A little over a year ago, Ben Garrison drew a political cartoon that took shots at
Dilbert creator Scott Adams. I
tried my damnest to analyze what Garrison was trying to say but ultimately I just could not figure everything out. The cartoon itself made no sense without any context and Garrison's 700+ word commentary raked Adams over the coals... for entirely the wrong things. Adams was very much in the wrong and an asshole about everything that prompted Garrison to draw the cartoon in the first place, but Garrison seemed to so completely misunderstand what Adams had actually said and did that he completely undermined his own rage. He was literally mad at Adams for things Garrison imagined. And even with Garrison's almost entirely imagined problems with Adams, his cartoon still didn't make much sense on its own.
So, with Adams shooting himself in the foot a week ago, I was interested to see what Garrison might do with that. Here's the result...
I literally have no idea what Garrison is trying to say here. With last year's piece, I could at least
kind of see what he was
trying to get at with
most it, even if I never did figure out the final panel's "punchline." But this one, I'm at a complete loss. I mean, there seems to be some notion of Black people not liking Dilbert and/or Adams and Dogbert seems to be concerned about what I presume is a downward trending sales chart, but Adams and Dilbert are doing... I really don't know. Adams has never used
Dilbert to reach out to POC; in fact, the only time he's ever included POC in the strip was to make fun of them. So why Dilbert is reaching out to them in an apparently friendly gesture completely does not represent the strip in any way. And why is Adams the one trying to remove Dilbert from their presence? It was the newspapers who were removing Dilbert from people's presence before the Andrews McMeel syndicate dropped their contract with him entirely. I mean, yes, they were responding to Adams' hate speech, so it was ultimately his fault in that regard, but he didn't say any of that
in order to get
Dilbert cancelled. The strip's cancellation was just a by-product of Adams being a racist asshat.
Garrison's extended explanation offers no clues that I can find either. He notes that white slowly becoming a minority in the US is a bad thing, and President Biden's comments (not about
Dilbert, just in general) do nothing but fuel racial division. He slides into a general hating on Black people and run-of-the-mill "George Soros is destroying everything" anti-Seminitism, before circling back to being sympathetic with Adams, claiming that it's not fair that Adams' hate speech cost him not just his job but his ability to make a living since he'll be banned by all social media and banks will close his accounts. Apparently, all of his outrage at Adams from last year has been totally forgotten.
But nowhere does he come close to explaining anything about the cartoon itself.
The
Saturday Night Live bit with Dilbert over the weekend wasn't very funny, but it made sense.
Garrison's comic from a year ago mostly had a message behind it; it was poorly executed and based on almost total fabrications, but it was at least nominally coeherent.
This is just... I don't even know what the fuck this is.
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