Water or Stone?
Some of you regular readers may recognize this cartoon from years past. I decided to publish it again because my readership is larger and more widespread now than it was then and I think this cartoon deserves a wider audience.
Bizarro is seen more often on the Internet now but it first became known as a newspaper comic and in that world, there are two kinds of cartoons: ones meant to be funny and ones meant to be opinionated. The ones on the “funny pages” were supposed to be funny and the ones on the editorial page were supposed to be opinions. Most funny pages features don’t crossover to serious matters much and when they do, it’s usually for some sentimental reason like to show some recently-dead famous person in heaven being missed by those of us still stuck here on Earth. Bizarro has crossed over to the more serious side many times over the decades but I’ve had to do it carefully because getting too overtly political is a good way to get dropped from a market because Bizarro is not sold as a political comic.
I’ll be honest, in my early days I wanted to be a political cartoonist but chose not to and I’m glad. I didn’t go in that direction for a few reasons. Before the Internet, to find an audience as a cartoonist you had to be published in books, magazines, or newspapers. To get a political cartoon published in newspapers, you pretty much had to be hired by a newspaper to be their official political cartoonist. There weren’t many of those jobs available, as you can easily imagine. The funny pages offered more slots and more chances to be published so it seemed wiser.
But the biggest reason I avoided editorial cartooning was that to be an effective political cartoonist, you have to read all the news every day, which is like immersing yourself daily in sewage so you can intelligently comment on the flavor and odor of it.
I found that to be impossible. If I read that much news each day, I’d be nothing but angry and depressed. To be honest, I think this happens to most political cartoonists and it shows in their work more often than it probably should. It’s so much easier to be preachy than to be thought-provoking and it’s a slippery slope between the two.
From my current vantage point—closer to the end of my career than the beginning—I’m certain I made the right choice. I now see that my talents lie more in lampooning the human experience in general than the political climate in specific. So here I am.
The cartoon above spotlights a common unjust superstition from the European Dark Ages. People actually believed that it mattered which hand you used most of the time and that being left-handed was a sign of evil. In fact, the word “sinister” comes from the Latin word for the left side. But now that we’ve stepped out of the dark and into the light, we see how ridiculous this was. Or do we?
It is no secret that the thought processes of many people today are just as dim as those who lived in the Dark Ages. Almost everyone has given up the ludicrous belief that using one’s left hand dominantly is a sign of evil because, obviously, what you write is far more important than which hand you write it with. But many people are still fumbling around in the dark so much that they do not see that the same thing applies to sexual orientation; loving people is the important thing, not what kind of people you love.
We humans are so frightened and insecure that we tend to want to control everything to the nth degree. Nature is curved, wiggly, and a bit messy—almost none of it is straight (and under a microscope, nothing is straight!)—yet we have built and live in a world of straight lines, right angles, and grids. This is all part of our attempt to control nature rather than experience it. And I think this tendency is at the root of our fear of anything different; if it is outside of our usual, approved experience—our grid— it becomes unpredictable and therefore threatening. People who don’t follow traditional behavior make us nervous so we want to get rid of them.
This reminds me of a very old adage about getting a thorn in your foot while walking barefoot—you can either pave the whole world or wear shoes. This can easily be translated into something like this: Instead of insisting that everyone be just like you, learn to accept people as they are and get over yourself.
I’ve come to believe that wisdom lies in living with and inside nature, accepting it as it is; flowing with it like water and bending with it like bamboo instead of hitting it with rocks and resisting it with concrete.
In the ancient philosophies of Taoism, there is the concept that over time, it is water that shapes rock.
“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” ––Lao Tzu
If you enjoy this kind of thought and have not read the Tao Te Ching, I highly recommend it. You can read the whole thing in a half-hour or meditate on every line of it for the rest of your life.
People often ask me how I get so many ideas for cartoons. This is how. Creativity is based on accepting and opening, not resisting and closing. So is happiness, I think.
I’m now feeling open to whatever Wayno did this week with the other six Bizarro cartoons. Let’s find out together!…
He looks soft and harmless but don’t take him to NYC.
Just be careful not to walk into a wall.
“Cyclops” has an interesting etymology. “Cy” is from the Mesopotamian word for “bully” and “clops” is from the Incan word for “my lack of depth perception makes me irritable.”
Was Harper Lee obsessed with birds? In addition to the title, three main characters share the last name of Finch, the guy on trial is Tom Robinson, and the actor who played Atticus in the movie was Gregory Peck. I’ll bet if you dig into it, there are dozens more bird references related to this book/film. (Somebody do that and let me know what you find out.)
Unfortunately, there are always tots of reasons for not wanting to bring a potato into this world.
Wayno has some interesting things to say about this nameless phenomenon in his weekly cartoon blog post. And also an awesome pipe pic, as usual.
Hey, we’re finished here, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for pointing your faces at us once again. If you like what we do and that we do it without ads and clickbait, help us keep it that way by having a look at some of the links below. Wayno’s got a tip jar, too, and God knows I’m not paying him enough to do as awesome a job as he does around here!
Until next time, remove your hat and glasses but keep your dentures in your mouth.
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September 19, 2021