In which a political cartoon is interpreted

Steve Breen (?) cartoon, unknown date:

What is satirist Breen trying to tell us here? For one thing, he's wrong. Liberal arts students do not think of menial laborers as "losers". We think they perform the very important job of keeping the world turning and saving us from having to get a honest job.

Although Mr Artist here is not wrong. A career in welding is probably going to make Mr Smith die young, with a dulled mind and a wrecked body, in pain and darkness and despair over a life squandered. All in service of his corporate masters, in exchange for a pitiful crumb of their table.

And the worst of it part is, he doesn't have any choice. He can't choose to pursue a higher education. He has been prepared for his work by a society that teaches him learning is for the weak; that won't let him study at a level where he may justify getting in debt or qualify for a scholarship. He can't afford to have what he wants, and so he's an easy target for the allure of a quick, large and steady paycheck.

And then he'll start a family and have literally no way out. Every single full time worker I've known in my life has worked to support their family, not because they enjoyed their work or thought it was meaningful. Just because they had to.

In the game of life, yes, Smith is a loser. Don't mock him, but have some pity. Don't blame him, but blame the ones who turned his life into a game.

Your humble critic's yearly income: ~$16 000 in disability benefits and rent supplementals.

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 16

Pluggers, 20150811:

Today, "Plugger" means "Someone who jealously guards their cookie recipe to the point where they literally cannot imagine anything worse than seeing it published on the local gossip magazine's website where other people may get to enjoy it".

Note, by the way, how in this nightmare Mr Chicken (or is ir Mr Dog? How do fable creature marriages work?) displays an appropriate amount of slack-jawed, newspaper-dropping shock at this horrendous turn of events. In this worst of all possible worlds, hubby is there for her. He doesn't really matter; his reaction is irrelevant, as are his comforts. Deep down, all Mrs Chicken loves is that no one else can have her peach muffins. All she cares about.

Anyway, I was going to make a joke about how no hacker in the world could be paid to leak Ma Chicken's secret recipe, or about how utterly unbelievable it is that she'd store such information on an electronic device, but then I thought over what kind of characters and authors we're talking about here and realized when this chicken woman says "We've been hacked" what she means is that Mrs Rabbit looted her recipe box when they were over for supper last time and the local gossip magazine's website is having a field day with it.

I'm your humble critic, and I believe truth should be told.

The Meaning of Pluggers, part this is my life now

Pluggers, 20150810:

Today, "Plugger" means "Male-identifying Western-themed TV show enthusiast without Internet connection".

Did you know movies and TV shows used to be made primarily for middle aged white men? Because they were the buying powers and the decision makers of the house. It was a marketing study that changed everything by showing that middle aged television owners aren't actually susceptible to marketing because they generally know what they like. (See previous installments re. crusty minds incapable of change.)

And that's how we got the now-classic "13-35" key demographic. Why make shows for people who don't care about advertising?

So we don't see a lot of new Westerns these days. (Team Coen's True Grit was a masterpiece, but, you know, remake). And reruns is all you get if you don't know how to work the Inter Netflix on the pirate machine. Kind of weird when a grown man and old film enthusiast is taken completely by surprise that an actor he idolizes did a movie sixty years ago but imagine his joy.

Funny story, you know in Blazing Saddles when Bart invokes Randolph Scott's name to stir the hearts of the townsfolk? Here in Sweden, the subtitlers translated "Randolph Scott" as "John Wayne". That was incredibly confusing to me when I was six and didn't speak a word of English.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Negative

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 14

Pluggers, 20150809:

Today, "Plugger" means "One who still uses travelers cheques on vacation".

Sometimes the strip does my job for me.

Okay, clearly they're trying to make a metaphor about people who're set in their ways, who've stopped paying attention to the changing world around them, stopped taking on board new ideas like internationally connected debit cards and ATMs and frauds that have made travelers cheques increasingly obsolete for the last twenty-five damn years, and refuse to accept that it's all but impossible to actually do things the way they used to even if it did used to be at all practical back then; who have let themselves be left behind and grown old and ossified, not in body, but in mind; who have become afraid of change.

I have seen twelve year olds like that, though. They're not a joke. They're frightening and sad. They're holding my country's parliament hostage at the moment, working to undo all progress of the last eighty years and help Europe back to the "good" old days when women were properly grateful to be allowed to vote and foreigners knew their place and nobody would get on your case for stringing up a few queers in the woods.

That is where legitimizing the fear of change and turning it into political ideology gets us.

So I'm sticking with the strip's story.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Noooooooo

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 13

Pluggers, 20150808:

Today, "Plugger" means "Teacher".

Really. That's all it's saying. If you are someone who, in your life, has learned things and, at some point, teach these things to others and they learn from you, you're a plugger.

That's the kinder interpretation, anyway. I read "Work hard and keep your nose clean" as a symbolic advice, a representation of generic basic learning, a summation of the fundamental things that people should learn along with the precepts of language. If we take it literally, it's the kind of toothless, content-free advice you'd expect from a discount fortune cookie or a robot programmed with conversational phrases but no actual understanding of human communication and they're making a joke at the expense of old people and their too often dissolving minds.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Positive

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 12

Pluggers, 20150807

Today, "Plugger" means "Old person", as it almost usually does.

But the nuances to this specific oldness are many. A plugger needs to have driven a four on the floor (never heard that expression before) as their primary (only?) mode of transportation, and needs to have moved directly from driving their ancient car to being unable to move without a four-legged walker for support. Those two vehicles specifically, and not in the sense of "vehicles", but "modes of transportation", as in "what are these lumpy things attached to my butt for?"

Your humble critic's mode of transportation: Apostle's horses

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 11

Pluggers, 20150806:

Today, "Plugger" means "Scam artist in 1987".

I think that time Ernie had a storyline about Sid "The Human Piranha" Fernwelter making up a long series of fake names in order to get out of paying his utility bills actually happened in 1987. There was a time when a dishonest person might successfully fool debt collectors by smooth talking, but that was before credit card companies started doing a better job at preying on people than any human beings could.

I know, given our lives are run by corporations built up to effectively be psychopaths using people any way they can to benefit their shareholders, I shouldn't be upset with little people and their little lies, but it bugs me that there are people who cannot grasp that debts they owe is money they have spent. Yes, you spent it before you had it, and you may not even remember anything about the poker game where you spent it, but you still owe that money to be paid. Debt doesn't go away before you pay it. That's not how money works.

My cousin's check for $1600 that he owes me has been in the mail for over twelve years now.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Zero credit, zero debt

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 10

Pluggers, 20150805:

Today, the para-stable matrix of the hyperword "Plugger" returns to meaning "Old".

Maybe not as old as Keith Roberts thinks, though. We had party lines when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I called them with our rotary, bakelite phone. I'd have guessed they died out with the advent of fiberoptics, but it turns out they still exist. Just not in your big city-centric reality. What, you thought the subway map marked the edge of the civilized world? Turns out there are still people living out there, and I'm not even talking about suburbs. I'm talking about isolated communities deep in the wilderness where you'd have to vespa for days to get a wireless connection.

Or, wait, maybe I'm reading this wrong and it's not about the cultural isolation of the incestuous Pluggers author/readership where they come to think something as blatantly unthoughtful as "Where did those party lines we used to have before we moved to the city go?" is a universally shared thing that everyone of their generation is thinking. Maybe it's about being so old you start believing your party's lines and actually value their rhetoric over their demonstrated interests, competence or integrity; that quoting a good-sounding soundbite is better than doing useful things like let's say keeping people from starving to death in the street.

I've seen that level of oldness. It's not pretty. But it's perfectly in line with what we expect from Pluggers.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Probably negative, sadly.

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 9

Pluggers, 20150804:

Today, "Plugger" means "Person whose main contact with popular culture is through the newspaper crossword puzzle".

I despise The Big Bang Theory and its conceit of laughing at people for being nerds, but I've also never finished a crossword puzzle in my life, so I'm feeling left out by everyone here. I, however, have made peace with fact that the world doesn't revolve around me, and I don't beleaguer it for failing to make an effort to keep me in the loop. I accept that me not being able to name any of the actors playing in The Big Bang Theory is due to my own lack of interest, not because the world has gone mad.

The world was never made for me in the first place, so maybe it comes easier for me than for people who used to be normal and now find out they've turned old. I don't know.

But I do know if you want to do anything, working to make the world into a place for you is going to be a more constructive endeavor than passive-aggressively joking about how a TV show that's named after an astronomical concept has "stars" in it.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Negative

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 8

Pluggers, 20150803:

Today, "Plugger" means wait we had basically this joke just two days ago. Fine, "Plugger" means "One who justifies their bad decisions by transparently twisting known facts into law which they can obey to the letter while still indulging in their ultimately self-destructive appetites".

How do you like that, Brookins?

How does it taste?

Sweet, like a hot slice of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream, perhaps?

Your humble critic's plugger status: Positive

=I

Gee I hope I don't remember what I learned from the future so I can stop it from happening because it's just too painful

Funky Winkerbean, 20150802:

Some backstory: Funky Winkerbean is, to me, chiefly a comic about Mr Les Moore and his love affair with his loss of his wife Lisa, and what an amazing person he and everyone around him thinks he is because of how deep and profound that love is, and what an amazing writer he is because of the uncompromising, personal vision supposedly shown in his book about his dead wife. So in this storyline, where the cast of the comic has a reunion with their younger selves from when the comic was funnier, the plot is chiefly about Old Les (with a goatee and blue hair to the right) dominating the "In memoriam" table with his stuff about Lisa, Young Les (with black hair in the middle) having super intense manfeelings when he finds out Lisa is going to die, and Lisa herself (the very plain girl talking to Young Les) being ignored completely.

And so we see the man's caliber, in the end. He has the choice to potentially rewrite history, saving a woman from a horrible, pointless death in cancer - someone he knows and supposedly loves with all his heart, no less - and he does nothing. Twice! His younger and older selves could both try something.

We have always thought the older Les was far too deeply in love with his own martyrdom to care to do anything to get over Lisa, but I didn't think he'd literally let a person die in order to get to feel sorry for himself.

And what's the younger one's excuse? He's too overcome with terror and wants to deny what's going to happen? What he knows is going to happen, because he's literally in the future? He doesn't like it, but he's not even going to try to do anything about it? It's not like everything else worked out so well for everyone  he can't risk upsetting anything; in fact the whole cast should be working together to take notes on how to make the exact opposite of this heavy-lidded, anhedonic, misanthropic, lethargic future devoid of hope happen, if the narrative had half as much interest in all the rest of them put together as it does in Les.

In conclusion, I hope Les gets cancer and dies alone and unmourned. Soon.

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 7

Pluggers, 20150802:

Today, "Plugger" means "Construction worker".

Very straightforward. Almost old school.

Did you know construction workers have a higher incidence of suicide than any other distinguishable profession? I read it maybe a decade ago in some glossy magazine. It's because tradition dictates they get up at 5 in the morning and start working, to show that they are Real Men and tougher than common folk. Like a reasonable person could figure out using only their ass, this is Not True and only serves to make them more miserable than common folk. It turns out forcing yourself to wake up before dawn five days of the week for indefinite periods is really bad for you in the long term!

That coffee and donuts breakfast on the road probably isn't doing Mr Bear any favors either.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Negative like a HIV test

The Meaning of Pluggers, part 6

Pluggers, 20150801:

Today, "Plugger" means "One who eats fruit and vegetables".

If I wanted to be mean, I could take the view that pluggers are people who think old wives' tales are a working substitute for affordable health care, i.e. Americans. But that'd be contrary to the principle of letting as many people as humanly possible feel like Pluggers is talking about them, so it seems the less likely interpretation.

Your humble critic's plugger status: Positive