L'Infame Why Are Newspapers Censoring This Strip? Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, August 30, 2007
Berkeley Breathed’s Opus cartoon usually runs in a few hundred newspapers, among them the Washington Post. Berkeley ’s home page had this note: “The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post.” What gives? It’s the new form of terror—media corporations’ terror, in these days of dwindling circulation and stock prices, that they might lose readers, any readers, over “sensitivity” questions. Never let humor, truth and the American way, whatever that is anymore, stand in the way of shareholder value. Here's the strip:
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
