Carson Burch ’27 is considering a government major. He likes reading about historical and current events, as well as dinosaurs. Contact him at ceburch@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
I would like to discuss media near and dear to my heart, beginning with the Sunday comics.
When I was a child, my dad would begin every Sunday by reading the Virginian-Pilot, our local newspaper down in Chesapeake. When he was done, he would give me the comics section to read — in fact, some of my first memories of reading anything were of reading the Sunday comics. “Peanuts,” “Garfield,” “Zits” and more were all parts of my childhood I am acutely familiar with (“Calvin and Hobbes” is something I also love, but I can’t say I grew up with it as our newspaper never carried it in my lifetime). To this day I still love what would be published, and have even picked up a few new favorites: the black comedy of “Pearls Before Swine” is something that didn’t resonate with me as a kid but gets more than a few laughs out of me now.
Why do I bring this up? Well, whenever I talk to people my age and I mention this staple of my childhood, I find that no one has a similar memory. In fact, I have only met one person at this college who even knows what a Sunday comics page is. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember; when “The Peanuts Movie” came out in 2015, I recall my dad saying he read something about the creators being worried it would fail because kids back in those days didn’t know who Charlie Brown was (a situation which is surely worse now). I even felt a small amount of joy to see the football gag parodied in a cartoon headlining an opinion piece in this newspaper about Joe Rogan, simply because the football gag was an iconic part of my childhood that I find an increasing number of people in my demographic don’t recognize.
I notice this trend with a lot of things. I’m a big sucker for older media, but a lot of the things I personally like and enjoy are things that many of my peers are unaware of. Another good example is with “Star Trek”: I’m a big fan of the original series and its spin-offs, but when I began getting into the franchise in middle school, all of my peers had either never heard of it or assumed it was a rip-off of “Star Wars” (it’s not, at all). Likewise, a lot of my references to older movies are ones that people my age often don’t get.
This may sound Boomer-esqe, but I think it’s kind of a shame.
There’s a lot of value to be found in this kind of stuff. Take “Pearls Before Swine”; sometimes (more often than not) the images form a cheap joke about censorship on the comics page, some facet of our cultural life or a pun. This by itself is fine: the jokes are often funny. However, occasionally, the comic will transcend this and include something poignant and emotionally resonant — something that hits even harder when you don’t expect it.
This point is even better-illustrated with the older “Star Trek” shows. Many aspects of them have not aged well, but on the whole these shows still constitute good television. “Deep Space Nine” is one of my favorite TV shows because it can be funny, serious and poignant ranging from episode to episode, and that makes it a joy to watch and rewatch. Likewise, “The Next Generation” managed to produce highly entertaining television which retains relevance to our own day, with Captain Picard’s speech in the episode “The Drumhead” both being a brilliant piece of writing and also immensely relevant. I’d even go so far as to say his warning on the dangers to a free society posed by demagogues pretending to be heroes saving the public from immense threats is, if anything, more true now than when it was written in the early 1990s.
So, with this in mind, dear reader, what do I advise? Try checking out a piece of old or old-fashioned media. Not only is it a good idea to be more literate about things you’ll see referenced in our popular culture in the present, but you may find something of a diamond that shines as bright, if not brighter, than what you could find today. Just ask your parents or grandparents about things they like, or at least did when they were your age. It may set you down a path to discovering something you’ll fall in love with.
