Found it! The comic you seek is “Dan Rather” (1992).

While I was looking through the archives, I also found this strip from 1990.

You write: “But as recently pointed out by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his keynote speeches at TREXPO West, we actually live in the most criminally violent period in American history. The murder rate is down, not because Americans have stopped trying to kill each other but because emergency medicine has advanced ….” This is not true. If you check the FBI UCR, since 1992, violent crime rates per 100,000 population have fallen every single year except for small upticks in 2005 and 2006. (The increase those two years never brought the rate above where it was in 2003.) Absolute numbers of violent crimes committed decreased every year except for 2001, 2005, and 2006, even as population increased. The figures include not only murder and non-negligent homicide, but also attempted murder, all forms of aggravated assault, and forcible rape, so advances in ER procedures and technology would make no difference at all. Why are you repeating a claim that could have easily been proven false by spending a couple minutes checking easily-read tables on the FBI’s website?

Francois,

Where did you get the image for the “New School Version” from?

Bob,

I did, actually, understand the metaphor. The problem is I don’t like it, and I sometimes try to use flat-footedly literal readings to point out implications of metaphors that I don’t like.

I don’t mind “vulgar” language, and I certainly don’t mind giving William a shout-out for a brave and eloquent speech in front of the world, especially at such a time.

What does trouble me is metaphors that tend to identify courage with masculine sexual anatomy that more than half the population doesn’t have, because it identifies courage with masculinity (and in particular with an especially obnoxious form of male sexual aggression, i.e. proudly exposing your man-bits to an assembled crowd). And, contrapositively, it also suggests that there’s something wrong with not having balls — by identifying not having balls with being cowardly. That kind of metaphor points up irrelevant or nonexistent features in those who get the “praise,” and simultaneously excludes a lot of people (like, say, Betsy or Celia) who actually are both very brave and also literally ball-less.

It’s particularly troubling when the tenacity, endurance, and courage of that majority, in the face of suffering, terror, or death, have historically been, and often currently are, systematically blanked-out, denied, disparaged, or ridiculed and mocked (as silly, worthless, sanctimonious, or “bitchy”) — mainly because those forms of tenacity, endurance, and courage were and are practiced by people with no balls, and also because they were and are typically practiced outside of antisocial institutions devoted to killing foreigners or beating up demographically “suspect” locals — institutions such as the hollering, chest-thumping uniformed thugs trying to intimidate and assault their way through the streets in St. Paul. (And it’s largely from the vernacular talk within those military and paramilitary outfits, suffused as they are with a cock-swinging macho “warrior” mindset, that metaphors about things like balls of steel have generally entered our language.)

There are lots of good, visceral metaphors for courageous defiance — showing spine, having guts; even “courage” is one (etymologically, it means having heart). So why not use one of those metaphors, which would probably have worked just as well in the rhetorical context, and which don’t have the same sexual implications?

Thanks for spread the word on all this.

Just one thing. William Gillis’s address at the press conference was marvelous. But what have his testicles got to do with anything? And where in the video did he flash them? Seems to me like if he did, that would have been just rude, not to mention distracting from the main point.

Shawn,

I’m definitely up for some brainstorming and strategizing. Count me in.

The new movie may, for all I know, be part of the reason for the timing of the close. Every new Star Trek product that comes out actually requires some fairly expensive changes to the attraction, and in particular the large Star Trek future-history timeline that they have between the entrance and the two rides. Prequels are the worst, since they can’t just add more material on the end, but rather must start the whole thing over from scratch in order to add material at the beginning. If they were already thinking about closing the attraction, they may well have decided that they would be unlikely to make up the cost of the rewriting and retconning before the time came to pull the plug.

I’m just glad I got my “Romulan Ale — Legalize It!” t-shirt before they shut down.