— But what this injustice consists of is usually not elaborated. If one presses for details (and this is already a breach of etiquette), the reasons offered are often tendentious. The term privilege is used not to make a case but rather to convey a mood. Why is there so much political opportunity to be had by deploying this mood, as a weapon? What accounts for our susceptibility to being cowed by it, or indeed to indulging it ourselves, this fuzzy indignation? In particular, we need to account for the fact that accusations of privilege are most prominent among…well, the privileged. (For example, Ivy League students.) Hold that thought.

— These early cartoons present a rich phenomenology of what it is like to be an embodied agent in a world of artifacts and inexorable physical laws. The tendency of these things to thwart the human will is exaggerated, and through exaggeration a certain truth gets brought forward. As the stand-up comics say, only the truth is funny. In depicting the heteronomy (being ruled by something other than yourself) that the world of objects inflicts on us, the slapstick sufferings of Donald Duck acknowledge, and thereby seem to affirm, the human condition as it is, beneath the various idealisms that would transport us out of that condition.