They haven’t posted the cover for this month’s Funny Times online yet, so I’ve put up this Keith Knight cartoon with a link to the magazine’s homepage.
Jon Winokur’s “Curmudgeon” quotes Emile Capouya on the high school teacher’s mission: “A high school teacher, after all, is a person deputized by the rest of us to explain to the young what sort of world they are living in, and to defend, if possible, the part their elders are playing in it.” That’s one of many reasons I rejoice in not being a high school teacher.
Matt Bors wonders what people really mean when they say “teach the controversy.”
Zippy the Pinhead wishes he could to travel back in time to the year 1885. He changes his mind when a disembodied head with a neatly waxed mustache announces that in that year, “schoolchildren were routinely flogged, pigs ran loose in th’ streets, and heroin was sold over the counter as ‘cough medicine.’” In related news, I now wish I could travel back in time to 1885.
Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown calls on the state of Virginia to “Let Confederate History Month be the festival of self-loathing it should be.” I hold no brief for the Confederate States of America or for Virginia’s official commemoration of it, but I’m decidedly against all festivals of self-loathing. For one thing, self-loathing usually seems to be a form of narcissism. That same cartoon shows how that is. Dangle depicts a bunch of yahoos waving Confederate flags and exclaiming “We used to own human slaves.” Well, they didn’t, did they. Perhaps their great-great-great-grandparents owned human slaves, but a great-great-great-grandparent is after all a very distant relative. Beating yourself up over the misdeeds of someone so remote is merely a way of keeping attention focused on oneself rather than others. If your ancestors created a system that continues to privilege you and to do injustice to groups of which you are not a member, staging a festival of self-loathing may be the very worst thing you can do. Your privilege puts you in the spotlight, your self-loathing just keeps you there.
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