CSotD: Kidstuff and Other Unforgotten Dreams
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We start with the grownups and this Kevin Necessary cartoon, which reminds me of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment where they put a little kid alone in a room with a marshmallow in front of him on the promise that, if it was still there when the adult returned, the kid would get two marshmallows.
In a follow-up several years later, the kids who were able to wait were also the kids with better SAT scores, better grades, better physical fitness and more all-over success.
Except, as noted in that linked article, a repetition of the experiment suggested that the results had more to do with economic status than individual willpower, and that kids primed for success were also primed for delayed gratification.
So we’ve repeated the experiment, with adults and a different promise: If you can wait two months, you can have your life back, but, if you can’t, you’ll have to wait some more plus your grandmother will die.
Researchers now have to find if there is a correlation between being unable to wait and not understanding science and causality.
But industry is also finding it hard to wait to resume normal patterns, and Rico Schacherl offers a view from South Africa that seems pretty universal.
Expecting the virus to simply disappear is as scientifically naive as denouncing it as a libtard plot, but there’s a lot of political pressure to open up as soon as possible, and even to ignore medical advice and decline to impose mask rules and other safety measures.
David Fitzsimmons indicates how that’s working out down in Arizona, where they have preserved their freedom to infect and be infected.
Cartoonists got a gift in the form of President Trump’s theory that, if you didn’t test so much, you wouldn’t have so many cases, and we got a gift in Tulsa when he announced that he had actually ordered fewer tests in order to improve the numbers, because it gave us this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Spokesmodel Kayleigh MagaNinny finds herself in Sean Spicer’s position of making statements that are non-operative almost before she leaves the podium.
Jeff Stahler barely got his cartoon out before Trump stepped in and let John Deering more or less simply record what happened next.
It kind of makes you miss Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was no more honest than anyone else in the administration but at least managed to get the story straight and come up with consistency in her spin, half-truths and outright lies.
Then again, Sanders was a professional, and let’s not forget that a very good cartoonist at a major paper lost his job for observing that, while Sanders didn’t fit the spokesmodel arm-candy mode from which Trump usually makes his female hires, she was extremely good at her job.
Small-town editors not having any monopoly on being chickenshit.
Anyway, it was good to have someone up there whose statements didn’t make you roll your eyes or giggle. And who would never, ever have played the role of a visual prop in that gawdawful Bible photo.
The PR people I’ve known didn’t even want to be quoted by name, much less seen in pictures.
And don’t you wish that was the only rule of professional decorum that’s been jettisoned by this White House, though better behavior would deprive me of this second
Juxtaposition of the Day
I might have let Beeler take this one on his own, since he’s conservative and so his criticism of Trump is more newsworthy, but Wuerker adds so many examples and fillips to his accusation that I can’t resist using his work yet again.
According to this morning’s reports, the CHAZ or CHOP or whatever in Seattle is pretty much over, which means it lasted about as long as Woodstock, a pretty dream that couldn’t be replicated.
Much of what happened at Woodstock had already been done by Diggers in the Haight and was repeated in places where dreamers rolled up their sleeves.
We’ll have to see what comes out of Seattle’s experience, but, in the meantime, Beeler and Wuerker put a good spin on it, describing a world in which rules are suspended not for idealistic reasons but quite the opposite.
No doubt there will be complaints about cleaning up the mess left when the kids leave the CHAZ, but that’s small potatoes compared to the clean up ahead in January, 2021.
Inshallah.
Meanwhile, between the youngsters pranking the dictator on-line by ruining both his rally and his electronic mailing list, and their slightly older brothers and sisters setting up a temporary colony of hope, Paul Fell provides a fresh variation on the man-defying-the-tanks photo that’s been used too much by too many cartoonists.
The original man-defying-the-tanks was courageous but presaged a slaughter by Dear Leader’s beloved Chinese leadership.
I think Fell has a good eye on what this one means, and if the young folks aren’t the only cause of the wheels coming off, they surely get to count coup on it.
I wish they’d pay more attention to the planning and strategizing that went into the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, but maybe they’re more effective for just leaping in and not fretting over details.
We can save the planning and strategizing for the November elections and let the wild rumpus serve to set the mood and stir the necessary discontent.
Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a donation out of my hat!
If you’ve figured out that pulling a quarter out of their ears no longer impresses the young people in your circle, here’s a chance to learn some tricks that will.
A consortium of excellent magicians have put together a 282-page book that will teach you a variety of top-rated illusions and are offering it as a PDF download for a suggested donation of $25 that will go to BLM, NAACP and the National Lawyers Guild.
Details are here, and if you haven’t got $25, they’ll take what you can give.
(Tune by Buffy, Lyrics by Leonard Cohen)
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