Too Busy to Read?
It's not hard, just look at the piktchers
The famous phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has been attributed to author George Eliot who wrote those words in the 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss. Eliot was of a living example of that phrase because “he” was novelist Mary Ann Evans.
Beneath the Cover
Mary wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as a writer of light romantic fiction, which was the expected domain for women authors at the time.
In the mid-1800s, women writers were often dismissed or not taken seriously, especially if they wrote about politics, religion, or human psychology—themes central to Eliot’s work.
Evans knew that publishing under a male name would give her work credibility and authority. It worked! I envision the revelation of her true identity as a Gomer Pyle moment:
Photo credit: imgflip.com
Gomer was a well read man, specifically an avid reader of comic books. However he was a 1960s man, not 1860s. That’s OK because for this blurb my margin of error for dates is plus or minus a century.
Presidential Powerpointism
If you’ve spent any time in corporate culture, you’ve likely been exposed to PowerPoint presentations. They have a role, but the main criticism of electronic slide shows is that they often oversimplify complex information and encourage passive consumption rather than active engagement.
All this unnecessary background brings me to the main character in my cartoon, President Trump. His own words:
“I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.”
Maybe it’s the POWER part of PowerPoint that scratches his itch. And how about the usage of bullets? They’re powerful, too. Especially when they come out of a gun. Tremendous power.
A gag waiting to happen
I’d never read The Ugly American, but I found enough online summaries to work for my short term need, to create an editorial cartoon. Thinking as a cartoonist thinks, I imagined Trump in a bookstore for a photo op—why else would he be there—seeing this book in a section labeled American Diplomacy and then going full Zelensky on the poor clerk. She handled the assault quite well.
Making up for lost time
As a function of my advanced age and forgetfulness, at every opportunity I am filling the gaps in my mental bookshelf with refreshers on books I have not read or simply forgotten about. I found these three summation and study guides sources online:
Each requires a modest subscription fee, I’ll pick one soon. There is some truth in me not having enough time to read lengthy works, but the difference between me and President Trump (besides wealth and moral clarity) is that I like to read. It takes you places money cannot. Three cheers for book learnin’!
Frank, I was the best at PowerPoints. Microsoft, creator of the thing, ran on them. The effort that went into big exec review presentations was stupendous. Then, if the Trump in the room took the conversation sideways-which happened a lot-all your slides with graphs and data and pretty pictures and animations, were for naught. The slides were guardrails really, to try to guide the conversation to the conclusion you wanted from the boss.
At Amazon slides were verboten. While I never worked for Bezos, there was a lot of back-and-forth of Microsoft and Amazon employees and the lore was a written report was distributed at the beginning of meetings and there was 10 minutes of silence at the beginning of the meeting while everybody read it. I have no idea how the meeting was conducted after that, but it sounds like chaos.