Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 26, 2011

I know that guy!

This wisdom of crowds? You’re doomed.

The wisdom of the mob?

Maybe Citizen X struck a nerve in Mark. Mark then feels exposed as someone on a ego trip. It’s all about Mark! So for the moment he abandons his senses, snatches the paper bag disguise and dons it so he can feel protected and safe — but at Citizen X’s expense. In other words, he’s contracted Citizen X’s infection. But of course CX now feels exposed and betrayed (by Mark) and wants his disguise back. The “new paradigm for change” issue is now lost in the confusion between Mark and CX. On second thought . . . . Do I know what I’m talking about? Is my “theory” anything more than a flatulence in a hurricane?  You decide. (In order to feel safe, I now need to reach into panel 4, snatch the bag off of Mark’s head, and put it on my own head.) Decide, dear reader, decide! Decide, gosh darn it all to heck, decide! Am I right? Or am I as batty as that — drum roll here — that green plutocratic parrot thing that burst into last strip’s commentary thread at the end? Sigh!

You don’t have to worry about the media seeing you. They don’t care about you until you do something freaky.

We are doing a RADIO interview. Forget the bag!

Did Mark make himself invisible to express GBT’s sense that OWS is oblivious to the babyboomer generation of individuals? Can the OWS generation tell the difference between Mark and B.D., say, or Zonker?

And nobody, so far, got the joke….

Mob: A sort of beast with too many heads and not enough brains.

I remembered Megaphone Mark, but I thought the wisdom of the crowd here was doing all right without him.

I also remember Mark on campus radio during Watergate. “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” This conversation with Citizen X can only aggravate Mark’s mid-life crisis.

God bless the kids, they’re doing it right. The megaphone mouthy ones screwed up a lot of good social impulses…they can’t hang us all, or if they do…we still have shown they can’t cow and dominate and use us as tools.

United we stand is far far better than letting some egotist stand on our shoulders.GOTP delenda est…

All too often, the widsom of crowds is to yield to clowns on ego trips.

I am not a French historian, but during their revolution, didn’t the mob behave rather unruly, like massacuring large numbers of people?

Thomas Jefferson was in favor of the Electoral College because he believed, “The masses are asses.” So much for the wisdom of the crowds.

If we’re quoting the great elitists, let’s add George Bernard Shaw, who once said that the great thing about democracy is that it gives the people the government they deserve..Personally, my only reaction to this strip is this: I wouldn’t wear a paper bag on my head that someone else had worn on his head without first spraying it with Lysol…but that’s just me.

@paulproteus48640 – I’m a huge believer in democracy, but even democracy has leaders. There’s a big difference between democracy and a mob. As much as I’m sympathetic to OWS, Trudeau is delivering some well deserved lampooning of their particular foibles.

When these kids get what they want they will have no idea what to do with it.

To tell the OWS generation that they’re on an ego trip is to say that they’re really just like us.While we and Mark criticize them from a distance, some of our generation have joined them. The grey=headed interviewees I’ve seen on the news show none of Mark’s (or GBT’s) wariness of their younger compatriots.

Indeed. Maybe we should give them all chocolate chip cookies.

With out public high schools graduating kids who learned practically nothing in four years, small wonder we’re becoming a nation of people who neither know nor respect the facts. Examples: • Half of us believe in literal creationism and reject evolution as an attack on our “faith”. • A huge number of us reject evidence-based health / medicine and accept traditional herbalism, folk medicine from the 19th century, and placebo-based acupuncture, chiropractic, etc. • Most of our population largely rejects the solid scientific evidence for global warming (thus sealing the doom of large oceanside communities which will be flooded). • Too many of us are gaga over over the secret rapture and other “the sky will fall in 1012”-type scenarios. • We’re basically anti-science now (letting Europe and China exceed us in shutting the Super-Conducting Super-Colider, the Shuttle, Fermilab and letting Europe beat us with the Large Hadron Collider, depending on Russian launch systems to reach Low Earth Orbit, etc., etc., etc.  There’s more. There’s more. But this is nuff 4 now. 

 Bottom line: We’re sliding backward toward pre-Enlightenment, pre-Copernican, pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation feudalistic, “fall off the edge of the earth”, Middle-Ages type of mind set. 

“Older persons nearly all praise bygone times and denounce the present, railing against its doings and at everything that they, in their youth, did not do; affirming that every good custom and good way of life, every virtue—-in short, all things—-are continually going from bad to worse.”Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (ca. 1529)

In the 70s GT lampooned the ego driven protests. He mocked both a college professor who had developed a cult like following at Walden and he was merciless with John Kerry.

Algurka’s attempt at quote from Jefferson is so far off-base, in terms of TJ’s philosophy, I am sure it’s a fake. Footnote please?

Re: today’s strip, a seventh-grade level comment:

Guy in strip, WE Stopped A War! What have You done? Na-na-na-na-na-nah!

I’m glad you are out there, doing something. Americans Must do something. We do need to HIT the STREETS !!!

But not having any leadership makes you look silly. You look silly all over the WORLD with no clear message. Plus, you won’t accomplish anything but a media-attracting hobo encampment.

Have 2 consuls, a triumvirite (that’s 3 leaders, consensus, a gang of five, whatever. But GET SOME GOALS !!!

Remember the CORPORATIONS TOO !!!My suggestion is to go to WASHINGTON DC, on the Republican side of the Capitol building, and FILL UP THE MALL !!!! I’ll come. I bet you a lot of people will come. BUT- this but is huge- First make sure you have a shot at Occupying the Mall (or somewhere near Congress). Make sure the National Guard won’t move you out. As in, PLAN. Scope it out. Do your homework. You can even stay at Wall Street. However, SOMEONE must organize ODC!!

Individuals make decisions. Committees and herds make waste. The light bulb did not come out of a committee. Neither did the first automobile.

“A new poll shows that the Occupy Wall Street movment has a favorability rating double that of the Tea Party. ¶ The Time Magazine survey shows Occupy Wall Street is viewed favorably by 53% of Americans while the Tea Party gets a 27% approval rating.” Source: http://utahpulse.com/bookmark/16168333-Americans-Like-Occupy-Wall-Street-More-than-the-Tea-Party  Okay, okay, out there. I’m feeling better now. But doesn’t anybody wanna comment about this issue?

The Left has always been vulnerable to charges of lack of focus, lack of consensus, lack of (for lack of a better word) leadership. As Will Rogers put it, “I don’t belong to an organized party; I’m a Democrat.” For now, the “leaderless” aspect of the Occupants may be a good thing, since in the long run I suspect they’re more likely to dissolve into factions than to unite behind a single battle plan.

But if you get enough people shouting “I’m as MAD AS HELL, and I’m not goint to take this ANYMORE!”, it is a powerful agent for change, even if there’s no consensus about what, exactly, is to be done. That’s the power of the mob.

It is the nature of sheep to be led (or driven). The question is, are they better off being led by a handful of independent-minded goats, or driven by a single shepherd (and his dogs)? I’d say go with the goats, since their interests are in line with those of the sheep: good pastures, avoidance of wolves, “quality of life” issues. What are the interests of the shepherd? The shearing shed and the slaughterhouse.

Back atchya, DT.

I don’t have a real opinion about what OWS should be, but I have “hope” that it will result in “change”, even if it’s about two-and-a-half years behind schedule.

@dt pi; in answer to your question: no, you don’t know what you’re talking about. (i can’t understand what you’re saying, therefore it must be meaningless.)

@tcity; yum!! I would bake some now, but my oven isn’t working…

@palindrome; actually, I think that things are a lot better in many ways than when I was young.

Maybe the OWS movement needs to get organized like the Tea Party did. Get a few billionaire sponsors, and have Fox News provide logistics, transport and coverage . . .

I’m not in disagreement, but I think it’s easier said than done. “How things really are” is “really complicated.” I don’t think you’ll have any more luck getting people to agree what the problem is than you would getting them to agree on a proposed solution.

I was an idealist once. And when reality swatted my idealism across the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, I got cynical. But then I decided that cynicism is not productive, so I returned to my ideals, but seasoned with the understanding that things will never be perfect but we can make them better than they are. I mistrust Grand Theories and Sweeping Plans, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I don’t mind incremental change, so long as the ultimate goal is kept in sight (or at least in mind). The option of periodic course-correction must be kept open.

(Sorry, kinda got off-course myself.)

Thanx 4 UR input. I’ve been a science / health / medical writer / for many years now. I edited a hospital-distributed tabloid called HEALTH SCENE for a number of years, taking its circulation from 5.5 million households to 8.0 million.  From all of the health / medical conventions I’ve attended and from interviewing innumeral top medical researchers across the nation, I KNOW what these people think: unless the health / medical messages from RESEARCH to PRACTICE are evidence-based, i.e., grounded in scientific research, it is UNRELIABLE. Politics, however, has a corrosive / corrupting influence (via Contress acting upon the NIH, e.g.). But I can tell you this: almost to a person [and I’m talking about hundreds of PIs (principal investigators) here], they DO NOT BELIEVE there is anything to acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal medicine, folk medicine (no matter how many thousands of years duration), faith healing, etc., beyond placebo effect, unless backed by scientific studies. The most determinative (reliable) studies are longitudinal (decades duration) involving thousands of people, with double-blinded controls, etc., etc. The physics / chemistry community has the same problem. BY AND LARGE THE PUBLIC HAS NO IDEA OF THE BATTLE RAGING BETWEEN SCIENCE AND NON-SCIENCE. AND SCIENCE IS LOSING.

Sorry ’bout that.

Uh oh, that parrot thingie is back. I’m outta here. Later. Bye.

“The masses are asses.”  —Variously attributed to one / all of the following: François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Karl Rove, Alexander Hamilton, H.L. Menken, Pedro Pietri, Charles G. Halpine

I have been to the White Horse Tavern several times. Never saw a parrot.

One moment, please:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…