CSotD: Go Read Something Else
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Pros & Cons (KFS) captures the moment, or, at least, my moment.
The election is still six days away, but while we’re being beseeched on all sides to jump up and panic, I’m sinking into Stan’s attitude.
Things have probably been worse, and the fact that I didn’t have to live through those times doesn’t change my sense that it’s all just going to have to play out now.
It’s not a matter of not caring. It’s more like the odd feeling Richard Henry Dana described as his ship anchored in Boston Harbor after Two Years Before The Mast.
A year before, while carrying hides on the coast, the assurance that in a twelvemonth we should see Boston, made me half wild; but now that I was actually there, and in sight of home, the emotions which I had so long anticipated feeling, I did not find, and in their place was a state of very nearly entire apathy. . . . There is probably so much of excitement in prolonged expectation, that the quiet realizing of it produces a momentary stagnation of feeling as well as of effort.
Dana also noted that, while you’d expect a ship to limp into harbor after two years, they’d labored mightily to fix it up and show the owners what good care it had received.
No merchant vessel looks better than an Indiaman, or a Cape Horn-er, after a long voyage; and many captains and mates will stake their reputation for seamanship upon the appearance of their ship when she hauls into the dock.
Not much of a parallel there.
Stuart Carlson (AMS) has it right, and this applies to both sides. Minds are made up and, between states that allow early voting and states that have relaxed absentee rules in light of the pandemic, a lot of people have already voted, while others are standing in line anxious to do so.
Despite the efforts of state legislators to suppress their votes. Phil Hands (AMS) suggests that, if the legislators and the courts are agreed on not counting votes postmarked in time but delivered late, you take matters into your own hands and guarantee that your voice is heard.
It’s too late to count on the USPS to get it there on time now anyway, but dropping off your ballot is a better idea to begin with, though voting in person is the best idea of all, since, if you forgot to sign something, the ballot clerks will tell you rather than reject your vote on a technicality.
Meanwhile, the desperation to change minds at the last moment provides an odd
Juxtaposition of the Day
John Deering reminds us of the dictators Dear Leader has embraced — sometimes literally — and for whom he has expressed friendship and admiration, while Walters warns that they are hoping for a Biden victory.
They can’t both be right.
Now, however you sort out this contradiction — and that’s up to you — Walters may believe the Chinese response to the outbreak was inadequate, which is subjective. But he should be embarrassed to flog that tired story of the “pallets of cash,” which has been so often refuted, disproven and explained that it is, objectively, absolute bullshit.
And both cartoons ignore the pushback we saw from Putin the other day in which he poked holes in Trump’s attempts to link Hunter Biden to various payoffs. You don’t have to trust our intelligence specialists, but you probably shouldn’t impose upon Vlad’s good will, or, certainly, take it for granted.
For my part, I put the opinions of dictators low on my voting checklist. At this stage, I’d rather hear what our former allies are thinking.
For instance, how does Australia feel about it? I think we can rely upon First Dog on the Moon (Guardian) to reflect the official viewpoint of the Australian government and not simply be wise-assing around. (That is a subjective judgment on my part.)
The recommendation — and you should go read the whole thing — is that we need a raccoon, or perhaps several, in the White House, and we should take this concept seriously because, after all, they’re conceding that it would have to happen in the next election, not this one.
Which puts their vision miles above most efforts to change people’s votes between now and Nov 3.
And, unlike those others, they’ve got an historical precedent to cite, which puts them head and shoulders above those who are just making things up. You should go read that, too.
But, if you prefer watching to reading, a video of the recent Improv Conference of New Orleans tribute to Jules Feiffer, with Liza Donnelly, Keith Knight and Matt Wuerker, moderated by Michael Tisserand, is available here free for the next two weeks.
(Want more? Here’s my coverage of a session at Dartmouth, with Feiffer, Jeff Danziger, Ed Koren and Edward Sorel back in 2009. There’s no such thing as “too much Jules Feiffer.”)
But if you prefer your distractions to be purely apolitical (Whoops — see comments, read comic), check out Joe Dator’s intelligent discussion of Columbo over at the New Yorker.
I will confess that my expectations for this were very low, but I went ahead and risked running into one of those whimsy-fests in which youngsters mock the things they weren’t around for, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is both sincere and insightful and yet a whole lot of fun.
The thing is, nobody ever took Columbo seriously — not the criminals he uncovered nor the viewers who tuned in every week.
Or, rather, every couple of weeks, since it rotated on the NBC Mystery Movie with McCloud and McMillan & Wife.
Gimme Gimme Good Earworm
Still here? Oh, that’s too bad. You should have clicked off and gone to one of those fine distractions.
Because I am not going to forgive Tony Cochran, who not only draws Agnes (Creators) but makes guitars and therefore can surely be blamed for planting this earworm.
Dammit, that band was no more real than Agnes’s religion.
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