Tommorrow, and Tommorrow, and Tommorrow

Day by Day, the cartoon by Chris Muir (which I am linking in place of the now-defunct Brunching Shuttlecocks. How could you, Lore? How could you?), went after Tom Tommorrow today, and Tom's attitude toward's pro-war bloggers. Needless to say, Tom's argument is a cheap shot: "If you support the war so much, why don't you enlist?" It's also intellectually dishonest: what's being objected to isn't our (I don't consider myself exclusively a war-blogger, but I do support the war, and I've been called a chicken hawk before) lack of enlistment, but our support of the war.


But whatever, I cut Tom Tommorrow lots of slack, because he's a funny guy, and he inks a funny cartoon. I've long enjoyed "This Modern World" for what it is, a skillful use of satire. Tom gets that the best way to do satire is to take honest opinions and place them in an inappropriate context, or twist them just the tiniest bit, so that they land in the land of risibility. It's a simple technique, which is why it works. Sensible people appreciate this, and thus enjoy the satirist's art but don't try to put too much stock in the satirist as a source of wisdom. It's like getting your political philosophy from oh, Jon Stewart.


But back to today's Day by Day. The last panel quotes Tom in an interview with the Buffalo News. I will steal Muir's punchline and quote him:

I think that there are no good conservative cartoonists. Good humor is about the real underdog taking on the powerful. That's what satire is all about. Conservative humor is picking on people who have less than you. That's not satire, that's just mean.

I'm gonna go ahead and assume that Tom Tommorrow makes more than I do, and that his status as a syndicated cartoonist makes him more influential, or more powerful, than mine as a mere schoolteacher, and then I'm gonna say that Tom Tommorrow is an aliterate tube-monkey if he really believes what he said (I'm making fun of him, see?). How profound does your ignorance need to be if you think that conservative humor involves nothing more than saying "Hey there, Sambo, how's being POOR workin' out for you? Wanna dollar? Go fetch! Haw haw haw!" Can he cite one instance of a conservative humorist saying anything even remotely like that? Has he even read P.J. O'Rourke?


Earth to liberals: Conservatives do not make fun of poor people. Making fun of poor people is mean, and besides, poor people do a pretty damn good job of making fun of themselves (watch enough stand-up comics, and you'll see them start to jive and riff on their humble beginnings). Conservative humor is aimed directly at liberals, who are mostly not poor (poor people who vote Democrat do so because the Democrats promise them the spoils of victory. If the Democrats ran on their moral or foreign policy agenda and left the social programs off the table, they'd never win an election). Conservatives, rather than mock the poor, mock the people who think poverty would just vanish if we cared enough/threw enough money at it/stopped trying to gain wealth in the first place, rather than commerce being in a strong enough position to train and hire poor people to work their way out of poverty. They mock the people who only seem to care about the military when the military is getting shot at, never when it's time to prepare the military to get shot at (these are usually the same people who proclaim that the military will never have to get shot at again, and then blame the failure of this prediction on the fact that we have a military). In short, conservative humorists mock people who think like Tom Tommorrow. Maybe that's why he thinks they're so mean.