CSotD: From the sublime to the ridiculous
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I'm going to start off with a couple of serious pieces, then go to the weird and silly. I think the times call for some of each.
The one most relevant to the blog's mission is this Mike Luckovich Wells Fargo cartoon, which shines out from a pile of "The stagecoach company robbed itself" sorts of takes.
I don't know if Luckovich came up with it before or after or independent of Elizabeth Warren's bravura questioning of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf before the Senate Banking Committee, but she went after the same point: The driver is never to blame, it's always the horses.
Or, "Road apples roll downhill."
I don't much care for congressional committee "hearings" that are a cover for speeches and I am aware of a strong possibility for a conflict of interest in my approving of Warren's grilling, since I agree with her.
It's certainly the case, though, that she followed the attorneys' rule to never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer: There's a point where she pulls out the documentation and just fries the guy.
And, morally, she couldn't sit back and wait for someone else to pull this stinking corpse from behind the curtain. It really was a case of "If not you, who? If not now, when?"
And, as Sanders has said, we've got to stop shooting the horses and start holding the fellas holding the reins accountable for where the coach goes.
If you missed it, here's the grilling:
(Spoiler Alert: The Military/Industrial Complex doesn't much like Elizabeth Warren. They're not big on Bernie Sanders, either.)
Plus this:
Pat Bagley takes off the gloves to discuss the latest outrage in the ongoing, never-ending horror story that results in butt-hurt sunshine patriots weeping at football games and police unions defending the indefensible.
Here's Chuck Canterbury's interview on NPR in which he explains that they want to fight poverty and thereby reduce crime, but fails to tie in how shooting unarmed people in the street is tied to that goal. And in which he explains that the police do not need reform.
Which, in as much as it ties in Colin Kaeperlink's silent protest against this blindness to the issue, brings to mind a small incident following the famous raised-fist protests at the Mexico City Olympics by John Carlos and Tommy Smith.
The weekend after, Notre Dame was playing Georgia Tech, and a group of Notre Dame students carried some banners around the edge of the field before the game supporting Smith and Carlos and generally decrying racism.
It should have been no big deal, but they were greeted with boos and pelted with whatever people had at hand, which seemed bizarre at Our Lady's University.
After the demonstration, the marchers went off and hung the banners in the student center, and shortly after that, I was there with a buddy and a couple of young women from St. Mary's, the college across the road, when some Georgia Tech fans came in and made as if to tear down the banners.
"Hey!" my friend said, "Those aren't yours. Leave them alone."
And the large redneck thugs looked at the somewhat average-sized hippies and I thought, oh, shit, I hope Mark fights as well as he talks.
But then they turned and walked away.
And I exhaled and rejoiced in the cowardice of thugs.
Which is relevant in part because the people who get so upset over Kaepernick and the growing group of athletes who also think shooting unarmed innocent black people is a bad thing are, in my humble opinion, cowards and blow-hards and easily turned aside if we but do so.
And in part because Mark, who now lives in Kenosha, dropped by the festival this past weekend and met some people and had a good time, adding one more reason I wish I'd made it there.
The world is full of good people. They've just got to speak up and let the world know that they are there.
Speaking of being heard
Now on to the day's more light-hearted offerings:
PC and Pixel brings to mind a problem this country boy always had with the old "if a tree falls in the forest" thingie, which is that, while I appreciate the metaphysical concept, the forest is full of ears and there's always someone to hear what happens.
And, no, changing it to "if a tree falls in the desert" doesn't help, since you've still got the fact of the tree, which can't live in a place where there are no other beings.
And if a tree falls on the moon … no, it just doesn't work, and even Mighty Google can't fix it.
Bottomliners isn't so much a matter of the metaphor as a chuckle over the current state of business. I made the switch from cubicle to free-range, or, actually, pasture-raised, almost a decade ago and so laughed that, yes, it happens but at least nobody has the damn nerve to try to make you do it within the same company.
And then I realized that a lot of editorial cartoonists have, in fact, been put through that process internally.
So I got a laff and maybe they won't. But, if we're going to press the point, they're really more cage-free than free-range or free-roaming.
Latest pressing issue for Social Justice Warriors
Greek cartoonist Dino points out the latest opportunity to be more socially sensitive, just and superior to everyone else on the Internet.
In the words of Abbie Hoffman, "Where's your sense of social responsibility?" and, yeah, you SJWs didn't invent that, either. We used to bat around the term "relevance" in just those parameters: Anything that didn't advance social justice was irrelevant.
I'm going to come back to the whole SJW topic, but, for now, I have to decide if I'm going to ask Brad and Angie to return that fondue pot or just be cool about it.
And finally …
Frazz reminds us that, if you want to solve real problems in the real world, it helps not to get too caught up in the metaphors and just deal with what is.
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