CSotD: Banging your head
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Retail this week brings back a funny-now-that-its-over memory. Marla was delighted to lose her annoying assistant manager but is now going through the old resumes that people had sent in before corporate forced her to sign him.
I was on the end of a "remember when you applied here?" phone call when I was still trying, and increasingly desperate, to get out of a toxic situation.
Which means I didn't pause to consider, if they made such a short-lived hire six or eight months ago, that really, there were only three possibilities:
1. Their situation is horrific and the person they hired ran screaming out of the building.
2. They are nincompoops and cannot tell if a person is a good fit for their position.
3. It's a wonderful place to work, they hire sensibly and the poor chap they hired last year has just been hit by a bus.
In this case, it was a small enough market that it didn't have a bus system.
And there isn't much practical difference between 1 and 2.
I love Retail because it's an ongoing remembrance that even a good, conscientious manager like Marla can be handcuffed by the jackasses above her, at which point the quality of her instincts becomes secondary.
At one place I worked, when I gave my two weeks notice, my boss congratulated me with way too much warmth, because we were friends and he was relieved that I was getting out.
He had a wife and kids and a mortgage and I think envied my empty-nested position in life, which I used to sum up as "It's just me and the dogs, and they think sleeping in the park and eating out of Dumpsters would be a blast!"
It gave me a certain mobiliy in life.
And I've also been in Marla's position, in which you have to try to hire people knowing that, if you lie to applicants about the situation, they're not going to stay very long, while, if you are honest about it, only fools and incompetents will accept the position.
Knowing that does not add to your own self-image, by the way. That boss who was so happy for me got canned a few months later. We spoke on the phone and he was as happy as I'd heard him sound in a couple of years, now that Corporate had made a decision he wasn't in a position to make for himself.
But, of course, if Marla were to escape the chamber of horrors, Norm Feuti wouldn't have a comic strip anymore.
Though Sally Yates got out, and her ex-employer still inspires cartoonists. (More on that later)
Don't drink the water
Mike Thompson has been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for cartooning this year, based on his coverage of the Flint water crisis.
His paper, the Detroit Free Press, has a brief write up, and Michael Cavna goes somewhat more in depth. Both feature Thompson's award-winning portfolio on the topic, from which I snagged the above cartoon.
Thompson tells Cavna that his goal to keep the issue alive has been frustrating, since very little has actually happened to remedy the situation: "What’s happening in Flint is a harbinger for the country. Need help? Too bad, you’re on your own," he said.
I would note that the biggest benefit to come out of Flint is that you no longer hear the foes of bottled water claiming that what comes out of the bottle is no different than what comes out of your tap. They have finally figured out that testing water at the well head is not the same as testing it after it has passed through miles of ancient, corroded, lead-leaking pipes, which those of us who have lived in crappy neighborhoods knew all along.
But there were also stories that other communities were finding the same problem, stories that, for some reason, fell on deaf ears. Flint is simply the example we know about.
Fortunately, there's a good chance we won't have to worry about municipal water supplies no longer meeting federal standards. As this NYTimes article states, Dear Leader is getting rid of those pesky scientists:
A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part of the wide net it plans to cast. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” said the spokesman, J. P. Freire.
Because who knows more about chickens and hen houses than a fox?
Keep on keepin' on
Thompson clearly realizes that winning an award doesn't solve the problem and plans to keep pushing, which is all you can do. And, just as the water problem is not only in Flint, so, too, the mission of editorial cartoonists is hardly confined to that problem and that community.
Ann Telnaes — who has piled up a few plaques in her time and is currently president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists — recently gave the keynote address at the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom luncheon in Ottawa, and her remarks there are well worth reading.
They're a solid reminder that some cartoonists face far greater challenges than being ignored, and yet they keep on drawing.
And, as she said there
I used to tell my colleagues from around the world that American cartoonists never had to worry about being imprisoned for our cartoons because we have the First Amendment as our protection. But I’m not so sure anymore. … White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said in a recent interview that libel laws are “something that we’ve looked at.” I find it very unsettling that a president of the United States doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment and thinks the role of a free press is the same as his personal PR firm.
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