CSotD: Tuesday Short Takes
Skip to comments
A bit of wrap-up while we wait for the eclipse gags to clear from the political cartooning sites … and another reminder from Brewster Rockit that the best dumb jokes have a smart base.
Watching the eclipse by means of a smart phone turned out to be a bad idea, by the way: The lens protectively blacked out the Sun, and so all I got was a small reverse image with the Sun black and the Moon light.
However, going to the dog park for the watch party was a good idea because people there had glasses and were passing them around.
But, while I'll probably drive the 90 miles or so north into the totality zone in 2024, I felt a certain lack of awe yesterday, not so much that it didn't matter but that it wasn't as cool as a lunar eclipse. Given that lunar eclipses are much more common, that didn't make sense at first.
It's the gear.
When you have to look through eclipse glasses or use some special contraption to see it, you might as well be watching it on television.
If you're in the zone of totality, that would be different. In 1979, when I saw an 86% eclipse, the difference in ambient lighting made a difference missing in yesterday's 62%. When all the lighting changes, you feel the impact even without looking up.
With a lunar eclipse, looking up is the entire thing. Nothing else changes, so it's right there, an anomaly within a normal setting: It's the only thing different and so it's much more impressively jarring.
Watching through something artificial removes the immediacy. You might was well be watching Alderaan explode.
YMMV, but I'm a lunar eclipse fan, and not just for the more frequent gratification.
But because no ladder is required.
A more dread shadow
Jimmy Margulies notes the passing of Dick Gregory, and his melding it into the Confederate statue controversy is more than apt.
In fact, when I heard of Gregory's death, I hoped that it was a slow fade, because I hated the idea of him shuffling off this mortal coil with the taste of fresh Jim Crow in his mouth.
I'd have preferred he either died before all this overt racism started up again, or stuck around until we had some resolution.
Not, I'm sure, that he was fooled into thinking the problem was over. Still, the idea that it is a "controversy," that people in positions of leadership could openly debate the merits of Nazis and the Klan, takes things to another level.
But I was even more dismayed when Jerry Lewis died within 24 hours, not because I felt we had lost two comic giants but because that was an eclipse that I knew we would not require special glasses to see, and I knew we'd all be well within the totality.
Sure enough, the Pearly Gates cartoons are all about Jerry, who, by the way, was Jewish and so theoretically didn't believe in Pearly Gates if he believed in any sort of afterlife at all. (I seem to recall that he was reasonably observant, but, in any case, he wasn't Christian.)
I don't know how much attention Dick Gregory's death would have gotten anyway, because he's more like A. Phillip Randolph or James Farmer than Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. That is, every American ought to know who he was, but they probably don't.
And this isn't about two comedians dying and one being more well-known than the other, because the fact that Gregory was a comedian isn't a whole lot more relevant than the fact that Randolph had worked as a waiter: He wouldn't have had the impact without that starting point, but it's not what made him matter.
Well, he did matter. Glad Margulies knew it, if few others did.
I'm certainly not going to ask how many papers ran this cartoon, compared to the ones who ran Jerry-at-the-Pearly-Gates.
Popularity not only outweighs significance, but the two factors are generally synonymous.
Juxtaposition of the Day
( 
(Ted Rall)
I listened to Trump's speech last night and wondered what he was talking about, and then checked the news sites this morning and was gratified to find out that nobody knows, except that we're staying in Afghanistan, ramping things up a bit and possibly pissing off another nuclear power, justifiably or not.
I'm impressed with the speed with which Bennett and Rall responded, but I suspect they may have sketched these before the speech and then held them — and their breaths — before posting, to make sure he didn't have something less obvious up his sleeve.
It's certainly a Juxtaposition, with Bennett optimistically recalling Churchill's speech following the British victory at El Alamein and Rall picking up on the "here we go again," though missing the fact that the 9/11 attacks were indeed planned from within Afghanistan, where the Taliban offered al Qaeda shelter in return for a few favors.
Whatever Trump has in mind, it's better than Bannon's cunning plan to bug out and leave it in the hands of mercenaries, which would recall Phil Och's song about the Bay of Pigs:
Why were they wearing my country's clothes?
Why were they spending my country's gold?
Who are my friends and who are my foes?
The headlines were lying; why wasn't I told?
Most of Trump's remaining supporters are more aligned with Rudyard Kipling's imperialistic bombast than Ochs' socialism, but even Kipling wrote:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
We'll see.
Thanks, Bill
The thing about today's Free Range is that I don't even have to embed the video. I just have to offer the obvious link.
Whether you click on it or not, Bill Whitehead has planted the ear worm.
Have a nice day.
Comments 2
Comments are closed.