Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Farewell to Scott Adams


     Seventeen years is a long time for a cartoon to hang on your wall. Or door, now. It's shifted over the years. But that's how I roll. I'm looking at a photo of a woebegone beagle that has been tacked over my desk for at least 30. "Terrifying Effect of Unprofessional Environment" is the caption. No idea if the point was ever conveyed to its intended audience in the decades it was displayed in my office downtown. 
     As for the above Scott Adams cartoon, as someone frequently chided by readers, this one spoke to me, and my truism that most people who offer corrections are themselves mistaken.
     That last panel, where the irked reader shifts into false accusations of hating minorities, never really factored into the joke. Now it seems ominous. Oh, I knew Adams had become an increasingly strident right wing asshat. But I try to separate the work from the person. Wagner was a jerk too. So what?
     That all blew up last week when the cartoonist went on a tirade in the wake of a poll that purports to show that about half of Black people disagree with the statement, "It's okay to be white." Which itself is fairly meaningless, first because the poll taker, Rasmussen, has a reputation as being biased and inaccurate, presenting questions in a way to shore up right wing talking points. Only a hater or an idiot or both would put any kind of significance on that.
     Because even if the poll were accurate, what would it mean? The question is vague enough, and the key missing data is how white people would respond to a similar question. One essence of racism is to fault a particular group for exhibiting flaws that you yourself possess. People like Adams, the boo-hoo-white-people-have-it-so-bad crowd, think they're refuting racism, when in fact they're manifesting it.
     Anyway, the result was Adams being cashiered at hundreds of major newspapers, including, eventually, the Chicago Tribune. Which is not a particular loss to cartooning — "Dilbert" had long passed its sell-by date, particularly after COVID stripped offices of their workers. I can't vouch for how Adams reacted to the pandemic, since I stopped reading it years ago. But if he kept to desk-bound wage slaves sparring with their nincompoop bosses, well, that's like those single "Grin and Bear It" gags the Sun-Times runs where men in fedoras sit at bars and gripe. Times change. I used to love the comics. 
     I spoke with Adams once, now that I think of it. He did some strip I really liked — not the one above — and I thought I'd try to get the original. I have drawings from everyone from Matt Groening to Bill Mauldin, James Thurber to Mort Walker, Joe Martin to Pat Brady. Somehow, cartoonists seem more approachable — I'd never ask John McPhee for a manuscript page. Maybe because of their association with journalism. 
    Adams was nice, but explained that he doesn't actually draw "Dilbert," just assembles it on a computer screen from stock images. Which made me shiver, and think of how Charles Schulz dismissed the thought of somebody else lettering his wildly remunerative strip with, "That would be like Arnold Palmer hiring someone to do his putts." 
     All people are biased, by the way, all people of all colors and religions. Every single one of us, to a greater or lesser degree. A person can recognize that without falling weeping onto a sofa, clutching at oneself, as Adams did. The mistake he and those like him make is that they consider being called out on their biases a form of oppression. They think they're victims, suffering from the category error belief that squelching hate speech violates their First Amendment rights. Which might carry some truth were the government doing it. But there is no amendment to the constitution requiring newspapers to run the cartoons of clueless bigots. I decided 17 years is plenty, gently pulled the cartoon off my door so as not to damage the paint, tore it into small pieces and tossed it in the trash.



19 comments:

  1. Adams realizes he stepped in it, and he's trying to (kinda) back pedal that he really meant something more benign, and people are too stupid to understand his brilliance. It is not working. (Oh, fix this. "He did some stripped ..." and Scott Adams in the buff is a place I cannot, will not go. Thank you.)

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  2. Yeah I removed Dilbert from my daily reading bookmarks a few years ago after he fell under the spell of Trump, and haven’t missed it one iota. Replaced it with Ruben Billing’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix.

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  3. I used to have a Dilbert cartoon posted right above my monitor. I took it down and threw it away some years ago. I don't think I tore it up. I should have. Adams has been an asshat for a long time.

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  4. The first amendment is overrated. Sure, we should be allowed to express our opinions but that is not the same as being allowed to posit false and destructive rhetoric. Outlets like Facebook and Twitter have made a sport out of it.
    The damage Trump caused with his Big Lie has set our country back decades. Only now are his vehicles of hate (e.g. Fox, etc.) grudgingly acknowledging the errors of their ways. Will Adams follow suit? Jim Jordan? Kari Lake? Nah.
    The horse already left the barn.

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    1. disagree about your statement about free speech. Of course they are dead now, but tell that to the people who were deported to Russiain 1919. Among them was Emma Goldman. No doubt not many people know about her. She was 17 when she came her. She had heard about the Hay Market Riot. It was the main thing that turned her into an anarchist. She was deported for speaking against the draft. She was married to an American. At the time if you married an American you were considered a citizen. They got divorced and he disspeared. I am not sure how she got to buried in Chicago. But she is burined next to the hay market rioters that were killed or hung.

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  5. And yet, I still marvel when people willfully implode their careers in such a way.

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    1. Easier to blow up your career when you already have $50 million in your pocket.

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    2. Bingo. So another zillionaire Trumper commits career suicide? Boo fucking hoo, and tough noogies for Adams. He won't starve.

      When Dilbert made its debut in 1989, I was a wage slave and earning peanuts...chained to a desk, working for asshat bosses and working with asshat colleagues, calling deadbeats on the phone all day. Maybe that was the reason I found Dilbert to be lame and irrelevant...like so many other unamusing comic strips that have appeared in recent decades. I stopped reading the strip almost immediately.

      Not all strips resonate with all readers, all the time. I was able to ignore such timeworn characters as Mary Worth, Brenda Starr, Judge Parker...and the folks in Apartment 3-G. And, yes, even Doonesbury. I gave up on Trudeau decades ago. He just stopped being funny. Or maybe it was just me.

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  6. I have long thought that Dilbert was the most crudely drawn comic ever to hit the big time, the kind of thing a high school sophomore would do a few times for the school paper until the editor told him to find another creative outlet. And it never got better. Shouldn't 30 years of practice lead to artistic growth? Now I learn that he didn't even draw the thing, but put it together with copy and paste.
    I'm not proud of this, but I watched his video explaining what he was "really" saying. It was an exercise in mocking how devious the media is, how everyone is too dense to understand his analytic genius, and how laughable criticism of his statements are. He is a victim and has been cancelled. At one point he was saying yes I'm racist, but that's a good thing, reflecting the nature of existence, and you are too dumb to realize I'm the only person who is honest when I say black people are a hate group. The obliviousness of it was stunning.

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  7. I will continue looking at Dilbert online to see if Adams makes any reference to his own stupidity in the next few weeks.
    I did like the black box the Trib used instead of his cartoon on Monday. I really wish they would bring back Non Sequitur, as they dumped that from the Sunday comics because the artist snuck in a "Fuck Trump comment one Sunday". That however was totally appropriate as Trump is a wretched & useless pile of shit!

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  8. As it turns out, the slogan for the poll on is a bit less meaningless than it seems. But it's designed to be somewhat innocuous. Judd Legum in his Popular Information newsletter (https://popular.info/p/is-it-ok-to-be-white) summarizes the issue well enough.

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  9. As I understand it, "It's okay to be white" is a phrase that's been adopted by white supremacists. So the innocent-sounding poll is a bit like asking Proud Boys about "Black Lives Matter" or modern Germans about "Arbeit Macht Frei." It's not an innocent question where the response can be taken at face value, out of context.

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    1. Exactly. It's part of a victimization narrative.

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  10. Although his politics are far to the right of my own, Clint Eastwood has always been one of my favorite actors and directors, but as his Harry Callahan quote goes in "Magnum Force," "A man's got to know his limitations." I can enjoy his films without buying into his politics as well.

    Similarly, I enjoyed "Dilbert" for many years, and read a couple of Scott Adams' earlier books maybe a couple of decades back. His writing always struck me as very precise, saying exactly what he wanted to say, and landing his points perfectly; I got the impression that he had rewritten and revised heavily before committing his words to print. I try to do the same thing when writing anything for consumption by others, mainly in comment fora or Internet discussion groups (I'm not into Facebook et al), rereading and proofreading until I get it just the way I want it.

    That said, I can't find a way to put the same filters on things that I say out loud. I wouldn't last three days on the radio, probably getting booted with profuse apologies for popping off about someone or something on the air from which I could not recover. I don't know if it would be for a joke that didn't land well, or a poorly-expressed political view, but once it's out there, I'd be done. You can't un-ring the bell.

    Perhaps I'm slow on the uptake, but I only recently starting noticing some MAGA-grade commentary creeping into the strips. The artwork or style of drawing, computerized as it is, never mattered much to me (some strips such as "Brewster Rockit" practically revel in their assembled-from-parts look), but the writing is what counts: it's either funny or it isn't; you either relate to it or you don't. As a cubicle rat for many decades, I saw Dilbert's relevance to my own life for many years, but in retirement, not so much, and now Scott Adams seems to have put the coda on his own career. He could have chugged along into the sunset as so many other past-their-prime strips are doing, but chose to implode it instead via a different medium that he probably should have stayed out of.

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    1. I have always liked the Eastwood comment. I know there a lot of people who think his Dirty Harry movies are fascist, But who does't like seeing the bad guys get it. He is not the only detective that has cut corners in movies or tv. There aren't too many Sherlock Holmes types in movies or tv. One of my other favorite quotes is from Harry Bosch of the Michael Connolly novels. Everybody counts or nobody counts.

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  11. I thought "Dilbert" was funny, and sometimes still is, but Adams is letting his toxic views leach into the strip. He recently introduced a Black character who "identifies as white," hurr hurr hurr. That plus the sour view of women he's always had (the women in the strip are angry, abusive, demanding and often violent) is making the strip correspondingly less funny.

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  12. The unintended consequnce here is that newspapers around the USA will lose subscribers from on side to protest to the dropping of the comic series. On the other hand, if there was no response by the papers a similar reaction would have occcured by the other side.

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  13. Time to revive Wiley and Non-Sequitur from Purgatory. Good riddance to Dilbert.

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