The long view

You will agree I have shown tremendous restraint from boring you about my San Francisco Giants.

My last post dedicated to the team was in May.

May!

I have shut up through most of summer.

Indulge me here, then.

I'll be brief and be gone.

The Giants sit two games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers, which is the best place to be right now.

The Dodgers can't dodge this target.

The Giants play mostly great baseball. Their ace, pitcher Madison Bumgarner, struck out nine Atlanta Braves last night as the team won 6-1 and Bumgarner notched his 12th victory. Third baseman Matt Duffy makes his case for Rookie of the Year just about every game.

Frenetic right fielder Hunter Pence is back from injury and energizing the game. So is left fielder Nori Aoki, his broken foot healed and his bat back in the leadoff spot.

Sensational sophomore Joe Panik hurt his back (Argh!) and rookie call-up Kelby Tomlinson got a hit in his first Major League at-bat two nights ago — dedicating it to a batboy from one of his minor league teams, who died this week — and last night drove in three runs, going 2 for 4. Broadcasters are already calling him Clark Kent for his glasses and resemblance.

All-Star™® superstar catcher Buster Posey is hitting .332, quietly shredding the league in his "aw shucks" way.

It's all good. And I don't care.

I care, but I'm not invested in the outcome the way I was last year. I may have reached baseball nirvana, being able to enjoy The Giants for entertainment alone.

Sure, I shout aloud in the empty living room why Angel Pagan is batting leadoff when Aoki is healed and ready to go. But I wince in empathy — meteoric salary aside — to watch Pagan struggle in center field, his knees betraying him on fly balls he used to chase down.

I hold my head in both hands when closer Santiago Casilla comes in the last inning with a lead and then gives it up or walks batters in needless agony. But then I get over it.

It's. For. Fun.

A radio talk show caller told the host last week how nervous the Giants were making him, the shaky way starting pitcher Matt Cain was throwing after a long injury rehab. Keep in mind the Giants had just won 11 of the last 12 games.

You often hear how sports is escapism, to help us forget about life's trials for a while and luxuriate in the spectacle. But I wonder sometimes whether, for too many people, sports and celebrity becomes a substitute for life's trials and real issues. They have become the things we fret and worry about instead of the difficult and life-changing things we should worry about.

Real life may be futile, but sports certainly is: The general manager is not listening to you, Mr. and Mrs. Radio Show Caller, when you insist the Giants retrieve third baseman Pablo Sandoval from the struggling Boston Red Sox and move Matt Duffy to his natural position at second.

Yell all you want, nothing's going to happen on your say-so.

Join the vast crowd, cheering and commiserating too, and use the game to recharge yourself for what really matters.

Now the Giants try to cut through a swath of winning teams (The Cubs? The Chicago Cubs? Those Cubs?) before finishing the season against the hated Dodgers and much of the National League West.

The Giants may go the World Series again this year. Or they may not. Whatever.

•••

In other news: Goodbye, Jon Stewart. What The Sacramento Bee said.

Here it is, your moment of angst

It's no joke to call Jon Stewart and his TV show institutions.

Stewart raised The Daily Show to national prominence — to national need. Talent off camera helps, of course, but Stewart's role as canny jester has cemented the show's success and worth.

No other vehicle for political satire comes anywhere near The Daily Show for reach and dogged potency.

No one else can summon our attention so well, by standing on the ramparts, pointing a finger at the politicians meant to serve us and the media meant to alert us, and shout "Look! How ridiculous!" and make us laugh, truly laugh, at the hypocrisy.

I'd love it if editorial cartoons and satirical magazines led the pack, but they're no match for Jon Stewart, not by a looong shot. Never will be.

Now Jon Stewart is leaving Jon Stewart's TV show.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Be afraid that Comedy Central won't continue The Daily Show. As a brand, host channel Comedy Central has dropped in ratings since September, losing 17 percent of its audience, Bloomberg reports, citing Nielsen data.

Though No. 4 among late-night talk shows — behind Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and David Letterman's network shows — The Daily Show ranks No. 2 among adults 18-34, and No. 1 among adult males 18-24, The New York Times reports.

The show is important to Comedy Central, which also said goodbye last year to Stephen Colbert, Letterman's replacement, and saw The Daily Show's substitute host, John Oliver, start a similar show — weekly, with more depth per topic — at HBO.

(Colbert's departure is not only bad for Comedy Central, it's bad for me. I'll never see the guy again, except in day-after excerpts online. I'm not staying up late. I have no doubt he'll shake up the late-night structure; heck, if he got rid of the opening monologue, it would shift the planets in their orbit. But I digress.)

Viacom executives indicated to The New York Times it plans on continuing The Daily Show.

OK then, be afraid that Comedy Central won't be able to replace Jon Stewart, and the show — and the young audience it reaches — will wither.

Replacing Stewart wouldn't be easy. He was Mr. Right Person at the Right Time, having worked his way into that desk from many years on the comedy and talk show circuits, always the smartest smart aleck in the room. He didn't talk topical humor, preferring topics we really should be talking about.

Stewart is the guy I don't mind saying what's wrong with me — with us.

As he demonstrates on The Daily Show, Stewart knows his stuff politically, and can draw down adroitly on a variety of pressing matters with a broad spectrum of notable figures, very much playing his audience's stand-in. Even if he's getting his analysis on the fly right before the show, he's good at owning the material.

Yet Stewart wasn't a megastar. He didn't get in his own way or deflect the message with his celebrity. Imagine someone like Chris Rock taking over — purely hypothetical example — and try to separate the message from the messenger.

Despite Stewart's rise on the national stage — and I gagged a bit seeing his reported $25 million annual salary — he still seems like your  beer buddy at the corner of the table, the one who puts things in perspective. "C'mon, you buying all that bull?" he says with a smirk and a shrug. "Here's what's really going down."

So who takes his place? Choose carefully.

Oliver was great when Stewart went off to direct his first movie last summer, and he's probably even better versed in hypocrisy, having grown up with his own brand in Britain. But Oliver already has his HBO show. And — here's where I go all Rush Limbaugh xenophobe, forgive me — he's a foreigner. More pointedly, he's British. We already know the British are going to tell us what's wrong with our country, and we already know it to be true.

It's just more effective hearing it from one of our own. No offense.

Someone from the show? Maybe. It'd be interesting to see long-time correspondent Samantha Bee host, or fairly new addition Jessica Williams (here with an intro by John Oliver), or perhaps Aasif Mandvi.

But do they have the chops, the  — heaven help me — gravitas? The Daily Show skews liberal, but Stewart is just as volatile, if not as often, against liberal hypocrites. That's the strength of the show, exposure to hypocrisy of all stripe, without fear or favor.

Which new host will be as good as Stewart at holding up the mirror at just the right angle, at throwing hypocrites' words back in their faces, at making viewers take notice that matters are not going well on their behalf?

(By the way, why does the show skew liberal? Is it a liberal lapdog? Or is it because the majority of hypocrites in media and politics are conservative? That the nature of being conservative, of slapping the hand of each and every citizen, lends itself to hypocrisy?

(The Atlantic explored this last week in "Waiting for the Conservative Jon Stewart?" by Oliver Morrison, wondering why there isn't one. Morrison pointed to some competitors that prove pale, not only by their small stage but their inability to be funny, relying instead on the old, "How about that Harry Reid, huh?" bits without context to actual news.

(One possibility that resonated with me: Liberals for some reason are better at doing funny, and conservatives better at talk radio. Though when Morrison asked Colbert his favorite conservative comedian, Colbert took a pause, smiled wide and said, "Bill O'Reilly."

(Which is my hypothesis too: Fox News and Limbaugh are really liberal satirists, their jokes so far inside that nobody recognizes them. Limbaugh and everybody at Fox News give large chunks of their salaries to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Planned Parenthood. Just my theory. Prove me wrong. But I digress.)

Jon Stewart has brought a big chunk of the young voting public to the news. Like the best editorial cartoonists, he sometimes raises news topics his viewers hadn't heard about, and gives them a chance to find out more, to find out about matters that really matter to them. And he demonstrates critical thinking, and warns us not to take issues or leaders at face value.

Without another Jon Stewart, who else — and how else — to bring healthy skepticism about the yahoos that are supposed to be serving our best interests?

Comedy Central — or some channel with as much guts and reach — needs to find as good as or better than Jon Stewart.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

The eyes have it

He knows when you are sleeping, comrade …

Change happens, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

A Luddite from way back, I meet change with lethargy, so facebook's new Timeline feature — and the subsequent cattle call to get all us facebookers with the program on the new format — left me catatonic …

… until I saw the great big picture frame facebook gives us to reveal things visual about our lives.

Though not eager to populate my profile with actual information about my life — it bores me even to contemplate telling it — I don't mind rebranding my artwork.

So I'm performing wholesale surgery on my collection, extricating the eyes in each and blowing them up mondo large, mad scientist style.

No big deal, so to speak. Just trying to make the space interesting.

Then a few people indicated they "liked" the resulting abstract shapes, which surprised me (that you could "like" that picture, for starters; that facebook even tells people that I put up a new picture — can't make a move without facebook telling everyone you know; and that people would find the abstraction remarkable.)

It occurred to me that I should post the artwork from which those abstractions came. The eyes above come from the holiday card I call "Commie Santa:"

 
The Peter Max-ish monstrosity below is a blow-up of a grand ol' caricature I made of The Daily Show Host Jon Stewart:




First up: This tiki-inspired logo for a Boy Scout summer camp excursion:

More to come …

You spell Gaddafi, I spell Khadafy, you spell Qaddhafi …

The more things change …

Twenty-five years ago this week, The U.S. was preparing to war with Libyan leader Khadafy …

Hmm. Not entirely sure the message I was trying to send. Police dog to the World, the United States,
might be sniffing around a number of countries, but then found motivation with the crazy Libyan leader.

These cartoons were for The Hanford Sentinel, when I was just getting started on what an editorial cartoon should be.

Three days before the cartoon above, U.S. and Libyan aircraft had clashed in the Gulf of Sidra on Libya's coast, and four Libyan attack boats were sunk. This was another in a simmering sequence of tense clashes with Libya, tied to terrorist attacks against U.S. and British targets. In April, terrorists bombed a Berlin nightclub, killing a U.S. serviceman and injuring some 50 more among 200 people hurt in the blast. The United States unleashed Operation El Dorado Canyon, bombing Libyan targets.

(Before we go on, could the United Nations or someone organize a standardization of Khadafy's name? Virtually every other world leader's name is spelled the same across the news media. Why not his? It's not just his last name, sometimes spelled with the prefix al-, as in al-Qaddafi; his first name has almost as many variations, including Moammar and Muammar . Maybe this is a part of the chronic problem: He's not getting the world's tea cards asking him please to stop brutalizing his people.)

Again, my meaning is unclear, though the name, Tommy Tonkin, alludes to the United States' penchant for
manufacturing provocations for war or violent "nation building" (as in Gulf of Tonkin incident). Though not alone in this practice, the United States is especially good at it. The same with warring in the name of idealistic principles when in truth it's almost always for business. The new "no-fly zone" looks and feels like more of the same.

President Obama just went to the airwaves to explain this generation's bombing of Libya, dubbed Operation Odyssey Dawn (which Jon Stewart described as a Yes album, Stephen Colbert called a Carnival Cruise ship, and Lily Tomlin said was a bad name for a drag queen.)

As with his predecessors, President Obama has aspired to irony. I give him no argument about stopping a brutal leader from harming his own people, but as with the others who have made the same justification for war, I say, "Yes, but …" As in "Yes, but the people of Yemen are suffering in a similar fashion. Why aren't we stopping its government? Or Syria's? Why aren't we bombing hell out of those who massacre in Congo, Somalia and, for that matter, Mexico?"

It can't be just because we can't stand to see a government harm its own people, because quite clearly we can. It would be refreshing if our leader said, "Look, we can't intervene in Yemen because we have a military base there and we've got it pretty good with the government . Libya provides oil with fairly close access to our European allies, and we don't really have anything cozy going on with Mr. Khadafy, or however you spell it." Or something like that.

It would be depressing, but I'd prefer it to the same stirring rhetoric that belies its true aim. Then again, what would have cartoonists have to draw?

President Obama says action against Libya should eventually force Khadafy out because "history is not on his side." The guy's been in power for 40-some years; I think he's got the history racket worked out.

Get ready for another long, painful entrenchment.

Lord, I was wordy in the early days. That's a lot of ink to point out that the U.S. was practically alone
in this attack and President Reagan was less than skillful in getting help. One difference this time — apparently — is that France and Britain are taking more of a lead.