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CSotD: Humor, richly laced with wise sayings
It’s not always easy, possible, or productive to separate comics into humor or politics, and Thorny Town (AMS) has always been a political band.
In this case, we see the Republican party taking nominal control of the House only for the Freedom Caucus to prepare to play the anger blocking roles the Democrats faced in the Senate with Manchin and Sinema.
They have indeed declared an apocalypse, mostly based on Hunter Biden’s laptop, that should trap their leadership in constant extremist and divisive games and undermine any chance of the party passing serious legislation.
The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee (KFS) started out as a more political strip than it is now, but here’s a comment that fits Prickly City, in that the incumbent has far less interest in politics than in getting re-elected.
I particularly like the way this is framed, as it seems to represent not so much the bomb throwers and lunatics as those potentially wiser lawmakers who sat in silence to indulge the extremists.
Today happens to be the anniversary of our first day in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who raised himself under the tutelage of Senator Sam Rayburn’s doctrine that to get along you have to go.
It was more polite than another doctrine that arose during LBJ’s administration, “When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”
LBJ ruled with a little of both, but in the years that followed we saw the rise of Goldwater’s once-rejected doctrine: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue.
Kennedy’s assassination took place 59 years ago and the median age in the United States is 38, so the majority of Americans have never lived under his inaugural promiseswhich sparked enlistments in the Peace Corps and VISTA and inspired young people to go South and enlist disenfranchised voters.
Maybe you should be there. Today, such goals are derided as “woke”.
Although, to be historically honest, we also grew up with the policy of Buz Sawyer (KFS), which kicks off an adventure that’s a revival just a year before JFK was elected, and therefore not so many years before we had a real, non-fictional showdown with the Soviets off our coast.
Roy Crane delivers great art and good storytelling, but he had no qualms about letting his politics write the scripts.
I always thought it was curious BTW that my generation was raised on Robin Hood and Zorro’s heroic challenge to unjust governments and then banned from disneyland to look like the kind of people who could challenge unjust governments.
Can’t we talk about something nicer?
Not only can we talk about something nicer, but, for once, we can do it with a cartoon in Roz Chastwho coined the phrase as the title of a wise and important book.
Unlike any of them, but thank goodness because, just like on the internet, no one can tell you’re a dog, nor can they tell you’re not, in fact, the most fabulous cook, gardener or parent who ever walked the earth, especially if your schtick is about 30% advice and 70% self-promotion.
To quote another saying, when I google a recipe for how long and at what temperature to roast a chicken, I end up thinking of this: “If you ask him what time it is, he’ll tells how to build a clock.
My answer being an old Irish adage: “Close enough is close enough”.
There was a time when I knew how long and at what temperature to roast a chicken without having to look it up, just like I knew people’s phone numbers and how to get from point A to point B without GPS.
And please don’t tell me it’s because we know so much more now than before.
Non Sequential (AMS) argues that we only learned what we needed to know to make it through the finals, and that we emptied as many of our skulls as possible at the end of the academic year.
Which brings us dangerously close to politics, given how much we should have learned in Grade 8 social studies about the Constitution and so on.
The flaw in Wiley’s joke being that we still don’t realize we should have learned all of these things and we didn’t. As another old saying goes, ignorance is bliss.
No one seems to go through “It’s better to be silent and look like a fool than to speak up and dispel all doubt”, leaving us instead with Robert Willensky’s quote:
We’ve all heard that a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce all of Shakespeare’s works. Now, thanks to the internet, we know that’s not true.
Did you have enough wisdom for the day? here is a existential comics it reminds me of all the philosophy I endured in a major where philosophy played a major role. There was ethical and political philosophy which I really liked, and then there was metaphysics and other stuff that drifted into that.
For example, I understand that you don’t consider your view of reality to be certain, but when the professor holds out a piece of chalk and asks, “If I drop this, will it fall on the table?” my unspoken response was to offer to put some money on it.
Although, as Macanudo (KFS), I liked Nietzsche. As we said in the 60s, we thought he was Pietzsche.
And, in fact, we’ve put quite a bit of effort into field-testing this particular theory.
To finish, Buttons (KFS) triggered a college memory of a guy I knew who was home for the summer. One morning, his father woke him up because his own car wouldn’t start and he needed to borrow the boy’s junkyard to get to work.
As he slipped behind the wheel, however, he found a note, from a rejected lover, recounting his last passionate encounter with his son in some anatomical detail and begging for a second chance.
Sonny Boy was supposed to study for the priesthood.
Dad was late for work that morning.
Well. It could have been worse.