CSotD: In the Wake of the Fools
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This meme is as good as any "April Fools" cartoon I saw yesterday, and I didn't see it until this morning, which brings up a pair of interesting topics related to the day.
The first, specific to the content, is that the Internet has so trashed reality that having a special day for it is whoa like totally meta.
A visit to Snopes these days reveals a flood of stories that make the vanishing hitchhiker seem perfectly credible and that make you wonder how anyone stupid enough to believe this stuff is yet smart enough to work the keys on a computer to pass them along.
The idea that you have to be clever to fool people has been pretty much disproven and, if there is any legacy to April Fools Day 2016, it is the last line of what, for a more formal title, might be called the Great Lets All Do The Same Web Cartoon Thingie.
The problem being that, when syndicated cartoonists pulled the Switcheroonie in 1997, the gag was that syndicated cartoonists couldn't do that, and yet they did.
But the whole point of web cartooning is that you can do anything you want, so, yeah, you can do that.
Also, 1997 was nearly 20 years ago.
So maybe they are the fools, but I'll give them this: At least I saw it on April Fool's Day.
I'm willing to grant that I look at things pretty early in the morning — about 4 EDT — but the whole "dead trees" anti-print hipster snark is based on the idea that by the time something gets printed and distributed in analog format, it's too late, it's over, and only the Internet can deliver with the speed of today's world.
Which is true of breaking news, but the idea that April 1 will be April Fool's Day does not fall under that category. Y'all knew April 1 was going to come right after March 31 this year.
It was on all the calendars ferchrissake.
Starting at midnight. Not 6 am, not 9 am, not noon. Midnight.
One of the reasons for the extinction of the paperboy is that changing work schedules meant papers had to be on doorsteps at an hour in which most states do not allow young workers to be on the job. Tony Soprano may wander down the driveway to pick up his paper in the full light of day, but most workers don't have the kind of latitude, and the last paper had to be on the last porch absolutely no later than 6 am, and many papers made that 5.
Our first bundles were out on trucks before 1 o'clock, and they weren't sitting on the corner until Buster and Tighe came by at dawn: They went straight to drivers and into subscriber tubes.
Beaten by print?
Maybe you're the fool.
As long as I'm in grumpy old guy mode
Bug Martini touches on the changing idols of young people, and, having recently talked about Dennis the Menace, I had, in fact, just been thinking about how his hero, Cowboy Bob, has so completely disappeared from the scene.
This is one where you have to separate the cultural icon from the way it was carried out, and, if you mouse over that strip, you'll see Huber has named it "Invading Cattlemen and Native Americans," which adds a nudge and a wink to the gag.
I've never met an Indian who felt the term "Native American" was anything but silly and an example of trying to fix the least important part of all that is broken.
Back in 2000, I did a major piece on the history of the American West and how the cowboy became a national icon, and huge parts of the saga are entirely fictional while other parts are only somewhat fictional, and the racial parts are all over the place.
I consulted with tribal historians from several nations and, trust me, movies with Burt Lancaster and Chuck Connors as blue-eyed Apache chiefs leading befeathered Italians in bad wigs is only scratching the surface, and trying to fix it up is something that would take seven maids with seven mops far more than seven years.
I'm not sure you'd like the results anyway. It wouldn't make much of a movie to show a cattle drive stopping at the Cherokee Strip while the cowboys and Indians quibbled over how much per head was supposed to be paid to cross over Indian Territory.
Never mind branding the cattle: They needed to slap EZ-Passes on them.
That would have solved a lot of problems, at least until Kevin Costner came along and screwed it all up all over again.
By the way, that educational piece was the first time I commissioned a piece from a cartoonist, in this case, to illustrate the song "Windy Bill," which I used as an example of the influence of the vaqueros on cowboy vocabulary and culture.
(Old Guy Trivia Experts will recognize the source.)
How about pirates? Do kids still play pirates?
There's probably a good cartoon in the idea: Angry mom wants to know who's been fooling around with her make-up, confronting a couple of little Jack Sparrow wannabes.
Anyway, I'm slipping out of grumpy old guy mode, thanks to Scott Stantis, who not only lays out the basic plot for the modern version of playing pirate, but points me to news coverage that restores this grumpy old guy's faith in history and culture.
Okay, the Trib didn't embed the canonical version, but they're young.
Here ya go, kids:
He's not quite an old guy, yet
Happy Anniversary to a strip that has been a favorite from the start.
Nice throwback to the original artistic style, one more example of 15 years of often being just a little too smart and too subtle for the house.
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