And I also like that he's not afraid to take on the Dems when they screw up, as in this strip:
However, I do think that Tomorrow is buying into the false 'tough guy/wimp' dichotomy here in a way that really undermines his point. He's suggesting that Bush Jr. is a bully, and I think that characterization tends to stand, and is shown in his actions. But then at the same time he's also characterizing Reid as a wimp. Sure, Bush Jr. likely does see himself as a tough-guy, and he has gone to great lengths to paint himself that way, but, angry as I am at Reid and other Dems for backing down on timetables for withdrawing troops from Iraq, I don't want to buy into the tough-guy/wimp idea. Reid, one hopes, isn't worried about being construed as a tough guy or a wimp when he makes his decisions--hopefully he's making political decisions based on political expediency, and on some, dare I say it, philosophical foundations (useless war is bad, mmmmkay?). I'm all for taking Reid to task for not standing up to the bully that is Bush Jr.--I'm just not interested in calling him a wimp because of it. I'm interested in calling him the ex-Senate Majority leader.
3 comments:
But Tomorrow is parodying a famous advertisement. While the original Chales Atlas beach confrontation scene explicitly endorses the idea that one must be tough to be a real man, it's not clear to me that Tomorrow is. Tomorrow is just using the well-known Atlas premise as a framework for making fun of Reid. I should think that a pop culture reference in a lighthearted work such This Modern World should not be automatically construed as an endorsement of the work being referenced.
Unlike the original ad, in Tomorrow's strip neither the tough guy nor the bully is "the ideal man". They both suck. However, one could read the implication that if only the dems were to toughen up they might succeed. I'm not sure to what extent Tomorrow is buying into the dichotomy and to what extent he's just manipulating and exposing it.
zm--
I am old enough to remember the original ad, and perhaps I should have made it clear that I was aware that Tomorrow was parodying it. I think, though, to the extent that we're to think of Reid as a wimp for not standing up to Bush Jr. (rather than to think of him as not standing by his professed values for ending the war, say), Tomorrow is buying into a false dichotomy. Is he buying into it wholesale? Nope--after all, this is a parody. But I'd rather him not buy into it at all.
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