knocked off Jim Crow and thought we'd pointed things in a new direction.
A longer blip than the one that came about when the Republicans cleverly stashed the troublesome, popular, reform-minded governor of New York in the oubliette of the vice-presidency, only to have Leon Czolgosz step up and turn "the Man in the Iron Mask" into "the President with the Big Stick."
They're still cleaning up the results of that mess, though they've made good headway lately.
Still, only a blip, because I think that, while Ohman is right specifically about the Republican Party's self-destruction, it would be oversimplifying things to suggest that the larger collapse was entirely orchestrated from above, or from one direction.
Not that it wasn't orchestrated, of course, but the overwhelming popularity of Teddy and FDR and Ike and JFK seemed to fade away like a morning fog, and it would be impossible for anyone to popularize the idea that, while four legs are good, two legs are, in fact, better, without a fair amount of cooperation, or at least brute acquiescence, from their four-legged audience.
And so, as the Democratic Establishment rallies to make sure the Inevitable remains inevitable, with a sudden flurried panic of endorsements and serious, thoughtful, well-reasoned columns about how only the Establishment can make meaningful reform, it's worth noting that it wasn't the neighboring farmers who repainted that wall.
Benjamin felt a nose nuzzling at his shoulder. He looked round.
It was Clover. Her old eyes looked dimmer than ever.
Without saying anything, she tugged gently at his mane and led him
round to the end of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments
were written. For a minute or two they stood gazing
at the tatted wall with its white lettering.
“My sight is failing,” she said finally. “Even when I was young I could
not have read what was written there. But it appears to me that
that wall looks different. Are the Seven Commandments
the same as they used to be, Benjamin?”
For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her
what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except
a single Commandment. It ran:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
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