Do Teens Read LuAnn? Sure Hope Not

by on May 26, 2010
Posted In: cartoons

Found via the Comics Curmudgeon who duly mocks it:

The only way I read the funny pages these days is through the Comics Curmudgeon, which probably has some influence on my interpretation of this strip. I don’t know the specific story line for this week’s LuAnn, but the strip has been around long enough, that I know the basic motif of Gunther’s unrequited love for LuAnn and her mixed feelings about his advances.

All together now: “He’s a nice guyyyyyy.” Gunther does not get the message. After years of failing pursuit, you’d think he’d hang it up and see if someone else might take a shine to him. If I were writing the strip, that’s what I would do. That’s called normal behavior of a healthy human being. But I’m not writing this strip. Greg Evans is. He has created Gunther out of “nice guy syndrome” cloth, posing the possibility that one day Gunther will follow advice like this, turn himself into a Gender Stereotype and win LuAnn over with his Powerful Masculinity. Cuz LuAnn has nothing better to do than wait for Gunther to conform to her desires. Or for Gunther to tell her what her desires are.

See, what’s messing me up here, actually, is the mother. “Why do you need to feel romantic toward anyone?” “Well, mom,” my version of LuAnn would respond, “because I want to fuck. I want more than that, of course, but fucking is a big part of it. I don’t find Gunther fuckable. Maybe someone else does; bonnie for them. But I don’t. So I don’t want to hold his hand. Or kiss him. Or get to any number of bases with him. I definitely don’t wanna fuck him.”

This is a reasonable response. Just because Gunther has the self-esteem of a beaten dog does not obligate LuAnn to either give him a mercy fuck, as some Nice Guys™ would have it, or to suppress her own romantic and sexual desires as a reward for Gunther’s self-negating supplication to his object of love.

What the mother is suggesting — and parents in these strips tend to be The Voices of Reason, so I suspect Evans is suggesting it, too — is that LuAnn’s notions of romance are frivolous, silly, the kinds of fancies only the immature would entertain themselves with. That is, until they grow up and Reality places them in a marriage of mounting responsibilities and subsequent compromises, while their bodies age and decay, and the thought of shtupping anyone seems too much effort, might as well read a good book, zonk znorrrre.

Such is the mom’s perspective here. On the funny pages, where discussions of adult and young adult themes are usually verboten, the suppression of youthful sexuality is common sense. As with the eventual union of Lizard Breath and Anthony in For Better or For Worse, the union of LuAnn with her unromantic nice guy stalker Gunther is, if not inevitable, the course of events preferred by nervous editors and the moonbat readership who plague them. Abstinence until marriage, then breed, then hands off. What would a young woman like LuAnn want a hottie for, anyway? Gunther is dependable, good marriage material. Why would he want to marry some slut who is sexually attracted to him? He has bread to earn! She has babies to birth! If only we reproduced through spores, we wouldn’t have all this messy romance stuff in the first place.

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Weasel Column

by on May 24, 2010
Posted In: politics

I hate opinion pieces like these. Peter Beinart advances the useless notion that President Obama’s address to the West Point Academy wasn’t stirring enough:

Obama is clearly trying to ensure that the Afghan war no longer be run on a blank check. That’s why he famously brought OMB Director Peter Orszag to be photographed at an Afghanistan strategy session, and why, according to Jonathan Alter’s new book, The Promise, he demanded that the U.S. begin drawing down troops next summer, over the objections of top military brass. As I suggest in my own forthcoming book, The Icarus Syndrome, I think Obama’s effort to restore humility to American foreign policy will be his defining intellectual and political struggle. But it’s a struggle. And the West Point speech shows why. Because Obama believes that America must limit the amount of money and time it devotes to Afghanistan, he has limited America’s goals. Rather than defeating the Taliban we’re going to “break” their “momentum.” Rather than birthing a stable Afghan democracy, we’re going to “train Afghan security forces.” That’s a limited mission, all right. The problem is that at West Point, Obama was addressing cadets who are being called to make an unlimited sacrifice. Telling them they and their buddies are going to risk their lives to break the Taliban’s momentum is not exactly the stuff of Churchill.

So what’s your point, Peter? Should Obama go full throttle and commit the troops to total eradication of the Taliban — a dubious prospect that only a neocon could love? Or should he pull up roots and bring everyone home, consequences be damned? Neither of these are scenarios that Beinart favors, but the unhappy middle fails to put a rise in his pants, or at least the pants of American jingoist culture as he may see it.

And as such, Obama’s speech, laying out a three point plan of Wilsonian provenance that should give Beinart and the rest of us pause, is simply a political “clunker.” Beinart himself identifies the Wilsonian doctrine of “collective security” (i.e., keeping the interests of Western imperial nations safe through mucking up the rest of the world) as “the default liberal foreign policy vision” informing Obama’s current appeals to keep Western allies on the battlefield or at least in the aid tent. Shouldn’t he be alarmed that the same thinking that brought us the ineffectual League of Nations, that provided “humanitarian” cover for the disastrous First World War, and served as one half of the mad ideological chess game with the Soviet Union for 50 years is now guiding our president’s disingenuous rhetoric?

No, instead Beinart pithily concludes, “It may be a defensible strategy, but it’s not an inspiring one. And it’s not a strategy for which the American public is prepared to lose many lives. Perhaps the president should avoid West Point graduations for a while.”

Emphasis mine. He has part of that right: the American public is pretty fed up with the wars that have wasted so many lives the past few years. But would they be more willing — would they “have the stomach” as neocons love to put it with such bullying gusto shortly after 9/11 — if Obama put on a flight suit and stood on a pile of rubble, calling for Taliban blood through a bullhorn? I think not.

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Outrage Fecklessness

by on May 22, 2010
Posted In: politics

Under Bush I recall a lot of talk of “outrage fatigue.” Things were so bad, with news of the administration’s nefarious activities or the out-of-control consequences of its policy decisions hitting the public every day, that anyone not in the Reflexive Apologist Camp felt overwhelmed and almost helpless.1

Thank goodness for elections. Not that people could not have mobilized and changed the system in other, more substantial ways (constitutional convention, revolution, throwing Bush and Cheney before the Hague, etc.); but our consumer habits don’t trend to such extremes. Better to have a suave talking liberal with centrist tendencies speak to our better angels and provide inspiring relief with his wit, knowledge and stirring evocations of some of the better moments in our relatively recent past.

So what happened? David Sirota points to a recent example of what the right might call “liberal hypocrisy” with good reason:

We know that before the disaster, President Obama recklessly pushed to expand offshore drilling. We also know that his Interior Department gave British Petroleum’s rig a “categorical exclusion” from environmental scrutiny and, according to the New York Times, “gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf without first getting required [environmental] permits.” Worse, we know that after the spill, the same Interior Department kept issuing “categorical exclusions” for new Gulf oil operations, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar still refuses “to rule out continued use of categorical exclusions,” as the Denver Post reported (heckuva job, Kenny!).

Undoubtedly, had this been the behavior of a Republican administration, “the left’s” big environmental organizations would be scheduling D.C. protests and calling for firings, if not criminal charges. Yet, somehow, there are no protests. Somehow, there have been almost no calls for the resignation of Salazar, who oversaw this disaster and who, before that, took $323,000 in campaign contributions from energy interests and backed more offshore drilling as a U.S. senator. Somehow, facing environmental apocalypse, there has been mostly silence from “the left.”

But as Sirota rightly notes, this hypocrisy is not simply a symptom of My Party, Right or Wrong disease; no, it’s a big flashing neon sign pointing at the fundamental institutional weakness of the left whenever a Democrat assumes the executive branch of our corporate-run government. I know plenty of fellow lefties/liberals/progressives/independents/whatever who share my ongoing disgust with a whole list of Obama policies that either carry on with the horrible business of the previous administration — violating human rights, upsetting constitutional law, serving corporate interests against those of the public — or striking new ground (assassination of U.S. citizens abroad?! Novel!)

So where’s the outrage? Well, you can always hear from familiar quarters on the left, thank goodness, that are treated as “fringe” or “wacko” in the usual habits of marginalization. But what of the institutional left? Or the D.C.-selected lefty bloggers? Chirping of crickets or perhaps angry denunciations of “false equivalency” for noting similarities between Obama and Bush.

Matt Bors recently treated this theme much more humorously than I do in recent cartoon.

To be fair, it should be noted that media coverage can distort our impressions wildly. Remember that Tea Party protest in D.C against health care reform? It was outnumbered — 200,000 to 25,000 — by groups protesting against the oppression of immigrants (and this was BEFORE the Arizona law), big enough to get the attention of Obama himself via video speech. So what did CNN/MSNBC/FOXNews/et al. cover wall-to-wall over that weekend? Why that “grassroots” uprising of honest citizens hurling racist and homophobic insults at congresscritters on their way to work, of course.

1Yes, I know it’s an Onion article. Just citing the source, which spoke a deeper truth, as good satire always does.

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