Word: cartoons
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...reason I'm going to miss Bill Clinton is that watching him these past eight years has given me the same unbridled, childlike joy as watching a cartoon. Clinton was our first cartoon President. He ran off cliffs, was crushed by anvils and flattened by turn-of-the-century trains. Yet moments later, we always saw him, just like Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck, completely reassembled and eagerly pursuing his next crazy scheme. Essentially, people love cartoon characters because they cannot be hurt. They defy the rules of Greek tragedy. Clinton, unlike Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson...
Clinton was such a cartoon that anyone who entered his orbit immediately became an absurd, two-dimensional character. Ken Starr, once a boring lawyer, magically sprouted a buckle hat and musket. And, like all cartoon villains, Starr became single-mindedly obsessed with catching his wisecracking prey. He did everything short of arranging sticks of dynamite into the shape of a woman, dropping a wig on it and hiding behind a nearby rock. Clinton made Starr funny and watchable. And without Clinton on the scene, Starr, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and all the rest revert back to bland, Anglo-Saxon reality...
...show is over. The stuttering pig is telling us there is no more. Some saw hope in the 2000 election, hope that either candidate would offer strong cartoon potential (I'm not including Nader, who finds anvils "unsafe"). But I was not optimistic. We wince when we see these men fall. We fear for them. Strap Acme rocket shoes to Bush, and you'll spend months cleaning up the mess. No, the irony of Bill Clinton is that he may have felt our pain, but we didn't feel his. We just listened joyously for which funny sound...
CALLING JOE CAMEL How can the tobacco industry undo the damage done to impressionable children by cartoon camels that smoke cigarettes? With antismoking cartoon characters. A study of kindergartners through 12th-graders reports that children are more likely to believe cigarette health warnings when they are accompanied by a cartoon critter. Which critters? The study tested walruses, penguins and bears...
...highest paid, most widely read cartoonist ever. The only modern American comic strip artist to be given a retrospective at the Louvre, he was now in a class by himself. His characters cut a broad path across commerce and culture; Charlie Brown and Snoopy could go from being cartoon pitchmen for cars and life insurance, their huge heads and tiny bodies stretched across blimps at golf tournaments, to being the inspiration for a "Peanuts" concerto by contemporary composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, premiering at Carnegie Hall. At the peak of Schulz's popularity, "Peanuts" captured 355 million readers...