Das Kompany Piknik

See it here.

Class warfare in the guise of a U-Stor-It company picnic.

U-Stor-It is a bloated organization, typical of the kind controlled by the landed gentry. A street-wise blue collar worker could run an entire storage facility with as few as 5 people to watch the site 24x7x365, while hiring janatorial/landscaping and security workers part-time. But U-Stor-It is an aristocratic corporation, with at least 2 levels of management, and dozens of workers. I assume management is playing a shell game with Cayman Island accounts while siphoning off the benefits and retirement accounts of its workers.

Until the scam is complete, the company picnic affords management the opportunity to feign solidarity with the lumpenproletariat, if only for 45 minutes. The working class must feed itself at this event, but management provides booze and entertainment, the opiate for this particular mass. Management even allows controlled expressions of class anger, in the form of carefully-packaged protest songs and the opportunity to toss a pie in the face of one's superior.

But management studiously avoids actual solidarity, interaction, and expressions of equality between the classes. They ostentatiously walk about wearing T-shirts emblazoned with institutional crests of higher education, lording their superiority over the working class drones. The fact that the T-shirt is brand-new only further highlights Mr. Sheldrake's affluence in contrast to his minions; he can afford to splurge on a brand new T-shirt for every day of the week.

Joy and Burl represent the salt-of-the-earth blue collar worker, surviving by their own wits rather than advanced education. Burl and Joy are unique among the working class, however, in that they refuse to be distracted by the beer and music. They use the picnic as an opportuity for revolution, actively seeking out confrontation with the management who dare to walk among them.

Joy is the passive-aggressive revolutionary. She refuses to recognize the affluent world of privelege to which she is not invited. She asks if Mr. Sheldrake is enrolled at Harvard, pretending to confuse Harvard with a correspondance school or a local JC offering continuing education classes.

Burl, on the other hand, is directly confrontational. He counters with his own shirt, which aggressively challenges the usefulness of a college education and openly mocks those who have paid the steep price to obtain a 4-year degree. The unspoken, but clear intimation is that an education in the school of hard knocks is just as useful.

Burl is also unwilling to play the subserviant, fawning role management envisions for him. Instead, he counters his boss' coy admission that he attended Harvard with the brusque reality that he isn't enrolled now, clearly hinting that Burl has overcome, through hard work and determination, any advantages a Harvard education may once have given Mr. Sheldrake (though, of course, his deferential addition of the word "boss" belies the truth of this belief).

Burl is so aggressive in his class pride, so antagonistic towards the over-educated management class, that it's not a stretch of the imagination to assume that, were this panel set in Vietnam, it would end with Burl fragging his college-educated Lieutenant.

The following marginalia have been approved by management:

• Harvard's crest is a mushroom or a jellyfish, apparently.
• The dancer whose crotch is strategically obscured by Joy's beer can is extremely limber. Either that or double-jointed.
  
• Lindberger?