Trump has eerie parallels to Dogbert, who consistently gets ahead at everyone else’s expense. In the ’90s, Dogbert published a fake-news-filled tabloid dedicated to denouncing enemies and promoting lies about himself. He also advised an audience to eliminate guilt by blaming all problems on “invisible people named Juan and Cindy,” adding, “All you have to do is find them and kill them.” In more recent panels, Dogbert appears as a negotiation expert who charges Dilbert’s boss $1 million for five minutes of his time, then tells him, “We’re out of time, unless you want to renegotiate.” Adams allowed that the two have one similarity. “They’re both kind of megalomaniacal,” he said.
I’d thought the point of those strips was to laugh at Dogbert’s cruelty—not celebrate it. But Adams seemed elated by the triumph of a Dogbertesque president. “I’m probably feeling more optimistic for the country than I ever have,” he said by phone, when we spoke on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, amid reports of Russian meddling in the election and a chaotic transition. “I know that’s surprising, but the stock market is up, consumer sentiment is up. … It’s an impressive new management style that, as far as I can tell, is working.”
In a February post, Adams admitted that Trump’s first month might look to some like “incompetence” or “chaos,” but he noted that others would say the president was simply “draining the swamp and learning on the job.” Much of the world was feeling less sanguine. Less than 100 days into his administration, one view of Trump is that he’s the ultimate, dystopian version of a Dilbert joke gone horribly wrong: an unqualified, bigoted, greedy, dangerous, and blustering boss promoted to the world’s most powerful job. But Adams would say such people are just living in a different reality—a different “movie,” as he put it, the last time we spoke.
The Crook Versus the Monster
Thanks to timely assists from Wikileaks, Trump has successfully framed Hillary clinton as a crooked politician. Meanwhile, Clinton has successfully framed Trump as a dangerous monster. If the mainstream polls are accurate, voters prefer the crook to the monster. That makes sense because a crook might steal your wallet but the monster could kill you. As of today, Clinton has the superior persuasion strategy. Crook beats monster.
.. The biggest illusion this election is that we think the people on the other side can’t see the warts on their own candidate. But I think they do. Clinton supporters know she is crooked, but I think they assume it is a normal degree of crookedness for an American politician. Americans assume that even the “good” politicians are trading favors and breaking every rule that is inconvenient to them.
.. Likewise, Trump supporters know what they are getting. They know he’s offensive. They know he’s under-informed on policies. They know he pays as little in taxes as possible. They know he uses bankruptcy laws when needed. They know he ignores facts that are inconvenient to his message. They just don’t care. They want to push the monster into Washington D.C., close the door, and let him break everything that needs to be broken. Demolition is usually the first step of building something new. And Trump also knows how to build things when he isn’t in monster mode.
.. If Trump gets elected, and he does anything that looks even slightly Hitler-ish in office, I will join the resistance movement and help kill him. That’s an easy promise to make, and I hope my fellow citizens would use their Second Amendment rights to rise up and help me kill any Hitler-type person who rose to the top job in this country, no matter who it is.
Global Gender War
I wonder if the discussion of so-called radical Islam is disguising the fact that male-dominated societies are at war with female-dominated countries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Islam doesn’t look so dangerous in countries where women can vote.
.. Women have made an issue of the fact that men talk over women in meetings. In my experience, that’s true. But for full context, I interrupt anyone who talks too long without adding enough value. If most of my victims turn out to be women, I am still assumed to be the problem in this situation, not the talkers. The alternative interpretation of the situation – that women are more verbal than men – is never discussed as a contributing factor to interruptions. Can you imagine a situation where – on average – the people who talk the most do NOT get interrupted the most? I don’t know if the amount of talking each person does is related to the amount of interrupting they experience, or if there is a gender difference to it, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis. My point is that men are assumed guilty in this country. We don’t even explore their alibis.
.. Now compare our matriarchy (that we pretend is a patriarchy) with the situation in DAESH-held territory. That’s what a male-dominated society looks like. It isn’t pretty. The top-ranked men have multiple wives and the low-ranked men either have no access to women, or they have sex with captured slaves.
.. Now consider the controversy over the Syrian immigrants. The photos show mostly men of fighting age. No one cares about adult men, so a 1% chance of a hidden terrorist in the group – who might someday kill women and children – is unacceptable. I have twice blogged on the idea of siphoning out the women and small kids from the Caliphate and leaving millions of innocent adult men to suffer and die. I don’t recall anyone complaining about leaving millions of innocent adult males to horrible suffering. In this country, any solution to a problem that involves killing millions of adult men is automatically on the table.