Therapy

One of the motivations that got me started on this blog was my regular reading of the blog of the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, which can be found by going to his main website at http://www.dilbert.com and then clicking the blog banner. Or you can click here:

I like the way Scott Adams talks each morning about whatever springs into his head, which might be anything from a scruffy hotel in which he's just spent the night to one of his intricate theories about humanity and society. I've always maintained that the excellence of the language appearing in the Dilbert cartoons contributes greatly to their impact. There's never a word too many, or the wrong word, and every phrase seems to have been constructed with care. Well, in Scott's blog, we find the same kind of linguistic faultlessness... which has often made me wonder (I guess I'm jealous) if there might be some kind of an editorial team working in the shadow of the artist. Scott seems to speak openly of himself as a successful businessman, rather than a great cartoonist of the traditional American kind. [I've inserted the verb "seems" to underline that the alleged "fact" I relate is rather fuzzy, because I'm totally out of my depth when it gets around to concepts such as "a successful businessman" or, even more so, "a great cartoonist of the traditional American kind".] So, it would be perfectly normal if he had a team of talented individuals to assist him.

Scott often speaks of his having to steer a straight line to avoid rejection by the numerous newspapers to which he is syndicated. This means that he has to avoid images that might shock narrow-minded viewers. Although he has never said so, I would imagine that he has to avoid cartoon situations in which he might be accused of making a political statement, in one way or another. Well, in his last two blogs (called Vacationing Toward Victory and Better off Losing?), Scott has just gone completely over the deep end... in an anti-Bush sense.

The most amusing thing is that Scott has made this explicit political coming-out (which is unlikely to really surprise any of his fans) at a time when he is supposed to be receiving specialized therapy—of a psychological kind, if I understand correctly—to rectify a serious speech defect. I wonder if somebody could persuade Dubya—who doesn't express himself all that well—to go along to the same therapist...