It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Pleasure Garden.
The extent to which the strip is now little more than a deluded old bigot spouting racist gibberish and every now and then explaining, no, no, you're the real racist, is kind of astounding at times.
In universe, you'd wonder how Damon would handle all this naked white supremacy now, but then you recall that the cast declared him an honorary White a while back, and he was delighted.
That is exactly what I was wondering about myself--how soon will Muir pull Damon or Javier out to do one of those "see, there are good Black people too" strips.
ReplyDeleteHe's already doing that in the comment section--tap dancing around the racism with this "there are whites and white trash, blacks and chimps" etc. BS.
Oh, I do expect Damon to pop and explain this is the good kind of racism.
DeleteI know it's a point I've made before, but the extent to which the strip has moved him and Jan by is remarkable. Damon in particular is practically a modern day Barney Google, doing occasional cameos in the strip he used to feature in.
Damon and Jan are one of those awkward remnants of old DBD that no longer fit Muir's warped state of mind. Like Sam being an engineer.
DeleteI think it boils down to this--he was always racist. But he wasn't an out-and-out white supremacist in those days.
DeleteEurobrat: I think that's pretty spot on. Damon and post-retcon Jan would not have been created by the version of Muir that's existed for roughly a decade at this point. Nor would Sam have been an engineer. The more time goes by the more jarring those earliest strips get -- with Sam as a capable, dignified, careerist professional and Zed as just kind of a laconic, weary schlub without particularly strong opinions.
DeleteI think your memory is exaggerating the contrast here--Mystery Business(tm) era Sam was always crass and a bit of a slacker, and while Zed tended to stick the office humor and slice of life strips, he was always fundamentally depicted as a conservative, just not particularly partisan about it.
DeleteBut yeah, he was a schlub in those days.
To continue in this vein... Muir was putting Sam into what he imagined were sexy poses in skimpy clothes all the way back in 2002. As opposed to Zed, Sam ultimately serves the same function in the strip she always has--Muir's dream woman. It's just that the dream has become grubbier and nastier with passing years.
DeleteWell.
ReplyDeleteAs has sometimes been the case when a new line is crossed, there is some minor pushback from some in the Peanut Gallery.
Joe:
"I feel a line has been crossed on here."
James/G
"I have to agree in part. While it is true that Black People seem to commit a disproportionate amount of crimes, I would prefer if this was stated without the derogatory labels. That just might be me, but terms like Porch Ape, Porch Chimp, Porch Monkey, or Coon, is a bit much."
****
Muir, predictably, makes it a toxic brew of disingenuous semantics and soft-brained historical revisionism:
Chris Muir
"The black middle class had just about caught up with the white middle class in the 50’s, doing great…then the Democrats got their hooks into them and made them their slaves, again-this time mentally. Decades of Democrat breeding, in low IQ inner city vote farms, would destroy great numbers of any race to what we see today."
While I think there's truth in how far the small black middle class had managed to claw a space for itself before the Civil Rights Movement, this assessment is, shall we say, rather surgically selective.
What always boggles my mind about the stale, decades-old conservative narrative that "Democrats keep blacks down" is that the other side of the same mouths have quite literally been advocating for every possible measure that would keep the cycles of deprivation going. Putting aside those motivated by just plain bigotry, these people are ideologically opposed to the idea that government can ever be used as an instrument for social or economic uplift, so they rely on such stalwarts as "charity", "faith", and the old "bootstraps" chestnut.
Never mind that exactly none of those things were responsible for the creation of the flourishing postwar white middle class.
"Niggers. Kikes. Wops. Krauts. Beaners. Honkeys. They’re just words, no need to edit them. In the 60’s everyone used them in humor to each other. Nobody cared."
It's amazing how many social conservatives and reactionaries not only believe this, but believe it no matter what age they are or what actual time period they're romanticizing. I've seen fellow Millennials saying essentially the same thing. Somehow, whenever one was a kid, everyone was chill and cool, but now everyone's all PC/woke/snowflakes or whatever and comedy is dead because everyone's always so offended.
To be fair, there is some truth in it that doesn't necessarily just exist solely in the rose-tinted lenses of reactionaries. Animator Shamus Culhane touched on it when writing about his time as a young staffer at Fleischer Studios in NYC during the early 1930s. But you'll notice the context is a bit different than what I imagine people like Muir are thinking of, and in a rather significant way. The "New York street kids", as he describes he and many of his colleagues, were largely first-generation Americans with at least one immigrant parent, and as they had felt tremendous pressure to conform growing up, their ethnic backgrounds had been a source of embarrassment.
Delete"There was a derisive quality about our attitude towards the grown-ups. We mocked their attempts to speak English, poked fun at their clothes, and jeered at the Old Country customs which they vainly tried to retain, because they were not American and we yearned to be just that.
When we addressed each other as "Jew boy", "Mick" and "Wop", the terms had the same motivation. Poking fun at somebody's background was not an attempt to be scornful or to make the person feel inferior, but was a continuation about our derisive feelings about the whole ethnic problem. While those terms will make present-day liberals shudder, in those days it was merely good-natured banter, and nobody dreamed of taking offense."
But as awkward and distasteful as that of that seems now, it feels quite different from the way people like Muir always harp about the good ol' days. Because for them, there doesn't seem to be any pain involved. There's no "underdog" tinge, no sense of being on the defensive in any way. It's all coming from a place of entitled, comfortable thoughtlessness. Like those Wall Street bigwigs interviewed after the 2024 election who expressed how happy they felt to supposedly be liberated once again to be able to say "pussy" and "fag" and whatever else.
Also. There truly is nothing to be said to someone who actually believes, as Muir does, that "nobody cared" about "nigger" in the freaking 1960s in particular.
It's like him romanticizing the era of Dean Martin's Celebrity Roasts, that halcyon time of racial goodwill, the 1970s.
Delete