CSotD: Modern format, old story
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On the road this morning, so a brief posting featuring a long comic, with a hat tip to Brian Fies.
This look at homeless youth in the Central African Republic is really a short book rather than a long article, so any time saved by my brevity today will be more than compensated for.
It's a format we've seen before, but from Cartoon Movement rather than HuffPost, and I'll call that a good thing, since it's a valuable way to spread information. Kind of like finding standing rib roast on the menu at McDonald's, yes, surprising, but, if it's good, why not dig in?
This is good.
The combination of art, video and photography in a cartoon format allows for a wedding of artistic intepretation with documentary exactitude, which is often missing from relatively long form comics told strictly as a sort of drawn diary.
It is like an extension, in modern media, of the 1941 collaboration of James Agee and Walker Evans in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," which documented poor farmers in the Depression with a combination of now-classic photographs and less remembered but still excellent prose, the passion of which, as the Guardian notes, is "anything but reportage."
The difference being that it goes back farther, with echoes of homeless youth in the 19th century cities, both in, as seen above, the street names, but also, as seen later, the extreme dangers faced by homeless little girls.
The format also is, I think, more accessible to the casual reader than pure text, photography or video alone.
That may be personal: I don't have the patience for long videos, and have a tendency, when text is long, to glance over at the right hand side to see how far down the slider has gone and how much is left. And while I listen to tightly produced radio shows like "On the Media," I can't sit through a 40 minute podcast of which 20 minutes are giggling and rambling smalltalk.
In any case, have a look. This is valuable stuff and, even if you do have the patience for those other formats, I don't think you'd be here if you didn't also like comics.
Scouts Dishonor
As Lee Judge notes, the Boy Scouts have issued an apology for the bizarre tirade their kids were exposed to at the jamboree, and it's been interesting to see how it was received on social media.
Some people are happy to see a less mealy-mouthed response than the initial "Don't look at us — we always invite the President" statement that BSA put out in the immediate wake of the storm.
Others, however, were apparently hoping the Scouts would assemble a firing squad.
As someone who has been involved in public apologies — though I certainly never faced a disaster of these proportions — I found the response to be measured, sincere and, well, as straightforward as possible, given the circumstances.
They didn't go quite as far as Judge suggests, but I'm not sure anything that specific was called for.
I suppose they could institute a policy of only permitting video addresses, but, even then, what would you do in a similar case? Send it back to POTUS with a rejection note?
Or simply stop the tradition of the president being the honorary president of the organization, which seems kind of sad, though not the only time that Trump as been the catalyst for "This is why we can't have nice things."
Maybe it's not their fault. Maybe we need to look within. Maybe, if we stopped electing vulgar, unbalanced narcissists to the presidency, we wouldn't find ourselves faced with these constant humiliations.
What if we began to really think before we went to the polls, and to use our ballots to ensure that we would be represented by thoughtful people who would make good decisions for all humanity and would project an image that would inspire the world to admire our nation?
Nah.
Got to get on with this road trip, which we will revisit tomorrow.
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