CSotD: Friday Funnies, with a side of politics
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The Cosmic Timing Award goes to Wallace The Brave (AMS), where this strip dropped the morning after I got a long-delayed haircut and even got a compliment on it from a dog-walking friend. Fortunately, only our dogs ended up in the water and they did it mostly on purpose.
As for how long it had gotten, I wasn’t trying to recapture my youth. Even Lyndon Johnson began growing his hair longer after he retired and my excuse was that I used to get it cut twice a year before I flew out to Denver for workshops with my young writers.
No workshops, no haircuts.
Now I only get it cut when I want to embrace how handsome I am, or at least to not look like the Accordion Man from Pennies From Heaven, a character so disturbing that, when, shortly thereafter, Kenneth Colley played Lord Nelson in another BBC production, I couldn’t watch it.
I’m just a sensitive soul, which is why I’m going to avoid politics today, after a brief rant. Or two.
As much of an information junky as I am, you might think I’d be glued to the Sunday lineup of political talk, but quite the opposite and for the reason outlined in this Mannequin on the Moon (AMS). Their search for “balance” may not include the clearly unbalanced, but it certainly does seem to consist of bringing in a pair of contrasting Loyal Party Members to recite scripted talking points.
Or, at best, someone genuinely willing to talk paired with someone genuinely intent on shutting down any meaningful exchange.
Opposing viewpoints, mind you, are fine: I have often gotten my best insights and information from people with whom I disagreed, but who were frank and honest enough to back me into a corner and force me to fight my way out.
This fits with something I read in the ’60s which contended that most hippies were Catholics and Jews because they’d grown up with rules and strictures that gave them something to rebel against.
More on that at the end.
Juxtaposition of the Day
No meaningful dialogue here: Republicans and their cartooning consorts have been screaming for months about gas prices, blaming Joe Biden despite the fact that gas prices are similarly outrageous in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, none of which have the Ukraine War or Joe Biden to blame.
Paul Fell points in a different direction, given that, whatever pain drivers may be experiencing at the pump, the oil companies are reporting strong profits.
Apparently, Republican House members would rather preserve the talking point than help constituents: Yesterday they voted against a proposal to limit price-gouging by petroleum companies, just as, the day before, they opposed a bill to help resolve the infant formula shortage which has also been a major attack point despite having no particular connection to the White House.
As Nick Anderson (Counterpoint) suggests, they’re more wedded to their partisan quest for power than they are to bipartisan cooperation and moving the nation forward.
Which is why I’m not going to discuss politics at all today.
Or, at least, not very much.
Not as much politics as there is in politics, egg, sausage and politics, anyway.
For instance, this Man Overboard isn’t about politics at all, is it?
For goodness sake, not at all.
Besides, you don’t have to look for political cartoons to depress yourself. At least, I don’t.
I’ve been noticing a shift of sorts in Zits (KFS) since I wrote about the strip back in 2003, from an affectionate look at parent/kid relationships to a level of generational hostility that seems, to this parent, more depressing than funny, and this week’s story arc, which begins here, seems to be bringing things to a head, as Connie works out with a woman who says she has a healthy relationship with her son.
It could be funny if Connie responded by being depressed over the contrast, but her anger doesn’t suggest that this is going to stretch into a two-week arc in which she sits down with Jeremy to repair things. I’d love to be wrong. But comments at the site include a suggestion that the upshot will be finding that Brendan is a juvenile delinquent pulling a con-job on his mother. I’d rather those were wrong.
My boys and I never set aside an hour to talk, but they used to hang around the kitchen while I cooked dinner most nights, and, while I occasionally complained about sloppy lawnmowing or a shoveled out driveway barely as wide as the snowshovel blade, we managed to keep things open, civil and even affectionate.
Within, of course, the bounds of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” that have led to some funny, distressingly surprising confessions over Thanksgiving dinner a few decades later.
Still, I never claimed to be their best friend, and I did try to enforce curfews and suchlike.
Not to start a quarrel within the Comics Kingdom, but today’s Between Friends (KFS) offers a far more upbeat take on parenthood.
A few notes: First is the old saying “A son is a son ’til he takes him a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life.”
Then we add the backstory that Susan and Harvey were unable to have children and adopted Emma, which may have amped up their efforts towards bonding.
Still, if Susan and Emma’s relationship seems a little too carefree — I’ve seen similar ones in real life — today’s Moderately Confused (AMS) is, I hope, more realistic than Zits: He’s mystified and maybe a little sad, but he isn’t angry.
Rather, he appears to recognize that kids need to establish independence. Fair enough, even if it hurts at the moment.
And for pete’s sake, even the Lockhorns (KFS) have, in recent years, ramped down the overt hostility into light, dismissive sarcasm and regular bursts of actual affection.
I wish Zits would do the same, because we’ve seen in real life what happens when parents don’t offer a safe haven, even to a ship that doesn’t want to tie to the dock just now.
Y’know, I don’t think this film was intended to be a comedy.
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