CSotD: Generational Gappage
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Tom the Dancing Bug steps forward to stop me from deleting from my bookmarks an entire category of editorial cartoons.
I've said before that I am losing patience with "bland restatement," those altie cartoons in which people simply restate in simple terms the things people in power are really saying.
It may be an age thing: I've been to enough rodeos that I already know what they're really saying. Maybe these cartoons, which are generally drawn by Gen X'ers and aimed at Millennials, simply aren't intended for me.
But two points:
One is that the days of micro-targeted media are over, and you have to appeal to a wider audience if you want to be viable.
Which, granted, you may not want to be: Some of us would rather do our thing than grow rich, and I'm all in favor of that, though you may need an empty nest and a compliant landlord to make it work.
The other is that there is an artistry in finding and applying a good metaphor, and while only the oldest among us remember when houses were heated with coal, and many were too young to sort through the acid rain issues of the 70s when Midwestern coal-fired power plants were poisoning lakes in the Northeast, most adults are of an age where we easily remember VHS (if not Betamax) tapes, and remember all too well their shortcomings and flaws and don't want them back.
Which is how both consumers and most industries feel about coal.
It's a brilliant metaphor. And when you blandly restate the issue of Trump's obsession with "bringing back coal" with that metaphor laid over the conversation, the result is a brilliant cartoon.
Sticking with tech issues, I got a laugh out of The Joy of Tech's takedown of the "laughing Alexa" issue.
Which, by the way, Lars Kenseth put to some good political use.
However, I don't get it.
The cartoon I get, the problem I don't.
My Echo occasionally thinks she heard her name and pipes up with a remark, but I'd say less than once a month or so, and she's never burst into spontaneous laughter. Maybe it's a glitch of later models: I was an early adopter and got mine in January, 2015, about two months after it was released.
Or it may be that I haven't monkeyed with Alexa, hooking her up to a lot of other devices, though she does get a fair amount of work: My morning Flash Briefing, a lot of "Alexa, play songs by …" requests, current temp, and random things like the date of Easter (April 1) or Passover (starts March 30) or the next time change (tonight).
Sometimes having Alexa in the house is like living with someone from a different generation; The other day I wanted to hear "He's Sure the Boy I Love" to see if it would work as the day's moment of zen (it did), and, instead of the 1963 Crystals classic, she played a 2015 duet with Darlene Love and Bette Midler.
But she usually understands me: I just asked her "Alexa, play some music" and she queued up a Billie Holiday playlist, so I'm gonna take that earlier mix-up as an anomaly, and assume she knows me well enough that, if I ever did ask her to play some Bette Midler, I'd get to hear that Alexa laughter everyone is talking about.
Never mind. Generational humor.
Speaking of which, Anne Hambrock Morse is enough younger than I am that, like half the population (Alexa just told me the median age for Americans) she was raised on the 1964 Disney movie and thinks of Mary Poppins as cheerful, reasonable and kind.
Those of us who grew up with the books pre-Julie Andrews think of Mary Poppins as anything but cheerful, only moderately reasonable and rarely kind.
In fact, as magical as the places she took us and as wonderful as the adventures we had, she was scary, short-tempered and unpredictable.
Mary Poppins was our version of Lord Byron: Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
I still remember when Michael got hold of her magic compass and tried to have an adventure of his own and all Hell broke loose. Turns out that, if you weren't with memsahib, all those various colored folk were a lot less friendly:
There were four gigantic figures bearing down towards him—the Eskimo with a spear, the Negro Lady with her husband's huge club, the Mandarin with a great curved sword, and the Red Indian with a tomahawk. They were rushing upon him from all four quarters of the room with the weapons raised above their heads. . . . Threatening and full of revenge. They were almost on top of him, their huge, terrible, angry faces looming nearer and nearer. He felt their hot breath on his face and saw their weapons tremble in their hands. . . . "Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins—help me, help me!"
And even on non-disastrous days, you needed a spoonful of sugar just to counter the tension of having Mary Poppins in the room, because you never knew whether she was going to take you flying on a delightful adventure or ream you out for some perceived breach of nurseryroom etiquette.
Which doesn't mean I didn't like the books, but it was a roller coaster, not a carousel.
And her personality seemed normal enough at the time, bearing in mind that I asked for a crew cut in first grade because I'd seen Sister Theophilus haul my little classmates out of their seats by the hair.
Anyway, they're making a sequel.
It's fine with me that half of America thinks of Mary Poppins as cheerful, reasonable and kind. It's the one time I'd rather they went with the Disney version.
And maybe she is. Maybe somebody slipped a little sugar into her tea, back when they were making that movie.
Not a spoonful. A cube.
Never mind.
Generational humor.
(Hey, Travers did rewrite that traumatizing chapter with animals in place of minorities)
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