Ted Rall for December 07, 2009

There is like a forest of references here.

America, the most war-like country in modern (since WWll) history is feminized? That’s a stunningly stupid comment-as usual. We still have troops in Germany and Japan, nimrod. What’s your point? That we really are an imperialistic country?

Scottfreitas: I won’t lol @ you. your to be pitied. sounds like you have had a less than idealic life…sorry you feel castrated. with help maybe you would someday be able to date and feel comfortable around women

Mick Jones, not Joe Strummer. Get your Clash straight.

“forced entry to the military”? Did some chick scooter knew re-institute the draft and we haven’t noticed?

DoctorJeff, thank you. You made me lol heartily. Likewise for Thinginthebasement.

Good to see Scott back although I think he is confused enough to confuse his indentity with Bugs Bunny. I think what is really funny is that he mentioned all the things rikoshayrabbit made fun of him for the other day…

That was a very interesting reply on Mr. Rall’s last comic, rikoshayrabbit. (pointedly understated) I wonder then what opinion you have of FDR overall?

Excellent comic, Mr. Rall. There’s a lot there, so even though I don’t get it all, I still got a great series of laughs!

scott should get out of his never-ending latency. He hate s women, his boss is a woman, everybody hate their boss.

Frito’s back!

The joke works better with Joe Strummer, because that name automatically invokes CLASH.

Long long ago, the name Mick Jones used to invoke confusion over whether you meant the guy in Foreigner. Don’t know about these days.

rikoshayrabbit, I wonder what Robert Kiyosaki would have to save about that…I’d hesitate to think he would be unaware. I don’t know how many of you know who Mr. Kiyosaki is, but he has tirelessly studied money and its relationship to government. He focuses on the times taxes were made permanent and when we went off the gold standard. The masses certainly don’t realize the extent or lack of precedence or impact of such changes. It surely won’t be anytime soon such issues are made right.

Aren’t these comments supposed to be about the cartoon and not Scott? Stick to the subject at hand. We are not here to dis the people who comment, just say what you think about the cartoon.

^Hmmm… I guess you’re right.

I rub my hiney on Robert Kiyosaki with malice aforethought!

Are the comments not also for discussion? Do we not respond to each others’ comments? Why even post if no one can talk about your comment? I answer your post Gangsteroflove, by asking you to think before your next comment.

You guys realize that Scott in actuality is a brilliant Left wing female comedian right? Every day when she is having her morning coffee she goes onto comic message boards and drives all the Rall fans mental with Reactionary, sexist, Racist and unfounded rabblings.

Great stuff! Love that girl!

Great Cartoon too.

wow scoof - that post was revealing

“America–being a feminized country–is big on Closure. Until we get Closure, we’ll continue to Hover worriedly, scared we might say or do something wrong… Yeah. It’s confusing. I know”

13 of 25 posts are of, by or for scottfrito

I’d like to talk about “maroon” and its connection to the comic. Maroon is an antiquated word that means a runaway slave. People of a certain age (all of us, including the OP who does not need to “Get disappeared” by anyone) immediately went to Bugs Bunny, because we don’t think of how racist Looney Tunes was for a VERY long time, we just think of slap stick. Pop culture has acclimated us to hearing maroon as a synonym for idiot, IT ISN’T. War culture has acclimated us to hearing BS, like this comic points out, as well as the Ft. Hood. comic I thoroughly enjoyed for its emperor’s clothes quality.

My favorite part of this art is the “Lip(s) Sync” in the first frame. I started posting here to defend President Obama’s need to think about Afghanistan before doing something, and “getting the gorilla smell out of the curtains” hilarious line from Ahab.

But I finally agree with the pundits. Obama (btw calling the president Osama only shows that you are childish and not to be taken seriously) knew the wars were out there when he ran, and now he has a plan, it really is his war. What’s the change? Limited change? Someone (might have been David Korn of Mother Jones) jokingly said he stands to be the most successful Republican President of the last 30 years.

OFF topic, but not really

Those of you from the Party of No: Please note, GWB pushed decisions on both wars on to the next president. Not only are we forming a plan, but President Obama has made his deadline BEFORE the 2012 elections, so as one NPR commentator mentioned, he is holding his own feet to the fire.

Accountability? WTF is that? I’d like to have seen that out of Cheney or Rumsfeld.

Lots of historically All Women Institutions have already gone coed, without fanfare. William Woods University in MO went coed at least 5>

You had a 50/50 chance of being a female when you were born. Congratulations on your decision of choosing your sex.

killbill, do you have any evidence that “maroon” in the Bugs Bunny sense is anything but just a mispronunciation of “moron”?

This is running off topic in a different direction, but

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroon_(people)

i know its wiki, but I trust wikipedia in general things like definitions, not for teaching heart surgery..

Intentionality from Blanc and Co. do you mean? I don’t have a memo from Mel Blanc saying which racial slurs are allowable. But if you are familiar with Looney Tunes of the era, if such a memo existed, it would be pretty big.

Mispronunciation maybe. But there are some pretty horrible depictions of black people from “classic” Looney Tunes, and Germans, and Japanese, and Chinese…

If it was a mispronunciation and they realized what they implied (contemporarily speaking), would they be horrified and apologize?

I think I’m right :-)

killbillvs007, I entertained your assertion of the meaning of ‘maroon’ in Looney Tunes until I remembered that Bugs mispronounces everything from Albuquerque to Des Moines and beyond…Whenever he said ‘maroon’ he was calling someone stupid…so is it more likely that he meant to call the person a runaway slave or a moron?

Having been to Afghanland on CSAR duty already, you know, I have to agree with Jim McGovern’s dissent, Obama wants to spend $1.3 bil on this country, fostering jobs, while defending its corrupt govt., when we should be focusing on insurgents holed up on the border of Pakistan, and I say, if the Paki’s don’t clean up, send in the drones. And there is no way of effectively training a largely illiterate Afghan population in civil defense and restructuring AND expecting a withdrawal timetable of 2011. It looks good on paper but it’s not feasible in application. It would be nice if the Congress had further deliberation before sending in that impending 16,000, particularly since Karzai’s government is doing little to correct itself or clean up its lingering ties to the Taliban, its graft and bribery. No wonder Pres. O.’s approval rating is 47%. Clemenceau once said that war was too important to be left to the generals and common soldiery. Now it’s too important to be left to untried, untrained civy-politicians who have neither the time, training or inclination for strategic military thought.

Fill in the blank-

This would be funny if we didn’t have a plan.

.

Therefore, it’s not funny.

ER

I see your point, but IF we agree Maroon can be used as a racial deregatory, lets remove intent. assuming it was a mispronounced word, WB cartoons of that era would not be heartbroken to learn they were accidentally offending black people. IF is the key word here.

Again we are traveling further from the bigger point of comic, (but i also agree with your earlier Post, it would be mental masturbation if we didn’t respond to each other, without ad hominem attacks of course, I just don’t want to hijack the thread)

However, BB’s mispronunciations are/were phonetic, e.g. per your example, saying Dez Moinez, introducing silent letters as spoken ones… So wouldn’t a mispronunciation of moron use long/short Ohs/ahs instead of changing the ohs to different vowels?

I remember Albuquerque and [Rancho] Cucamonga for that matter, being pronounced correctly, just that they were fun names to say… Kalamazoo for good measure

I think we are putting too much time into this :-)

Sensitivity to Maroon -

I live close enough to The U of Illinois, to hear 10 justifications a day for their racist symbol Chief Illiniwek (part of heritage, honors Indians, all thinly disguised racism) that I started wondering about more team mascots, beyond the Braves and Apaches and wondered what a Maroon was (Champaign Central, A College in Chicagoland also uses The Maroons) since the origin clearly wasn’t the color although A LOT of places that have changed to an amorphous maroonish person/thing.

So call me oversensitized (sp) but common usage of terms and structuration theory matters to me.

This is so long I feel like I should make reference to EBT cards… (ad hominem cheap shot)

Cartoonists everywhere are re-thinking the “extended comments” concept…

Wow. And here I thought “maroon” was just a dark red color or something pirates did to uncooperative crew members, and that scottfreitas was just a moron who couldn’t spell.

churchillwasright & kanjizai pretty funny stuff.

Scott is right! I need my periodic dosage of truth from Mr. Rall! I’ve become dependent!

The use of “maroon” as a noun meaning “fugitive slave of the West Indies” (or a descendant thereof) is derived from the Spanish cimarrón (“wild”) and dates from the late 1600’s. Its use as a verb meaning “to strand on an island” or a noun meaning “a stranded person” is adapted from that (early 1700’s), but has eclipsed the earlier usage almost entirely.

The use of “maroon” as a noun meaning “dark red” dates from the late 1700’s, but is etymologically unrelated to the other term, deriving from the Spanish marron (“chestnut”).

Bugs Bunny’s taunting of the bull in “Bully for Bugs” (1952) with “What a maroon! What an imbecile! What a nin-cow-poop!” is surely meant to be merely a humorous malapropism (the intended word clearly being “moron”). Taking offense to “maroon” as a racial slur when there is no justification for doing so in the context of the cartoon is as ridiculous as taking offense to the word “niggardly” as a description of, say, Ebenezer Scrooge.

killbillvs007- I think the Bowery Boys movies of the 1940’s and 1950’s strongly influenced the comical mispronunciations common in early Bugs Bunny cartoons. I really don’t think racism was behind the “maroon” dropping.