Culture of Offense

The American Culture (Art, Books, Movies, Music, Television) was already Terminally Ill in 2010. By 2017 it was dead, and we are witnessing now its Decaying Corpse. Of the Reasons Why this happened, the Impossibility that artists face of Doing Good Work is just one. And just one of the reasons behind that impossibility is the Culture of Offense that we live in today.

It is a contradiction in terms to suggest that a creative person can do good, interesting, challenging work that doesn't offend SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE. The human race is itself far too contradictory, always ready and able to argue about any damn thing, no matter how trivial. 

In years past, you could offend a few people and it wasn't the End of the World, but today? Offending even a single person carries a Death Sentence. That person will wear their Offense like a Hair Shirt and go out into the world with it and take it online and make it their Life's Work to Utterly Destroy The Thing That Offended them, and the person that created it.

And the money people aren't stupid. Nobody is going to sponsor an artist whose work could possibly destroy their Peanut Butter sales figures.

American Culture has always tended toward the Bland for this reason, but now it has become braindead. A creative mind cannot function properly in a Police State that is heavily patrolled by jack-booted thugs existing at both ends of the political spectrum as well as the middle, middle-left and middle-right. Nothing rational can survive that kind of scrutiny. If the the right to offend is removed from the culture, freedom of thought and expression is removed as well.

When people can be raised to Ire by the color of the socks a character wears, art becomes untenible.

And now we live in a place where art has become so Inoffensive and bland that it's possible be offended by Inoffense, which offense itself offends a whole other group of people, and on and on and on.

There never was any chance of Winning the game of life, but most people now living refuse to acknowledge it. And by refusing to acknowledge that Winning is Impossible, the masses have killed Discourse. Not coincidentally, Discourse is where Art and Culture live.

And today it seems that the only thing that can get the extremists of the Right and Left to Unite is the place where they can both stomp culture out of existence.

"Good!" they will both say as they look down at the bloody, mangled corpses of Discourse, Culture and Art. "Good Riddance! They were a Rum Lot!"

Meanwhile, those of us for whom art and Fiction are the only way of coping with existence will have to crawl ever-deeper into hiding, and glean what we can out of the fragments to the past that remain.

—Thorn.

 

Dave

 I suppose that everyone begins to feel, at some point, that they belong to a Lost Generation — especially when they begin to see significant losses from among their own ranks. Death being the main Occupational Hazard of Life, after all.  

In July, my friend Dave Peabody, known professionally as Dave Naybor, died from a cancer that shot through him at an astonishing speed.  This was him just last year, on the day when all my oldest friends came up to visit me here at the DuckHaus.

He was a guy with a great sense of humor, who always, always came at an idea from a direction that no one else would have thought of. In a world of Sameness, Dave was Daringly Different. He had a great laugh and he always made me laugh. He had a lot of friends. It’s a testament to him that a lot of folks have remembered him online. One thread on Facebook alone holds 111 comments as a type this. A good round number. 

For now, I’ll turn you over to our mutual friend Bruce Canwell, over at the Library of American Comics. Comics were the connecting thread that held us all together over the years, and they were part of what connected Dave to a lot of other people as well. Bruce’s comments about Dave’s passing are closer to what I feel than any words I could possibly muster. 

https://libraryofamericancomics.com/my-job-is-talking-to-people/

I’ll just add that along with the loss there is a sense of shock that I know all of Dave’s friends are feeling. He was just 63 — his illness came quite suddenly, and Dave had no more than informed us that he was in a lot of pain when the announcements came, in rapid succession, that he had lost 100 pounds (Dave never had that much extra weight to lose), that cancer was confirmed, and then that he was in hospice.

We all should have benefitted from his recommendations, his observations, his humor and laughter, his unique perspective, for many years more. We all expected that he would be around with us for a lot longer. There's a sense that the gods have cheated us, by taking him so soon. It's the same sense we felt when our mutual friend Howard was taken from us a decade ago. 

The world is greatly diminished without him.

He was a better friend to me than I was to him. He will be missed. Good night, my friend.

Oh: his collection of Walking Christendom comics is still available at Amazon, here: https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Christendom-One-End/dp/055741167X. A taste of Dave’s humor runs throughout, and is evident in the name he took to publish them: Ed, the Masked Dog Global Empire.

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