It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya.
It's kind of sad how this what Jan and Damon have been reduced to. Making the occasional bad joke over whatever paranoid online drivel Muir has become obsessed with at the moment, just to remind you they're in the strip.
Because I'm a political junkie, I listened to the Cabinet meeting which is the topic here a few days ago. Jill joined the meeting, and Joe Biden gave the floor to her to speak for a few minutes about a women's health initiative which she has been working on in her role as First Lady. She spoke about it, then the press was ushered out of the room so that the Cabinet meeting could continue, led by the President. In the right-wing social media world and the Muir peanut gallery, this has turned into "Jill took over the entire meeting, and Joe had to be wheeled away for a nap and diaper change." It's just fascinating to me how these people don't even care if what they say has any connection to reality or the truth. And, very discouraging as well.
ReplyDeleteI wondered what this latest nonsense was about, but thank you for valiantly doing the legwork.
DeleteBack during DBD's first few years, I was still naive enough to google what I eventually came to call Muir's "panel-one pronouncements", anticipating the possibility that I might learn something new that could alter or at least challenge my understanding of a situation. But over time it became increasingly clear that Muir had zero credibility as an observer, and was on a trajectory --- parallel with the entirety of the American right in general --- toward abject madness.
By default, I now assume that anything Muir has a character declaring to have happened in their panel-one pronouncement is either complete nonsense, or something so distorted from its real-life counterpart that it effectively functions as complete nonsense.
It's a safe bet.
DeleteI can assure you that it was no great sacrifice on my part--like I said, politics is my passion and hobby, God help me--so I follow all this stuff anyway. It does make reading DBD that much more painful, because it's so ridiculously detached from anything resembling reality or fact, as you say. It's kind of a wonder to behold, which may be why I keep coming back to gape at the insanity.
DeleteThat's pretty much exactly the reason I can't look away from it, too. It's a morbid fascination. The thing is incredibly compelling simply by virtue of how much of a deranged BizarroWorld it lives in.
DeleteI've mentioned my other right-wing cartoonist obsession Todd Schowalter --- he fascinates me for sort of opposite reasons. Muir is earnest, brooding, intense, and delusional. He is basically a firebreathing paranoid lunatic before he is anything else.
Schowalter, on the other hand, is a cheerful, happy-go-lucky, guffawing meathead. Muir fancies himself a sophisticated and savvy observer with intellectual pretensions, whereas Schowalter's idea of political analysis is "Nyaah nyahh, you're a big stupid dummyhead!" Or, on alternate days, "Nyaah nyahh, you're stupid and ugly and you have boogers!"
His cartoons are idiotic in a much less specific and much more vague, breezy way that, even more than Muir, reveals a mind almost completely divorced from anything actually being said or done by the people he mocks.
(I suddenly feel compelled to note that, despite the inordinate amount of brainspace occupied by these two cretins, I DO actually have healthier interests in life.)
I'm surprised you aren't checking out Ben and Tina Garrison.
DeleteTurning to the rest of your discussion--it's fascinating, because it has to be said Muir's always had his "Yur a Smellyhead!" side. It was easier to spot the purer strain of it in the early days of the strip--which I've been doing a lot, as I've been really grinding on getting the older entries here functional--where he'd alternate wordy quasi-intellectual explanations of right wing virtues with childish putdowns. These days, it's all tangled up, as Muir has shifted to a man who, as I've noted, paints trucknuts as a sign of cultural superiority. Muir these days is a wordy incoherent rant followed up by a crude insult, Schowalter, from what I've seen, is a cogent but shallow argument proceeded and punctuated by them.
Honestly I think your description of Schowalter's output is about a thousand times more generous than it merits, largely because he almost never actually HAS anything that could be considered an "argument".
DeleteHe's just about the starkest example I know of "politics without policy".
Basically about a third of his output is "trannies are weird, gross, crazy men with with heavy beards who wear dresses", the second 33% is "feminazi women are ugly oafs with piercings and colored hair who angrily scream at people all day long", and the rest is mostly "hur hur hur Biden's old and stoopid, hur hur hur" --- except now that last one's been replaced with "hur hur hur Kamala's a stoopid dumb bimbo who's stupid and dumb and also she's a slut hur hur hur".
Even more than modern Muir, the man does not seem to know what policy is.
I used to apply the "politics without policy" label to people as different from Scholwalter as you can get --- alt-right personalities and influencers in the immediate pre and early Trump era who were always hyperfocused on a handful of personal bugaboos -- often misogynistic, homophobic and deeply reverent of Classical art and architecture. The idea of these people, even the more pseudo-intellectual among them, actually discussing POLICY is as difficult to picture as Trump being humble.
I actually went to high school with one such person who kept hovering just on the edge of widespread visibility (she was a frequent guest on Gavin McIness's show during this period, and appeared in that idiotic music video with Ajit Pai), but never quite broke in. I used to follow her social media for similarly morbid reasons as I read DBD. Her "politics" can be summed up thusly: "Fat chicks suck, trannies are gross, and Classical art is humanity's ultimate achievement. Vote Trump."
I was probably overegging the pudding with that description, but Scholwalter seems to specialize in telling his audience simple things, simply, all in the service of the message 'Our traditional way of life is under attack by filthy degenerates who are utterly beneath us!' Muir, with the same general worldview, uses it to launch into rambling nonsense that baffles all but a select few.
ReplyDeleteWell put. I'm a political junkie and half the time even I have trouble understanding what the hell he's babbling about. Schowalter on the other hand is the ultimate dictionary definition of "lowest common denominator".
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