CSotD: Cynics and Critics
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Pooch Cafe echoes my own cynical take on all those heart-warming specials that not only come up on TV this time of year but are also parts of Very Special Story Arcs in comics.
I've said enough about my doubts lately on how much all these "redemption" stories actually change anyone, but Jeff Stahler's "Moderately Confused" made me chuckle today, so here it is and you can scroll back to the last couple of days if you need a rant to go with it.
But I don't think it's "cynicism" except in the classical sense of Diogenes the Cynic, not the one with the lantern but the one who lived in a barrel in the agora.
The story goes that, hearing of this ascetic philosopher, Alexander — student of Plato — went to see him and offered him anything he wanted.
Diogenes asked him to step to one side so he wouldn't block the sunlight.
It's not cynical to identify with Diogenes and feel good that he put the puffed-up Alexander in his place.
It's probably cynical to assume that the story is apocryphal.
There's a line somewhere between the cynic and the critic, and, while you shouldn't give insufferable glurge a pass simply because of the season, you also ought not to slip into the trap of hating everything.
You can always find an audience that will cheer on the professional bully, but you ought to be better than that.
You can and should criticize affectionately, as Keith Knight does in today's "Knight Life."
He's a huge geek and obsessed with Stars both War and Trek, but it shouldn't stop him from conceding how predictable the former has become.
I particularly liked this strip because the young critic I sent to the super-secret press screening hit a tight deadline for me, but, when I began to edit her piece, I realized she hadn't provided a summary of the plot.
Then I read it again and realized that it really wasn't necessary, and nothing I've heard about the film since has changed that.
I still don't have the slightest idea what its plot is or if it even has one, and I think that, if it mattered, somebody would have mentioned it and nobody has.
Non-Cynical Juxtaposition of the Day
This is how Rex Morgan and Judge Parker came up in my feed today, with an estranged daughter flying home in the former and a homeward-bound stepdaughter also on a plane in the later.
Both strips are targets of the hipster cynics who trash them so reflexively that it wouldn't matter what was in the strips, and that's part of the gap between "cynic" and "critic."
In the case of Rex Morgan, this may be a bit of a holiday interlude in an otherwise grim story arc about Rex's daughter being hit by a car that passed her stopped school bus, and, if so, there's no harm done because we'll get back to the hospital soon enough.
And, yes, even if the kid regains consciousness on Christmas Day, what the hell is wrong with that? I don't think she's slated for the morgue, and she has to wake up sometime.
By contrast, the cynic in me has been surprised to see the girls both re-emerge in Judge Parker because I assumed Francesco Marciuliano, having taken over the strip, was trimming it of extraneous characters and that one was dead and the other exiled to Alaska.
However, he's got enough balls in the air right now that I'm willing to sit back and see what happens.
I'm even sentimental enough that the juxtaposition reminded me of Gary Weis's classic short film from the early days of Saturday Night Live, in the days when that show was still inventive and adventurous (that's the critic speaking).
He filmed airport greetings and placed them over Simon & Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound" and the only cynical thing to say about it is that it's a damn shame the piece isn't in an embeddable format, but a few people have saved it and you can see it here if you have Flash.
I suppose you could accuse Edison Lee of cynicism, in that the strip ran the day after the Electoral College met, but it's hard to pin down the exact message here.
On the one hand, we're in a heap o' trouble, yes, and thinking people remain a bit shell-shocked.
On the other, we're not going to get a new election and you might as well ask a department store Santa as sign one of those ridiculous petitions that's going around.
That's the cynic in me.
The critic suggests that, when we take down the Christmas trees, we also stop talking about Hillary and the past and pitch into some more practical conversations about the present and the future …
… including the growing influence of Vladimir Putin, who Clay Jones criticizes here not for his role in our election but for his role in Syria and thus in the assassination yesterday of Russia's ambassador to Turkey.
As Jones notes in his accompanying remarks, the assassin struck in Turkey, not Syria, and the new form of warfare doesn't simply eliminate bodies of soldiers marching towards each other on otherwise unoccupied battlefields — it's been a century since war looked like that — but it no longer means fighting within the borders of a particular area.
Turkey wasn’t the only site of terrorism on Monday. Three people were injured at a Muslim prayer center in Zurich, Switzerland and at least 12 were killed at a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany.
As our next president forges a closer relationship to Russia and perhaps Syria, we may expect some of this backlash to be directed toward us.
That's not cynicism. It's criticism and analysis.
Now here's a moment of zen the cynics will really hate:
I had the "War is Over – If you want it" NYTimes full-page ad on my apartment wall.
Better a sentimental fool than a heartless cynic.
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