Amitai Etzioni: You Need Cartoons to Read? - Media on The Huffington Post

I recall working for the US Park Service in Skagway, Alaska, in the archaeology of the Gold Rush "city" it once was like Chaplin's "Gold Rush". About 600 residents are inundated by waves of tourists, similar to the "canals" of people, Claude Levi-Strauss once described Fire Island, NY in the summer. There, next to the riverboat Captain Moore log cabin (moved a short way) that his wife, a Tlingit native and son lived, we found a small newspaper "cartoon" lead plate. Once upon a time, I learned about typesetting in public school. On the small plate (in reverse, so inked printed right) were two boys watching another boy go by who was dressed like the proverbial "Little Lord Fauntleroy". They remarked at in the caption, there goes who or what that never had known what it was like to go barefoot. I thought an interesting "cartoon" perhaps, speculating an offhand reference to the barefooted Tlingit who carried a great number of supplies up the Chilkoot and White Pass trails, when a minimum of a ton, literally, of supplies were required of those crossing the border into Canada, a border that had been recently determined, internationally. Moore, promised 200 acres, thought he was working for Canada when he "found" the trail up over the mountains into the Yukon! I think it is amazing what levels of meaning are supplied and how attention is focused and re-focused in this "brave new medium" which, like the "wizard of Oz" also has someone and agents behind "the curtain" of appearances. It does make the traditional print medium seem more secure. I for one, having read one of the dense sociological works of Mr. Etzioni, probably out of the Whole Earth Catalog recommendation of Stewart Brand, ("The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes") have been reminded that books are written by people who are alive and to meet many of them, like here on the Huffington Post, is a thrill, a democratic thrill if I might use that word in another sense than party, almost like a gazillion seminars. Amitai Etzioni: You Need Cartoons to Read? - Media on The Huffington Post