Narcissists facing major widespread scorn often compare themselves to historical firebrands. Libya's embattled Col. Moammar Gadhafi last month compared himself to Queen Elizabeth. Rod Blagojevich compared himself to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. But no one can beat Glenn Beck, who has famously compared himself to Paul Revere, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.
Strangely playing a different self-comparison game is Dilbert cartoon strip creator Scott Adams, who just compared himself to embattled teabagger Marilyn Davenport, the Obama chimp family emailer.
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The comparison is made on the Scott Adams Blog, where the cartoonist muses about heat he received for defending himself online not using his own name but, as he put it, “under the
name PlannedChaos and pretending to be the only person in the world who
doesn't hate me.”
Adams continues, “According to the wise and fair denizens of the
Internet, this behavior is proof that I am a thin-skinned, troll,
asshole, dick, fame-whore, ego maniac, douche nozzle, misogynist. That
list might sound bad to you, but keep in mind that I was starting from a
pretty low base, so I think my reputation is trending up.”
Sounds like someone needs a hug, no?
Anyway, from this intro Adams slides into an interview between himself and his alter-ego PlannedChaos, which ends suddenly before picking up again with it about three-quarters of the way down. Anyone who finds Dilbert clever might feel the same about the mock interview.
Sandwiched between the shtick are a couple long paragraphs that reference the Davenport controversy. Adams begins by mentioning he is being targeted by “Men's Rights advocates,
Feminists, and one bearded taint who is leading an anti-creationist
movement” because things he has written were, he says, “taken out of context,” presented “to the lazy Internet media who doesn't check
context” and used to “demonize” him and “gain publicity for their
respective causes.”
It is how advocates get free publicity, according to Adams, who then claims that is what is happening to Davenport.
The same thing is happening with
a Republican official who emailed some friends a humorous photo of
President Obama's face on a chimp and a punch line about his birth
certificate. If your only context is what the Internet says about this
story, you assume it's a typical racist act by a Republican who is
already guilty by association. But if I add the context that Googling
“George Bush monkey” gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are
jokes where President Bush's face is transposed on a monkey, you see
what's really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are
using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was
probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn't set off her
alarms as being a career-ending risk.In my book The Dilbert Future,
published in 1997, I predicted that in the future the media would start
killing celebrities to generate demand for their so-called news. That
seemed like a stretch when the worst part of the media was the tabloids.
Now the Internet has given media power to the likes of Gawker,
Metafilter, and any other cesspool with an IP address. When the low end
of the media conspired with unscrupulous advocates to label the
aforementioned Republican woman a racist, they probably killed her
career, and they might end up killing her too.
Mercy, this fellow should draw a cartoon called “Gloomy Gus.”
First, I don't think of Orange County Republican Party Central Committee representative as a career, but I suppose career politicians have to start somewhere. Still, Davenport, a retiree and grandmother, does not strike me as the type that sees her post as a career.
I would assume from this one post of Adams' writing I have read and Davenport's professed teabaggy political view that they would deplore someone sticking up for their race, gender or (non-Judeo-Christian) religion as “playing the victim.”
And yet, notice how Adams makes himself and Davenport out to be the victims. He even props ol' Marilyn up for a sniper's bullet.
As Ronnie Reagan put it, “There you go again.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.