(see update below)

Several complaints about different issues made their way to Stripes recently.

A cartoon drew the ire of at least three readers. Another reader was bugged by a headline. A passage in an article about gas prices butted up against yet another  reader's sense of good taste versus bad.

THE OFFENDING cartoon was from the "Non Sequitur" series that runs daily. It showed a chicken dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member which, according to the farmer in the frame, "only lays egg whites." Here it is, from the issue of Nov. 24:

Letter-writer Spc. Brian Strongreen called the cartoon "crass and tasteless" and said it "stirs up racial controversy and negative emotions, two things that are not conducive to a productive working environment...." This echoed a message from another servicemember who asked Stripes to make an apology for running the cartoon, and a third who sent a letter saying he was appalled.

Key members of the staff agreed with the criticism. Executive Editor Robb Grindstaff said: "I think this cartoon laid an egg." No question, the artist dreamed up an unhappy scenario. Depiction of the Ku Klux Klan in this way is offensive on its face. Young reporters are told early that jokes and funny remarks are out of place when there is a serious subject in play.

Still, I'm not sure I would have pulled the cartoon. If there had been any clear racist intent on the part of the artist, the call would have been easy. But it seems to me this was an attempt at humor solely -- even though it failed to tickle everybody's funny bone. I would hesitate to censor a cartoonist or columnist even when his or her work strikes the wrong chord.

UPDATE:

Cartoonist Wiley Miller has responded to criticism of his cartoon, after being notified by Executive Editor Grindstaff who, incidentally, says he does not find the cartoon offensive, just unfunny.

From Miller:

I would have bet just about anything that if there was one group of people in the world that was safe to openly ridicule, it would white supremacists.  Good thing I'm not a gambler.

What is truly baffling to me is just how anyone could be "offended" by this cartoon, much less call it "racist"... unless, of course, they're a member of the KKK. Then it would make sense. But seeing as how this cartoon is mocking white supremacists, these letters of complaint are stunning. Perhaps what's really needed is to open clinics across the country for the satirically challenged.

I'm sorry that these readers somehow misread the cartoon, but such are the vagaries of satire.

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A HEADLINE that ran alongside the image of the fossilized remains of a giant scorpion Nov. 22 led Maj. Dallas Powell of Kuwait to wonder: "I guess your editors are not smarter than a fifth-grader." The headline read: "Big bug -- Scientists find fossil of 8-foot insect." Well, as the letter-writer pointed out, a scorpion is an arachnid, not an insect. There's a difference, though perhaps not in everybody's mind, because other arachnids are such things as spiders and mites.

Anyway, the major was right. But in case you're wondering, the use of "bug" was appropriate -- it covers both insects and invertebrates, a class under which scorpions also fall.

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A LETTER from Mike O'Beirne of Stuttgart decried the fact that a story Nov. 22 about travel options open to servicemembers in Germany used the word butt three times in two paragraphs. This is what the article said:

"The main reason for this [the fact that driving is cheaper than other modes of travel] has to do, in a way, with butts.

"In a car, the cost of driving from one place to another is about the same regardless of how many butts are inside. In a plane each butt is charged to take a seat. The same goes for trains -- when they are running...."

Said O'Beirne: "I allow myself the comfort of assuming that the lapse in language quality is an example of something that simply slipped past your editors responsible for journalistic quality, and thus is not a harbinger of yet-unknown further Stars and Stripes written delights."

The letter is surely worded more elegantly than that passage from the article. There could have been better ways of describing the economics of travel without repeated references to a certain nether part of the body.(How's that for a euphemism?)

Still, I would commiserate more with the letter writer had language once considered gross not made its way so invasively into modern usage. In newspapers, magazines, movies, television and, especially, the Internet, blunt references to body parts ("you bet your xxx") and body functions ("I',m xxxxxx off!") make the Stripes' article use of "butt" seem tame.

You can be offended by this wave of questionable language, and I usually am, but it's too late to stem it. We can only watch our own language and hope some people notice the difference.