Setting Your Goodwill Ablaze

Scott Adams died, creating a big shrug here at Media Magpies. We don’t actually care enough to list everything that’s awful about the last couple of decades of his life, but we also don’t really care enough to eulogize him. I, for one, will always remember the classic “I hate Mommy’s new haircut” April Fool’s comic, one of the best of the April Fool’s strip-trades of that era. But Christ, he became such a libertarian tool, if that’s not redundant, and he stopped being relevant to most of us. No matter how much we’d liked him before, it was hard to care anymore.

This is a fairly common occurrence, more common than it needs to be. The bar is frequently “just don’t be terrible.” All you have to do for some people is maybe keep your mouth shut. We aren’t even talking about the people who turn out to be predators, like Jared Leto. We’re talking about people who turn out to be obnoxious and insufferable in some way, like Jared Leto. In all cases, it does boil down to “just don’t suck,” I admit, but some of it is easier than others.

I’m not going to say I was ever a fan of Rob Schneider. There are some genuinely great comedians who were on Saturday Night Live in those days, and then there was Rob Schneider. Everyone knows he got most of his work from being in movies with his buddy Adam Sandler. And you know, that’s fine; whatever. But he earned a little goodwill from me for having sent Roger Ebert a bouquet of flowers from “Rob Schneider, your favourite actor” when Roger was in the hospital. I’m not going to relate the backstory to that here, but it was genuinely sweet. And now he’s off whining about being canceled for being conservative instead of, as is the real story, being ignored because he’s untalented.

We would be perfectly happy to let Schneider end in “former SNL cast member” obscurity, like Tim Kazurinski or Melanie Hutsell. No shame in the designation. A lot of those people are talented, and some of them are even doing solid character work or writing. They can’t all be Jim Belushi or Phil Hartman, after all. But the thing is, Rob Schneider was one of the most mediocre people ever to appear on the show, and he’s convinced that he should have the career Sandler does without having Sandler’s talent or charisma.

I don’t mean to pick on him, here. We could talk instead about Scott Adams and his ridiculous libertarianism. I don’t think he ever actually influenced anyone enough to say he hurt anyone, but Lord he wouldn’t have had a problem with having done so. The seeds were there back in the ‘90s, when he thought certain jokes about women were funny, but eventually he became the Pointy-Haired Boss without noticing it. He also complained about being canceled for his being white instead of that the Dilbert cartoon was expensive and didn’t get high enough ratings. The Clerks cartoon got canceled, too, and you can’t call Kevin Smith anything but white.

The issue is that I’m trying to stay with relatively low-stakes examples. Clint Eastwood and the empty chair, I suppose, because that was 2012. But that’s clearly when he stopped being “filmmaker who is also conservative” and started being “conservative who is also a filmmaker.” But the stakes rapidly escalate, because after all the chair thing was at the Republican National Convention, and there’s a lot I’d rather not get into about that. I’m sure there are people whose Twitter beefs killed off their fan base. The Napster thing and Metallica, for a lot of people. And so forth.

But the stakes rapidly escalate. Twitter beefs indicate where you’re spending your money. Because being a hateful transphobe on Twitter then becomes forming a foundation for the purpose of harming trans people to the level that having tattoos of your only work that anyone cares about comes with a higher regret rate than transitioning. Harmless conspiracy nuts end up destroying science for entire nations. Being weirdly obsessive and sexual in your “Method acting” can cover up preying on teenage girls. And so forth.

No one is perfect. Believe me, even my friends can tell you things that are wrong with me, and I’d own up to them. But you can let the negative things about you take the lead. For all I know, some of these people are, for example, fiercely loyal friends. Supportive of their local library. Fond of supporting random GoFundMes and Kickstarters just to help out people who need it. All sorts of other quietly positive things. But instead, they’re known for being hateful and toxic. And they could’ve just kept their mouths shut and been hateful and toxic in private, at least.