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I was a big Dilbert fan as a kid. I had probably a dozen books, both collections of the comic and Adams' longer-form hardcover books that were meant to satirize fad business books. So the ongoing Adams meltdown stings for me, even many years later. 1/ https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1278424313079758848
Looking back, it seems kinda weird that a preteen kid would be really into a comic strip satirizing corporate America. What little I knew about corporate America came mostly from listening to my dad complain about it and from him getting laid off when I was 10. 2/
But I can see now what it was I related to. The core satire of Dilbert comes from the tension between what a corporate job is supposed to be (people working harmoniously to create and sell a product or service) and what it often actually is (chaos, idiocy, sociopathy). 3/
Perceptive kids can see the same sort of tension between what school is supposed to be (a place of safety and learning) and what it often actually is (jail for children, complete with prison-style social hierarchies and oppressive bureaucratic control over all your movements). 4/
Dilbert the character, like me, is a nerd, which means he's fundamentally a rule follower. He wants to work hard and be successful. He wants do the right thing. He wants the system to work. But he can see the system is so utterly bent that it can't possibly work. 5/
He never really figures out what to do about this--satire has never been good at actually fixing things anyway, and it's not even clear there's anything he could do except maybe try to keep his dignity. But that was never the point of the comic, at least when I was reading it. 6/
Dilbert's popularity came from its willingness to say, loud and clear, that the people seeing the rot in corporate America weren't crazy. Whether you could fix your situation or not, it was comforting to know that someone else was seeing it too. There was a sense of empathy. 7/
By contrast, Adams' embrace of Trump has been driven by his belief that Trump is what he calls a "Master Persuader"--someone who is extremely skilled at hijacking other people's irrational tendencies for their own ends. 8/
Adams initially couched his admiration of Trump in more descriptive terms--here's what he's doing when he says x, here's why it's effective, etc.--but eventually he went whole hog and endorsed Trump substantively, citing Trump's Master Persuader status as a feature, not a bug. 9/
And that hurts--in a way that retroactively curdles the whole experience of reading Dilbert in the first place. The point of Dilbert was to get some solidarity with someone looking at the world and pointing out exactly what was wrong with it. 10/
But Adams' admiration of Trump is based on Trump being *good at being an amoral predator*. Trump is a narcissistic sociopath, and Adams is saying, "yep, that's the right way to be." Might makes right, in other words--which is literally the definition of fascism. 11/
By throwing in with Trump, Adams has revealed the contempt he has (and maybe had all along) for his main character. If the point of life is to prey on others, and if Dilbert can't or won't, then he deserves whatever happens to him. He had it coming. 12/
And since the reader is naturally going to empathize with Dilbert, Adams is saying the same is true of you. If you aren't willing to lie, cheat, or steal, you're weak and you deserve to suffer. Morals are for suckers. 13/
No wonder he's followed that idea where it always leads--to ugliness and racism, to a persistent sense of contempt and victimhood that can't be sated by any real-world success.
Sad!
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Sad!
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