CSotD: Of Pickle Queens and Perspective
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David Sipress jumped the line with a cartoon at the New Yorker site in advance of last night's Commander in Chief Forum, but the question was in the air before Matt Lauer's odd and now disputed grilling of the two candidates.
I'm not as prone as some to crucify Lauer himself for the way he ate up so much of Clinton's half hour with his own questions about, in the words of Bernie Sanders, "the damn email," then hurried her through her answers to the questions being asked by the people for whom the event was purportedly intended.
It was distressing that he seemed to question the frankness of her answers, while seeming to give Trump a pass on some strikingly vacuous answers in the second half hour.
But there's a difference between being prejudiced and being in over your depth, and Lauer is a lightweight who never should have been put in that position to begin with.
When you choose someone trained to interview the Pickle Queen for some great recipes using pickles and have him moderate a forum with the candidates for the most powerful political position in the world, it's hardly his fault if it doesn't go perfectly.
And don't look for anything more penetrating to come: We seem locked into the same brand of follow-the-common-knowledge coverage that assumed John Kerry had fudged his military record and that Al Gore had claimed to invent the Internet.
I did wonder, as Trump explained that he has his own plan to defeat ISIS and he'll ask his generals to come up with their plan and then he'll look at the plans … I did wonder how many of the veterans were sitting there thinking it sure didn't sound like a way to defeat ISIS or, for that matter, run a military organization.
And I was disappointed that their questions were so much better than Lauer's.
But I was heartened to think that perhaps the people who have literally been in the trenches were more interested in Clinton's discussion of what she has done and will do about the VA than in Trump's airy assurances that he's gonna just fix it all.
I guess we'll see.
Meanwhile, if the broadcast media is content to play "on the one hand, but on the other" artificial equivalencies as we move towards elections, there are some rising questions about the Pam Bondi contribution being raised elsewhere, this Jack Ohman piece being one of a number emerging among cartoonists.
As noted before, Sipress's panel also appeared before the forum and was on this more general topic that is, I hope, being picked up on: Is anyone paying attention to Trump's scandals?
And how many voters are simply going along with the Pickle Queen approach to this race?
As Ukrainian cartoonist Sergii Fedko notes at Cartoon Movement, the whole world is watching. And they aren't all looking for great new recipes you can make with pickles.
Lauer didn't press Trump on his Kremlin fan base as much as he might have, but, again, you have to wonder if the veterans were as readily accepting of his vague, puff-ball answers as Lauer seemed to be, and as I'm sure Ukrainian viewers would not have been.
On a lighter note
Bob Mankoff has posted a surprisingly extensive slideshow of reader-favorite cartoons from the New Yorker and there were several I might have chosen to highlight the collection.
I picked this one because I really did, a few decades ago, stand in the shower reading the bottle of a girlfriend's shampoo and think they were warning me that it hadn't been fully tested, rather than assuring me of the fact.
And then there's this furshlugginer guy
Michael Cavna has an interview with Mad Magazine pioneer Al Jaffee, on the occasion of his being inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame. In it, Jaffee talks about his youth and how the hard times helped make him the funny guy and great artist he is today.
It's a good piece, and your bonus is that it reminded me of a piece that ran in Forward this past February, in which Jaffee laid down the Yiddish origins of Mad Magazine terms like "furshlugginer" and "potrzebie."
As an editor, the gushing fan-girl tone of the story makes my teeth hurt, but the writer does penetrate into a world in which I think it's less the poverty Jaffee notes with Cavna as it is an overall outsider consciousness that inspired the humor.
And, boy, were they outsiders, chillingly so, given the times and what their families had just been through.
A fascinating read, and the two articles together will not only tell you a lot about Al Jaffee, but a lot about how humor works.
It made me wish that, having read that, I could now transport back in time to all those Sunday evenings watching the standups on Ed Sullivan.
I thought they were hilarious at the time, but I'd love to come upon them fresh, knowing where they came from, beyond "the Catskills."
Have a double-helping of zen
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