As practically everyone will agree, Al Capp was one of our truly great cartoonists.

Now, I wouldn't blame you one little bit for not clicking on that link, especially if you're a regular reader of this site — I linked to that glossary entry more than 500 times, by actual count. (No, I do have a life, thank you. A machine did the counting.) But if, by chance, you did click, you saw that as I use the word here, cartooning includes the script as well as the art. So to be a great cartoonist, Capp must have been a great writer.

An obvious mark of a great writer is that he has his characters say great things. And the Li'l Abner characters do say great things. One of my favorites is Mammy Yokum's famous observation that "Good is better than Evil because it's nicer."

Most people acknowledge that as a great line, but not everyone agrees why. A friend of mine once opined that it's great because it highlights the difficulty of coming up with an exact definition of the difference between the two. I say it's great because it very succinctly does define the difference between the two. "Because it's nicer" is precisely why good is better than evil.

Obviously, this means I don't believe in abstract evil, the idea that some things, like homosexuality and trafficking in magic based on non-mainstream religions, are evil just because they're evil. I don't see that either gayness (gaiety?) or its opposite is necessarily "nicer" than the other, so I don't see evil there. And I don't see magic from one source as being necessarily less nice than that from another.

And this can be applied to other things, too. For example, peace is better than war because it's nicer — which may seem obvious to you and me, but there are some folks, such as our "leaders" in Washington, who could stand to have it pounded into their heads. They see war and peace as a simple matter of policy, decided on by whose political star is in the ascendancy. Can't they see there's an objective way to choose between them? Peace is just plain nicer.

Not that there aren't legitimate reasons to wage war. For example, fighting back if your homeland is invaded by a foreign power. And — I can't think of any others. Well, that's one, anyway. Come to think of it, I suspect there might be some relationship between the two non-nice things mentioned here, evil and going to war in someone else's country.

Anyway, being alive is better (nicer) than being dead. And dropping bombs, which kill a lot more innocent people than legitimate targets no matter how smart the bombs are or how good the pilots think they are, isn't as nice as spending the money on education and health care.

Or booze and cigarettes, for that matter. Those aren't all that nice, but at least they're nicer than that.

— DDM