Civilization Goes Boink, 2015

According to my wife’s doctors, she will give birth to our third child mere days before my 40^th birthday.  This seems like pretty bad timing on their part, but I didn’t go to medical school, so what do I know?

It’s still a bit too early to know the baby’s tie-breaking-gender, but, thanks to previous experiences, I already have a pretty good idea how many people will respond.  If it is a girl, I will receive a lot of “oohhhs” and “awwws,” and, “Oh, more pink dresses, huh?”  If it’s a boy, I will most likely get something like this:

“Well, I hope you’re ready to get peed on again.”

For the most part, I’m not.

I have been peed upon, of course, but this is not the same as being ready for such an event, and so I think the question, in and of itself, assumes quite a bit.  As we know, baby boys, due to anatomical specifics, simply “go” on things more often than girls. Even I, apparently, once “went” on my grandmother many decades ago during a routine diaper change, and thus the karmic implications are clear.

I have it coming, and I have been warned.

Despite all this, though, it is important to note that most boys outgrow this tendency in practice, if not always in theory, which leads us rather clumsily into the actual focus of today’s column:  comic strips.

Many years ago, during the zenith of American history more commonly known as the 1990s, an immensely talented man named Bill Waterson wrote and illustrated an immensely entertaining comic strip by the name of Calvin & Hobbes. Calvin, named after the 16^th century French theologian John Calvin, possessed a galaxy-sized imagination that he often used to escape his humdrum life by exploring space, fighting monsters, or building dozens of decapitated snowmen. 

Hobbes, on the other hand, named after the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, possessed the wonderful ability to change between a rather normal stuffed tiger into a wry, philosophically-gifted real tiger that was prone to spastic bursts of intense, good-natured violence. Together these two ruled the world of late 80s and early 90s newspaper comic-strips.

Watterson was an artist, though, and, like many artists, he often let his integrity get in the way of good old fashioned commercialism. Fed up with the hounding of his employers to market Calvin and Hobbes and weary of newspapers throughout the country voicing their own annoyance about his strip taking up so much space, Watterson left the comic world in the winter of 1995. He accomplished, thus, what very few entertainers ever do: he retired on top with an unsatisfied fan base asking for more.

A few years later, as many of you might recall, a decal of Calvin began appearing on the back windows of cars and trucks. This twerpy little doppelganger looked almost exactly like Watterson’s version except this character was relieving himself on the number 24. Or the number 3. Or a Ford emblem, or a Chevy emblem, or just about anything you might imagine a person would secretly want to pee on but could not because of our society’s draconian laws forbidding such behavior. Thus, if you did not like Jeff Gordon the racecar driver and needed a straightforward way to express your disgust, you simply bought a decal of this kid doing what he did on top of Jeff Gordon’s racing car number. Problem solved.

What this said, in effect, was this: “My contempt for Jeff Gordon is so profound I really, really wish I could just go to the bathroom on him. But I cannot, both because it is illegal and  I’m not certain where he lives, thus I will instead verbalize this contempt by placing a decal of Kalvin P. , (who represents my inflated Id) peeing on the number 24 (which represents that nasty NASCAR driver I despise so much.)”

At first I assumed that the decal was an anomaly, a trend that would eventually go away. Unfortunately, the sticker has turned out to be much more harbinger than quirk.  That decal, I’m afraid, is totally us.  As a people, we have become cartoon versions of ourselves pretend peeing on whatever it is we find annoying, offensive, or rude, entirely oblivious to the fact that we, ourselves, are often being annoying, offensive, and rude.  Most angles and sides of almost every single issue you could ever wish to imagine have become so bloated with pride and self-righteous indignation that there’s practically nothing left to talk about.  Only yell about.  Only pee upon.

With this in mind, I’d like to end this column by asking Mr. Watterson a favor.  Come back.  We need you.  Our civilization has gone absolutely “boink.”  In all my years, I have never met someone who didn’t like a good Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Watterson’s artistic talent and integrity, combined with Calvin’s enthusiasm and Hobbes’ wisdom, are sorely needed in today’s public discourse.

In the meantime, I’ll reread some of his old volumes.  Starting in December, I’ll reread them to a new audience.