DILBERT

There’s been lots of commentary this past week about how Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the office “comedy” Dilbert, has managed to light his career on fire, since the strip is now no longer in any newspaper and he even lost his representation, over his decision to let a Rasmussen “poll” convince him that the majority of Black Americans dislike him as a white American and thus all white people should have nothing to do with Black people because they are a “hate group.”

As my friend Lucian K. Truscott IV pointed out in his “Salon” column for today, the Rasmussen “poll” (Rasmussen being a right wing polling company that has yet to get it right in my experience of reading about their polling) was conducted with 1,000 respondents, of whom 13% were black. That’s 130 respondents for my fellow math-challenged readers. And in the poll, 26% of the black respondents disagreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be White.” That’s 33 people. And 23% weren’t sure. That’s 30 people. 53% agreed. That’s 67 people who said it was OK to be white.

Scott Adams is even more messed up with his math than I am, since he took people who disagreed and people who weren’t sure and made them all people who said it wasn’t OK for him to be white. And from those 63 people, he decided to tell the world he’s in favor of racial segregation.

Interestingly enough, the name "Dilbert" was created during World War II in US Naval Aviation flight training, as the guy who "never got the message," the guy who always did everything wrong: didn't use a pre-takeoff checklist, forgot to put the landing gear down before landing, etc., etc., all the stuff a naval aviator was supposed to know and do right - in other words, the squadron idiot. "That's a real Dilbert thing to do" was still a way in the Navy I was in 20 years later of saying "you're really stupid." Everybody I knew who had ever been in the Navy who I ever mentioned this to when the topic of the cartoon came up said they had noticed that too (I think there were ten, maybe, so yeah, it was/is an esoteric bit of knowledge).

I always wondered if Scott Adams knew that when he chose the name for his character.

I tend to think not, since that character in the strip was always the guy who did know what was what, and never got any credit for that; in other words, the white guy who had lots of reason to resent people who didn't see his genius. I think that character has been "telling" us who Scott Adams is.

So it's no surprise that Scott Adams would become the star of his own remake of "Falling Down."

Basically, his character is an obvious candidate for being a “reverse racist,” as well as a “reverse sexist” if you consider the way the female characters are portrayed in the strip. He only recently put in a black character, so the reverse racism business wasn’t that obvious, but the reverse sexism was obvious all along if you are anyone who was aware. All this reverse sexism crap that came along in the 1970s when women began showing up in positions of responsibility beyond "secretary" in the work force. It's "they're getting something I should have gotten, and they're just getting it for the accident of their birth" (I heard that argument about both non-whites and women when "affirmative action" was first applied in the workforce back then). Of course the person complaining “knew for a fact” he would have gotten the position because he was smart, not the fact he was born white and male.

I was particularly aware of the reverse sexism stuff as a man, because I was at the time married to a woman who was among the first in her industry - insurance - to go beyond secretary and file clerk. She happened to get a job at an agency where the son of the founder had just taken over, and he saw her as the smart person she was, and started promoting her in the agency. And every promotion she got, she worried that was going to be the one where she would finally be exposed as not being capable of doing the job. She finally listened to me when I told her that from my experience, every competent person *always* has that response, because they’re competent and understand what they’re going to be responsible for. Ten years after we divorced, I heard from a mutual friend that she’d been made a partner there several years before.

But that attitude that someone like her is getting the promotion because of the accident of their birth is what that person has to fight, because they know the attitude, and because they’re afraid it might be true. Because they are competent.

Hell, I have that argument with myself every time it’s time to put my signature to the contract for the next book. It’s the Curse of the Competent.

As with everything else Republicans do, reverse racism and reverse sexism is projection. You want to know what they’re thinking and doing? Look at what they say we’re doing.

The truth is, the majority of white people are idiots, and the majority of that majority are men. I present as proof the fact the overwhelming majority of white males are Republicans, the majority of white people are Republicans, and the overwhelming majority of white Republicans voted for Trump. With more voting for him the second time than the first, after they knew what an idiot he is.

Scott Adams is another point of proof of that truth.

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