Yesterday I noticed this moderately funny Tom Tomorrow cartoon mocking bloggers who support the war in Iraq who face no threat more daunting than an attack of carpal tunnel syndrome. His point (gratingly obvious): If you’re so goddam brave, why the hell don’t you sign up and get in on the fighting?
This blogger who calls himself Lt. Smash (an actual Gulf War vet, he says) finds the strip odiously unfunny — and writes to ol’ Tom, calling him to task and posting excerpts of his email exchange at his blog. From there the comments attached to his post run on for page after page. First the righties come out, then the lefties come out and before long every drip of rhetoric imaginable in regards to this cartoon is squeezed from the lemon.
And, naturally, I realized after I’d been reading those comments for a half hour: this is what’s alternately cool and terrible about the Internet: on one hand, every faction in this debate has a say. On the other hand, everybody involved in the debate spent time they could’ve been devoting to more productive tasks dissecting the merits of a mildly amusing comic strip.
Can’t help wondering precisely what was accomplished by all this.