The only comic strip I read every day until a week or so ago was Dilbert by Scott Adams. It reminded me of the old Doonesbury. Both had an incredibly good ear that enabled them to come up with perfect zinger for the last panel. And nobody covered the territory Dilbert did: the people in the cubicles at work and all the b.s. that people in corporate settings put up with every day. You were almost guaranteed a good laugh each morning.
So, then Adams goes rogue and puts out some YouTube video that has a bunch of totally racist screeds and this is the most classic cancellation situation. By the end of the weekend, he had lost about two-thirds of his 2000 or so newspapers that carried his strip. They got one line out of him while all this was happening: "By Monday I won't have a paper left."
Today, the Washington Post had an article about the whole business. It picked up on earlier stuff, including a shorter piece in the Times. The line they took was that he had been playing on the edge for quite a while and now he finally went over. He had introduced a black character and apparently had started presenting some unacceptable stuff around him. There was more, too.
I suppose I took some minor notice that he had been pushing the edge, but I guess I didn't want to see it. I just liked his strip and anticipated what great punchline he would come up with in that last panel. And right to the end, he usually did.
It turns out that his politics had become increasingly right-wing. He was a Trumper. I've seen this happen to people. Something starts to go somewhere inside them and their resentment pushes them to go off the right-wing deep end. Usually, however, they really obviously lose their cool. He didn't--at least from my standpoint.
People have come back from this kind of fall. But all the signs so far are that if he isn't doubling down, he's making no effort to apologize, at the least, and do the required public penance testifying that he's seen the light. There have been plenty of cases where people have pulled this kind of stunt and saved themselves, but I don't think he's interested in that or that he even cares.
Why? Maybe he's made so much money over these bountiful years that he doesn't need to work anymore. He put out two books at least, he was honored with awards from his peer cartoonists, and I figure he did well on those books and other projects. I'll keep wondering, though, why he decided to do this right now. I can't believe he thought he'd get away with the stuff he put out on the video.
The bottom line is: what about me? I just miss every morning,as I now pass the comics, an unusually sharp source of a light moment with material drawn from the workplace, something I studied in college and something I've learned something about in the various workplaces I've inhabited over the years.
I was enough of an enthusiast that I went to hear Adams at FOSE, the Federal Office Systems Exhibition, more than a few years ago. It was a trade show for government people in DC at the Convention Center that mostly was filled with salespeople pushing IT systems and related stuff. He did about an hour's turn before an audience of a few hundred people. He was funny and he seemed to enjoy showing some strips that he had never published because they went over the edge.
Not that I expected his current imbroglio based on this presentation. I could see how he couldn't put this stuff in the strip in the paper, but if it had been as bad as his video, they wouldn't have let him present this at the show and he probably would have self-destructed all those years ago.
His ear for corporate-speak was superb and the villainous yet comic personalities of the boss and the super-boss were right on point. He said in the FOSE presentation that his favorite character was Wally, the bald-headed guy with a single hair who was always figuring out how to get along without doing any real work.
I guess he achieved the goal of being Wally--except Wally was funny.
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