CSotD: Things we mostly knew
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Best of the Day goes to Susan Camilleri Konar at Six Chix.
Simply having a comments section forming would be funny enough, but what really ties it into social media is the fact that nobody has taken a tab.
Everyone is eager to express an opinion, nobody steps up to help.
I'm sure none of the comments are helpful, several are vicious and others are completely off topic, insisting that the loss of a cat is not the point because the commenter has this other cause that clearly matters a great deal more.
We'll address this further in today's moment of zen.
News we already knew
I like the art in Steve Breen's take on the Otto Warmbier case, and I agree with him that Justice was poorly served. This, IMHO, is the best of the cartoons commenting on the tragedy.
I can't, however, help a "What did you expect?" feeling, and perhaps that's why I like Breen's take: The bland normalcy on the faces of the guards.
It's hard to comment on the case without either appearing to blame the kid for not knowing better than to swipe a government poster in a place with an insane government or acting as if we had no idea North Korea had an insane government.
Neither position is acceptable, but the midpoint is a bland "Sucks to be you," and that's not particularly elevating.
A guy I knew in college decided to go check out the Prague Spring with a couple of buddies. I'm not sure whether they were already there when the Soviet tanks rolled in, but they were there when taking photos became a very bad idea and ended up in custody with their film confiscated and authorities demanding that they sign what they were told was a simple release acknowledging that they were giving up the film.
Since the document was in Russian and Czech but not English or German, George refused to sign and demanded to see the American consul. His friends wanted him to sign the damn thing, whatever it said, so they could get the hell out of there.
He eventually gave in and signed and they were released and it became one more Funny Tourist Story, but, given the mood of the times, they could just as easily have disappeared, and that wouldn't have been amusing.
And the Soviets were only very, very nasty. They weren't insane.
I'm sorry for the kid and his family, and I'm sorry for other prisoners of the North Korean government who have even less leverage, but I guess I'm having trouble understanding the shock.
You don't have to be able to remember the Pueblo. You don't even have to be able to remember the Sony hacking. You just have to be reasonably well-informed.
It's not like North Korea has been living up to that "Hermit Kingdom" nickname, after all.
Granted, it was an easier situation back when we had an administration with some foreign policy cred, but that's actually an argument in favor of not ramping things up at the moment.
On a somewhat related issue, David Horsey comments on Megyn Kelly's interview of raving lunatic Alex Jones, which many people didn't want to have happen, since, they said, it would give him publicity.
I suppose maybe the people who think Alex Jones is some obscure niche nutjob are the same ones who were flabbergasted to learn that North Korea doesn't treat prisoners very kindly.
The real argument against interviewing him is futility. No matter how you expose his utterly insane conspiracy theories, even if you were able to prove that he knew he was lying, even if he admitted he was lying, even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue and you got it on camera, he wouldn't lose any listeners, because they're all crazy and they'd just deny whatever you were able to show.
Horsey's caption asks "The Voice of America?" and the answer has to take into consideration that this is a nation in which you can be successful airing "documentaries" about Bigfoot and alien visitors and alternative takes on history that are just as unhinged as Pizzagate and Jones's other delusional ravings.
And I don't know the turnout percentage in yesterday's special election in Georgia, but whatever wakeup calls have been sounding since November don't seem to have changed things much.
I do hope the Alex Jones screwballs are a minority in this country.
But getting Megyn Kelly not to reveal the existence of crazy people wouldn't make them go away.
Meanwhile …
The newly-formed cartooning partnership of Price and Piccolo continues to do their thing at Rhymes with Orange, and continues to be funny, and now we're starting to hear more details.
As it happens, Hilary Price was in town recently and we met for breakfast before she went over to the Center for Cartoon Studies to teach. She told me there was something really big in the air that she couldn't talk about, and she did send me an email the day it was announced, so that's fair.
But she sure played the sphinx when I talked about how impressed and curious I was over the changes happening at Tina's Groove, and, looking back, she didn't offer any guesses of her own about what was going on there.
She did, however, express agreement with my high opinion of Rina Piccolo.
As well she might!
In any case, Rina has now commented at length about the changes and, yes, she's drawing the curtain on Tina. So it goes, and my feeling is that, while I've always liked the strip, I'd rather it came to an end than dragged on without passion.
YMMV, but, if you like tired, uninspired strips limping along on autopilot, flip open your newspaper and take your pick.
It's not like there aren't any.
Getting back to that bit about social media:
This came up on my tunes yesterday and it occurred to me how well she would fit in on Facebook.
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