Comic Strip of the Day: Random Outrage

I wish I thought Matt Davies‘ cartoon would reach more of the people it probably won’t.

I find myself increasingly in the position of wanting to fine-tune arguments in a world in which there is no longer a vertical hold or a horizontal hold or, lord knows, a fine-tuning button.

And most of the people I’m talking about have never seen any of those things, though it’s true that technical advances have done a lot more than creating self-adjusting television sets:

They’ve also allowed self-centered, fatuous arguments once confined to dormitory rooms, barrooms and barber shops to go global.

This is not entirely a generational issue, and I offer in evidence a favorite Jeff Danziger cartoon from 2005, which seemed a lot funnier back before such folks gained political ascendancy.

Furthermore, as tiresome as I find bitching from those who expected to be offered good jobs straight out of college, we also swallowed that fable, so l can’t criticize them too harshly.

But they are not in the same situation, and neither were their parents: I wrote a column in 1994 contrasting my own experience with then-current college students, noting:

… and, after pointing out a few ways to avoid monstrous debt, concluding:

That was 24 years ago; The current crop of recent grads were not yet born and not only have we not solved the problem, but the math has become even more daunting.

Now, as Davies’ cartoon references, we’re actively making it worse in order to allow the fat-cats to capitalize, heartlessly and dishonestly, on student debt.

The man who defrauded college students and his deputy, Cruella DeVos, are actively rolling back consumer protections for students, and, to make sure they stay rolled back, undermining the system intended to oversee fair lending practices.

Read that. Then read this.

Then look at the cartoon again.

They’re not just exploiting those particular students. They are destroying our educational system and our economic future.

Share those articles. Share that cartoon. This matters.

Because — and pardon me for slipping into Grumpy Old Man Mode — as Matt says, there are consumers and there are the consumed.

If what is happening to the cost of college and the oversight of college loans doesn’t get young people to the polls in November, they’ve made their choice and we’re all going to have to live with it.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Morten Morland)

(Patrick Chappatte)

As long as I’m in rant mode, what in the hell happened to Aung San Suu Kyi that turned her from a Nobel Peace Prize saint into the overseer of a genocide?

In Morland’s cartoon, the general wipes the blood from his hand on her shawl, a garment that implies an element of Buddhist prayer, while, in Chappatte’s cartoon, the general joins in Myanmar’s rejection of the UN report, explaining that, “If it were a genocide, there wouldn’t be so many of them.”

For several years, it was easy to believe, and thus not be shocked by, reports of cruelty and tyranny in Myanmar, but the elevation of Aung San Suu Kyi was supposed to signal an end to those years.

Well, they still have leopards in Myanmar.

And they still don’t change their spots.

 

The Word of God

From his home in Utah, Pat Bagley comments on the fact that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has, through its prophet, declared that it no longer wants to be known by the term “Mormon” nor the abbreviation “LDS.”

This is mostly insider humor and, as such, I wouldn’t normally post it, but the declaration raises some fascinating issues.

This is the opposite of the N-word issue that racists bring up when they want to sound intelligent, i.e.,”How come they can say it and we can’t?”

I suspect this will play out that only the people in the group can’t use those words, and it’s already raising questions internally about things like the famous “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Tabernacle Choir.”

If it were simply a branding issue rather than a religious one, it could be as simple as citing history, which is the answer when the aforementioned intellectual racist douchebags wonder why NAACP has the word “Negro” in it.

But this was a primary directive, and, as a recovering RC, I can’t be talking smack about a church leader who gets direct input from the Almighty. Because of my childhood beliefs, I understand the position the faithful are in: The whole thing tends to come apart if you begin to express skepticism.

However, if you ever believed in Aung Sun Suu Kyi, STFU.

Anyway, I don’t know if Mormons — sorry, if members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — believe anyone goes to Hell, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that not everyone will laugh at Bagley’s cartoon in the Salt Lake City Tribune.

However, even those who intend to go with the dictate are parsing the process a bit, and, across town at the Deseret News, editor Doug Wilks explains the role of the media in sorting it all out.

And I’m trying not to be too much of a wiseass, because those folks take enough abuse outside of Utah, Idaho and western Montana as it is, but this passage did make me snicker: “So we will do everything we can to accurately reflect the church, just as we do the Catholic Church … ”

I wonder if he meant the Roman Catholic Church or one of the many other Catholic churches?

However, if you’d like to see this sort of thing discussed by someone who did try, quite successfully, to be a wiseass, I would direct you to the blog of the late Bill Walsh, who discussed how to spell K.D. Lang’s name and how, why and whether to reproduce corporate logos instead of using the names of businesses.

 

And, by the way

Matt Wuerker‘s cartoon reminds me that I never heard how many lots Monica Lewinsky had purchased in the Whitewater development.

 

Names are funny things. Or so I thought when I was 9 …