It's the Day's Day of Days! Because takin' my time.
Like many fascists, Muir keeps running into two problems. Firstly, for all he likes to imagine himself a patriotic American, he actually hates the nation and views its government as decadent and weak. As usual for his ilk he gets around it by declaring the present government is in fact in hock to foreign powers, so his opposition to it is just him being extra patriotic. Yes, it is those foreign powers who are corrupting the nation's vital essence and doing things Muir doesn't like. But then the second problem rears its head... Muir is a delusional, ignorant, and bigoted reactionary and the things he doesn't like are usually good actions.
And so we get the insidious Chinese plot to vaccinate people and not persecute gay people.
I've realized that Day by Day actually resembles, more than anything else, something like the Enquirer or the Sun. Because like those two and their imitators, it is constantly announcing these arm-flailing bombshells that end up going nowhere and are completely forgotten in short order.
ReplyDeleteI have never understood how the readers of the Enquirer mentally process all this stuff. On Monday, Barack Obama might be at death's door from some horrible disease. On Wednesday, his health is normal but he's been caught running a coke smuggling ring. On Friday, there's nothing about the coke smuggling, but his secret love child with Taylor Swift has been revealed. The following Tuesday, he's been poisoned by an assassin and the government is covering it up. On Thursday, he's come back to life and has just failed a paternity test for Malia and Sasha.
How does this WORK? What is actually going through the readers' minds from day to day, week to week, as explosive revelations are announced one day and simply vanish into nothingness the next? I've never understood that at all.
That's basically what Day by Day has become. Muir picks up every loony conspiracy theory or ludicrous red herring or deluded distortion of events that comes along, often presenting them as bombshell revelations. And then they're never mentioned again.
If he actually followed through on these things, and wrote them into the continually unfolding reality of his strip, he'd be forced to reckon with their real-life implications. But he doesn't do that, and that's because he CAN'T. Most of these bombshells hit complete dead ends and are unable to be mined for any further material, for the obvious reason that there's never any there there.
So life in the DBD-verse is like living in a world where God is constantly pressing a reset button, wiping out yesterday's bombshell revelation to make room for today's, neither of which will lead to any real-life developments for Muir to work with any further.