It’s pretty easy to rip on The Family Circus – at a glance, it does appear to have been running the same dozen gags over and over again for the last 114 years. However, a number of Amazon.ca readers and reviewers truly get the genius of the strip
Bil Keane hold up the mirror to our culture to see the jumbled scribble of the words of an era of McCarthyism, Watergate, Iran Contra, and Monica Lewinsky, and asks us to look into the dark well of our souls and indeed ask ourselves “What *does* this say?”
All the more poignant for it, the real questions that show the rotting core of the post-modern political paradigm are asked in the guise of children, their innocence unstained by the real and ideological bloodshed of our new moral relativism. As Dolly says, “PJ started eating his cupcake before I could peel the skin off it.” Indeed. These children consume the sweetness of life without peeling the skin of evil off of it, because in their innocence, they know no better, but to the elder generation, the horror is amply evident, and like Keane, we pine for the carefree and pure days of America’s youth.
Of course, as with all great art, not everyone understands. Here is the lone 1 star review:
At first glance you see a single panel with a crude drawing and what appears to be a very poor attempt at a pun or a strained malapropism. You know, an “Out of the mouths of babes/Kids say the darnedest” sort of thing.
If this is what you take from Keane’s work, I commend you. I am in earnest because in attempting to divine the author’s true intent, both the reader and author must inevitably fail.
In his work, Keane addresses the eternal duality of Man and the epic struggle of good vs. evil. However, neither good nor evil exists independently of the other leaving what the Greeks called (italics here) epikappnoai. Okay, maybe it was pre colonial Hawai’ians.
The result is that the sentiment expressed would be better expressed by a blank page.
Philistine.
