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Scott Adams, the cartoonist who gave the world “Dilbert,” is suffering mightily in the final throes of cancer.
After he departs this vale of tears, his glorious BS radar deserves to be prominently displayed in the Smithsonian Institution. No one has a sharper ear than Adams for contemporary American bloviating.
The “Dilbert” cartoon strip was launched in 1989 and caught fire in the 1990s. For many downtrodden office workers, posting a “Dilbert” cartoon in their cubicle became a tiny flag of independence.
No corporate or social trend was safe from a Scott Adams smackdown.
“Our company is family-friendly and very green,” Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss explains to a job applicant in a 2011 strip. “If I get a chance to sell your kids for a handful of carbon credits, I’ll do it.”
Adams has left almost no Washington sacred cow unkicked.
A 2012 cartoon caricatured the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with Dogbert’s International Bank for Bailing Out Countries That Are Bad at Math.
A Third World despot clamoring for a handout complains, “Our Treasury is empty and we’re not sure why.”
Congress has had the same problem for almost 25 straight years.
Government surveillance spurred some of Adams’ best smackdowns.
Anyone who ever castigated TSA’s whole-body scanners will appreciate the 2016 strip in which Dilbert returns from poverty-stricken Elbonia and is told he appeared naked on TV.
Why? Because “the only television show in Elbonia is a live feed from their airport full-body scanners.”
A 2018 strip exposed Washington’s favorite scam.
Dilbert’s boss explains: “Your project summary needs more jargon and acronyms. The goal is to make ourselves look smart while making the readers feel dumb.”
Federal agencies perpetually play that charade on slow-witted congressmen.
I’ve lambasted federal grantees for touting boneheaded “goals that look like they may have been lifted out of a ‘Dilbert‘ cartoon.”
A Mississippi program promised that its AmeriCorps members would perform a “Self/diagnosis in an end-of-year survey” that produced “a 75% increase on average in understanding about self.” Da hell?
After I swooped down to the Mississippi Delta to investigate that squirrelly claim, the chief of the program was convicted of fraud and sent to federal prison.
Shortly after President Joe Biden dictated an illegal vaccine mandate for a hundred million American adults in 2021, “Dilbert” featured the evil HR director Catbert notifying staffers: “When you signed your employment documents, you agreed to let us manipulate your DNA. … Roll up your sleeve.”
Unfortunately, voters weren’t warned in 2020 that Biden would inject them with an experimental vaccine.
(The Supreme Court struck down most of that mandate in 2022.)
At his best, Adams obliterated the dogmas propagated by bootlicking Washington pundits.
After the Jan. 6, 2021, clash at the Capitol, Adams scoffed, “What kind of coup takes over a few empty rooms and controls the country? ‘We got your empty rooms and your lectern too! Bow to us!’”
No wonder the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack never called Adams as a witness.
In a bushel of books, Adams offers plenty of life advice for the perplexed.
In his 2013 book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” Adams advises: “If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.”
That’s a modern version of an axiom from the Greek philosopher Epictetus that I taped to my bedroom wall 40 years ago: “First say to yourself what you would be: then do what you have to do.”
Working out of my home office, I can’t use Adams’ surefire fix for pesky colleagues: “Drape an empty gun holster over your guest chair. If anyone asks where the gun is, say, ‘Depends. Whose side are you on?’ ’’
Perhaps Adams’ best advice is to guard your concentration like the crown jewels.
Modern technology is one damn distraction after another: Who has not heartily cursed dings from untimely text messages?
“My morning is all about stilling the outside world so my mind can soar,” Adams wrote.
There is a magic to morning lucidity that usually vanishes before high noon. Admittedly, I never aspired to Adams’ dairy-farmer-style 5 a.m. awakenings.
Adams’ reputation is colored by his political zealotry; he became an avid Trump supporter in 2015.
His legacy is marred by a 2023 podcast in which he read the results of a poll that asked if it’s “OK to be white” — 53% of black respondents agreed — and urged white people “to get the hell away from black people” for their own safety.
After newspapers and his syndicate terminated “Dilbert,” Adams groused that “only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me.”
Adams also sparked controversy by questioning the Holocaust death toll: “No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, but wouldn’t you like to know how the exact number was calculated, just for context?”
When Adams revealed his terminal diagnosis in May, he said he’d postponed the announcement because “once you go public, you’re just the dying cancer guy.”
But for tens of millions of his fans, Adams will always be the guy who brightened their lives by brilliantly mocking the absurdities and indignities they faced each day.
James Bovard is the author of 11 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.”