Rental Rocks
The above cartoon created more “I don’t get it” comments than I had anticipated, but I get it. One thing that cartoonists sometimes attempt to do is to lead the viewer to perceive something differently than usual. The bait-and-switch that happens in your head as you go one direction, then realize the answer is in the other direction, is what makes you chuckle. I’ve gotten better at designing cartoons that do this over the years but I’ve learned from experience that it’s impossible to lead everyone down the same path. There’s always a certain number of people who will see something differently than most.
When some people look at the cartoon above, they see a caveman village, then read the punch line and wonder, “What ‘ones inside’? Elks inside? Wheels? Cave people?” They can’t find a joke down that path so they don’t get it.
Another person, however, might notice that the adverts on the cliff faces are similar to cave paintings—which today are only inside of caves—and make the leap that the cartoon is proposing that cave paintings might actually have been advertisements. Or even part of a menu inside Og’s Elk Steaks.
As 21st century humans, this seems plausible because in modern times, everything has been about money. Make a point one day of noting how many times you mention it, hear it mentioned, see a reference to it on TV or the Internet, or make a decision based on it. You don’t even have to actually do that to immediately understand it is all day every day. It runs our lives.
If you’ve got a full-time job, most of your time and effort during each week is dedicated to earning it. The quality of your life, your safety, your children’s chances of getting a good education are all based on how much of it you have. For the average person, unless you fight hard against it, most of your life is about money. Yes, you love your family and maybe you even love Jesus, but you spend more time and effort at your job than you do with your kids or doing anything Jesus would. After your kids are gone and you’ve worked your ass off to send them through college, you continue to spend most of your week working. By the end of our lives, most of us spend a third of it at work. One can only hope most of us truly love our work but the sad truth is most humans don’t.
I have been very fortunate in that I enjoy my work. The very thought that billions of people are spending the vast majority of their days doing activities they dislike is heartbreaking to me. It is tempting to shrug it off, proclaiming “that’s just the way it is,” but in reality, it’s only the way it is in this system of money that we created. It didn’t have to be this way, we did this to ourselves.
Money is an agreed fiction that we all buy into because it’s currently the only game in town, but theoretically, our system for attaining goods and services can be any way we want. Money only started to be a thing after the agricultural revolution—the part of history we call “civilization”—and in terms of human residency on this planet, that’s a very short amount of time—approximately 10K years. But for hundreds of thousands of years before that, pretty much everything was about sharing equally and making sure nobody gets left behind.
So how did we get here? In simple terms, agriculture created property, and property created selfishness.
How do we get back to a shared system where no one gets left behind? I don’t know for sure. For one thing, we can stop believing billionaires when they tell us that capitalism (gimme, gimme, gimme! mine! mine! mine!) is of God, and socialism (sharing, like they teach you in kindergarten) is of the Devil. I think a growing number of us are smarter than to keep falling for that.
And I’m not touting socialism as an antibiotic for all of the U.S.’s ills. Not even. What we really need is something new that starts with a different relationship to each other and the planet. It may sound preposterous but it is already happening; climate change is giving us no choice but to start thinking of ways to live that do not entail winner-takes-all mounds of property and cash at the expense of the rest of us and the planet.
So what I’m advocating is that we stop resigning ourselves to the way things are, thinking all of this is inevitable, and instead imagine a better world with more compassion and justice. We dreamed up this mess of a world we’re in now, we can dream up a better one for after this house of cards collapses.
And what better way to begin than by assaulting Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week with our seeballs?…
The word for “delicious” in Spanish is “delicioso.” The word for bear is “oso.” So in some places, Gummy Bears are called “Deliciosos.” To the best of my knowledge, this is true.
I fear that even after the pandemic is totally over, many people will not return to their previous level of personal hygiene.
Don’t forget to drop by Wayno’s weekly cartoon blog to find out what behind-the-studio-door secrets he’s sharing this week.
The musicians in this cartoon are based on ones Wayno knows personally and the sax player is a particularly interesting story. Wayno talks about this stuff on his blog this week. (Link in the previous paragraph.)
Wayno loves him a good clown joke, especially one that refers to the impossible number of clowns that can fit into a single VW Beetle. In this case, spleens become clowns and clowns become Beetles.
I get the feeling this guy’s happiness results don’t vary all that much. But that’s probably because of all that stuff I said in the Opening Heartfelt Philosophical Message part! (See top of page)
And, speaking of money, we’re donating half of our profits from the Bizarro Shop to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (The other half is helping to keep my daughters afloat during the current virological weirdness.)
And, speaking of my shop, we’re not manufacturing the enamel pins anymore and are almost out of our current supply. I guess they’re collector’s items now. Accordingly, we put our last few in a group sale. Only a few units (groups of five) left, then they’re gone for good. Thanks to all those who bought them!
Well, Jazz Pickles, that’s last call at the ‘Toon Tavern. Thanks for getting drunk with us. If any of you who can still lift your head off the table enjoy what we do and that we do it without ads or paywalls, please consider saying thanks with a visit to one of our links below. Every little bit helps to keep plugging the leaky roof at Rancho Bizarro!
Until next week, be smart, be grateful, laugh about something, make something, don’t freak out.
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