The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 5; Ol' Zip, He Be A Larned Skolar!

And now we move to the next member of the cast, the one built from the start to be blatantly political, the one who got the first little storyline in the strip, Damon. I should warn you that this is going to be a long one, as this is likely going to be the only one of these little essays focused on Damon. (He will likely be discussed in future essays, but only as part of the ensemble.) Part of this is, as I've noted, Damon has faded in importance considerably over the years, something that started during the Transition Era. I've compared him to Barney Google for how he's collapsed into the background of a strip he used to be a star of, but perhaps a better comparison would be Peanuts' Shermy, a character everybody but real Charles Schultz fans are going to go "Who?" about, which really proves my point. (The best part is this gives Jan a counterpart in the form of Patty, and no, not Peppermint Patty, this is the original Patty in Peanuts who faded into the background early along with Shermy.) Damon's gone from one of the central members of the ensemble cast to popping up every now and then, even when Muir tries to feature him more, his place taken by new characters, but also by a pair of old regulars who have become even more central to the strip.

But there's another reason for this--Damon is one of the easiest characters to write about. Characters in Day by Day don't generally develop, but they do change as Muir moves them into different roles, and that is something we will talk about in the future. For Straw Liberals, this can sometimes mimic character development, but it isn't really. But again, that's for the future. For a clearer example, Zed and Sam were a pair of urban professionals, and are now a pair of rural rednecks while keeping many of the same essential character traits. Change. Not development. But Damon though, doesn't change. His role in the strip remains exactly the same throughout. The Damon of these modern times is the same character that Muir started with, serving the same function. He's just drawn differently. Damon's circumstances may have changed, but this doesn't alter him, because again, Muir's characters do not develop. They sit in their slot, and they stay in their slot, unless Muir suddenly decides they should be in a different slot. And that, as I've noted before, will note in this, and will likely note in future installments, is why Damon just faded into the background. Muir changes much more than the characters he writes, and the Muir of today has little need for Damon, even if this lack of need does seem to feel somewhat awkward to him, resulting in the occasional

Now, a quick explanation of the title of this installment that will seem like a digression at first--this is a line (or rather a version of a line) from an infamous minstrel show song, about one of the more notable minstrel characters. (It was also set to the tune we now largely know as 'Turkey in the Straw' one of the reasons that tune has acquired... implications of late.) Zip Coon, who so far as we can tell is the fictional character who made that word a racist slur, was different from some of the other minstrel show standards, like Jim Crow or Tambo and Mr. Bones. Where they were largely about portraying Blacks as lovable, slightly shiftless dimwits who whites could easily feel superior to, Zip... well, he had a somewhat more sinister agenda. Oh, Zip was just as stupid as Jim and the rest, but he didn't think he was. Zip thought he was clever, and that gave him airs. Yes, Zip was the original uppity negro, and most minstrels shows were filled with his efforts to bamboozle others with ridiculous high-flown language, including, as a rule, at least one ludicrous monologue filled with malapropisms, actual nonsense words, dog Latin, and sometimes even pig Latin. The underlying idea, for whites, was that Blacks might imagine they're smart, but they're wrong, and that the Black People who do it are prone to become incompetent crooks. That said, Zip was arguably one of the only elements of minstrel shows that had any complexity. Part of what made Zip amusing to audiences is that even as he attempts his ludicrous falsehoods, on some level he buys his own bullshit. As he speaks obvious nonsense, he imagines that this torrent of words is doubtless showing everyone how ingenious he is. Zip was paradoxically both lazy and shiftless, and yet constantly scheming. And if fans of old radio shows are thinking, wait, this sounds familiar, yes, this is the character type that the Kingfish, of Amos 'n' Andy fame, emerged from and from him quite a few other comic schemers. Now, as should be clear, Damon is a modern bit of minstrelsy, a white man creating a Black character to make jokes about Black people and one might be tempted to consider him a descendant of Zip. But he's not. Oh, Damon is something much worse.

Damon is a Black character who possesses only a nominal Blackness. For all that Damon shouts that liberals and Democrats only judge him by his skin, that is the only claim to Blackness as a character that he has. Damon has no connection nor interest in Black culture and Black history. Indeed, he even possesses no Black relatives, being by his account, an orphan with no family. He is completely severed from the Black experience, not only by upbringing, but by author fiat. Damon faces no hindrances by being Black. In the upside-down world Muir has crafted, the only problem his race causes him is the irritation of arrogant liberals pestering him about not fulfilling his stereotype, and about the only way he interacts with Black culture is to dismiss it. The only narrative functions of Damon's Blackness are to allow him to rail against the "real racism" of liberals and leftism and all their social programs, and to give Muir cover to announce radical conservative politics and dismiss . He is white man playing a Black man to tell other whiny, bigoted white racists that yes, everything you think about race and politics is correct, and the people who claim otherwise are just stupid and deluded. An actual worse form of a minstrel show character.

And that is really why Damon has fallen to the wayside. Muir no longer feels he needs to have a Black character say this. Zed and Sam can announce this racist blather openly, the Redneck Elite explaining everybody's proper place to them. Which leaves Damon hanging around, increasingly useless in a strip that clearly thought he was going to be a main feature.