The dudes who think up the Sunday morning comics – I think they call them “comicazes” – are really just writers with good penmanship, storytellers with a picturesque imagination. Every Sunday they give the human race the rare chance to walk on the sunny side of the street. I always seize that opportunity. It’s the highlight of my week, actually, a fact that is either a sad commentary on my life or an indicator of a guy preoccupied with stick figures and captions.
Just got done watching The Vietnam War, the documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. I found it worthwhile, but at the end of the final episode, after eighteen hours, you’re a bit emotionally spent and I found myself shaking my head and muttering to myself, What a waste. Literally, everyone got fucked. Thirty years, over 58,000 American dead, 150,000 wounded, $111 billion . . . For nothing. A nation divided, an ally betrayed, a people abandoned.
You remember Colin Kaepernick, right? When he used to be a football player he took a knee for a cause, and after hanging dormant for the better part of a year, his knee has taken on a new life of its own, has become the catalyst for words and actions and tough talk and hurt feelings and harsh realities and, maybe, liberating ideas. In all this dust-up we can’t lose track of the knee. We mustn’t let the subject be changed, the agendas that come from the mouth can’t be allowed to overpower the knee.