Nifty announcement: May 2011 was, by every statistic, our best month ever! That’s because of you! You’re neat! Thank you thank you!
On to the comic itself – Frederick’s processing of tragedy is something that it’s hard to make a set rule for. In the midst of victory or the need for renewed action, loss often just rolled off his back only to hit him twice as hard later. That’s pretty much the only way he was able to keep on going during the often ceaseless bad news of the Seven Years’ War.
Gertrude Stein. Gerrrrrrrtrude Stein…. Newton and Frederick are being a little cavalier here in calling her the Reigning Queen of the Unimportantly Important. Rather, I think it’s more fair to say that the gulf between how she evaluated her importance and what that importance genuinely was is unusually and adorably sizable. We’ll have a better opportunity to talk about it later, though, oh yes we shall!
– Count Dolby von Luckner
When we were at the Emerald City Comic Convention, somebody asked me to draw a picture of Franklin Pierce. It happened to be the time that I was thinking about which historical era Marx and Emily were going to land in first, and the more I read about Pierce, the more intrigued I became. Previously, my knowledge of Pierce was more or less “Kansas-Nebraska Act, Ostend Manifesto, Jefferson Davis Was In His Cabinet, Didn’t Raise the Flag When Lincoln Died, Routinely Ranked Among the Five Worst Presidents in History.”
Then I got my hands on Peter A. Wallner’s two volume biography and, yeah, Being Franklin Pierce turned out to be a pretty tragic thing. He lost all of his children at young ages – the last killed … in front of him… in a train wreck… on the way to his inauguration. His wife hated his political career and micromanaged his life down to when he was and wasn’t allowed to keep his hands in his pockets. His commitment to economic honesty and his concept of governmental ethics caused all of his allies to turn on him when he wouldn’t look the other way during their various graft schemes (the Minnesota Railroad, the New York Harbor appointments). All of the legislation that he originated was aimed at making a more honest, capable government, from clerking standards to Manypenny’s humane Indian policy to the thorough review of the naval officer corps.
But he had one fatal flaw – Franklin Pierce was, to his core of cores, a dedicated party man. He believed with all his soul in the party line inherited from the Jackson Era, relentlessly attacking those in the party who would question it and steadfastly supporting anything that was in accord with it. While most of the Democrats – the Hards and the Softs and the Barnburners – jumped to wherever the power and money could be found, Pierce planted his feet and got crushed. For him, an abolitionist wasn’t a man trying to free a soul in immoral servitude, he was a man working against the Democratic Party and the Union it was trying to support, and that led him to support legislation that is unthinkable to our minds – the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. All in all, a very complex fellow who is something rather more than The Guy Before The Guy Before Lincoln.
On another note, Geoff got married on Saturday! I had something of a toast written up, but didn’t give it at the time, so I’m giving it here!
I was reading The Tortoise and the Hare the other day and it occurred to me that, for lots of people, that’s the choice they have to make – between the Way Awesome but Entirely Not To Be Relied Upon hare, and the steady, dependable, but uninspiring tortoise. You can have one or the other – Mr. Darcy or Wickham, Faith or Buffy, Han Solo or Luke, Foghorn Leghorn or Sam the Sheep Dog – Actually the entire rest of this toast is just going to be me listing pairs of fictional characters, so dig in. Now, to find someone who has the best of both – that is something. And for TWO people to have both in each other is entirely mind boggling, and that’s why I get ever so slightly dizzyish when hanging around with Geoff and Evan. A couple that includes Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, Tom Servo quotations, the creation of frankly hilarious webcomics, thirst for knowledge and faraway places, all based on a constant regard for each other’s health and happiness. Just looking at them makes you feel like you’re in a big warm blanket and outside, everybody meets their soulmate always. To Geoff and Evan, then – two beautiful people, and a dazzling, utterly ripping future!
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Last time, we were too busy mourning to talk about the mechanics of Marx’s assault on Peter. The thesis he used to unravel the tsar was that Peter’s drive to modernization was really the result of the reaction against boyar fiscal inefficiency, and therefore Peter was not necessary for its realization, and therefore is not necessary in general. But Russia is always an odd duck – a bourgeois intelligentsia without a proper bourgeoisie, followed by a communist revolt against the industrial capitalist structure it equally didn’t have. Peter fought with every nerve of his being against the tide of his country, and was almost entirely alone in the effort. It was less a question of a class finding a man to implement its will than a man making a class to carry out his own.
But perhaps that is taking the argument too closely. On a global scale, the economic pressure of the west would have eventually broken the back of the boyars, perhaps two hundred years later, but it would have happened, and it is perhaps by looking down from that platform that Marx summoned the material dialectic oomph to take out Peter.
On another note, this is the last episode that will launch before Geoff becomes a Married Chap! Onwards, to Matrimony!
– Count Dolby von Luckner