CSotD: Seeking a one-eyed man
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Against all past tendencies around here, I'm once more highlighting a bland restatement cartoon, this time the other Tom, the Tomorrow one.
I still think things have swung so far out of balance that simply restating what people say fails to capture the level of dysfunction, but on this topic, there is an utter cluelessness that, being set at zero, is an absolute and can't really be distorted.
Normally, bland restatement consists of stripping away the spin and hypocrisy and other packaging and depicting people blandly saying what is really on their minds rather than the polite phrases in which they actually speak.
No need here, because this is pretty much what they really are saying, and it's not so much frightening as simply discouraging.
It's not a universal cluelessness. There are certainly people who get it.
But it's a nonpartisan cluelessness. It's slopped all over both sides of the aisle, in Congress and on the editorial pages.
It's hard to pin Ted Rall down as either right- or left- wing, because he's more of a nihilistic disrupter, striking out at society as a whole, and he's pretty much summed things up here: Some fool scared to death of offenses he doesn't understand, some woman who just wants to do her goddam job.
I don't agree with Ted's implication that it's good for men to be scared because, in a nihilist world and probably in this one, too, it's simply groundless fear rather than anything that leads to corrective action.
Thing is, as Ron White of that bastion of left-wing humor, the Blue Collar Comedy Tour says, "You can't fix stupid."
So now they're talking about making our national legislators sit through trainings on sexual harassment in the workplace, and I've got to wonder what good it will do?
Out here in the real working world, when some jackass steps over the line and gets reported to HR, they get hauled into an office and lectured in private and then they bring in a flying circus from Corporate and we all get hauled into trainings, and we all have to sign a piece of paper indicating that we were there.
And then the dumb sonofabitch does it again and this time they hand him the cardboard box.
So the people who already got it had to sit there and learn it all over again and the dork who didn't get it still didn't get it.
I suppose it's bizarrely compulsive, like those people who go into a breakroom refrigerator and steal someone else's lunch.
They clearly know it didn't magically appear. They clearly know management isn't stocking the place with free lunches. They clearly know it belongs to someone else and, much of the time, they know who because it's written in Magic Marker on the package.
Well, damn.
I could suggest you read this excellent piece by Rebecca Traister that explains just about everything, but it's really long and I suppose people who already get it will get it and people who are hopeless won't and so why bother?
Case in point: There was a piece in Think Progress that recounts how, at a rally for Roy Moore last night, a guy who served with him in Vietnam told how a buddy invited the two of them to go to a "private club" in Saigon that turned out to be a bordello, and Roy insisted on leaving.
Which seems like an obvious testimony to his virtue, but is presented at Think Progress as "Ah ha! He went to a whorehouse!"
I'd be okay with "See? He's a prig and prigs are always covering up their own degraded instincts!" In fact, I expected to find that when I checked out the comments.
But nobody responded to the story and there was no discussion of what had happened all those years ago.
They were totally focused on the whorehouse. Nobody addressed the original argument that he hadn't known what it was and left as soon as he figured it out.
Plain as it was, even in a mangled retelling, they just didn't get it.
Meanwhile, what I'm seeing is rightwing cartoonists playing the exact game that Tom Tomorrow mocks, that "oooh, we can't even say good morning anymore" blatant partisan stupidity, while, on the left, we've got cartoonists making jokes about innocent contact because they don't get it either and somehow they think there is humor in it.
Of course there is humor to be found in it, but first you have to understand what you're cracking jokes about.
And then you have to know who your mockery will wound. There isn't any "Do no harm" rule in editorial cartooning, but there damn well is a "Comfort the afflicted/Afflict the comfortable" rule.
Belittling the claims of those who step forward is afflicting the afflicted.
Know your target.
Clay Bennett gets a laff because he has targeted Roy Moore and his defenders specifically and then depicted his perv as a clueless goof rather than a sinister figure. (People don't mind being called evil. They object to being made to look ridiculous.)
This is a well-thrown pie.
And it had Roy's name on it in Magic Marker.
On a lighter note
BC has been playing with the strip's iconic single-wheel transportation, as seen here in yesterday and today's strip.
Which reminds me of the actual dawn of the bicycle just before the turn of the 20th century, which became a media fad and so sparked the same kind of overheated, under-pondered coverage that distorts the news today and proves that clickbait is nothing new.
Which I've said already:
Now get out there and behave yourselves and stay away from new technologies.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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