In the Funny Pages
I'm taking a quick break from weekly services at Our Lady of Perpetual Laundry to say that Mallard Fillmore can bite my ass.
Honestly, what a sniveling git Bruce Tinsley is. I am so tired of that damn strip. Last week I saw one lamenting the fact that a public-school student in Denver had been suspended for wearing a patriotic T-shirt, emblazoned with the American flag, because this might offend holders of anti-American sentiment. An asterisk pointed to a cite from the Denver Post for the story.
That'd be a newspaper, of course. If you click around long enough to find anything actually pertaining to the subject of the strip, it appears to have been grossly oversimplified. A school principal instituted a temporary ban on any political or patriotic statements through clothing, for any stance or any country, in response to increasingly heated and hostile discord among students over the illegal immigration issue. Whether you agree with this approach or not (I can't help but feel some sympathy for public school administrators, who are forced to grapple with complex social, moral, and legal issues, equipped only with the brains of public school administrators), in no way could its motive be construed as over-the-top PC. What the school officials were trying to avoid was not causing a little minor offense to someone whose opinions clearly shouldn't matter anyway (pinko commie scum!), but allowing an already existing situation to escalate, possibly to the point of violence.
And the way that Tinsley cites source material is itself disingenuous. He didn't print a link to any particular article, only to the newspaper's website. But the mere fact that he cites a source of any kind makes him sound a lot more legitimate than he really is (not that I necessarily mean to call him a bastard). And as someone who can't get on the internet at work, where I read the funnies at lunch, and didn't remember to look it up at home until over a week later, I particularly appreciate the first comment on World o'Crap's post about this apparently long-running issue. (So I'm a couple of months behind here. Better late than never!)
Oh, and that reminds me: Garfield can be funny if you take out all his thought bubbles. Now I have to go fold some clothes.
posted by Beth @ 1:19 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Mallard Fillmore runs in our local paper. I must have read it three or even four times. I figured out it wasn't worth looking at, so I don't get exercised over it.
There's a thoughtful treatment of the issue of censorship in schools in a book by Avi called "Nothing But The Truth." The situation involves an individual rather than a group action. The book explores how the mixture of motivations of different players -- a student not wanting to admit how he'd gotten in trouble, a teacher without much political sensitivity, an administrator primarily concerned with whether the next school budget would pass, talk show hosts with a political agenda -- blow a local, minor discipline problem into a national issue, with lots of personal repercussions for the players.
The book is aimed at high school kids, but it's a worthy read for adults.
Thanks for the book recommendation - I may add that to Katie's (and my) reading list for the year!
As for Mallard Fillmore, I guess it just really bothered me the way he provided a "source" which he had to know most people would not check up on, to support a point he must have known was misleading. I never get particularly worked up over, say, B.C. :)
In Austin they run Mallard Fillmore right above Doonesbury. Is this an attempt to keep the cartoons 'balanced'? Thanks for doing the research, Beth - I was too lazy to look the T-shirt thing up, but assumed it was bogus or exaggerated.
Annie
They used to run Doonesbury on the editorial page. If I remember right, they started running Mallard Fillmore in the comics pages, then went ahead and moved Doonesbury back next to it - yeah, for "balance," I'm sure!
I don't remember what the source was that he mentioned today - a name rather than a link, citing the slew of times celebrities have badmouthed Christians and the mainstream media have ignored it, whereas they're jumping all over Mel Gibson. *rolls eyes*
Oh hey, Spikey's doing great, by the way! :)
Did he/she ever bloom? My friend had one plant with weird but cool flowers.
No, but his stem got all tall and all the lower leaves fell off, then the stem dried up and he fell over, so I thought he was dead. But the top took root and he's growing again. It's fun to watch as I've never known much about horticulture, and suddenly I seem to be surrounded by plants! I'll have to post another picture.
I enjoy your blog because you're so funny, eclectic and you're in Austin. Plants are a major part of my life, and my blog is mainly horticulture with a few movies thrown in. Gardening is dangerous and addictive, Beth, so be careful!
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