Revocation (a term perhaps more appropriate than the one commonly used in the English language i.e. cancelling) happens so often that writing about it risks the loss of readers. Ultimately, weeklies should focus on man bites dog, not the other way around. The fact is that a hypothetically, triumphal return to the library shelves of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird or Orwell's 1984 should constitute much bigger news [than the cancellation of the Dilbert comic strip].

Let’s be honest, the reporting of successive revocations, deletions and decisions by moral censorship week after week is quite unambitious. It looks like a right-wing journalistic ploy that might just qualify as a column in a professional monthly magazine like "Nowe Książki" ["New Books"].

 Chronicle of Cancellations

 Such a column, call it "Chronicle of Cancellations", could report all the decisions about dethroned, stigmatized and ostracized books on a weekly basis. It would explain what had been cancelled by the Guardian and what by the Washington Post, for example. I imagine a column like that would be similar to the stock market quotations of pre-Internet times: boring strings of numbers carefully studied by experts.

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  The "Chronicle of Cancellations" would be eagerly pored over by the owners of second-hand bookshops and rebellious publishers, while also being read by small investors and moneygrubbers. For example, knowing that rarely available and forbidden goods appreciate in value, rather than ruining themselves on Canadian gold dollars or mouse-resistant buckwheat groats, they might hoard in their home safes a dozen copies, say, of "Winnie the Pooh" (increasingly perceived negatively given the traditional image of the mother in the person of the Kangaroo), "The Three Musketeers" (an apologia for violence and religion) or, not to be limited to classics, "The Crying of Lot 49 " by Thomas Pynchon (Oedipa Maas is, after all, a stereotypical image of a labile and greedy woman!).

Other than in such a chronicle, reports of the growing number of banned books are plain boring, and I gladly leave them to the indefatigable whistleblowers of the right. If there's anything guaranteed to jolt the observer of modern culture out of his jaded state, surely it's acts of devouring the fathers and mothers of the revolution (I'm waiting for the day when some zealous Tik Toker will file a motion to withdraw books by Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood from the libraries) or situations in which authors themselves will be begging for their own cancellation, and finally getting it. And, I have the impression that this is exactly what happened with Scott Adams and his, as we once used to describe it, cult comic book, "Dilbert".

What? "Dilbert"? "Dilbert" that for years seemed to be the cry of revenge of the pushed around white collars, employees of lower and mid-level corporations, tormented by their bosses' absurd decisions? The title character, along with Asok, Wally, Alice and half a dozen other personae, bravely try to survive in the office ruled by the nightmarish Pointy-Haired Boss and his allies: the perverse Piesbert and Phil-Prince of Twilight. This is what is called emancipatory and subversive, revolutionary and mocking reading. "We didn't live with Dilbert -- we lived Dilbert," an experienced Polish manager, who has been working in international corporations for 30 years, told me.

Well, maybe that's why…

Conquest and defeat

"Dilbert" was conquering readers much like General Patton's Third Army had when advancing in France in 1944. Scott Adams' career began in the classic manner of an uplifting American tale of "garage millionaires". Early mornings, from 4 to 6 a.m., before setting off to work as a cashier and later manager at the Crocker National Bank branch in San Francisco, Adams was drawing what became the initial episodes of his famed cartoon strip. By 1991, "Dilbert" was appearing in a hundred magazines. By 1994, this had risen four-fold. By the year 2000, the strip was syndicated to two thousand publications worldwide.

The time was ripe to start selling books, gadgets and TV series. Moreover, it didn't bother anyone that Adams was now publishing books on a broad range of topics, including a pantheism manifesto ("God's Debris", 2001), while declaring his support for politicians of such disparate and opposing views as Clinton and Trump.

However, twenty years later, this blitzkrieg turned into a blitzrückzug. And maybe it is precisely the scale of this change that has proved so shocking. On February 24, Adams made a statement on his regular video blog "Coffee with Scott Adams" that was interpreted as racist (we'll come back to that in a moment). Two hours later, the publisher of Cleveland's largest daily newspaper, "The Plain Dealer", decided to end its syndication arrangement. "It wasn't hard for us," the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Chris Quinn, asserted in an editorial. Cleveland was followed by the "USA Today" network that publishes 92 state and local titles ranging from "The Cincinnati Enquirer" to "The Indianapolis Star".

Next day, the "USA Today" network's example was followed by the Hearst Corporation, the publisher owner of several hundred titles and portals. By the afternoon of February 25, the decision to part ways with Adams had been announced by the "The Washington Times", "The Seattle Times" and "The Los Angeles Times". In the case of the latter, the editors were quick to point out that "in the last nine months" they had "rejected" individual Dilbert strips "four times because they did not meet our standards." Way to go!

  Down with Scottism-Adamism!

On February 26, less than 48 hours after Adams had uttered what proved to be fatal words, the cartoonist was fired by Andrews McMeel Universal, the firm that had been profiting from the management and sale of his comic book rights for more than twenty years. Next day, February 27, the Portfolio publishing house, publisher of several Adams’ books, also broke off its association with him. Then representatives of the largest television networks spoke out, declaring: "There is and will be no place for TV programs based on ‘Dilbert’".

What else? "Stunned by the unheard-of phrase Scottism-Adamism, I proceeded to open another journal, one that had published two articles. One was written by Łatuński, the other signed off with the letters «N.E.» You can be assured that the texts by Ahryman and Laurowicz were as nothing compared to what Łatuński wrote. Suffice to say that the title of Łatuński's article was: ‘Belligerent Old Believer’" ... Oh sorry, this is a fragment from another novel ["The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov]. But the mechanism is startlingly akin to that which was activated in the 1930s in Moscow.

And perhaps this is what is most striking about the Adams’ case: the universality of the decision to erase him and the absence of alternatives; also, perhaps the fact that hardly anyone associates this procedure with earlier historical precedents. "The conservative circles in Poland are crying over the fate of an American racist millionaire," an art-director of one of the largest comic publishers in Poland scoffs in private conversation, someone who knows the fate of the various "silenced" and erased, from Władysław Strzemiński [Polish artist] to Mikhail Bulgakov.

Is it okay not to be black?

So maybe, for the sake of clarity, armed with chalk, garlic and the latest brochure of the Center for Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Behaviors for safety, let's risk reading this racist sentence by Adams, that supposingly justifies his "erasure".

On February 24, the cartoonist celebrity was commenting in his videoblog about the results of public opinion polls published just a few days earlier that had been conducted by a large public opinion research center Rasmussen Reports. The company, which studies political moods and attitudes, sympathizes with the Republicans, yet has never been accused of unreliability or tinting its research results. For example, on the eve of the last presidential election in the USA, it predicted the victory of Joe Biden over Donald Trump in its White House Watch publication.

The Rasmussen Reports survey in question had examined attitudes and responses to the sentence "It's OK to be White". In Polish, this declaration can be translated in two different ways -- either as "It's nice to be White" or, probably conveying its meaning better, "It's okay to be White too". From the outset, the phrase, which first entered into public circulation in 2017 as a reaction to the "Black Lives Matter" campaign, has been deemed "hate speech" by many commentators, a reaction that perhaps already revealed the scale of divisions in today's USA.

For those who take this slogan affirmatively, it simply means recognizing that the cultural identity of White people, challenged and criticized by the mainstream, is as acceptable as any other. Critics, however, decided that we were dealing with a hate crime, and that the slogan itself was being distributed in a viral and guerrilla-like manner, making it impossible to publish in the largest media.

The question asked by the Rasmussen Reports pollsters was doubtless somewhat provocative. After a few years, however, the emotions burned out a bit: representatives of the majority of the ethnic groups surveyed considered it mostly neutral and acceptable. That is with the exception of the African Americans surveyed, 53% of whom agreed with the statement, while 26% rejected it, while 21% either disputed it or considered it debatable. All told, nearly half felt that there was something deeply wrong about being White.

We're leaving

Adams, in turn, reacted to this opinion with an emotional statement, maintaining that it is the African-Americans who constitute a hate group. He commented: "The best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people; just get the fuck away."

Strong words, especially if we decide not to omit the profanity.

Brutal. Unnecessarily generalizing. Absurd, even if Adams' next words imply that he means not a physical relocation, but a withdrawal from participation in aid programs and equality initiatives in which a large part of the White community is involved. Defensive and laced with resentment. But to decide that this phrase is "racist"? Well, maybe you have to be the editor-in-chief of Cleveland's largest daily newspaper. And really want to keep your job.

Of course, previously Adams had committed many more mistakes, much worse in my eyes than his emotional reaction to being stigmatized for the color of his skin. These pronouncements have ranged from heavily demagogic "anti-vaccine" tweets to, perhaps the most damaging claims that Americans who support Ukraine do so because they have been brainwashed with anti-Putin propaganda.

Slippery path

Adams is not the first to trip up on the polemical path. This is a phenomenon and a broader slip that may be noteworthy. The dynamics of discussion within the entire intellectual spectrum can often lead us to inadvertently and carelessly expand the field of dispute, to the point where we engage in matters that we may lack competence in. At the same time, in the era of social "bubbles", we meet with more and more support from radicals among those who are like-minded that we consider our own. This can encourage us to formulate increasingly radical views that are less and less thoughtful.

Over the years, Adams has been incredibly accurate at capturing the absurdities of corporate life, including such recent examples as the unquestioning response of company authorities to #BLM emotions and criticism of "structural racism." It is no coincidence that in one "Dilbert" episode from last fall, the Pointy-Haired Boss introduces a black Dave to the team of designers in the name of diversity. Nor is it a coincidence, since Adams drew it with his customary dark sense of humor, that the same Dave in his first sentence says that he "identifies as White." "You ruined everything, Dave," the Pointy-Haired Boss moans.

But if the audience enjoys these jokes about the newspeak that everybody has up their nose why not to make fun of other slogans repeated in the media a hundred times a day? And this is how you can embark on a path that leads some to the flat-earther camp, and others to a group of polyamory enthusiasts. Although at the beginning they were simply defiant...

Never mind Adams' contrariness. His risky stance on Covid or geopolitics has never been expressed in comic strips. Nonetheless, his strips were removed from the archive of "The Cincinnati Enquirer". Why? Because of his views.

Where is the limit to such practices? The master of twentieth-century French prose, Celine, continues to be published, despite being an indisputable anti-Semite and Vichy collaborator. To this day, Mikołaj Rej’s works are included on the list of school-set books even though he certainly had serfs working for him. And Leopold Tyrmand is still being sold at bookstores, although he supposedly knew many minors. But for how much longer?

I am telling you, buy books.

While they are still here.

– By Wojciech Stanisławski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

 –Translated by Agnieszka Rakoczy