CSotD: Investigate Yourownself
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Mike Luckovich gets top honors today for going beyond the obvious to cover Al Franken's scandal without ignoring the facts.
The massive piling on happens to coincide with my growing disenchantment with social media and does nothing to diminish it, though it is proof of non-partisanship, if not "fairness," on the part of the media.
Way too many cartoonists have confined their research on the topic to the fact that Al Franken once played a character named Stuart Smalley who had a smarmy, silly catch-phrase about himself.
Mark Streeter cites it with thoughtful restraint and thereby captures a mood and response not reflected in the feeding frenzy elsewhere.
In the corner of his cartoon, Streeter contrasts Senator Franken's self-deprecating claim of "Giant of the Senate" with Comedian Franken's silly personna, and you can't run away from who you were.
In this case, Franken set himself up by posing for a silly, tasteless photo, the gist of which remains a little uncertain. There is a claim going around that she was awake and part of the gag, but it is based on very shaky provenance and I'd discount it.
What is obvious, if you care to look close enough, is that he isn't actually touching her and that this is a sexist, stupid gag in which he pretends to molest her.
And if you don't think it's pretend, 'splain to me how much pleasure you can get by groping a flak vest.
But then I'm not turned on by leather or latex or women's underpinnings that became obsolete a half-century ago. Maybe there are freaks out there who get off on Kevlar.
The point of Luckovich's cartoon, however, is that Franken immediately owned up to the tastelessness of the gag and to having offended his accuser in rehearsing for a skit, and, best of all, offered an unqualified apology.
That is, he didn't say he was sorry if he offended her.
He said he was sorry. Period.
Hence the joke in Luckovich's cartoon: Trump hasn't even apologized if he offended the women he admits he groped, or the young girls he admits he deliberately walked in on while they were dressing.
He even denies it happened, which hardly seems credible but despite that, as David Rowe shows here, somehow Dear Leader has remained sheltered from the natural results of behaviors which have toppled everyone else.
I suppose it proves that there is some benefit to being a notorious, blatant liar.
Trump is the living embodiment of the expression, "If he tells you it's raining, you'd better look out the window," so he can deny the things he's already admitted, since nothing he ever says is true.
The cry from the left is that Franken's call for an investigation of his own past behavior forces Trump to do likewise.
I have no idea why anyone would believe that.
Anyway, I'm disappointed in the joyful piling on, not because I like Franken's politics, which I do, but because, as I've said numerous times before, I'd rather see purposeful partisan distortions than simple lazy cartooning.
As for being disappointed in Franken, I'm sorry this foolishness provides his opponents with a foothold, but, then again, he's part of a Groove Tube/Lampoon/SNL coterie of Ivy League smart-asses who made their reputations by normalizing cruel, tasteless humor, though he's one of the least cruel and tasteless of that crew.
No? Find some Millennials who have never seen "Animal House" and have a screening.
Let me know how funny they think it is to mock international students as socially unacceptable losers or to get an underage girl drunk so you can decide whether to rape her or trundle her home in a shopping cart.
And see if they find that roadtrip sequence delightfully humorous or an appalling combination of racism and misogyny.
Ruben Bolling depicts the backsliding in our current society, and I like his take, but I certainly don't think it began here and now.
I'm more with Matt Wuerker in believing we had several opportunities to call bullshit on ourselves and failed to do so.
I'll admit I'm currently in a cynical funk, but, like Wuerker, my take on the decline of civilization goes back pretty far, and it's not just the acceptance of JFK's dalliances.
It's the normalization and celebration of deliberately cruel humor that I think has come to a flashpoint.
Franken put it well in his apology. And I'm sorry it's taken us all so long, assuming we really are coming to terms with it.
Franken is only one comedy writer in an era of macho backsliding.
Laughing at forbidden humor went mainstream with "All in the Family" and then "Animal House" begot Beavis and Butthead begot Austin Powers and, y'know, you're not really an iconoclast when you're just doing what everyone else is doing.
So anyway.
So anyway, Ms. Magazine used to run a feature called "Click!" in which women recounted the moment when they saw the light.
Not simply "I was offended by this" but "I suddenly realized how much bullshit I'd been passively accepting as normal."
One of mine came in the late 60s when I sent my folks a copy of "Be Not Content," a roman a clef about the early days of the psychedelic revolution.
My mother's response was to ask why all the women were, in her phrase, "sexy idiots."
An apt question at a moment when the women I knew were asking why all the guys were passing the pipe around in the livingroom discussing the meaning of meaning while all the women were out in the kitchen doing the dishes.
It wasn't just the housework. It was the overarching assumption that they were accessories rather than players.
Worst part was that it was not a cunning plan. It was, indeed, an assumption we all shared.
Until some of us didn't.
Obviously, not enough of us.
Al Franken proposes hearings, and we need to listen.
Oh, shut up, Phil
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