CSotD: A Series of Short Sunday Sermons
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Yesterday I featured JD Crowe’s cartoon of Musk with baby Trump on his shoulders, noting that there were several variations going around. I’ve seen so many of them that I was tempted to do a whole day of nothing else, but decided that sarcastic repetition doesn’t make much of a point.
Ditto lately with cartoons of Trump/Musk sawing off various branches of the government tree, often from the wrong side of the cut. But while running them all would again be a weak statement, there are levels within the overall concept, and I like Ariail’s version, because it’s not just that this or that branch is being damaged. It’s that the whole thing is being destroyed.
There is a large difference between a tree surgeon and a clown with an ax. Someone who has learned the craft can trim a tree substantially and make it healthier, but a fool will kill it.
Which brings us to …
Chappatte depicts Elon ennobling the job description of his goons, but what I’ve been hearing lately is that, while they certainly aren’t competent auditors, they aren’t even very good hackers. Their own website is vulnerable to intruders, and pranksters have been having fun breaking in and leaving messages.
And they’ve apparently created all sorts of entry points and back doors and front doors and side doors and trap doors in the government sites they’ve rifled, which is aside from the legal question of whether an unelected subcontractor should have been allowed to play in there in the first place.
The latest rumor — I’m not a coder and can’t verify it myself — is that Elon’s claim that Social Security is paying people who are 150 years old is evidence that his crew of vandals don’t understand Cobol, which reportedly defaults to 1875 if no date is available.
I don’t know enough to confirm that, but it makes more sense than Elon’s ridiculous accusation, so it wins at least according to Occam’s Razor if not by actual computer literacy.
And it brings us back to the plain fact that the sorts of examinations these intruders claim to be conducting are best done by forensic accountants, and slowly.
Which reminds me of a time when I wanted to compare American and Canadian pay, benefits and taxes to see who got the better deal. I approached a fellow at a company that did a lot of cross-border work, and who was both a CPA in this country and a Chartered Accountant there and asked him about it.
He shook his head and said it wasn’t a newspaper article but a book or perhaps a doctoral dissertation and that neither he nor I had time to do it right.
Doing things right isn’t high on the priority list of our current government, which would rather cut firewood than create healthy trees.
Matters of Taste
There have been many cartoons showing Trump’s wonderful resort on the site of a mass killing, but Deering turns in what I think is the most chilling and effective one. His palette and style open it up as innocent on first glance, until you see what the little moppet has in her hands and read the caption, at which point it becomes unspeakably grim.
Emotional whiplash is a powerful tool, and one that needs to be deployed thoughtfully. If you use it too often, it becomes obvious: Even Calvin and Hobbes fell into that trap, such that if you saw realistic panels on a Sunday, you recognized it as one of Calvin’s fantasy sequences well before you got to the final panel.
For Deering, this is a departure from his usual approach, which gives it far more impact than usual. Very well played.
However, there are limits and considerations. Bill Day’s use of a Tesla in the destruction of Liberty isn’t a bad idea but the notion of dragging a body to its death evokes such strong racial associations that, IMHO, it is self-defeating: Instead of thinking about Musk and Trump, the viewer thinks about lynchings in general and the murder of James Byrd, Jr. specifically.
I’m not sure why I’m so horrified by this but not by Deering’s piece. It’s certainly not because I value Black lives more than Palestinian lives, but I suspect it’s because that one skull is a theoretical example of tens of thousands dead, while being dragged on a chain to death evokes a particular person.
Also, Deering is purposely evoking the deaths he raises, while Day is comparing a metaphorical death to a real-world event.
In any case, if I were an editor, I’d have leapt on one and rejected the other. And getting editors to run your work is a critical part of reaching the public.
Which brings us to this cartoon and my decision to break our rule about F-bombs, since that’s my point. It’s a really good cartoon for the first 29 words of a 31-word caption.
Granted, if it said “Like, what the hell, man?” I wouldn’t flinch as an editor, and that would have sparked rejection a generation ago. I suppose when the Gen Z’s are sitting in the big chairs, F-bombs will be seen as equally harmless.
For Gen Z’s and Millennials, the F-word has lost its savor and is just an intensivist expression. Still, while I often eat with my hands at home, I use a fork and knife in company. Time and place, y’know?
It reminds me of something I read back in 1967, in which the writer asked, if you say &^%^# all the time, what can you say to a flat tire on the George Washington Bridge during rush hour?
If this had come across my desk, I might have offered to buy it with the change of a word. Or not, depending on my mood at the particular moment.
So, does the word matter enough to take that risk? If so, by all means stand your ground.
Come on, Man
I would think that, having dropped the black plate two Sundays ago, you’d make a particular effort to include it thereafter, particularly if you’re about to invoke a major price increase.
Maybe that’s just me.
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