THIS MODERN WORLD

Or not.

I had a friend once, who fell for that street hustle in which the mark is left holding what he believes to be a brick of cash wrapped in newspaper, in exchange for which he has given the con man something of value as “temporary” collateral — in my friend’s case a camera. When the newspaper is unwrapped, of course, it turns out to be … carefully wrapped, currency-sized strips of newspaper.

The Politifact “Lie of the Year” is something like that. What the Ryan plan proposed handing you would have been called Medicare, and you might even have believed that it was — until you unwrapped it and found that you’d been left holding an entirely worthless package.

You can cut up old newspapers and bundle them up and tell the mark that they’re cash. But that doesn’t make them legal tender. And the Ryan plan, though still using the name “Medicare,” would not have been Medicare.

Katha remembers Christopher.

For some reason Paypal is not sending me notifications, so I just noticed that a bunch of you responded to the post below about donations. Many thanks to each of you! That kind of support means a lot.

Sometime during the academic year 1978-79 — I don’t remember the exact dates — I went on a school trip from Iowa to the East Coast, making the basic tourist run from Washington DC to New York City. When I managed to carve out a little unsupervised time in New York, I did what any lifelong Mad magazine fan from the midwest would do, and made a beeline to 485 MADison Avenue where, for reasons that befuddle me to this day, they not only let me past the reception desk, but gave me a thorough tour of the place. I even met the legendary founder and publisher of Mad (not to mention E.C. Comics), William M. Gaines, who was probably, and I mean this quite sincerely, the celebrity I most wanted to meet in New York City. Being quite the junior shutterbug, I snapped a few photos on my Nikkormat, which I found today going through some boxes in my basement — the photos, not the camera — and thought, that’s something that needs to be on the internet. So here you go: William M. Gaines in the old Mad offices, being impossibly gracious to a 17 year old from Iowa.

I am slowly rebuilding the archives in a more user-friendly format — for now, the entire year 2011 is accessible again. I’m planning to get twenty-plus years’ worth of work back up over the next few months, and for a brief while toyed with the idea of making the older stuff available only as a subscriber premium (given that the internet has more or less killed the anthology-publishing part of my career). I ultimately decided that would be more trouble than it was worth, and more likely to annoy readers than anything else, but while it’s on my mind I’ll make the quick pitch: if you’d like to toss a few bucks in the kitty in support of the work I put into the cartoon and the blog over the course of the year, there’s a big yellow button over to the left. (Or if you’d prefer, you can buy a signed print, or a poster, or a t-shirt!)