CSotD: Saturday Short Takes
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Maybe Scott Stantis saw something I missed, but I'm not sure what his lead time is on Prickly City and I'm not gonna go back and look this up anyway.
However, and for whatever reason, she made a thankfully short splash on social media recently and, golly, it was like she'd never gone away, with people screaming about who didn't vote and why everyone hates women and what about those Bernie Bros with their vulgar misogyny and the borscht on their breath?
Which is why I had chalked it up to Putin's trolls just dropping in a little something to disrupt the nation and keep the Democrats from righting the ship.
Knowing we'd bite.
Juxtaposition of the Puns
(Brevity)
Some literate humor on the funny pages! Jeff Stahler offers a good gag that assumes people know what a "thespian" is, which shouldn't be a reach but probably is. However, there are plenty of comics that make no demands on readers and wotthehell, why not offer something that requires a soup can of cultural literacy?
Meanwhile, Dan Thompson, who never met a pun he didn't like, sets this one up with an opening line that's funnier than the punchline and could have stood alone. Save this one for the anthology, pal.
Call the book, "Gags I Made For The Few Who Got Them."
There's nothing wrong with literate humor and, while cartoonists gripe about not being allowed to pursue "adult themes" on the comics page, I think the more important challenge is to write gags that require people to pause and think.
They enjoy the Jumble and the crossword puzzle; why shouldn't they be asked to figure out a clever joke once in awhile?
xkcd always makes demands on its readers and there are days when they get so deep into the geek that I just have to shrug and move on.
But this one I get, twice: Once because I eventually read the entire Narnia cycle to my boys at bedtime and the other because I've had actual Turkish Turkish Delight.
That is, I gave a Turkish kid a ride from the airport to his dorm and he gave me a box of Turkish Delight, and I can report that, while perhaps there's some higher level of the stuff that we don't just hand out to random people who give us rides, there is at least a level of Turkish Delight that is pretty much the same as the kind they make here.
Perhaps C.S.Lewis had never had it, or was signalling how very easily Edmund could be manipulated.
On a more serious note
Phil Hands tackles a local issue, in which the Madison City Council voted to remove a marker from a cemetery where Confederate POWs are buried, an action analyzed and criticized in this editorial.
It's not simply "political correctness" but ignorance run amok for several reasons.
To start with, the Civil War was wrenching enough for the nation, but far moreso for the families of the dead, because people were supposed to die at home, and not only were tens of thousands of young men suddenly dying hundreds of miles from home, but frequently their bodies were unrecovered and simply lay when they fell, while often the system of rosters was such that nobody really knew who was missing after a battle, much less what had happened to them.
As for the POWs, it wasn't an entirely new concept. After Saratoga, we marched Burgoyne's poor surrendered troops around from colony to colony for five years, with nobody wanting to house and feed them. A number of our German forebears were Hessians who escaped from this forced march.
In the Civil War, Lincoln and Stanton found that exchanging prisoners simply kept rebel armies populated and so began to put captured soldiers in camps, but the necessary bureaucracy — food, blankets, medical care — never caught up. In the South, Andersonville was a genuine hell-hole, and, while attempts to compare it to Elmira and other Northern prisons are revisionist nonsense, the northern camps still had unconscionable death rates.
But each dead Reb got his own marked grave; they weren't tossed into ditches like the Yanks. Early evidence that liberals are too sentimental, I guess.
In any case, it is not celebrating the cause they served to admit and preserve your part in their deaths.
Pretending they aren't there simply commemorates the use of young soldiers as disposable, forgettable cannon fodder.
Juxtaposition of History
(Herbjorn Skogstad, 2003)
(David Rowe, 2018)
We've got one more ally on our side this time than we did the last, though hardly as many as in the first, but, still, it's something.
And, hopefully, we didn't nail any baby formula factories last night.
Herb may have been early last time around in both declaring Bush's fearsome giants to be nothing more than windmills, and in reducing Tony Blair from Sancho Panza to a monkey, but he proved right in the end and, as Matt suggests, Theresa May is going to have to be cautious about joining France and the US in answering the chemical strikes.
Blair was forced to answer some very hard questions about Britain's entry into that second Gulf War and she wouldn't want to be put through the same wringer.
Bush was never called on the carpet, of course, because Americans don't make mistakes.
So there's your lesson, Mr. Trump.
And, while we all agreed that dropping poison gas on civilians is a bad business, and we've all signed pacts promising never to do such a thing, and we've all made agreements to make sure nobody else does either, well, we didn't think anybody actually would.
So now what?
As Kevin Siers points out, if we wanted a reason not to do anything, god knows Putin and Assad would happily assure us that there's nothing to see and we should just move on.
But we are doing something.
We're just, as Nick Anderson points out, being very careful in choosing what we do.
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