CSotD: Progress, of a sort
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Tjeerd Royaards offers this thoughtful take on one of the more interesting stories of the week, the reversal of Saudi Arabia's ban on women drivers.
Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world that didn't allow women to drive, but Royaards nails the fact that the change is only incremental.
The turn signal is a bit of subtle brilliance and, by the way, he crowd-sourced his Arabic with a request on Facebook.
And as long as we're talking mechanics here, let me grouse about photos of women in burkas driving. Granted, during the protests over this silly, repressive law, it was wise to cover your face on Youtube, but even there it was not universal.
There may be some graphic justification, too, for portraying Saudi women in full repression, assuming the burka is a good symbol of that. But it also, I think, portrays them as universally subservient, and that's not the case.
For instance, as seen in their photos, none of the women the Washington Post interviewed about the law wear burkas, though they do cover their hair. And they wear makeup and they look very lovely and joyous.
Certainly, Saudi women have endured a great deal, and the afore-linked activist from the Women2Drive movement – if you didn't click it then, click it now — currently lives in Australia. She shared the fact that she underwent genital mutilation as a child, and that women face genuine danger in stepping up to protest.
And yet they are not all kept in purdah. She also explained that she was an IT security specialist with enough expertise that her Saudi employers stationed her in Boston for a time, where she did get a drivers license.
Which she had to give up when she returned home.
And she posted on her Facebook page the point being made by other activists: “We ask for nothing short of full equality for women. The rain begins with a single drop.”
The rain is coming. A member of the Shura Council, an appointed advisory group that acts as a parliament recommending actions to the king, got a reserved parking space and enjoyed the moment, but said it was only a moment that followed several years of work, and was not the conclusion of anything.
The Shura Council is lagging light years behind the government and is dislocated from reality, the vision, the national transformation and the mobility of the government. We are supposed to race ahead of the government, but because this will not happen, we should at least keep up with its initiatives and ensure we are not always lagging behind.
As the sign says, "Less Oppression."
But a start.
Meanwhile, amongst our own women …
Sally Forth drops an "ouch" into the day. This isn't necessarily a male/female thing, but I suspect that if you kept track, it wouldn't break down 50/50 by a long shot.
In any case, whether you are the male or the female in your relationship, I would suggest that, if you find a copy of this strip posted on the refrigerator, you do some serious introspection.
Or learn to sleep with one eye open.
Irony, effect and affect
Lil' Donnie has made its debut at GoComics, though they threw up the notice just a few days ago and it's already got a substantial archive. Nice stuff with good caricatures and imaginative commentary.
Not that I'd want the strip to go on forever, mind you. Maybe another year; three at the absolute most.
This particular example is a good contrast with what I have previously dubbed the "bland observation" humor and commentary of a lot of altie strips, where they simply depict what's happening and we're expected to carry away a message.
This is also reductio, with the absurdity in assuming consistency, but, while others do this, Mike Norton doesn't use their affectless style, but heightens his ironies in an appealingly dramatic setting.
Meanwhile, Tom Toles uses total absurdity to lift his related commentary past that "you fill in the emotions" flatness.
There are times that Toles, like Clay Bennett, does expect readers to bring their own baggage to his cartoons, and it works because he (and Bennett) set up unmistakable ironies rather than simply showing what people say in a way that is intended be understood as ironic.
There's an element of "I know it when I see it" to where the line is drawn between sharply pointed irony and lukewarm blandness, and I suppose it's mostly personal, but I think it also derives from the fact that a cartoonist in a mainstream paper must always be aware of the need to convert readers, while altie cartoonists run the risk of assuming the reader is already on their side.
That would also be true of working in places like Town Hall, where readers assume that Obama and Hillary are evil: In either forum, you can score with insults rather than insights, because the audience is already in agreement with you.
But assuming the audience is with you can lead to laziness, and often does.
The last few years of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson were an example: He had a collection of stock gestures and catch-phrases that got a laugh from an audience that had come to hear them, and the actual jokes didn't have to be funny anymore. His engines were off and he was just gliding.
Here's another thing about a bland delivery: George Burns could get a laugh out of observations that were not intrinsically funny, but only because Gracie Allen was so over the top that their combination allowed him to puff on his cigar and assume the audience caught his irony.
Without Gracie, you've got to come up with punchlines and not just attitude.
And, finally
I hope I'm not guilty of repeatedly flogging a strip that only philosophy majors can enjoy, but the idea of an ad agency headed by Soren Kierkegaard is pretty damn funny.
Now this word from our sponsor
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