As you may have heard, cartoonist Scott Adams Archie Bunkerish views on race has gotten his comic strip Dilbert dropped from newspapers right and left. Well, maybe middle-of-the-road and left. A fellow cartoonist, Clay Jones, responded with the above op-ed page cartoon. Of course, these day such cartoons aren't just found in endangered species-listed newspapers, but on social media as well. Which reminds me, this isn't Jones first comment on the issue, but that first attempt, as fellow cartoonist John Buss reminds us, got...
...banned on Facebook.
(Where I found Buss' cartoon, incidentally.)
We can't pretend the past didn't happen and we need to see it in context, not forget history but see us as reborn with different attitudes.
ReplyDeleteInteresting response, Andrew. Has Scott Adam's fame--or shall I say his infamy--reached Australia?
DeleteHi, Kirk!
ReplyDeleteThanks for showing us the latest executions on the political cartooning circuit, good buddy. It is a means of expression that I have paid very little attention to throughout my life, possibly because cartoons produced by conservatives upset me so much. Perhaps I need to embrace the fact that:
All Cartoons Matter.
The day is coming when a candidate for high office will be depicted wearing a KKK hood and brandishing an AK, or am I already late on that one?
Have a safe and happy weekend, good buddy Kirk!
Shady, you didn't mention Dilbert creator Scott Adams in your comment. Are you aware of the controversy swirling about him?
DeleteAnyway, the only reason I brought up Clay Jones brief banishment from Facebook is that I really wanted to show the first, and the more provocative, of his two cartoons addressing the Adams controversy, but that one was yanked, and I couldn't find it anywhere else online. So I resorted to John Buss' clever way of getting it back on Facebook. If you squint closely at the cartoon Mark Zuckerburg's hand, you'll see a drawing of Dilbert with a Klan's hood.
The consensus seems to be that Clay Jones is a victim of a bot programmed to take out racist imagery. Unfortunately, a bot being a bot, it can't distinguish true racist imagery from satirical racist imagery. In other words, it thought Jones was endorsing rather than criticizing Scott Adam's racism. The latter seems rather obvious to me, but then I'm not a bot.
As for the cancellation of Dilbert in paper after paper, including my hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer, that's not bots but humans doing that. Scott Adams can cry cancel culture all he wants, but he's made it impossible for anyone to read his comic strip without being reminded of the racist who's producing it, no matter how innocuous a particular strip may be, and that's what newspaper editors have to consider.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI stopped reading "Dilbert" about 15 years ago when it became apparent to me that it was starting to feature mean-spirited right-wing attitudes and misogynist "jokes." Guess Scott Adams has slid all the way down into the muck pit now with his racist rant.
ReplyDeleteDebra, this may be a case of contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism, or provocation for the sake of provocation, neither of which gets Scott Adams off the hook. Too many people have been hurt by racism for him to turn it into a pseudointellectual exercise in mindfuckery.
DeleteIt also may just be that Scott Adams has a chip on his shoulder, having to do with an animated television version of Dilbert that ran for two seasons on the UPN and was canceled: "I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience." The show, in fact, got low ratings.
Hello Kirk, I second Debra's comment. I used to like Dilbert, but quite a while ago it started to go off, and I also read some unpleasant comments about Adams. It's kind of ironic because Dilbert used to be a kind of all-people's champion--for example, the female characters were often the most clever and intelligent, and unwilling to be put-upon. --Jim
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know, Jim, it's puzzling. I've come across much speculation online that this is just one humongous deep fake or mind fuck, and the day will come when Adams says, "Just kidding!" But we have more than enough problems with real racists without a fake racist wading into the swill. And anyway, most people prefer to be taken at face value (even con men), so I'll take his racist rant at face value. If I'm wrong and he's an egalitarian sheep in KKK wolf's clothing, well, I don't think I'll have lost all that much in chump's change.
DeleteI always had my doubts about Dilbert and where Scott Adams was coming from. Now we clearly know.
ReplyDeleteMitchell, I can relate to his, as someone else online put it, Kafkaesque view of the workplace, but not his Goebbelsesque view of the world outside the workplace.
ReplyDelete