CSotD: Mixed Bag of Must
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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Maeve digs herself into yet another self-defeating romantic hole. This story arc actually began a few days ago, and now she has run into her ex, who is someone she can really talk to. I suspect that Simon is like a lot of the better exes in life, who still loves her on an almost sibling level but is glad not to be caught in the tangles anymore.
She seems to recognize that Benoit’s distance is a positive factor in things, which made me laugh because one of my best long-term relationships was long distance. You do avoid rubbing against rough edges, since you’re always at your best in those few days you spend together.
On the other hand, you’d better have an electric blanket, because it gets cold at night.
Maeve’s romantic disasters are as predictable as Dagwood hanging off the gutter, the difference being that it’s part of a well-rounded character who reflects, albeit imperfectly, on how she got into the predicament yet again. It’s not so much that she’s the most complex of the three characters in the strip, but I find her the most frustrating of them and hence the most interesting.
Which I guess puts me in Simon’s role, wishing she would snap out of it and knowing she never will. How can she be so competent at her job and so hopeless at managing her personal life?
It verges on literature.
It’s also well-suited for Valentine’s Day, so I marked it “Must,” a newsroom heads-up for a story that has to run ASAP. Holidays make for some mandated scheduling, so stand by today for a mix of humor and politics.
Not sure Jeff Stahler intended this as a Valentine’s Day piece, since, as you can see, it ran three days ago, but it fits the bill, and it hits on a couple of overlapping concepts.
One is that men are generally not so good at picking up unspoken messages, which can lead to just this sort of moment, when he’s convinced something is going on that isn’t happening.
We can hope that he goes away licking his wounds and trying to be more receptive in the future, though the toxic response is the kind of butt-hurt misogyny we see from incels who hate all women because they’ve never been able to figure them out.
However, if men should be more aware of this disconnect, there’s no reason women shouldn’t be as well. From her point of view, the signals aren’t mixed, which gets into that whole tree-falling-in-a-forest thing.
If one person doesn’t understand you, you can write it off. If nobody does, well, maybe you need to recalculate.
On the other hand, if we all understood each other, cartoonists would be out of a job. Think of it: There wouldn’t be any more gags about husbands who can’t figure out what their wives are angry about.
Misunderstandings start in the cradle, and if I were separating humor from politics today, I’m not sure which pigeonhole this Flying McCoys would have landed in.
There’s a reason a lot of schools have a system where everybody gives Valentines to everybody, though I suppose now that inclusion and equity are illegal, we’ll have to discontinue that.
But this gag works on the assumption that school day crushes are not offensive while work place crushes are actionable. I’d call that a false premise.
Little kids need to work things out and learn, so there has to be room for innocent mistakes and puppy love, but they do need to learn, though there’s far more tolerance in the third grade than there will be once you’re supposed to be a competent adult.
OTOH, it’s not as if little kids were allowed to be as innocently isolated as they were two generations ago. Their media and their fashions drag them into adolescence far earlier than was once the case, and if you want to talk about mixed messages, they start early.
It doesn’t get easier with age. Regardless of what you may have read in Time magazine, the Sixties weren’t really an era of free love, though there was societal pressure to pretend you felt that way. And of course some people did, but some people always have.
But most people weren’t in that camp to begin with, and most who were found themselves conflicted because they did care. I think a certain amount of giving a damn is hard-wired into our systems, regardless of how freewheeling we’re told we ought to be.
But wotthehell do I know? Twenty years ago, I wrote a column predicting that tattoo removal technology would be a good investment.
Sometimes the guru on the mountain top is just an old fart.
Juxtaposition of the Day
A pair of Valentine’s Day political cartoons, both based on a sense of insincerity emanating from Dear Leader, both citing broken promises.
As I wrote yesterday, I have no problem with cartoonists hammering Trump for his failure to stem inflation and lower prices. It was a major part of his campaign, and not only has inflation begun again to rise but his asinine plan to impose tariffs will accelerate price increases dramatically.
Is he responsible for bird flu impacting the price of eggs? Of course not, but, then again, neither was Joe Biden, and Biden didn’t promise to get those prices back down quickly, which, aside from eggs, was a silly promise. Inflation was coming down but the needle rarely moves very fast.
Trump also promised to end the war in Ukraine immediately, though, as Morland suggests, his cunning plan is for Ukraine to surrender. But, goo’ness gracious, that doesn’t mean that the Russian Hoax wasn’t a hoax after all.
A Modest Proposal
Finally, the flood of cartoons showing men presenting their lady loves with a heart-shaped box of eggs has inspired me with a solution for the crisis in editorial cartooning.
We should establish a fund to support editorial cartoonists, with the money coming from a 50% share of any revenue from political cartoons based on the “Here’s Johnny” scene from the Shining and on Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
One way or t’other, a benefit.
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