“Be to my faults a little blind, Be to my virtues very kind.”

I’m not sure who originally wrote that phrase. I’ve seen it attributed to various people from John Lennon to Ben Franklin, and I have yet to come across a definitive account of its origin. Maybe that’s because I haven’t spent too much time looking, but I’d like to think it’s also because it’s such a universal desire that it actually goes back to the dawn of time. Maybe when the first doomed nucleic acid was spit out by a primordial chemical system, it’s last words were “remember me well.”

The desire to be remembered as a positive force once we’re gone is probably as instinctive as it is universal. Every saint and every dictator wanted to leave behind a legacy they thought positive. And because we all want the same thing, we routinely, wilfully, whitewash people’s lives once they’re gone — hoping that someday, when our time comes, the world will return the favor. Some believe that pays tribute to the departed. Perhaps most believe that. I believe the opposite. I believe that by sanitizing someone’s effect on the world and their history, you don’t pay tribute to that person, you pay tribute to some phantom you’ve created in their stead. When it’s a person of historical significance, you run the risk of erasing history. And we all know the other saying about what happens to people who forget their history.

Here’s today’s Candorville, followed by a representative response to it from a Candorville reader:

Today’s strip

Reader feedback

Dear Darrin Bell,
My paper just picked up your comic strip on the first, and I was okay with it. It was mildly funny, and I could relate to some of it. However, today, you published the comic about James Brown “explaining” about what he didn’t do, while you showed Gerald Ford running away. I now refuse to read your strip. If you want to attack a person, at least do it while they’re alive.

My response

Thank you for writing. That’s exactly what tomorrow’s comic strip deals with — the notion that we should only speak well of the departed. You really shouldn’t judge a comic strip by one edition of it, or you might miss out on something you’d otherwise come to enjoy.

The reason the strip is called “Candorville” isn’t because I think I know the Truth. It’s my promise to always say exactly what’s on my mind, regardless of what everyone else is saying. It’s my suggestion that honesty is always the best policy, even when it involves sacred cows. When the war in Iraq was popular, Candorville pointed out its counterproductivity. When Barak Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were being idolized as phenomena by the Media a couple years ago, I pointed out that they’d done nothing more than anyone else could do, and the only reason they were seen as exceptional was their race (What has Obama accomplished, really?). Everyone loves Oprah Winfrey, but I’ve commented on how she seems to regularly invite celebrity guests in order to fish for compliments from them, and I’ve pointed out that every single issue of her magazine features HER on the cover (which strikes me as a bit egotistical, even if it is good business sense). Not all these observations are equally important, but they’re all candid assessments.

I “attack” people who are living 99.99999999% of the time, but I see no reason to sanitize someone’s past just because they’ve died. And when the rest of the Media, from left-wingers on Air America to the mainstream media to right-wingers like Limbaugh, are ALL refusing to mention a person’s drawbacks once they’re dead, I believe in the case of a public official, that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to ignore history, to sanitize it out of sentimentality. So I point out that the person isn’t a saint, that his affect on history hasn’t been as uniformly positive as the Media is telling us it has. I say “hold on a second, stop canonizing someone who has such a checkered record.”

If you want to hear the sanitized line on issues, the rest of the Media provides that. If you want to hear candid opinions and truthful depictions of modern Americans and their actions & discussions, Candorville tries to provide that. If you’re offended by that sort of candor, then perhaps Candorville isn’t the strip for you, but I thank you for giving it a chance up ’til now. Thanks again for writing, and I hope you have a happy New Year.

***UPDATE***
Looks like I spoke too soon. The above feedback was representative of a handful of e-mails early in the morning, but the vast majority of the feedback since then (all of it, in fact) has been positive. Here’s another note which is more representative of the feedback for this strip:

I have been a fan of Candorville since the git go. As a afro-cubano who was raised in Pasadena I can relate to Susana and the entire cast of characters. Since I was a teen in the mid-60s listening to KGFJ 1230am, I have been a fan of James Brown, I also lived the stain of Tricky Dick’s scandal and the behind the scenes arrangement he made with Ford to get pardoned, all the while I was on the front lines of the struggle, freedom fighting and protesting the Nam conflict

Your Jan 8th strip with the Godfather at the pearly gates hit home and if not your best, fo sho it is in your top 5 im my book…

“Be to my faults a little blind, Be to my virtues very kind.”I’m not sure who originally wrote that phrase. I’ve seen it attributed to various people from John Lennon to Ben Franklin, and I have yet to come across a definitive account of its origin. Maybe that’s because I haven’t spent too much time looking, but I’d like to think it’s also because it’s such a universal desire that it actually goes back to the dawn of time. Maybe when the first doomed nucleic acid was spit out by a primordial chemical system, it’s last words were “remember me well.”The desire to be remembered as a positive force once we’re gone is probably as instinctive as it is universal. Every saint and every dictator wanted to leave behind a legacy they thought positive. And because we all want the same thing, we routinely, wilfully, whitewash people’s lives once they’re gone — hoping that someday, when our time comes, the world will return the favor. Some believe that pays tribute to the departed. Perhaps most believe that. I believe the opposite. I believe that by sanitizing someone’s effect on the world and their history, you don’t pay tribute to that person, you pay tribute to some phantom you’ve created in their stead. When it’s a person of historical significance, you run the risk of erasing history. And we all know the other saying about what happens to people who forget their history.Here’s today’s Candorville, followed by a representative response to it from a Candorville reader:Today’s stripReader feedback

Dear Darrin Bell,My paper just picked up your comic strip on the first, and I was okay with it. It was mildly funny, and I could relate to some of it. However, today, you published the comic about James Brown “explaining” about what he didn’t do, while you showed Gerald Ford running away. I now refuse to read your strip. If you want to attack a person, at least do it while they’re alive. 

My response

Thank you for writing. That’s exactly what tomorrow’s comic strip deals with — the notion that we should only speak well of the departed. You really shouldn’t judge a comic strip by one edition of it, or you might miss out on something you’d otherwise come to enjoy. The reason the strip is called “Candorville” isn’t because I think I know the Truth. It’s my promise to always say exactly what’s on my mind, regardless of what everyone else is saying. It’s my suggestion that honesty is always the best policy, even when it involves sacred cows. When the war in Iraq was popular, Candorville pointed out its counterproductivity. When Barak Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were being idolized as phenomena by the Media a couple years ago, I pointed out that they’d done nothing more than anyone else could do, and the only reason they were seen as exceptional was their race (What has Obama accomplished, really?). Everyone loves Oprah Winfrey, but I’ve commented on how she seems to regularly invite celebrity guests in order to fish for compliments from them, and I’ve pointed out that every single issue of her magazine features HER on the cover (which strikes me as a bit egotistical, even if it is good business sense). Not all these observations are equally important, but they’re all candid assessments.I “attack” people who are living 99.99999999% of the time, but I see no reason to sanitize someone’s past just because they’ve died. And when the rest of the Media, from left-wingers on Air America to the mainstream media to right-wingers like Limbaugh, are ALL refusing to mention a person’s drawbacks once they’re dead, I believe in the case of a public official, that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to ignore history, to sanitize it out of sentimentality. So I point out that the person isn’t a saint, that his affect on history hasn’t been as uniformly positive as the Media is telling us it has. I say “hold on a second, stop canonizing someone who has such a checkered record.”If you want to hear the sanitized line on issues, the rest of the Media provides that. If you want to hear candid opinions and truthful depictions of modern Americans and their actions & discussions, Candorville tries to provide that. If you’re offended by that sort of candor, then perhaps Candorville isn’t the strip for you, but I thank you for giving it a chance up ’til now. Thanks again for writing, and I hope you have a happy New Year.

***UPDATE***Looks like I spoke too soon. The above feedback was representative of a handful of e-mails early in the morning, but the vast majority of the feedback since then (all of it, in fact) has been positive. Here’s another note which is more representative of the feedback for this strip:

I have been a fan of Candorville since the git go. As a afro-cubano who was raised in Pasadena I can relate to Susana and the entire cast of characters. Since I was a teen in the mid-60s listening to KGFJ 1230am, I have been a fan of James Brown, I also lived the stain of Tricky Dick’s scandal and the behind the scenes arrangement he made with Ford to get pardoned, all the while I was on the front lines of the struggle, freedom fighting and protesting the Nam conflictYour Jan 8th strip with the Godfather at the pearly gates hit home and if not your best, fo sho it is in your top 5 im my book…

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Mail keeps coming in from Chicago readers upset about the Tribune’s decision to cancel Candorville. Curiously, many in Chicago seem to have assumed it was my decision to pull Candorville out of the Tribune, or that Candorville has ended. For instance:

Dear Mr. Bell,
I suspect you must receive a ton of complaints from Chicago when you criticize the government, but that is no reason to pull Candorville out of the paper like The Boondocks did. Maybe you don’t realize that a lot of us read Candorville every day and appreciate your take on current events and look forward to reading what you have to say about modern life. The comics aren’t the same without Candorville. Please bring it back.

Just to clarify for Chicago readers, I haven’t ended Candorville, it was cancelled by the Tribune. I have no control over whether Candorville appears in the Trib. If you’d like to see it return, e-mailing me won’t do it (although I appreciate it). If you’d like to make your feelings known to those who make the decisions, I would suggest you contact the Tribune directly and tell them what you think.

It’s been an honor to appear in the pages of the Tribune for this long, and I hope those of you from Chicago will continue to follow Candorville online, perhaps in one of the other Chicago papers should they choose to pick up the strip, or in book form.

Mail keeps coming in from Chicago readers upset about the Tribune’s decision to cancel Candorville. Curiously, many in Chicago seem to have assumed it was my decision to pull Candorville out of the Tribune, or that Candorville has ended. For instance:

Dear Mr. Bell,I suspect you must receive a ton of complaints from Chicago when you criticize the government, but that is no reason to pull Candorville out of the paper like The Boondocks did. Maybe you don’t realize that a lot of us read Candorville every day and appreciate your take on current events and look forward to reading what you have to say about modern life. The comics aren’t the same without Candorville. Please bring it back. 

Just to clarify for Chicago readers, I haven’t ended Candorville, it was cancelled by the Tribune. I have no control over whether Candorville appears in the Trib. If you’d like to see it return, e-mailing me won’t do it (although I appreciate it). If you’d like to make your feelings known to those who make the decisions, I would suggest you contact the Tribune directly and tell them what you think.It’s been an honor to appear in the pages of the Tribune for this long, and I hope those of you from Chicago will continue to follow Candorville online, perhaps in one of the other Chicago papers should they choose to pick up the strip, or in book form.

Visit Candorville!

Colin Powell, 2003:“It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil.”London’s Independent, 2007:

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days. The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq’s oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise.

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His victory was determined by electronic voting machines that are indirectly under his control, he’s consolidating the Media and the now virtually one-party state under his command, and he’s planning to assume special legislative powers – powers previously outside the domain of the executive branch. For those of us who’ve criticized the GOP’s determination to govern without Democratic input the past five+ years and their tendency to ignore or support the President’s legally-dubious domestic spying, it’s tempting to say he’s George Bush’s Liberal mirror image. But here’s one major distinction (among several): Bush and his party never tried to eliminate Presidential term limits. I think it’s necessary to say now that what we have in Venezuela is an incipient dictator.From Yahoo News:

A leading anti-U.S. voice in the world and in the vanguard of a shift to the left in Latin America, Chavez now wants to scrap presidential term limits and lead the OPEC nation for decades. 

Many of us agree with most of Chavez’s stated goals; chief among them the novel idea that Venezuelans should benefit more than foreign investors do from their own natural resources, and that the United States’ Monroe Doctrine (used by Presidents to justify numerous invasions and subversions of Latin American governments) is an anachronism. We agree with Chavez that the nations of Latin America have a right to self determination, they have a right to deny foreign exploitation of their own resources and to insist that the United States stay out of their political affairs. But we cannot turn a blind eye to the very real prospect that an even more fundamental right – the right of people to govern themselves – looks like it may be endangered in Venezuela.If Hugo Chavez grows a long beard, we’ll know it’s game over in Caracas.***EDIT: As a reader points out in the comments to this thread, the leaders of Chile and Brazil – whose acceptance has been credited in no small part to the popularit of Hugo Chavez – have so far demonstrated that socialist values are not incompatible with Democracy. Perhaps the teacher should start taking notes.

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OK, let me get this straight: If you criticize Sean Hannity and call for the impeachment of George W. Bush, that makes you an “Enemy of the State.” (I know, I know, Hannity and his kind confusing a man – whether himself or the President – with “the State” isn’t anything new).I don’t know what’s worse — the fact that Hannity chose to name a segment of his show after the favorite phrase of every dictator from Caesar to Hitler, the fact that anyone is actually watching that show, or the fact that I’m wasting my time commenting on it. At this point, commenting on the irresponsible behavior of the Fox News personalities may be no more necessary than pointing out how water is really, really wet.

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