CSotD: Willing suspension of disbelief, on wires
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A peek behind the scenes to explain why I love Between Friends.
The above is yesterday's strip, part of an ongoing arc about Maeve's crush on the barista in her office building. It's been kind of silly, but that's within boundaries, because Maeve's love-life is always inadvisedly directed, sometimes in silly ways, sometimes in disastrous ones.
But it did occur to me that Frank is probably working for minimum, while Maeve is flown all around the world, and that, whatever they have in common, their income gap would be a rather large pea under the mattress.
However, I think about those things all the time; I can't help it. Let me see a live production of Peter Pan and I'm not lost in wonder over the story — I'm trying to figure out how he flew around such-and-such a prop without his wires getting tangled and wishing I could see up into the flies to the various levers and balances.
And I often get derailed by illogic and incongruity in plots and dialogue, which makes it hard for me to enjoy mysteries because I can't tell whether the professor who just repeated a popular legend is therefore an imposter and the real murderer or is simply wrong because the writer is a knothead.
Well, Sandra Bell Lundy is no knothead, so I dropped her an email yesterday and noted that I thought the income disparity would be problematic in a real relationship and wondered if she had that in mind.
And I got the equivalent of an enigmatic smile in return, and an invitation to keep reading.
And this is today's strip.
And don't worry about Peter Pan getting tangled in the scenery. Just relax and enjoy the show.
Foolish people deserve lattes, too!
Tom Tomorrow provides a better-than-average segue, not only taking us from "People Who Know What They're Doing" to "Blundering Doofi" but including the coffee reference.
And much as you may laugh over Trump extremists pledging to boycott a Broadway play that is sold out and costs two arms and two legs when it isn't, it's wrong — factually and morally — to stereotype all his supporters as bigots and fools.
Some of them don't drink good-but-overpriced coffee, some do. Some don't drink coffee at all: He did take Utah, Montana and Idaho, after all.
And the more the leftwing elitists brand Trump supporters as hillbilly morons and rail against a system that protects rural areas from tyranny of the majority, the more defensive I get about how "bigotry" is a door that swings both ways.
But you've got to work with me, here, Donnie.
First, you have to do more than tut-tut when your fans — typical or not — paint swastikas on black churches and go nuts on airplanes.
And you have to stop ginning them up by telling stupid, paranoid lies yourself. Adam Zyglis isn't subtle, but neither is he inaccurate.
It's one thing to blather some trivial foolishness to distract everyone from the real issues. It's another to spread substantive lies that undermine the Constitution you will soon swear to uphold.
Trump may simply have played the Birther thing to gain support among delusional racist lunatics, but the election is over and there's no longer any reason to pretend to believe idiotic tinfoil conspiracy theories, unless, as Zyglis suggests, he's not pretending.
In which case, we face a Constitutional crisis before inauguration.
Until the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, we were binary on the issue of fitness to serve: Live people could be president and dead people could not.
When Woodrow Wilson had his stroke, it was not kept from the public, but what was kept quiet was the extent of his incapacity. Still, he served out the remainder of his term and we moved on.
As for FDR's failing health as he sought a fourth term, I don't think the public had the slightest idea of how feeble and unlikely to serve out that last term he was. It's not even clear that the Democratic Party was fully aware of his health, though the fact that they replaced Henry Wallace as his VP may be a clue.
Today, the 25th Amendment lays out a path for declaring the president unable to serve, but it is complex and not likely to be invoked.
Reagan's halting, uncertain testimony in Iran/Contra came a year after he left office, too soon not to suggest that his dementia may have been present, if not strongly disabling, while he was still in the White House.
It may be that those around him felt, as in Wilson's case, that they could make up for his incapacities. Or they may not have recognized the problem: The slide can be gradual.
But we now have a situation where people who denounced the candidate as unfit for office are lining up to kiss the ring of the president-elect.
It probably doesn't matter whether you can declare a candidate unfit because he believes, or professes to believe, things that only a psychiatrically impaired person would, upon examination of the facts, believe.
The 25th Amendment, after all, assumes that concern for the national good will outweigh party loyalty.
Which is, itself, something that only a psychiatrically impaired person would, upon examination of the facts, believe.
Some improvement, however: Anne Telnaes mourns the ease with which Trump plays the press, and rightfully so, but they are beginning to wise up a bit, and his latest nonsensical declaration has been tempered by the press with headlines stating that his accusations have no factual basis.
There is also a new advisement from the Associated Press as to how to responsibly use the term alt-right, which is encouraging, given how often the press has been played by those seeking to sugar coat their intentions.
Are we in our "Have you no shame?" moment? Will we get there?
As David Fitzsimmons suggests, we shall see.
We shall surely see.
Now here's your moment of zen, with a dose of Fidel:
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