CSotD: Nostalgia and History
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A little walk down TV Memory Lane with this juxtaposition.
These are pretty funny and I like them, but the culture changes so fast these days that it's hard to make references that will really hit a wide audience.
The Flying Nun, for instance, premiered in September, 1967, just as I was heading out the door to college, which meant that I only saw it when I was home on vacations.
It was, therefore, no more relevant to me than the Eighties shows in Argyle Sweater, which I only saw when I wandered through the livingroom while my kids had the TV on.
Then again, not every cartoon has to be aimed at everyone in the world. Fine tuning is permitted.
My own frame of reference starts with Howdy Doody, which we had to go down to Butchie Nagel's house to watch until my folks bought a TV, and stretches about to Laugh-In, which I watched in high school but only when I wasn't busy having a life.
I did feel strongly about Little House, because I'd read the entire series to my boys as part of our bedtime ritual, and it's actually more of a Seventies show, since it dated from 1974 and was the hot NBC program when I was selling TV time at an NBC affiliate.
So I had to love it five days a week from 9 to 5 for what it did for our ratings, and then was free to hate it on my own time for what they'd done to the storyline.
Anyway, as said, not every cartoon has to be aimed at me and my boomer buddies.
Gen X appears to be in the driver's seat of the Nostalgia Van these days.
Enjoy it: You'll be pushed aside soon enough.
Speaking of which
The imminent departure of the Obamas is caught in this Gustavo Viselner piece, which, to pin down another TV memory, reminds me of the end of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I expect a lot of people to be as equally nostalgic over his eight years as they are over her seven.
I hope they have cable in the re-education camps.
Bob Gorrell offers a classy farewell to a president with whom he didn't always see eye-to-eye, though it's not as big a departure as it could be: Gorrell is one of a handful of conservatives who surprise me on a fairly regular basis.
I not only appreciate the quiet mood, but get a kick out of how the familiar logo and slim, well-dressed gentleman at its center resemble the opening of a Bond movie.
Meanwhile, in the present tense
Clay Jones offers a cynical look at the election and, as tired as I am of woulda-coulda-shoulda analysis, I think it's important to keep the dubious role of the intelligence community on the front burner.
The Senate Watergate Hearings are yet another moment of TV for which I am nostalgic, but I will admit to having doubted at the time that they would come to anything.
Still, you never know when some Alexander Butterfield will step up and turn things real.
Forcing Nixon to resign was an unexpected result of those hearings, but simply finding out that his crew had sabotaged Ed Muskie's campaign was a valuable insight, even if it didn't change the outcome of the election.
Or much that has followed. It seems that what reforms were imposed have mostly been abandoned since.
Bring on the hearings. I'd like to at least know we weren't paranoid.
Signe Wilkinson made me both laff and nod in agreement with her post-election-analysis-analysis.
Maybe the fact that her home base, Philadelphia, is resolutely blue collar gives her the insight that more metro-types don't get, but she certainly gets it.
Clinton was right that half of Trump's supporters were unteachable and unreachable, but when Garrison Keiller, in a highly-shared essay, refers to Trump as "a severely learning-disabled man," that is simply how chardonnay-drinkers yell "Retard!" while holding a pinkie in the air.
That kind of supercilious snobbery explains why the other half of the basket was neither teached nor reached. Or, perhaps, why they were never taught, hence what they wrought.
Which reminds me of a passage from one of my unpublished novels in which one character dismissed another's claim of sensitivity by remarking that the only Spanish she knew was "Please dust the piano."
If the zapato fits, amigo.
Cartooning with a sense of place
Jason Togyer chimed in from the other end of the Keystone State with this caricature of a client that he did as part of an assignment, saying it was fun to have his cartooning occasionally be part of his day job.
When I was editing the Franklin Journal, a tiny twice-weekly in western Maine, I sometimes called on Jason to provide cartoons on local topics, and more than once, I would later see them around town.
Local cartoons matter, and an example came when Maine's governor, John Balducci, ordered — not "requested," but shoved through legislation requiring — that rural school districts be consolidated in the interest of economy.
We already had kids spending an hour or more on the bus each way, and Jason did one cartoon showing a little kid in pajamas with a teddy bear and a pillow getting on the school bus in the middle of the night.
But this one, in which the five superintendants of our regional school districts are confronted by Farmer Balducci and his shotgun, turned up colorized and framed on the desk of the fellow fourth from the left, who told me that our state senator had presented each of the five with a similar souvenir.
I later learned that he had also handed a copy to the governor who, as it turned out, was not amused by the jest.
But, hey, five out of six is an excellent average!
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