It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Kamen Rider Fourze.
It's astonishing that Muir's incoherent pop culture strips and his incoherent politics have only gotten more so. He paints Biden as both the doddering old fool and the dangerous evil overlord simultaneously, even as they undercut one another, and he tosses out the crazy word salad conspiracy theory about the assassination attempt.
I've noted this before, but the big difference in outlook from the strip's start and its present is that Muir's outlook was triumphalist at that point. Muir viewed Democrats as criminal scum, but fundamentally weak criminal scum. Now they are the secret puppet-masters. He was always delusional, but when he thought he was winning, he was convinced that he could never lose. The simple fact that a loss happened began the spiral into a new delusion of eternal oppression, based in part because what Muir wanted in compensation for having lost once was vile nonsense he could never get.
Well put, but I would only argue with one part --- I think at the strip's beginning and for its first few years, Muir was still operating within the framework of "normal" politics. He certainly thought the Democrats were weak, corrupt and devious (well, they are, but not for the reasons he thinks), but he still depicted them as more or less normal political figures. His gradual shift into showing them as insanely evil puppetmaster overlords came with his worldview's gradual descent into madness, which directly paralleled that of the American right more broadly.
ReplyDeleteIt's startling to remember how the GOP establishment was still firmly running the show during most of the Bush era, and they still thought (as did the rest of us) that it was necessary to maintain a certain appearance of decorum and superficial fealty to norms. By the end of the Obama era, that was gone gone gone, along with Chris Muir's sanity.
I think even then Muir was on the fringes on quite a few issues, and where he wasn't he was swiftly heading there. Back then, though, again, he thought they'd won, and were always going to win, and that papered over any problems he might have with the Establishment.
Delete