CSotD: Ladies and Gentlemen and Fourth Graders of all ages!
Skip to comments
I'd like this Clay Jones piece even if it weren't a case of winning by default.
I've often said how much I dislike lazy editorial cartoonists, both the tired "oh those teenagers with their saggy pants" social commentators and the knee-jerk partisans who have nothing to say but feel sure that Hillary Clinton's email and Donald Trump's hair are worth commenting on.
(Oh, and I'm sorry Prince is dead, but howzabout we wrap it up and get back to work, okay?)
Granted, intelligent commentary on relations between Saudi Arabia and the US under Obama does take more digging and research, but, then again, how dare you complain about the lack of staff jobs and low pay rates for editorial cartoonists if you aren't willing to invest some elbow grease into whatever work does exist?
I had a professor who warned us each fall that he didn't want to read our pensées, and I guess I absorbed his attitude. Put some analysis into it, there, Buck-o.
The Atlantic piece analyzing Obama's presidency that I recommended the other day is likely off the newsstands now, but you can still find it at that link, and his attitude towards the Saudis is, as a lot of his attitudes are, nuanced.
In private encounters with other world leaders, Obama has argued that there will be no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity and undergoes some of the reforms that have changed Christianity.
Though he has argued, controversially, that the Middle East’s conflicts “date back millennia,” he also believes that the intensified Muslim fury of recent years was encouraged by countries considered friends of the U.S. In a meeting during APEC with Malcolm Turnbull, the new prime minister of Australia, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.
Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?
Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family, Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.
“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull asked.
Obama smiled. “It’s complicated,” he said.
It's complicated enough that it doesn't yield very well to single-panel gag-oriented interpretation, certainly.
Though, if you bothered to look into it, you might try a cartoon in which a middle-school student dares tell the most popular kid in class that he's inviting whoever he wants to his birthday party and the popular kid can come or not come.
A significant part of Obama's complicated relationship involves simply insisting that we're not here to help the Saudis in their ongoing quarrels with Iran.
Jones's cartoon captures that, because it is the Bushies who have been so adamant that they would rather alienate Iran and maintain a destabilized Middle East than risk offending our Saudi allies by telling them to grow the hell up.
And I'm sure the Saudis wish they still had friends like that in the US administration.
And excuse me for pointing this out
Also in that Atlantic piece:
At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal—a program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even acknowledge.
If you're going to take the money, do the job.
As if in response
Edison Lee is running for student council president in a thinly disguised parable.
When the strip debuted in 2006, there was a lot of thinly disguised political commentary and I faulted it for that, perhaps (in retrospect) because the characters and flow hadn't been adequately set up. To simply have a bright little kid making political wisecracks didn't seem to work, or, at least, it didn't work for me.
A decade later, I feel differently.
I don't think Edison himself has changed a lot, but his adventures, which always have social commentary at their base, have been more wide-ranging, so that his forays into politics have an established grounding in his personality.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the strip has evolved, so that their interactions with him are less stiff and one-dimensional, which depth in turn gives depth to those political observations.
Best of all, Katie, who was introduced two years ago, provides actual responses, rather than reactions.
And in this case, I'm afraid she provides pragmatism to buffer his idealism: Fourth graders don't care about issues.
Keep this in mind two years from now, when we're back in active warfare in the Middle East on behalf of (and in place of) our Saudi allies, and when Supreme Court cases are being decided 6-3 in favor of deportations, domestic surveillance, genital-based bathrooms and lack of women's choice.
Fourth graders don't care about issues, and you were pure enough and wise enough that you declined to support a less-than-ideal candidate for Prom Court the Presidency.
Okay, rant mode off
If some cartoonists refuse to dig in and think about things, Dan Piraro more than corrects for them by overthinking nearly everything.
See, now, with Mowgli, you could suggest that he adopted a loincloth because, being raised by wolves, he had no modesty issues but simply wanted some protection against cold-nose greetings.
But I don't know what Tarzan's reasoning was.
He sure didn't get it from hanging around with Jane Porter. Note the difference in uptightahood.
I think the old Jungle King has body image issues.
Comments 1
Comments are closed.