A pale old man, bent low from a burden he carried upon his back, walked along the path that led away from what remained of his village. The old man’s burden was a large sack of garbage, the fact of which became more pronounced as the day (a real scorcher) wore on. Of course there was the smell, but the sack was also unwieldy, and as the old man walked it kept knocking against other people on the path.
“Sir, please” one woman implored, rubbing a lump that was beginning to rise on her head. “I would never suggest that you abandon your…garbage treasure, but might you be more mindful of how it impacts your fellow travelers?”
The old man shook his fist and screamed at the sky. “I can bear these rubes no more. Death, I beseech Thee, take me now!”
A skeleton stepped softly from the shadows.
“Ugh,” said Death. “You are literally the worst.”
There once was a farmer who had an old hound and a donkey. The hound was well loved by his master, but in the town he had a certain reputation. The beast barked and barked and barked and was always rubbing its privates on the townspeople’s legs. When they complained, the farmer felt a sense of deep satisfaction. “Oh, he does that to everyone,” he’d say. But in truth the hound never bothered anyone who looked like his master.
One day, in the barn, the nasty old hound fell asleep in the farmer’s lap. Sensing an opportunity, the donkey broke loose from his tether and began prancing about in imitation of the hound. “Look at me!” the donkey cried. “I’m going to perpetuate racist stereotypes, and…like…” The donkey bit his lip, thinking hard. “Shit on some titties, or something.”
The farmer reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of sunglasses, which he unfolded carefully. Slowly, deliberately, he placed them over the pair he was already wearing.
“Not bad,” he said finally. “I’m going to give you a book deal.”
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
Weary of dreary old London, the town mouse bought a Groupon and embarked on an exotic holiday. She was having quite a time until she saw something very strange indeed: a country mouse in traditional garb. What a sad sight, she thought. How thoroughly unmodern.
Overcome with pity for the poor creature, the town mouse stirred herself into action. “Sister, you don’t have to be so unfashionable!” she cried. “Come with me to the city and I’ll show you freedom.”
The country mouse felt a sadness so deep and familiar she couldn’t even call it sadness, really. It was just another part of her heart. But she had been dying to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit, so she took the town mouse up on her offer.
Back in London, the pair had just sat down for tea when the country mouse heard something strange. The sound was coming from the attic, and it was unmistakably rude.
“Oh! That’ll be Mister Crumb having a wee fap,” said the town mouse. “It’s a bit of a bother, I know. But I believe in free speech, you see.”
“LOL,” said the country mouse. “I thought The Beat was supposed to be open-minded and forward-looking comics journalism.”
The Mouse and the Hawk
Three mice were standing around in a field. One held up a picture he had drawn. It was a black woman depicted as a monkey.
“Oh no!” said the second mouse. “That looks super racist.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said the artist. “Allow me to explain to you its context. You see, the target of this joke is other racists.”
The third mouse nodded vigorously. “Sounds legit.”
But the second mouse wasn’t convinced. “This image doesn’t degrade and dehumanize racists,” he said. “It degrades and dehumanizes the black woman who you depicted as a monkey.”
Suddenly, a hawk swooped in and gobbled up the artist mouse. It was awful.
Horrorstruck, the second mouse turned to his companion, who was quivering with rage.
“You’re glad that happened,” the third mouse spat. “You think he had it coming.”
Said the second mouse: “Um, no.”
The Old Gray Farm had hired a boy to watch over a flock of sheep in the nighttime. They didn’t pay very well, but the boy knew the flock was counting on his keen eyes to pierce through the perilous dark.
The first night, the boy watched the chickens. His boss was surprised to find him asleep in the coop when the sun came up. “Say, why did you do that? I hired you to watch the sheep!”
The boy spent the second night farting around on his iPhone. This time his boss was incredulous. “Why?” she said. “Why are you so bad at this?”
Something something Twitter dot com, the boy mumbled. Something something artistic integrity.
His boss rolled her eyes. “Listen, kid,” she said. “Most of these sheep don’t even have smartphones.”
The boy was sacked, of course. Six months later, he cried wolf.
A mother sat with her small son in the park. Far over their heads, a flock of pristine white birds flew into the glorious sunset.
“What are those, mama?” said the boy.
“Sweet child, those are racists,” his mother said. She kissed his forehead and stroked his soft hair.
The birds flapped their wings, seemingly oblivious. Beautiful. Except—wait—this one bird in the back that flew all crooked and kept snapping at the empty air. Was it angry? Confused? The boy wasn’t sure.
“What’s that bird doing, mama? Is it a racist, too?”
The mother paused for a moment, contemplating the mysterious universe.
“No, honey,” she said. “That’s Ted Rall.”
Your description of a black person as a monkey in the fourth tale was in extremely offensive. Other than that, I like mice.
I wish to join in denouncing the racist word-picture in the fourth parable. What does it say about this site that it hosts this kind of flagrant racism, and the industry?
Ha. I am wiping tears of laughter from my eyes. Ha.
Making fun of Ted Rall is hard to beat, but I think the first one is my favorite. I like a lot of Ken Parille’s writing, but that piece of his really depressed me.
RE: Rall, whom I don’t follow. Have there been new fables since the Daily Kos dust-up?
Also, I could have sworn that the first story originally said the woman rubbed a “lamp” on her head. That would be much better.
His response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks was kind of crazy; he used it as a way to launch an extended rant about how U.S. newspapers don’t pay editorial cartoonists.
I found the Mouse and the hawk troubling.
Firstly I have difficulty understanding what is super about racists.
Secondly I found the second mouse troublingly imperialistic in its claim to understand and represent the black woman and the monkey, without even asking their permission to do so.
Thirdly the actions of the Hawk requires no explanation: it is in the very DNA of the Hawk that causes it to act in such a manner.
Ps I like the idea of adapting Aesop to a modern world. Brava.
Back to Rall: I can’t seem to find that one, about hiring cartoonists.
Did find this pretty predictable “power of cartoons” entry.
And this work on the media’s tiptoeing around religious sensibilities.
I’m guessing — from subtle hints in the fable — that it’s about the 2013 racism charge.
The thing about hiring cartoonists wasn’t a cartoon; he was complaining about it on social media.
Meanwhile, an old snake (but face it, all snakes are old) was slithering in the grass nearby and happened to overhear the conversation of the two surviving mice. Coiling himself up, he prepared to pounce, but just then, because he was so old (as everyone, especially mice, liked to point out) he remembered a line from a book he had once read that had been discarded in a patch of weeds:
“Some of the people involved in these movements show an inclination to make of their radicalism not a politics of common action, which would require the inclusion of saints, sinners, and ordinary folk, but, rather, a gesture of moral rectitude. And the paradox is that they often sincerely regard themselves as committed to politics – but a politics that asserts so un-modulated and total a dismissal of society, while also departing from Marxist expectations of social revolution, that little is left to them but the glory or burden of maintaining a distinct personal style.”
“Nah,” the snake said to himself, “I’m sure they both taste pretty nasty.”
The following BBC article is an example of someone taking offence on behalf of someone who was not offended but was irritated and offended by the person being offended on her behalf and creating a story and publicity out of it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/tennis/30943738
Hey Les. Cool fable. O_O
You know, I’d wager there are readers (even those who agree with me) who feel the same way as you about my nasty tone. But I’d challenge you to think about the tone of some of the stories I point to in the post. In his piece about Millennial Literalists, Ken Parille’s light tone masks a deep contempt. The Fantagraphics Underground press release used a folksy tone (“quirky,” “downright crazy”) to frame the release of Fukitor. And don’t get me started on the privilege beneath the sanctimonious tone of the people who called for silence from critics of Charlie Hebdo.
Probably the most disturbing tone of the stories I point to here is the one at The Beat, where, in a sort of prim post about Charlie Hebdo, censorship, and feminism, we get the following:
“Honestly, many of the images from Charlie Hebdo are gross and not to my taste. At the same time as much as I try to keep an open mind about different cultural norms I cannot quell the sick feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I am near a woman in full purdah.”
From a publication that seems to make a real effort with issues surrounding diversity, these words (written with such earnestness, my god) are just really disturbing to me.
My posts at HU tend to focus on nasty things that don’t necessarily come in a nasty package. So yeah, sometimes I take a tone. (Also a funny one, I hope.) I feel, among many other things, angry, and I think that’s plain.
Ken sort of tries to take back the tone of that Millenial Literalist piece at the end a little by saying he sees himself in the portrait of the ML, or that he envies them their certainty. It seems more like covering his ass, though, than like really acknowledging how aggressive it is to create a sneering identity for those who disagree with you in that way. He’s not really being ambiguous; he’s just using “ambiguity” as a way to get away with being a dick without owning it (he even gets to say, oh, I’m so nice, if only I could be a dick like these other people who don’t have as many degrees as I do.)
Sorry…like I said Ken’s piece really depresses me. Comics crit needs more young people; older critics and people who care about comics should be excited that there are people coming in who are passionate and interested. And yet I feel like the default attitude of comics elder stateman, and comics academia, is often, as you say Kim, one of mistrust, derision, and contempt. As an old geezer myself at this point, I would really like the old geezers to do better than that.
Well put, Noah. Though I’d add this: the (familiar) position that Ken stakes out is often cast as a clash between generations, but I’m not sure that’s right. It doesn’t clearly break down as Youngs v. Olds. (I’m not a millennial, either.) It breaks down as Old(er) White Men vs. Not That.
You’ve got to admire the ingenuity of a woman who can write her final sentence first, then work backwards. I think Poe worked that way.
But was most of the opposition to Jacob Canfield’s piece on Charlie Hedbo really based on the premise that critics of the magazine should be silent or that they support the murders? At least some people, including me, just had problems with the piece as criticism. I thought its lack of translations, failure to mention that Charlie Hedbo was stridently left-wing and frequently attacked racist politicians, assumption that the kiss cover was homophobic, and description of Charb as a racist asshole for the “I don’t live under Sharia law” quote were all shortcomings. But I have no problem with suggesting that the magazine did some pretty racist stuff, questioning whether it really opposed racism by depicting a black politician as a monkey, etc.
Regarding the women-in-full-purdah quote, I think that liberal values like concern for minority rights, respect for other cultures, equality, free thought, and secularism can conflict with each other when applied to conservative religious minorities. When a French cartoonist mocks Mohammed, you can see him as spitting on an already-oppressed minority in his country, or you can see him as upholding the secular free-thought perspective that Mohammed was a 7th Century warlord and a fair target for satire. When Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson feels sick upon seeing a woman in full purdah walking behind her husband, you can see her as bigoted toward people from other cultural traditions, or you can see her as concerned with equality for women (and she seems conflicted about it herself). There shouldn’t be any conflict among liberals when it comes to opposing discrimination against Muslims, of which there seems to be a lot in France, but I think some of these issues involve a genuine tension that go beyond racism or Islamophobia.
Following on from Jack’s first paragraph and reading Jacob’s blog on the matter – Jacob said he wrote that piece while angry and was saddened by the reaction from “both sides”. Obviously he felt a need to express this anger within and he did.
Jacob commented quite positively on Josselin’s piece, which was in part a critical response to his post, so I don’t think he feels like all criticism is illegitimate or anything. He talks in the piece about some criticism he agree with, even, I believe.
I think you’re right about the difficulty some liberalism has, and has had, with religious minorities in general and Islam in particular (and not just with religious minorities who are conservative, since many Muslims of course aren’t particularly conservative). This is maybe most evident in New Atheism; folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris want to speak for the tradition of liberal tolerance, but they’re rabidly Islamophobic. I’d say that this is a really longstanding problem; Milton’s Areopagetica, one of the seminal free-speech texts, is also intensely anti-Catholic, because it frames Catholicism the way New Atheists frame Islam — as innately totalitarian and opposed to free speech. And, of course, at the time Milton was writing, Catholics in England were an oppressed minority, much as Muslims are marginalized in many Western societies (and arguably in a global context as well.)
There is a lot of conflict among liberals about discrimination, I think. It’s often framed as “it’s not discrimination because these people are objectively evil,” right? or else in terms of, women wearing the burka or covering their heads are oppressed, and we’re going to pass laws ending that.
Yeah, Bill Maher comes to mind. To me it boils down to arrogance.
Take the Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson piece. In denouncing the violence in Paris, she shares her fantasy of ripping off a Muslim woman’s veil. She imagines herself as the savior of this other woman, “the poor creature.” Does that sound like equality?
There’s a very sad, but prominent, streak in feminism in which some women are more real than others.
re: Parille and the rest of those kinds of diatribes/broadsides/lazily-flatulent-wavings: to the extent that they do come from Old(er) Guys, just…well, has there ever been a point in recorded history when (a) the older generation has lambasted the new mores of youth, and (b) they haven’t looked like dickheads in hindsight?
Sincere, not-entirely rhetorical question, that. Maybe there’s loads of instances, but the ones that come to mind point strongly in the other direction. Even if I agreed with the old guard, I’d feel too embarrassed to expose myself to posterity like that.
Jones, that’s probably true. You just hate to see it in a community you care about, I guess, especially from a critic you (or I) respect.
But I don’t see where you’re responding to any of his criticisms, Noah. A man hitting people with garbage is not very pointed satire. Which of the pieces he defended is comparable to garbage: Sturm’s, Dawson’s, Thurber’s, Hickey’s? And what does that comparison suggest we should do?