CSotD: Quibbles, ethics and decency
Skip to comments
(
I wasn't sure which of these to lead with, so here's a Juxtaposition in alphabetical order, on the topic of bringing out Sean Spicer as the punchline to Stephen Colbert's Emmy monologue, which you can see here.
You can scroll back from there and watch the whole monologue, but I thought it was pretty standard award-show schtick and hardly comparable to his legendary "truthiness" performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Jones lays it out straight: This ain't funny.
Thing is, there's a certain school of "how dare he!" outrageous humor that was central to Colbert's ongoing portrayal of a clueless, button-down conservative, but that often strays over into what is simply poor taste.
When it consists of making the joke no-one dares make, or illuminating the evil behind someone else's polite-sounding opinions, it can be brilliant stuff.
But it's dangerous ground and, when you cross a certain line, you get the response Clay Jones provides, of simply "That's not funny," because, as he points out, Spicer wasn't simply lying about crowd sizes.
He was lying about things that matter, and, if Jones is more restrained in his response than Keith Knight, you have to remember that Knight has dedicated a huge amount of his energy lately to Black Lives Matter issues.
When governments lie, people die, and it's hard to find much humor in that, or much potential redemption in those who made it happen or even in those who let it happen.
I mean, Albert Speer may have regretted his role and accepted his guilt, but he was still sentenced to, and served, 20 years.
Rob Rogers digs a little deeper, not only condemning the appearance but condemning the way in which staging it normalizes Spicers' role in assisting a government to lie to its people.
And I'm sure Keef is right and that all the henchmen will get nice publishing contracts, but I hope he's wrong in thinking we need to be told not to buy them.
Though I'm also sure we'll have one more lie to swallow when the books are bought up en masse in order to make phony best-sellers out of them.
But that's normal. Happens all the time. What's the big deal?
And this quibble
I like Jimmy Margulies' cartoon reminding readers to shop locally, but I'm gonna quibble over his choice of victims.
I have trouble summoning up a lot of pity for Toys R Us, which is the kind of corporate big box store that comes into midsize cities and wipes out locally owned specialty shops where someone who loves toys has carefully chosen good things, along with some fun little gifts and gadgets.
Just as, by the way, the chain bookstores began wiping out small independent bookstores while Amazon was still building itself up to, in turn, wipe them out.
Ah, but here's the thing: Toys R Us is headquartered in Wayne, NJ, and Margulies draws for AMNewYork, which makes this a local event, even though its impact stretches across the country.
Fair enough. But it's a local cartoon.
Ain't nobody out here in the hinterlands weeping for chain stores.
Quibble, quibble, quibble.
This is not a quibble
I really hesitate to comment on today's Luann, but I'm not simply offering wise-guy snark, and I'm not giggling over a double-entendre.
I like the strip, I like Greg and Karen Evans' work.
But if anyone has a less damning explanation of Luann's dialogue in the second panel, please leave it in the comments, because I've got nothing but the obvious, appalling one.
Luann is still (apparently) a virgin, though only by the grace of God and an ill-timed phone call. Still, she has to know what "spending the night" entails at the college level.
And I know that Luann and Tiffany dislike each other, but — even in setting up an arc about compassion — she cannot have been meant to suggest this, and I'm genuinely wondering how it wasn't picked up either in the creative process or by an editor.
Won't quibble or question this one
Well, one quibble with this xkcd:
He should have drawn a jumble of black spaghetti with the labels pointing to various ends poking out.
Took me a minute to recognize them, all nice and untangled like that. Nothing like that in my junk drawer.
Elsewhere in the ethical universe
Judging from today's Edison Lee, I think John Hambrock is watching too much daytime TV.
I just began watching in the daytime a few months ago; I bought a small smart TV for the kitchen and have been watching CNN while I did dishes and prepared dinner and, boy, you sure can tell who's home during the day.
Of course, lawyers were once forbidden to advertise on TV, as were peddlers of prescription drugs, so that all you saw during the Idiot Hours were ads for the Pocket Fisherman, and then cable exploded and someone realized you could have a whole channel that sold useless crap 24/7 and today there are several.
Leaving the regular channels to the ambulance chasers and (prescription) snake-oil salesmen.
Yesterday, I saw an odd convergence:
There was an ad encouraging you to start a retirement fund so you don't run out of money in your old age. Fair enough, though I suspect it was a package-buy on CNN rather than something targeted specifically to people who are sitting at home at 3 in the afternoon wondering what to do with all their excess income.
It was followed immediately by a more daytime-on-purpose ad, which was intended to get older couples to sell off their life insurance because they don't need it once their kids are grown and gone.
Which I guess makes sense if they took the advice in the first ad about 30 years ago and are floating in retirement funds.
Or plan to die at the same time, and soon.
Now, this classic ode to daytime TV
Comments 5
Comments are closed.