CSotD: Folly
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Seems like a clean-up day on the comics pages today: Some people doing "taking down the tree" 12th Night cartoons, others wrapping up the last of the New Year's Resolutions gags.
Candorville departs from that with a rumination on exes or, in this case, nearly-exes.
It's a potentially rich mine to dig in, because, on the one hand, there's the urge to want to be the best thing she ever had, and yet, on the other, you'd kind of like to have her excellent taste confirmed.
My own record on that is fairly good: My ex-wife married a terrific guy who was accomplished, successful, whip-smart and whom our boys adored.
In other words, she simply sharpened her focus a tad.
And ex-GFs have shown similar signs of their general good taste, the only clinker in the group being someone with whom I had a relationship that I look back on with a sense of "What was I thinking?" which I'm willing to bet she shares.
In general, I'd be a little disturbed if I looked at the New Guy and said, "Ha! What a loser!" because, well, people's taste doesn't change that much.
In this case, however, the fellow is talking about a woman who is not over him and whom he is not over and that's just kind of weird.
On the other hand, his prediction that her marriage isn't going to work out is probably spot-on, since, as noted, we don't often retool very much.
Tak Bui continues this exploration of oddly un-funny truths with a clever reversal of the cliche in a disturbing context, particularly as we prepare to end science and appoint a cadre of medieval nincompoops to positions of power.
This afternoon, I'll be wrapping up a teaching guide for a story that includes an 18th century sawmill operator and his children. I've been pondering the fact that a lot of city kids consider any harvesting of trees to be ecological slaughter, with no distinction between deforesting Brazil or Indonesia to make space for more ranches and managing a sustainable softwood forest.
But it occurs to me that, within a century of that fictional sawmill operator, real loggers had — still using hand saws and horses — turned the Adirondacks into a barren mudhole, so you can't simply blame it on modern technology.
The tie-in to PC & Pixel being that climate-change deniers don't distinguish between seasonal sea ice and the shelves around Antarctica and use fluctuations in the former to "disprove" concern about the latter.
I don't mind ignorance as long as it is genuine. When it is a cover for obstructionism, that's something else entirely, and, as we speak, a chunk of ice shelf the size of Delaware is fixin' to break off from Antarctica.
And the joke is that penguin parents will only have a limited time to carp at their kids about how easy they have it before the whole damn system collapses.
The cartoon is right on, but I'd be awfully surprised if any climate deniers got the gallows humor.
Which puts it on the same footing as Candorville in celebrating the Biblical wisdom that "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly," (Proverbs 26:11) as well as Proverbs 27:22, "Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding them like grain with a pestle, you will not remove their folly from them."
And speaking of fools and their folly, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is in the midst of a kerfuffle I hadn't heard of until Tom Spurgeon pointed it out at Comic Reporter.
The issue is that Threshold, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Publishing, is publishing a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, a hero of the alt-right.
Yiannopoulos is profiled here and he is certainly a piece of work who, among other things, was a prime mover in "Gamergate," the brown-shirt assault on women in gaming, as well as in the intense misogynistic and racist harassment of Ghostbuster-remake's Leslie Jones.
The signing has provoked a call for a boycott of Simon & Schuster, which has, in turn, provoked a defense of their right to publish from a group of publishing-affiliated groups, among them the CBLDF.
It's a troubling thing, because, for instance, I supported the ACLU's defense of a neo-nazi group that wanted to parade through heavily-Jewish Skokie, Illinois.
That move cost the ACLU a lot of members, but it was an event that came and went and actually never quite came off at all, so the principle was much more significant than the individual example.
In this case, Threshold has a history of publishing right-wing screeds, and the books are around for more than a single afternoon in a single place, so that it represents an ongoing and persistent influence.
It may have been tough and courageous to go to the mattresses for neo-nazis in Chicago, but standing up against boycotts of offensive publishers seems like a different matter, despite the fuzzy language in the statement, which sort of supports boycotts but just not this one, or something.
They either need better writers or stiffer spines.
My main experience with boycotts goes back to the grape boycott, and some of us didn't buy grapes while others boycotted entire grocery chains that were unresponsive to the Farm Workers.
The key factor being that we liked grapes.
I don't think boycotting Threshold itself would do much, since I can't imagine many in this battle will go back to purchasing books by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh if Yiannopoulos's book were canceled.
I'd be more inclined to put the pressure on the parent company, Simon and Schuster, the way many consumers pressured Safeway rather than simply not buying grapes.
As Spurgeon put it:
Simon and Schuster has a right to publish whatever they want to publish and that's a great virtue of our system; people have the right to push Simon and Schuster away and I think that's also a virtue of our system.
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