Annotated 19-10
Shanna’s not… WRONG about Ferris, really, but I found him a refreshing change of pace. Both Shanna and HR are Type A, high-ambition types, and even Carol is starting to act like one as she becomes more and more HR’s earthly surrogate. Ferris is happy and content just doing his job well and being part of something.
Shanna probably– not definitely, but probably– could have kept her cool if she’d just seen Carol passing in the hall or something. But when you’re on the lookout for something out of the ordinary and a giant clue gets dropped right in front of you, it’s really hard not to stare for the first few seconds.
But even if she kept her cool throughout, it wouldn’t matter all that much. As we’ll see, Carol is paranoid enough already that any unauthorized presence in her building is cause for deep suspicion.
By the bye, I think most readers missed the important aspect of Carol once being a member of a (fictional) “moderate-conservative-independent” political group in a traditionally very liberal college, though maybe that’s on me and I should’ve gone into further detail. Young Carol, while an idealist, resisted just identifying with one particular cult of thought and calling it a day, something I also try to do, which makes her current circumstances resonate with me more. (But remember as well that this story was published in the Obama era, when there was a lot more talk from numerous idealists about bridging political divides.)
Gotta love that awkward wave in the last panel.
Alt-text is also on point: that wig is really not a good look for Shanna.
Gotta disagree with you there. I like the wigs look, it’s got a very “Wicked Witch/In my off hours I rock out” vibe, which works for me. Maybe she just reminds me of a girl I knew.
Heading a Moderate-conservative-independent alliance in a liberal college is kinda interesting, isn’t it?
I mean, it *doesn’t* really suggest “walks her own way” at all.
It actually suggest she’s a contrarian as well as a reactionary, because in the US context, “moderate” specifically precludes any kind of really liberal stance.
So she built an alliance *against* the liberals.
Veeeery alt-right thing to do.
So, basically, she was a nasty piece of work, and at some point suffered toxicity overload and flip-flopped.
Something we occasionally see from that kind of people, because the cognitive dissonance of doubling down on literal evil can become more than some people can cope with.
This makes her going to jail for shooting HR a lot more bearable, really.
She did choose a bad road, but didn’t see it through, which I guess is better than the alternative, but also isn’t something anyone should expect a parade for.
Not failing on the very lowest bar in existence does not a good person make.
“Moderate” means different things to different people, especially as the Overton window shifts.
This page was published in 2012. Carol’s pretty young, so let’s say her college political career began four years prior to that, in 2008. (I realize the events of Guilded Age don’t really line up with the number of years it took to publish it, but bear with me.) 2008 was the same year that the term “alt-right” was invented and some time before it became a political force for the mainstream to contend with, especially on college campuses.
Most of the college activists I met were convinced that their politics, whatever those politics were, would bring about the best possible world for everyone. The nasty pieces of work tended not to be activists of any stripe. I s’pose I could imagine a cynical collegian making a name for herself with an eye toward getting a job at Fox News, but that seems unlikely to have been Carol’s career path.
Ultimately, this is a pretty lightly sketched part of GA, you’re the reader and free to read as you see fit, and I appreciate that you’ve put some thought into the interpretation. My attitude, for what it’s worth, is that Carol’s story is stronger if she was always inclined toward helping people before meeting HR. If it still disturbs you what interests she aligned with in pursuit of that goal, I’d suggest viewing her college years not as a counterexample to her later road-to-hell-paved-with-good-intentions, but as a preview of it.
I always saw her as the type who *really* wants to help *everyone* but doesn’t take the time to really examine what others are saying or doing as long as she’s told it’s to “help”.
The left these days is championed by socialist Mao/Stalin wannabes, while the right is made up of fascist Mussolini/Caesar fans and the only thing they like to work together on is suppressing any non-totalitarian point of view. Carol fits right in with all the other young idealists I know who think they can somehow manage to pick out the “best” attributes of both kinds of tyranny and somehow come up with a system that isn’t awful. It’s not that they’re bad people, it’s just that they don’t realise they’ve fallen into a framing error because they’ve never been exposed to any other points of view.
Meanwhile, if you’re a “Progressive” you hate them because they actually like some “Conservative” ideas and if you’re a “Conservative” you also hate them because they don’t automatically reject all “Progressive” ideas out of hand. And the moderates just sit there and hate themselves, deep down, because they have this feeling that they *should* be able to do something that’s actually significantly better, but no matter what blend of ideas they pull from the left and the right it just never quite works out.