CSotD: Saturday Short Takes
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This commentary from Ali Jamshidifar, an Iranian living in Paris, has been hanging around my files for awhile but each time I start to delete it as too old, my finger pauses on the button and I let it stay.
Erdogan's "olive branch" initiative is little more than a cleverly named but transparent attempt to allow him to wage war on Western allied peshmerga and still fool the EU into granting Turkey admittance. There's a real insult in that, something that falls along the lines of asking what kind of gullible fools he thinks other countries are.
And, as this Economist article — complete with a Peter Schrank cartoon — says, the notion of a NATO ally coming into possible conflict with the US is certainly off-putting.
But it also seems a bit remote, given that most Americans are ignoring Dear Leader's cooperating with the Russians in Syria and perhaps also in Washington, never mind the hijinks going on in Ankara.
I think it sticks in my craw more because Turkish Airlines had the gall to run a lovely tourism ad in the Super Bowl, in which Dr. Oz switches from promoting quack medical nostrums to promoting lovely vacations in the land that imprisons journalists and cartoonists.
This disconnect between justice and fashionable ignorance is hardly unparalleled: Vogue created a stir in 2010 with a flattering article about Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad's wife, and then doubled down by defending it.
And it goes back further than that: In the 1970s, when Greece was still under the heel of a junta, magazines were promoting it as a lovely tourist destination, and there were also articles suggesting that Romania — the exclusive property of the Ceausescus at the time — would be a delightful, affordable place to go live the life of the well-heeled ex-pat.
Maybe we can't expect the American public to keep up with the varying loyalties in Syria, but it's frustrating for journalists and cartoon fans to have Dr. Oz promoting tourism for a location that inspired the term "Turkish prison."
If Erdogan wants to make his country a tourist destination, maybe he could start by making it a safe place for reporters and cartoonists.
Not that we should cast the first stone
Chan Lowe weighs in on the breath-taking White House response to the revelation that Rob Porter — you know, the guy with no security clearance that they hired to handle top-secret materials — was a wife-beater but also a great guy.
“We found out about it recently and I was surprised by it, but we certainly wish him well, and it’s a tough time for him," the president said, adding that he hopes Porter has a great career ahead of him.
This is the same sometimes-in-error-but-never-in-doubt president who felt it important that we all read the Nunes memo but has blocked release of the Democratic response.
Good ol' Recep Tayyip Trump. Maybe he could get Dr. Oz to write a memo he likes.
This didn't used to be news
Walt Handelsman on what, a few decades ago, would not have been news: Each side had to give up a position or two in order to craft a budget they could both live with.
DACA is supposed to be raised separately and both House and Senate GOP leaders have restated their intent to do so. But the Democrats gave up the club they could wield, of a second shut-down if immigration reform didn't move forward.
Still, it's only in recent years that this qualifies as "Man Bites Dog," and it's sad that compromise on a major bill should be considered newsworthy.
But here we are.
Speaking of the Good Old Days
Darrin Bell does a lot of "old" jokes at Sadie's expense in Rudy Park, but I am old enough to remember when poor kids packed their own lunches rather than buying the hot lunch in the cafeteria.
As a little guy, I was mostly oblivious to money issues, but I knew that kids who brought a lunch were making an economic, not gastronomic, choice, though I'm not sure I saw it as necessity rather than thrift.
"Potted meat" sandwiches, spread paper-thin, were high on the list of things they brought, and I remember swapping for them a few times. I suppose my little friend got the nutritional better of the deal but I liked the variation, because we never had potted meat at home.
One of the benefits of small town life is that you know more kinds of people than you would in the city. That is, you can only have a certain number of friends that you know very well, and, statistically, if you're surrounded by hundreds of thousands, that number is likely to be drawn mostly from your own demographic.
It doesn't work that way when you live in a town whose population barely breaks four digits, and, while we didn't have much racial diversity, I sure grew up with plenty of economic diversity. It was a gift.
I think some kind of subsidy came into play somewhere along the line, because I don't remember my high school buddies packing their own lunches. (Maybe they just skipped lunch.)
But, by high school, we had all figured out the economics anyway. Some people moved freely throughout the layers, others were more self-conscious and defensive about it.
I'll admit, however, that it was easier to be oblivious about money when potted meat was not part of your regular diet.
This song came out sophomore year, and was a lot more popular with my friends than maybe was fair.
Note: "Boondocks" comes from the Tagalog word for mountain or rural area and was brought home by Americans without heel spurs from the turn of the century wars in the Philippines. As Wikipedia says, "When referring to people (taga-bundok or probinsiyano in Tagalog; taga-bukid in Cebuano …), it acquires a derogatory connotation of a stereotype of unsophisticated, ignorant, and illiterate country people."
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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