Out With The New, In With The Old

I was scrolling on my phone last night when this popped up onto my screen. This is typical of a one-frame cartoon, the humor relying on the reader making the connection between the caption and the image depicted. This one is fairly easy to decipher: two dinosaurs, one about to pop the top of the US Capitol Building, home of the Senate and Congress, while the other is warning his buddy not to “eat” it because it has “nuts” inside. Now one could, I suppose, take this to mean that one friend is alerting another because of a nut allergy, but that would be much too literal.  On a more figurative level, “nuts” is referring to the people housed in the building as being, “nutjobs,” “nutbars,” “nutcases,” all, of course, meaning “crazy,” as in “off one’s nut,” or “the ‘nut’ doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Whether it was intended or not, there is another way to read this cartoon, which is directly related to the choice of animals used in the frame. In this interpretation, the dinosaurs represent the “old” (extinct) in my title, and then make the inference that the building not only houses “nutjobs,” but old and nearly extinct “nutjobs.” Given all the recent pre-up-coming-election stories as of late, this is not that much of a stretch. I read one that quoted an “elder” congressman who was voicing concern over Biden’s age, but then went on to say: “I may not hit my five iron as far as I used to, but I can still play 36 holes of golf in a day.” Yes, you read that right. A congressman, someone elected to represent the people of his “neck-of-the-woods,” compared the rigors of being the President of the United States to a round of golf. Sorry, two rounds of golf!  And before you jump all over me, I know that my title is in reverse. The popular idiom is: “Out With the Old, In With the New,” which means that “it is good,” from time to time, “to get rid of the old and welcome the new.” The “out” in the phrase means “away” or “gone,” as in another idiom, “out of fashion,” or, if you want to sound younger, much younger, “that is so yesterday,” or “so last year.” By using the “alternative” reading of the cartoon, I am suggesting that the opposite is happening. No, we are not literally getting rid of the new (read young), but we sure as hell are not giving it/them much of a reason to be interested. In the 2020 election, 52-55% of people between the ages of 18-29 voted, which is a significant increase from the 2016 election where the numbers were 42-44%. I am not one to trust these types of statistics, but it does paint a picture that one could read into.

If, by chance, you were thinking that the cartoon above looks like one of Gary Larson’s “Far Side” offerings, you are not alone. In fact, I cropped the photo and eliminated the text above the image telling me that this was a Gary Larson cartoon. However, being the “dinosaur” that I am, and not really trusting anything I get from the Web, I did a little digging to see if I could find when this cartoon was first published by Larson. No luck. However, I did find a “Far Side” website. On it, there were notices about how reproducing any of his cartoons on social media was prohibited, which is amusing because there is a group on Facebook dedicated to his work that posts his cartoons on a regular basis. Well, let’s just say they claim the cartoons are his, but that is not entirely accurate, as it turns out. There was also a link to an email address if you had an inquiry. So, I sent them an email with the image above asking if they could confirm when it first appeared in print. They got back to me within the hour saying that this was not a “Far Side” cartoon, and they did not know who it was by or when it was first published, if indeed it ever was. Just because something on the Internet says this is so-and-so…well, you know the rest! Hmm, maybe being a “dinosaur isn’t all that bad!

Los Angeles 2023