It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Dagger of the Mind.
There's a lot to unpack in this awful little strip. There's Muir sneering at civil servants who have worked for the nation he claims to love and assuming that they must all be decadent worthless scum, people who have done more than for it than he ever has. There's the strange clunky tone where Muir, trying to portray he and his as the good guys winds up making them seem, well, just what they are--the barbarians at the gate, looking to tear it all down. Musk and Trump are closer to Muir's version of Nero than the people he's insisting are shoe-ins.
Of course the other point that must be made is that Muir's version of Nero is nonsense--a creation only of his shallow knowledge of popular history. The Roman Empire had centuries ahead of it after Nero--hell, a millennium and change for some portions of it. Muir clearly doesn't realize this. He clearly doesn't realize much about Roman history or any history at all. He talks about it a great deal, makes noises about how important it is--but he doesn't seem to actually study it that much.
Yeah, this one was a particularly bitter pill to swallow, when I'm hearing from friends (and I'm sure you are too) like the nurse working at the VA who now has to justify her work to Musk and his team of little teenage jerks. Oh, but I'm sure she's totally part of these decadent coastal elite bureaucrats Muir and the Peanut Gallery are talking about, right? And you're so on point--in comparison to her, what has Muir ever actually done for this country, except to mock America and Americans?
ReplyDeleteThe closet Muir has ever gotten to serving his country was when he was an "embedded journalist" in Iraq for a week, a situation where the brief period there and the individual doing it explains why I've put both in quotations. (And frankly the fact that Muir got the call, however briefly, shows the program's deep ideological problems.) So essentially, a week playing war tourist, and then making really shitty propaganda about it.
DeleteAh, I'd totally forgotten he'd done that. Muir as a "reporter"...yikes.
DeleteIt's so easy to forget he did that, because it's so hard to square with everything else. He writes like someone who hasn't left his neighborhood --- or even the house -- in twenty years.
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