CSotD: Unspoken words, unworthy thoughts
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Hilary Forth has been trying to come up with clever, creative ways to get her parents to face up to and discuss the obvious tension in their relationship. Today, she makes the only move she has, and it's a good one.
It's hard to say I'm "enjoying" this storyline, if you believe comics should be funny and that "enjoy" necessarily includes smiling and laughing. But I'm really enjoying this storyline.
I don't know if you have to have gone through the same thing to appreciate what Ces has going on here, and everyone's experience is different anyway, but perhaps not so much as to make it inapplicable: For example, our kids were too young to be fully aware of what was happening, but it certainly wore on them subconsciously.
It's painful to see the process done well, particularly since we don't have the safety net of knowing how it has to turn out: The strip's title, after all, is "Sally Forth" and not "The Forth Family of Three Who All Live Together."
So, painful as it is, I'm really enjoying this.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Retail and Rex Morgan fall together alphabetically on my Comics Kingdom feed, and so today presented me with a duo guaranteed to give heart attacks to the Trumpophiles: An established relationship of some years in Retail and one just starting between (gasp!) two veterans in Rex Morgan.
Though of course, as with the Obamas, it's not the racial thing that raises the ire of the rightwingers. Not at all.
They object to Cooper and Val because employees of the same company shouldn't date, much less live together, and they will object to Jordan and Michelle because … um … former employees of the same nation's military shouldn't date, either.
Non-Juxtaposition of the Day
(Bill Day)
I often comment on times when a strip's lead time results in a happy coincidence. It's only fair to observe that, when Kirkman and Scott decided to use an octopus gag in their strip, they had no idea the metaphor would take on such an appalling significance between then and the time it ran.
I like octopi, but they're in the "ewwwww" category for the moment. We don't talk about octopi right now.
Speaking of Whom
Nate Beeler is one of those conservatives who has had to think about actual values rather than kneejerk loyalties in this campaign, or, should I say, loyalty to values rather than loyalty to party.
That makes this mockery of Trump's delusional conspiracy theories that much richer: Coming from a liberal, it would simply be one more attack on the opposition.
Though I suppose Trump's hardcore followers won't see it as satire, but simply as a depiction of how things work. I'm beginning to worry about them, and the aftershock of Trump's inevitable loss.
There have been a lot of articles about how Trump needs to address a wider voter base than he did in the primaries, to bring in additional voters, but I've noticed that he is, as his campaign fails, narrowing rather than broadening his appeal, and going directly for the deplorable half of his constituency, the ones who wouldn't desert him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day.
He is promising them things he certainly can't deliver and – as with his birther challenge to the "oh, is he black? I hadn't noticed!" president – it's not clear how much of his bullshit he believes himself, nor does it really matter.
And let me float this idea: If you flip through the channels on your TV, you'll find a number of them offering political analysis of the elections, and a number of them telling you quite seriously that Bigfoot is real, that JFK was killed by the CIA and that aliens have visited the Earth.
Is it so unreasonable to think that broadcasters are willing to put lies and crank theories on the air? Why should anyone assume CBS is telling the truth when Discovery Channel is obviously not?
In any case, I doubt we'll sink into an actual civil war when Trump's loyalists are faced with the fact that they are not a majority.
However, he has, with the connivance of those aforementioned cable channels and, of course, talk radio, made it okay for antisocial scum to crawl out from under their rocks and shout pridefully into the air.
There will be some Tim McVeighs and Eric Rudolphs who will emerge in the aftermath of the elections, and stepping on them one by one like cockroaches won't end the infestation.
However, I don't see it resulting in the kind of societal reforms that would pressure bigots and armed, paranoid nincompoops to shut up and recede back into the sewers.
Mood Shift
Which is depressing enough that I'm going to offer this Thimble Theater from 1930 to cheer things up a bit:
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