CSotD: Black Humor, Dark Days
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You may have already seen the latest from Ann Telnaes, because cartoonists have been sharing it all over the Interwebs.
There's nothing to add, but that doesn't mean it doesn't stir thoughts, a large part of which is that cartoonists have been chasing their tails for weeks trying to comment on the #METOO movement and subsequent revelations and downfalls, and haven't come up with anything this solid.
Wow.
As I've noted earlier, some cartoonists persist in trying to blend humor into their commentary, but it's not funny and it's hard to find laughs, at least if you're not in the gallows humor business to begin with, and, even then, it's tough to wring even grim humor out of a situation where the President of the United States shrugs off child molestation in favor of party loyalty.
Telnaes, however, has a talent for black humor, which is a different thing. She greeted the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya with an absurd cartoon of Vladimir Putin, whose birthday it indeed was.
Gallows humor elicits a laugh. Black humor gets more of a grim chuckle, if that.
So today's cartoon is funny, yes, but there's nothing to laugh about.
Yeah, yeah, it's not just Republicans. But Republicans are the ones who have declared it okay to molest little girls, as long as you also vote against letting them have health care, or decent education or enough food.
You want funny?
It's funny that I'm even bothering to explain criticism of the party that would dig down to find out if Barack Obama ever smoked dope or went by an Americanized nickname and then try to convince people not to vote for him because of that.
The same party that wears their religion on their sleeves but mocked him for having worked for Catholic Charities, the sort of organization, by the way, that is supposed to take up the slack when Ebenezer Congress declines to support widows and orphans.
Want to hear a joke?
If a guy went door to door in Chicago to find out if people needed help, we shouldn't vote for him.
But if he hung out at the mall to find vulnerable underage partners, we should put that aside.
That's not funny, either.
So to hell with the "they both do it" argument, because they both do it but only one of them publicly announces that it's okay.
I've said before that Telnaes has an instinct for the jugular, and she does, but let me add a second metaphor: She has a rapier wit.
Going for the jugular can be a messy business, and sometimes "going for the jugular" and "being purposely rude" are indistinguishable.
By contrast, the rapier, in traditional swashbuckling literature, is employed against the broadsword, wherein we have a page or two of the huge, muscular villain smashing and destroying with his broadsword while our brave but small hero ducks and dodges.
And then our seemingly overmatched hero makes a quick move with his rapier.
It seems like nothing, just a red dot on the villain's chest, but there is a pause, and a look of surprise and mystified horror on the face of the brute an instant before he tumbles down, stone dead.
Anybody can go for the jugular. It just takes a willingness to draw blood.
Not everyone can employ the rapier with such dread effect.
Another year gone by
Even without Trump's horrific declaration and Ann Telnaes' brilliant response, December 6 isn't a day when I laugh about these things.
I was on my way to work the morning of December 7, 1989, and flipped on CHOM-FM as always, to listen to a little soft-rock and the bantering of Terry DiMonte, and instead heard grim, muted discussions and updates on the murders the night before.
Montreal is a big city, but it's not that big, and the Mayor arrived on the scene that night to find that his children's babysitter, the daughter of a city councillor, was among the victims.
Worse yet, the spokesman for the police department, also there in his official capacity, learned that his daughter had been killed.
And all the city, all the region, the whole country, felt connected to what had happened.
Later, I put this video together, using the song DiMonte had signed off his show with that morning.
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