When Dilbert, a Former Employee, Attacks

Scott Adams used to work for me. This is our story.

Me + Not Scott Adams. But you get the point.

Something about all of this reminds me of an old Kids in the Hall skit. The Canadian comedy troupe did a bit featuring the birdlike Kevin McDonald. He sits in a fairly staid business meeting and while the presenter is droning on about business objectives you can hear McDonald’s interior monologue while he tries, and fails, to not stare at the salt shaker.

“Don’t throw salt in your eyes…don’t throw salt in your eyes,” runs his mantra before he gives in to the overwhelming temptation to give in to temptation and throws salt in his eyes.

In the past week’s dust-ups I kept thinking of that and the fact that it must be a terrible burden for some to “toe the line” in regards to consensus reality. To the burning need to torch some long held shibboleths because, why the fuck not? Throw salt in your eyes.

Which is how we saw, in an unforced error to end all unforced errors, cartoonist Scott Adams wake up on the same kind of morning that must have claimed Kanye, now Ye, and decided that the world needed to know that the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, Michael Richards style, had HAD it with us Black folks.

His algorithm has been feeding him a steady diet of WorldStarHipHop videos and this and the terrible pressure he’s been under to keep this to himself has led him to need to announce that Black folks are now a hate group and fuck all of this chickens coming home to roost shit.

I, a Black man, as a Black editor-in-chief of Intel’s corporate publication Intel Leads had, in a burst of Black contrarian thinking decided to hire the very White Scott Adams, newly arrived as the White creator of the White Dilbert strip…

“Say…didn’t Adams used to work for you?”

It was a voice from my Intel past where I, a Black man, as a Black editor-in-chief of Intel’s corporate publication Intel Leads had, in a burst of Black contrarian thinking decided to hire the very White Scott Adams, newly arrived as the White creator of the White Dilbert strip to do one for each issue of the racially indeterminate Intel Leads.

I contacted the White Adams at his Silicon Valley job that actually paid him and offered him some cash by way of a retainer to have him send up corporate culture in a magazine that’s very essence was corporate culture. No other corporate pubs had Dilbert (nor John Cleese who I also hired, but that’s another White guy story), and I, a member of the Black hate group, was glad to have him.

Our communications were brief, convivial and full of the kind of jocularity you might expect from fellow travelers of about the same age and both stuck in main money gigs while our hearts lay somewhere else. Scant bits and pieces of his personal life came my way in the way that sometimes happens when you work with people you only know over email but not enough so that I can honestly say I saw this coming.

But there IS something going on. From Michael Richards, PJ O’Rourke, Dennis Miller and Gavin McInnes to, really, a raft of other funny men, usually always men, though not always white who, through some unnamed and unspecified disaster, end up leaving fun-loving behind, along with you, in a space to realize too late: they’re not fucking joking.

Someone, let’s say Tom Wolfe, once said that a Republican was a Democrat who had been mugged. Erstwhile guitarist Eric Clapton whose untimely diatribe against Pakistanis was fueled by his ex-wife having been “touched” by one might agree. Because, always, there’s some guy somewhere who knew someone who had something happen to him that categorically fuels his understanding of everything.

So much so that it’s worth shitcanning an entire career over.

Does this circle jerk of so-called free thinkers pay out at the same rate that made you rich and if not, to paraphrase Mae West, why bother?

Now newspapers all over America are pulling their Dilbert strips while the braying attention-whore of a man Musk throws his support behind the same algorithm that fuels Fox and any other orthodoxy that states, for the record, that Birth of Nation was a documentary and a damned good one at that, and claims that this is some sort of wokeness unbridled.

What this is, this true exercise of free speech, is the consequential behavior that so seems to fire rigid thinkers. You freely do the crime, then you should freely do the time. Adams has and will.

But my curiosity remains at what he would believe he’s gained versus what he’s lost. Same for the desperate Musk. Does this circle jerk of so-called free thinkers pay out at the same rate that made you rich and if not, to paraphrase Mae West, why bother?

I suspect I might get some hoopla about needing to wake people up, very much of what I got during an interview from the way more honest leader of the White Aryan Resistance League, Tom Metzger before he died. Largely broke. I also suspect it, in some way, fills a psychological need to feel like a “bad ass” when all other forms of obvious and extant machismo have proven themselves unavailable to you (See: Tucker Carlson).

Mostly though I really just have my own problems to deal with these days but if the White Scott Adams wouldn’t deign to have taken the green money from a Black Eugene Robinson back then, perhaps he wouldn’t be in a situation where now anyone White or Black, gives a shit about what he has to say.

So: consequences.

But passing a table at a local gun show I spied a bumper sticker for sale. I stopped, read and laughed until there were tears in my eyes. The sellers of said bumper sticker first laughed with me, then they saw what I was laughing at, and they started to suspect it was them. Then, the ice grill from them to me before I asked, “how much for this one?”

You see it said in bold red letters over a pictogram of a Black man running off with a White woman over his shoulder: “Next time a Nigger runs off with your daughter remind yourself: We should have picked our own cotton!”

Yeah, yeah…well, you know what? You probably should have.

But hindsight is 20/20 and if you’re a White public figure of some note these days my notes for the future follow thusly: don’t throw salt in your eyes.