CSotD: Playing the Roles
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Another "Where to start?" day, so we'll start with Between Friends, where it looks like the story arc of Maeve and Frank is heating up a bit.
I have infinite faith in Maeve's ability to screw up any relationship, mind you, so the suspense is whether she blunders into something awful and only gets out at the last minute or whether she gets irrationally insecure and blows something that might have worked.
Thank god you don't have any friends in real life who keep dangling the possibility of finally getting their act together and then snatching it back at the last minute, eh?
And I'll toss in today's Lil' Donnie, not because Larry Flynt's offer is all that significant — though it would be nice if it lured someone out of the woodwork — but just because I really like this strip and that last panel is priceless.
The combination of Trump family kleptocratic entitlement and Pence's position as Secretary of Tits-on-a-Bull is priceless.
Signe Wilkinson takes a cynical view of the Boy Scouts decision to allow girls to join.
I'm torn on this, mostly because the Girl Scouts do such a good job of teaching girls to become responsible young women that I hate to see anyone go enter knot-tying contests instead.
On the other hand, the Explorers — high-school Boy Scouts — has been open to girls for some time and, from what I've seen of Explorer troops, their emphasis on STEM sorts of things seems to work well for both sexes.
Still, I wish there were some place where little boys could learn to be responsible men.
When I decided to lose my beard, I approached my son's teacher and offered to shave it off in front of her classroom of K-2s. She laughed and asked why, and I asked her how many of those kids had ever seen a man shave?
She pondered that for a moment and then we set up a time.
In more pre-industrial societies, men and boys worked together on a regular basis, and the bonds between them arose naturally, just as girls naturally learned from their aunts and mothers. Nor was this simply on idyllic farms: Much as we decry child labor now, it was, after all, a gender-based bonding experience.
Of course, the fact that extended families lived in proximity helped. Just as the rise of single moms has kept boys from seeing men shave, so, too, our increasingly mobile society has separated uncles and grandfathers from the kind of daily contact that was once routine.
The Boy Scouts were originally a place for boys to interact with male mentors, until a shortage of volunteers led in the '60s to allowing women to take over the leadership roles, eliminating or at least diluting that aspect.
And, unlike Girl Scouts, I don't think Boy Scouts had a clear vision of their role in gender-bonding, or, at least, of how to go about it beyond teaching First Aid and woodscraft.
Having hosted many tours of newspaper facilities with Scouts, I'm not convinced the group has any sort of focused mission at all, though I may not have seen them at their best: Getting 11-year-old boys together at the end of a long school day is one time you can safely use the phrase "asking for it."
In any case, there are a lot of other groups out there and I guess parents will have to decide which one has a mission they feel will be valuable in raising their child with the values they cherish.
Or which one has meetings at a time which fits the family schedule, or which one the kid next door belongs to.
And here's the world we're giving them
Pat Bagley with a cartoon I suspect was influenced by the report by 60 Minutes and the Washington Post on the collusion between lobbyists and Congress to enable pharmaceutical companies to flood the market with opioids.
If you haven't looked into this, brace yourself, hit those two links, and become educated.
It's horrific when what we might have dismissed as paranoid fantasies of blatant, shameless corruption turn out to be real.
We've known — well, those who have wanted to know have known — for several years that the pharmaceutical companies were pumping ridiculous quantities of prescription painkillers into bogus clinics where doctors — whether they were present or not — wrote prescriptions for patients they'd never met.
And, in a post-election town meeting in Kentucky, Bernie Sanders spoke with the victims of this abusive practice, but, then again, who in Washington ever listens to Bernie?
So we could comfort ourselves with the notion that the government didn't know.
And that the victims were just druggies, after all.
Well, it turns out that the government not only knew, but that legislation was pushed through to make sure it continued, and agents at the DEA were interfered with and undercut to prevent enforcement of rules against such outrageous corruption.
And now, in a twist straight out of the most unbelievable of paranoid dystopic novels, one of the people who pushed hardest to enable this exploitation of human misery is Dear Leader's nominee to head the DEA.
If anyone has a better, more literal, more appalling example of setting the fox to guard the henhouse, step right up and amaze me.
But wait! It's just not all bizarre enough: Jeff Sessions is pushing to tighten federal laws on marijuana.
This twisted set of priorities brings to mind the old distinction from the Sixties between the "dealer" who sold grass and dexies, and the "pusher" who sold hard-core narcotics, a distinction that largely disappeared when the War on Drugs ramped up and took the casual hippies out of the business, leaving it largely to the Mob and the cartels.
And, apparently, Congress.
This old song from those days should be played before Tom Marino's confirmation hearings. The distinction may be an anachronism, but the central message is as relevant as ever:
Update:
Yeah, he's a great Congressman, all dressed in black,
PR shoes and big straw hat.
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