Important Thoughts From Ken Furie
I recall Ken being a Dilbert fan, so yesterday I sent him a piece by Martha Ross in the Mercury News, Dilbert’s’ Scott Adams: ‘White people should get the hell away from Black people’. Ross wrote that “Pro-Trump Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who has previously claimed he’s been a victim of racism in Hollywood and corporate America, went on a racist diatribe this week, labeling Black people as a ‘hate group’ and saying that White people should ‘get the hell away’ from them. During his Real Coffee with Scott Adams online video program Wednesday, the controversial East Bay cartoonist offered up his latest provocation. He cited a recent poll that he said shows that ‘nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people.’ If so, Adams said, ‘That’s a hate group.’… Over the years, Adams has appeared to embrace increasingly radical positions, the Daily Beast said. He first compared former President Donald Trump to Jesus in 2015 and continued to voice his support for the former president through his 2016 campaign and his controversial presidency. On Twitter and in his online program, Adams also has flirted with favorite topics of the far-right culture wars, the Daily Beast said. In the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, Adams claimed that he was the victim of racism, saying that he had lost multiple jobs due to his skin color.”
I don’t have much interest in Adams personally, but I recalled that Ken is a huge fan of Dilbert and not at all a fan of racism. Below is the response he sent me and I asked him if it would be OK to share it.
A Letter From Ken
Maybe luckily, I was blocked from reading more than a few lines before The Mercury's double whammy of paywall and "how dare you use an ad blocker" called a halt to my pursuit.
Which may have been just as well. I got the gist, and while some of the details re. Scott A. would undoubtedly have been new, I'm well aware of the basic situation with him, which is a constant trial: How can someone be at the same time (a) so smartly observant and trenchantly expressive about the way we live our lives and (b) so demented and diseased?
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be as simple as the phrase "the human race." My simplest way of registering this is by trying always to remember the fundamental principle: PEOPLE SUCK. It may have been a good, or at least interesting, idea, this business of having human beings (sometimes I'm far from sure that it was ever a good idea), but the execution of the idea has sure sucked.
Secondarily, and as a way of going on breathing, however shakily, I try to append the qualification: Not ALL people suck, or at least not necessarily ALL THE TIME. Just possibly, searching out those windows of exception to the PEOPLE SUCK rule makes it possible to go on. Or maybe it's a matter of "making believe" that I believe.
In music we have the ever-present, ever-looming example of Richard Wagner. I don't think there's any question that he was a powerfully loathsome human being, in a bunch of ways. It's almost impossible to read anything about Wagner without having to endure the writer's apparently breathless discovery that this was the case, and insistence on wallowing in it— without troubling to investigate the question of whether his loathsomenesses affect the validity of his artistic creations.
For me (and I've thought my fair share about this), not only are those artistic creations not invalidated, they are if anything confirmed and reinforced, because in Wagner's case it's truly not a case of "on the one hand this, on the other hand that." Because Wagner the artist was such an astute observer of the human condition, and developed such amazing musico-dramatic tools for exploring it, that he was among the most powerful creative describers and analyzers and communicators of what makes morally and ethically defective people, well, morally and ethically defective.
I guess in a way what we're talking about here comes to the concept that I find so repulsive every time I hear it mentioned: cancel culture. And I guess what drives me crazy about it is that people who use the term are so dishonest as to hide the fact that what they're really looking for is a free pass for violating basic tenets of human decency.
Hey, I don't say I'm not affected. There are a whole bunch of Woody Allen films that I think are works of unmitigated genius, films that— if not for the icky question of his personal behavior— I would have said unhesitatingly I love. (There are also a lot of Woody Allen films, especially among the last dozen or two— he sure does crank them out— that I've found kind of boring.) The original Cosby Show was, pretty much from first episode to last, as I recall, as astute (and of course funny) a depiction of life-as-I-know-it as I've encountered. And in the case of The Cosby Show, I have to depend on "recall" because you can't see it anymore. Gotta love that cancel culture!
Then there are all the pols whose eloquent, tireless espousal of beliefs and policies that seem both truthful and inspiring, whose personal lives are revealed to be so inconveniently at odds with all those virtues of which they have been such inspiring advocates. Don't ask me what to do about them, 'cause I dunno. "Do as I say, not as I do" takes us only so far in such cases.
And the fact remains that almost every Dilbert strip, at least for me, captures a hilariously brilliant (or is it brilliantly hilarious?) example of why life-as-we-know-it works so badly, usually in a way I've never seen anyone else express.
UPDATE:
In way of further explanation and elucidation, Ken later-- on his birthday today (Happy Birthday, Ken!)-- sent along this clip of J. Pierrepont Finch, singing Frank Loesser's “The Brotherhood of Man” in the 1967 film version of the Broadway musical, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. He suggested I pay attention to these lyrics in particular:
One man may seem incompetent,
another not make sense,
while others look like quite a waste
of company expense.
They need a brother's leadership,
so please don't do them in.
Remember, mediocrity
is not a mortal sin.
UPDATE #2— Today’s A Busy Day In Scott Adams’ World
The Besides the Washington Post, other papers that dropped Dilbert today included the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers (including the Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Austin American-Statesman and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the San Antonio Express-News. Chris Quinn, the vice president of content for the Plain Dealer, wrote in a letter from the editor Friday that pulling Dilbert was “not a difficult decision... We are not a home for those who espouse racism. We certainly do not want to provide them with financial support.” I can hear the Fox talking heads already!
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