Letters to the Editor
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Possible to be Tolerant
It is possible for Muslin societies to be tolerant and accepting of a wide range of women's wearing apparel, and Turkey is a good example. I visited Istanbul and a number of cities and towns in western Turkey last year, and was amazed and then really pleased to see women in all manner of public places in the full gamut of dress: from complete burqua to flowing hair, jeans, tank tops and bare midriffs. Sometimes a mother and daughter arm-in-arm: mother in burqua-daughter in cutoff jeans and tank top. Sometimes girls in short skirts and bare midriff also wore head-scarves. And the cutest anomaly was a girl with her mother in a mosque, both in head scarves, kneeling over in prayer with the teen-aged girl pulling up her jeans in the back so her thong wouldn't show.
I know there's current concern in among Turkish secularists that the new president, Gul, with his headscarf-wearing wife will be leading them back down the slippery slope, but it seems to me that the women of Turkey value their freedom of choice - and the people of Turkey have demonstrated that they understand and respect separation of church and state, and agree that one size doesn't fit all.
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I was a devoted fan...
...of Berke Breathed back in the 80s. Bloom County was a lot funnier and had a lot more to say to me than, say, Doonesbury. It was the best comic strip of all time.
It's really sad that Breathed now feels embarrassed by his earlier work and now feels that he needs to give us better artwork and a stronger "message" at the expense of (delightful) humor. I agree with him when he says that people should expect more from their morning cartoon strips than they get from Peanuts (reruns from a man who died years ago) and Garfield (the work of staff at a large marketing firm). On the other hand, people want something light, funny, and predictable in their morning comics. That's why they keep coming back to the same repetitive fare over and over. I don't know whether Breathed consciously decided to abandon his audience when he tried to redefine morning comics or whether he wanted to make a complete jump to the editorial page. But I feel like he turned his back on the qualities that made me become a fan of his in the first place.
We still have Opus, but now he is mostly just a familiar presence and less of a conduit through which we can look at the world in a cleverly twisted light. Opus (the character) was more fun and more funny back in Bloom County when he had trouble understanding the world around him and when he tried (mostly in vain) to do all the things in life that he thought people were expected to do. His struggle to follow his heart was epic, and it literally took him around the world. Now he inhabits a cartoon strip in what appears to be a barren life. Better satire? I don't think so. Better stories? Definitely not.
At least I got some closure when I saw the calendar illustration in which Opus finally found out what happened to his mother ("She Loved Her Boy"). It moves me to this day. After that, I can say that I'm a Berke Breathed fan forever. Unfortunately, I don't get the same enjoyment from Opus that I got from Bloom County.
Ah well, I'll keep coming back if Breathed keeps trying. I'm glad that he stays true to himself, and maybe someday, something will "click" for me again.
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Aha! It's not Muslims the Washington Post is afraid to offend.
Last week I thought the Post was being overly cautious with regard to offending Muslims, but after this second half of the Bloom County saga, I see now that it wasn't Muslims the Post was afraid of offending, but rather the Bush Administration and the 28% of dead-enders in this country who support it.
No doubt, if Breathed had managed to conclude the strip with an anti-Democratic Party insult, the Post would have run the strip on its front page.
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Polysemous, Multilayered and Prickly...with lots of quills
It's amazing how many seem to confuse a cartoon with a short story and suppose that Poe's dictum applies...i.e. that it should have a "certain unique or single effect." — By mistaking the genre and looking for that singular, unique message in OPUS, we end up with a Letters page full of disparate, contrary and unconnected interpretations, with a minimal dialog and not much insight in the Salon Community.
Think about it... It is truly possible for a cartoon —
1. to be operating simultaneously on several levels;
2. to be going in several directions at once;
3. to embody contradictory perspectives;
4. to have more than one "meaning";
5. to break out of it's frame;
6. to be open-ended and inconclusive;
— and I'm sure that I haven't exhausted all the possible layers of discourse and levels of meaning available to a cartoonist who's trying to communicate about something of significance.
Many times OPUS has several "points", often poking out in different directions with different targets. To focus on just one point, its trajectory and target...as if that's what the cartoon is all about...is to thoroughly misinterpret the piece!!
Returning to this (typical) Salon Letters page, I'll say that I find it tedious at times wading through the mish-mash of ill-formed/informed opinion... It's not what I hope for when I click on Letters in order to see what others think - as part of the process of developing my own thought, pushing it on past my own snap-judgments and knee-jerks. I pay for Salon.com as part of an effort to better inform my own opinion, not merely to express it and then go about my business unchallenged, unchanged and blissfully ignorant.
So, what can we do to raise the level of insight, thoughtfulness, civil dialog...and community?
All the best,
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My humble interpretation
This comic strip is an allegory about the U.S. "intervention" in Iraq. Americans think they know what's best for the people of Iraq. ("You love that I'm so damned smart about what's BEST for you.") Americans think that the Iraqi people want the same things that Americans want. ("You love freedom. You love hotness.") And Americans think they can impose their will on the Iraqis. ("And THAT, little dude, is how we're gonna straighten out the Middle East.") See the reference to a "benchmark"? See the metaphor for a deadline for the Iraqis? See the American jingoism on display? ("America rocks!") This comic strip is about American imperialism.
Issues concerning sexism, feminism, and the right of self-expression are implicit (as they are in almost any situation involving men and women), but in my opinion they are incidental and not the main point.
Lola is portrayed as a fool for adopting customs that don't really suit her. But Steve Dallas is an even bigger fool for being arrogant and overconfident. Just as he fails to understand other people's values, he fails to understand what he's dealing with. He's just like Bush and the rightwingers, see? They're the kind of people that Steve Dallas has always represented in Berke Breathed's comic strips.
If this particular comic strip is offensive, I have to ask, to whom?