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Friday Funny: Buying A Fuel Efficient Car

Posted by: Abhijeet Chavan

24 February 2006 - 2:00pm

Dilbert considers buying a fuel efficient car.

"It's my patriotic duty to reduce this country's dependence on foreign sources of oil."

Full Story: Dilbert: 19 Feb, 2006
Source: Dilbert, February 19, 2006
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The trouble with Dilbert

Submitted by Jacob Allderdice on Tue, 02/28/2006 - 11:56.

Okay, I get the joke: as long as someone smarter than me can feed me words I'm unfamiliar with, they're smart and I'm the loser.

Fungible commodity? Fact is, Dilbert has an image problem, best summed up in the 1997 book The Trouble with Dilbert by Norman Solomon. In a nutshell, it is that while Dilbert appears to be constantly "giving it to the man" in the form of caustic observations about the foibles of corporate culture, the truth is his creator, Scott Adams, sells himself as a tool for places like Intel and other mega-corporations that might seem to be legitimate targets of his satire.

So in this cartoon about the illegitimacy of buying a gas miser of a car, you have to ask: on whose behalf is he speaking? Not that of the guy in a cubicle who might have ideas about making the world a better place, that's for sure. Remember, the biggest corporation of them all (for now) is General Motors, which is stuck right now with a huge inventory of gas guzzlers and an even huger public relations problem. Anyone else wonder if Scott Adams has something more than just the syndication fees for his cartoons paying his heating bills this winter? Anyone from GM or Ford care to comment?

See also my blob on this subject at http://allderdice.ca/?p=88 . There I make the observation "Scott Adams’s argument [about fungible commodities] is a little like the one that says “it doesn’t matter that the World Trade Centre was brought down by force; it would eventually have decayed and fallen down anyway. And the people would have died eventually too.”

"We wonder if to Scott Adams, people and buildings are also fungible commodities."

  • The ALLDERBLOB at http://www.allderdice.ca/

    • Because it's past time to ban automobile advertising.

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    “
    These practices are also inequitable since they force non-drivers to subsidize parking costs, reduce travel options for non-drivers, and reduce housing affordability.
    ”