Dilbert: Renegade

Scott Adams has spent over thirty years making fun of the way business runs in circles chasing profits at any cost... mostly costs to employee sanity, but shaking down customers for useless products and services has been integral to the humor.

In a recent week, though, Adams penned a series that ripped the façade off of marketing as thoroughly as anything I've done, and I admiringly concede he has a somewhat larger audience. The series ran from Monday, February 2 through (so far) Saturday the 7th... here's a link to the starting strip. Go read; I'll wait.

Nasty, nasty stuff and a major tip of the hat to Scott for his insight and razor wit, and for using his enormous pulpit to bully the right targets. (Yeah, I know, that's not what "bully pulpit" means. Originally, anyway.)

It does continue to bother me that this is representative of the very sharpest insight and challenge to the marketing-industrial complex... buried, lost even, in the funny pages. I appreciate the sentiments; I appreciate the serial and editorial cartoonists who focus their rage (and ours) on the manipulative system with which marketing has managed to engulf our economic and individual lives. But the days of the cartoon as weapon have pretty much passed; other than occasionally enraging an unbalanced mind - Nous Avons Charlie - searing cartoons tend to make the reader laugh, agree, feel good that they're not alone... and turn the page. The days of Thomas Nast bringing down Boss Tweed with his cartoons - which he did; Tweed was arrested in Europe because he was recognized from Nast's portrayals - are long, long gone.

Humor can be a wonderful weapon, and I try to use it intelligently and not too excessively in my efforts. But at a certain point, making fun of things defuses focus and anger more than it sharpens it; the laugh becomes a dismissal. It leads to co-option by the target and by the audience, burying the need to focus rage under a soothing blanket of "laugh and move on, nothing to see here." There is something deeply disturbing that the comics so frequently score bull's-eyes on this topic, and serious journalism and essays do not. There is no fault in using marketing and fostered consumption as a basis for humor; there is a problem when our informational media pays it so little attention. There is greater fault when, as it is, the topic is left entirely to the funnymen.

Co-option is the death of all social, economic and political movements, and the system - systems - have gotten better and better at turning aside even the most ferocious and well-aimed effort by co-opting, blunting and burying it. Along with all the other targets needing our full renegade focus and attention, the ingrained, possibly even fostered, tendency of the media to minimize consumption issues and marketing's role in them needs to be kept in our sights.

We need to laugh, or we'll go as crazy as Dilbert. But we must not let the chuckles spoil our aim.