The cartoonist is bob, whose full name is Bob Eckstein, and the one-panel gag cartoon in question is a very recent one (from the May 2025 issue of Funny Times) and a pointedly topical one — and I greatly admire it:
bob’s lunch money cartoon; the cartoon — showing a middle-aged businessman who’s been somehow, absurdly, extorted for his lunch money online (just the idea of such a person having lunch money is funny) — would be entertaining in any circumstance, but in a world in which the US president is attempting to use online declarations to extort services and actions from various institutions (universities, law firms, media outlets, businesses), it’s painfully relevant
(For information about everything bob, see his official website)
The flip side of extortion is appeasement. So we are to assume that the businessman somehow appeased that bully by giving up his lunch money. Rather than fighting back — though it’s not clear to me what the online equivalent of punching the bully in the nose would be (but maybe Harvard is showing us the way). In any case, he probably believes be has gained, as Neville Chamberlain once thought, peace for his time. If so, he is doomed; today the lunch money, tomorrow the check at République. It never ends, it just gets worse, he’s on the hook, the poor sap.
So, to come: the English verbs extort and appease, with some lining-out of their meanings in detail, plus an excursus on Peace for / in our time.
(I know, I know, you let a linguist in the house, and suddenly you’re getting Little Lectures on Language. Life is perilous. Just be thankful I’m sparing you a gender and sexuality take on bob’s cartoon. There’s always a language point, in whatever, and there’s always a gender and sexuality take too, you just have to know how to look.)
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