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CSotD: Laughing While We Still Can

I’m going to take the risk of Dear Leader making up his mind in the next 24 hours and let the political cartoonists catch up a bit. Meanwhile, Doonesbury reruns are in 2003 and this one makes a point I made yesterday: If we’re going to throw another generation into the Mixmaster, let’s make it the entire generation.

Meanwhile, while we wait for someone to find the inevitable aluminum tubes that absolutely positively prove that Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction, let’s have a few laffs:

Why follow the news when it turns out most people are like Mamet and get their news from social media.

I have no idea where I fall on the continuum. I get most of my news on-line, including reading for-real newspapers and following some expert blogs. I don’t get a printed paper and I only watch local news on TV, except for a few snatches of news programming while I do dishes.

I heard on social media that RFK Jr wants to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, so I hunted up a for-real analysis, which started off poorly with “Drug ads, which are illegal in most countries …”

“Most countries” is every nation except us and New Zealand. They should have said that.

But the piece went on to explain that killing drug ads would be very hard on TV news channels because they are heavily dependent on selling magic potions to their viewers, which seems almost like suggesting that people who watch news are particularly gullible.

Anyway, it leaves me wondering, if they lost their snake-oil peddlers, how much more public service pity-porn they’d run featuring sick kids, mistreated puppies and adowable blankets.

There used to be a thing about how no two nations with McDonald’s ever went to war, but I doubt it’s true anymore.

But the central point remains valid: We’re much more economically intertwined than we were back when we cut off Japan’s access to scrap metal in the run-up to WWII.

For instance, it might prove hard to get all our automobile plants to start cranking out tanks and jeeps, given that a lot of automobile plants here are owned overseas, and that’s before we figure out how many automobile plants are entirely located overseas.

As for the high-tech stuff, we rely on imported parts, and thanks to just-in-time inventory practices, it’s not as if we have a bunch piled up in warehouses that we could draw on for awhile.

Meanwhile, our Fearless Leader is a guy who thinks exporters pay tariffs and that George Washington seized British airports during the Revolution.

We’d draft our best and brightest, and they could not only solve the issue of why hamburgers aren’t made of ham but why frankfurters aren’t made from people named Frank and how come Lebanon bologna isn’t imported from the Middle East.

The joke being that Eno in the Duplex is purposely depicted as a nitwit but he’s not nearly as atypical as we might wish, and now studies suggest that using AI can make you even stupider. Unless you use it intelligently, which is like telling people not to drive like the stunt drivers in the ads that persuaded them to buy a hot car in the first place.

All of which brings me back to one of my favorite Arlo & Janis strips:

Not to worry. If we get into a war, Rat will run some Zoom meetings. Zoom meetings solve everything!

We’ll always possess our infinite capacity for self-delusion. If I ever doubted that we live in Lotto Nation, where everyone thinks they’re about to become rich despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m persuaded now.

In our town, a local charity opened a supermarket-sized thrift shop, and, right up the street, a casino has also opened. The parking lots of both are often full and I can’t help but wonder whether, if we didn’t have the one, we would still need the other.

Though thanks to legalized sports betting, people can throw away their money and go desperately into debt in the privacy of their own homes. Ain’t progress wunnerful?

On a related note, I gave up on baseball years ago after I found myself trapped in a newsroom with an active fantasy league. I used to love the game, but that was when people talked about a great fielding play or a terrific job of base-running, but the fantasy leaguers only talked about numbers.

It was like sitting there listening to stockbrokers, not sports fans. I suspect baseball is reaching the point where, like jai alai, nobody pays attention to the games except in terms of wagering on the results.

Elsewhere in jobs you don’t want, Susan continues to have no idea where she stands at the place which recently acquired her former employer. But let’s forget, for the moment, that Between Friends is set in Canada, because, in the United States, the company wouldn’t be able to deduct those pastries much longer.

There may be fantabulous tax cuts for the plutocrats in the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bullroar, but don’t worry, they’ll be paying for it. They won’t be able to deduct the little niceties they offer their peasants, and the loss of those deductions will cancel out … well, not a whole lot, but it will cost them money and they will notice.

So it seems likely that things like donuts in the morning, or pizzas brought in at crush-times, will stop happening.

Better start getting used to vending machine coffee.

I got a large laugh out of this because it reminded me of going with my father to pick out a coffin when my grandfather — his dad — died.

It was obviously a solemn occasion, but that’s when you are most vulnerable, and when the fellow began to talk about the inner-spring mattress, our major issue became the importance of not looking at each other.

My grandfather had wanted no wake and only as brief a graveside service as possible, but hadn’t discussed post-mortem comfiness or subterranean bed sores.

We did well: We made it halfway to the car before cracking up.

Evelyn Waugh had warned us.

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Comments 9

  1. Your story about your grandfather and the casket reminded me of a story about an aunt. When she died her sister insisted she get new clothes to be buried in. My mom took her to the local store. They were looking at underwear when my aunt said she did not want her sister buried in an underwire bra because the wires would start poking her after a while, and be uncomfortable.

  2. Mike, I guess you don’t watch much network TV, because if you did you’d notice that three of five ads on every show, no matter its content, is devoted to drug or health-related ads. That includes sports and game/reality shows, so singling out the news networks is confirmation bias. Me–I watch network, cable and sports networks but record them and zip through ALL the commercials.

    And I have never bet on sports or participated in a fantasy league, but watch a full slate of hometeam baseball and football, where I’m genuinely interested in the players, their stats and the final score, but only those on “my” teams. I’ve NEVER watched a game that didn’t involve the two teams I root for and I’ve been watching both sports for over sixty years.

    1. If you go back and click the link, you’ll see that nearly half the pharma ads go to news networks where they make up a disproportionate part of the ad revenues. And observers within the industry predict that these linear news shows would take a major hit if pharma ads disappeared, moreso than other segments of broadcasting. It doesn’t mean pharma only advertises there, just that it has a more profound impact there.

      Within the segment, I don’t think it would be as strong a blow to the Today Show or Good Morning, America, as it would be to the daytime lineup on MSNBC, CNN, etc. but I haven’t seen the books.

      But try this link for more insiderish talk:
      https://www.tvrev.com/news/could-a-pharma-ad-ban-shake-up-the-tv-industry

  3. “But the piece went on to explain that killing drug ads would be very hard on TV news channels because they are heavily dependent on selling magic potions to their viewers, which seems almost like suggesting that people who watch news are particularly gullible.

    “Anyway, it leaves me wondering, if they lost their snake-oil peddlers…”

    You’ve completely missed the point: real pharmaceuticals will be banned, but snake oil, since it isn’t regulated by the FDA, will remain, and now be the only game in town.

    1. You’re not wrong, but you’re missing the point, which is that approved pharma drugs ads make up 30% of income on news shows. There would still be ads for deodorants and tooth paste as well as unproven herbal concoctions, but they’re already there, so it’s doubtful they would expand to replace the lost income.

      If that woman who rubs deodorant all over her body wanted to buy more ads, she could already do it. The pity-porn PSAs run when there is an unsold ad space, so it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of available slots already. Every time that kid offers you an adowable blanket or Sarah McLachlan shows you a wretched puppy, that’s a 30 or 60 second spot that nobody could sell.

  4. Rest assured…the peace president will make the right decision.

  5. When I was a child in the 1960s, I would be over at my grandparents’ place (around the corner where we lived) and watch the evening news with my grandfather. At that time, it seemed every ad was for Alka Seltzer, Doan’s Pills, Milk of Magnesia or Haley’s MO.

    Now we have medical ads on every news show.

    What goes around comes around.

    1. Until… Reagan probably? … it used to be illegal to advertise prescription drugs on tv.

  6. About that inflation — several decades ago, my Dad remarked that he never thought he would be able to live in a house that would cost $100,000.

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