CSotD: Taking responsibility for what you lay on the table
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Here's the only Thanksgiving cartoon you need, courtesy of the King Features Archivist, whom you should have bookmarked, because fascinating stuff pops up there well beyond the "Here's an old cartoon" offered elsewhere.
Not only do you get some context, but you often get extras, like buttons or coupons or ads, and, most important for a fan at my level, insider stories of how particular strips came to be and were then marketed.
There are more cartoons back there and you should go have a look.
What this specific cartoon brings to mind is that the urbanization of the US, and then the world, was not only gradual in the sense that people didn't move straight off the farm and into the factories, but they also didn't go straight from self-sufficient farming to getting all their food in cans and packages and styrofoam trays.
While tenement dwellers lived in what were undeniably "city" neighborhoods, others had not just a patch of yard on which a kid might play, but enough of a lot that you could have a small flock of chickens and a decent truck patch.
And this wasn't just 200 years ago when the Boston Common was the grounds upon which Bostonians could graze a milk cow. When I was a kid in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, in the early 50s, there were two houses on our block with chicken coops and, no, they didn't give them names, knit them sweaters and let them live long, pampered lives.
I remember as a very young lad a group of neighborhood kids gathered around like Spanky and the Little Rascals, watching one of the neighbors kill a few chickens. The fascinating part was not the execution, which was quick and expert, but the fact that the chicken body would then go running off into the corn patch.
"Running around like a chicken with its head cut off" was not an abstract concept. We'd seen it.
Nor were we naively cut off from our food. When it was written, "Charlotte's Web" was not something you needed to live on a farm to understand and, if most of us had not raised chickens ourselves, much less pigs, we pretty much knew where our food came from.
Anyway, the turkey in the backyard and Pops with an ax used to be a staple of Thanksgiving humor.
As were cartoons large enough that you could tell a whole story.
(November 22, 1925 having been a Sunday back when the Sunday funnies filled a whole page and not one of them skinny-ass brochure-sized pages they try to foist on you these days, either.)
Juxtaposition of the Day
Kal and Toles address what appears to be a coming period of isolationism, though we've also heard promises to, as Fearless Leader so eloquently put it, "bomb the shit out of" those we don't like.
So it's hard to tell what will happen next, but Kal points out the futility of playing the neutral in a carved up world, while Toles hearkens back to the days of the bunds and isolationists, which didn't work then and won't work now.
"Neutrality" is for nations that are not worth the cost of invading and are not blocking access to a nation that is.
You don't need a degree in political theory to understand this, if you've ever played "Risk." You don't waste armies on countries that are neither a threat nor a prize.
But there aren't many of those.
In 1975, I tried to work with a Cambodian who had been a very high-ranking diplomat in that country, starting as number two man at the Paris talks in the 1950s and in the first Cambodian embassy post-independence, after which he was ambassador to a half-dozen other places. He was personally and politically extremely close to Prince Sihanouk.
He was ambassador to South Korea at the time Phnom Penh fell, which was fortunate for him and his family, since he had sided with Lon Nol in the coup that sent Sihanouk into exile and prompted the China-backed rising of the Khmer Rouge.
So he happened to be far from home when Pol Pot began settling family business.
Cambodia was allegedly a non-aligned nation, but my friend explained that there's no such thing, and that they constantly pondered which of the three Superpowers would hurt them the least.
China was on their border, and the US military was all through South Vietnam and (secretly) in their mountains, but Moscow was way over somewhere else.
Therefore, aligning with the Soviets made the most sense, he explained, but the more things heated up, the less eager Brezhnev became to be helpful.
And with the US trying to get out of the tar pit, aligning with them had not worked out so well.
Cambodia was like a small business that happened to be on the border of a turf war in a heavily mobbed-up city.
As we were sitting in his kitchen and he was telling me this, Sihanouk was in Beijing waiting to be summoned home by the victorious Khmer Rouge, and Washington was pretending they didn't know about the Killing Fields or who was in charge in Pnohm Penh and perhaps they didn't, but my friend was getting letters and updates from refugees in Thailand and Burma and he was certainly up-to-date on things.
I personally introduced him to a Congressional Representative and I was in the room two or three times while he was on the phone with Philip Habib, so I'm inclined to view things through a cynical filter.
I'm also inclined to wish I had been older than 25 and better connected, and that one of the few editors I knew at a national publication had not responded that it wasn't much of a story because people were "tired of reading about Vietnam."
Can't fix that now.
Still, while I hope the Trump administration will reject the adventurism of Cheney/Bush, please don't tell me you're neutral because it insults my intelligence and makes me very angry.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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