CSotD: Waiting for the cartoonists to catch up
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Well, now we know what he was going to do, but it’s a little early to ask for commentary. I’ve seen a few post-bombing pieces from Australia, where they’ve had time to react, but most of the other editorial cartoons have been based, as Ohman’s was, on uncertainty.
We’ll give everyone 24 hours to respond, and, meanwhile, we’ll look at some less political cartoons, plus a few curiosities I’ve had hanging around.
Not that we have to avoid politics entirely. I think the 86/47 thing has largely blown over, but as a commentary on the president’s thin skin, the controversy remains relevant and I chuckled, if not laughed out loud, at this poke at the over-inflated presidential ego.
And if Lalo was hampered by the necessary lead time for a Sunday comic, Mark Tatulli got an accidental dose of serendipity for this portrait of a mischievous kid playing out his childish cowboy fantasies. I reckon Slim Pickens isn’t the only big galoot with a love of munitions, but this wasn’t intended as political.
It’ll do for now.
Today’s Cornered really is political. I’m currently reading White Rural Rage – The Threat to American Democracy, which is about the despair and anger in rural America, and it’s been interesting from my perspective as a progressive rural type, because I don’t share the conservative rage but I certainly agree with the book’s socioeconomic analysis.
Specific to this cartoon, it’s bizarre and frustrating to see how real estate prices, and taxes, have shot up even in places where the jobs are gone. I’ve heard fury from people who live on land that has been in their families for generations, but happens to be on a lake and so is now taxed as exotic waterfront property. Some states offer protection for existing landowners, others do not.
Even more specific to Baldwin’s cartoon, I donate to the American Farmland Trust, which helps encourage sustainable practices and also helps farm families who must leave the land put it into easements that prevent the kind of housing sprawl — and loss of agricultural infrastructure — depicted here.
So the cartoon didn’t make me laugh, but it made me happy to see I’m not the only person with this sort of thing on his mind.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The New Yorker takes some deserved heat for cartoons that (yawn) celebrate the various fads and fancies of Gothamites, but it also packs some political punch, largely in the same self-satisfied urbanite voice but with a less whimsical subtext. Noth and Sipress are two of the more pointed artists working this particular street corner.
Speaking of journalism in the Big Apple, I stumbled across this editorial from the December 11, 1936 edition of the Daily News, in which they take ex-King Edward VIII to task for what they describe as his dubious morals, leading up to his abdication to marry the divorcee, Wallis Simpson.
It was accompanied by this cartoon by CB Batchelor …
… and followed by a week of furious letters to the editor and then, on the 17th, this abject apology:
I don’t believe Vox Populi, Vox Deo, but I still like to see pomposity deflated, and particularly when it comes after an editorial nobody needed to write in the first place.
And let’s try not to read too much into that final sentence:
We cannot help asking ourselves how we would like it if our President should take to flying high, wide and handsome with he and she butterflies of the international social set, and bestowing usually his individual preferences on married women of foreign birth.
I’m not old enough to remember the abdication, but I do remember when everyone was sure that Nelson Rockefeller’s 1962 divorce spelled the end of his political career. O tempore! O mores! O gimme a break!
Lord knows there are more important issues to be dealt with. What a wonderful world it would be if every woman’s skin was soft and clear and she didn’t stink!
You also have to have some sense of history to catch the wink in this Argyle Sweater, because while the joke is that the fellow doesn’t catch the break between SOS signals, there was such a thing as the OSS.
And just as I was blaming Hilburn for not knowing that, I caught the name of that radio operator. IYKYN.
I’m still a little unsure of the intended joke here, except that the caller doesn’t actually request a particular song, so the DJ is unable to play anything.
But it gave me a chuckle because when I was in talk radio, I was at a small AM station, while through the glass in the next studio over was one of the first satellite stations in the world and our parking lot was full of giant uplink dishes.
It was quite a breakthrough, though it eventually spelled the death of local radio.
The jocks had to be taught a new set of rules, starting with saying “It’s 14 minutes after the hour” without specifying which hour, since you’d be simulating a local station but actually heard in several time zones, and you couldn’t talk about the weather or say “Good morning” for similar reasons.
As for requests, it was nothing new for a jock to respond by saying, “We’ll see if we can get that on!” with no intention of doing so, because if they were listening to your limited playlist to begin with, it wasn’t as if someone was going to ask for anything obscure and their request would likely pop up in the rotation anyway.
But with a nationwide audience, making a request was even more futile because each caller was a tiny dot on a massive map and taking requests was an issue of marketing. If their song came up, they’d be a more loyal listener in the future, and if it didn’t, nobody really gave a damn.
Meanwhile, on my side of the glass, I’d have been happy if our pitiful AM signal had carried to the state line, but, well, Colorado is a pretty big state. But I really did want to talk to my listeners.
Oh well.
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