Remembering My Friend Scott Adams While He Still Breathes

Give Adams the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. President

Adams and Trump in 2018

I want to say a quick word about the impending death of my friend, Scott Adams, and to speak about what his life and impending death had meant to me.

It’s terribly gauche to talk about the obvious but there’s something kind of ridiculous about not talking about it too. I feel a bit as if I am writing a living eulogy as if Scott Adams is playing the role of Huck Finn and listening to everyone weep about him from the rafters. How cool is it that he sent the President of the United States to voicemail?

In any event I’d taken a stab once or twice at this sort of thing and I had half considered publishing it once Adams shuffled off to wherever it is that cartoonists go when they cartoon no more.

I met him first through his work, as you know, and the newspapers I delivered as a young boy. In those days I had ink on my hands and not just in my blood.

But in the unlikely series of events that culminated in Donald Trump’s election in 2016 I met Adams several times at his hometown of Pleasanton, California. We had lunch and dinner on several occasions and one time one of my friends brought him some drugs which he enjoyed immensely.

In the first Trump presidency Scott and I spoke nearly every day. He was kind to me in promoting some of my friends and ideas and I have to say that I loved the power that came with socializing ideas through a trained hypnotist. It was rather remarkable the power that came with chatting to Adams and then listening to those very same ideas come from the White House or on Fox News.

I drifted away from Trump throughout his presidency as it became increasingly clear that the Republicans were a little too captured by Israeli interests to offer much of an argument. I wonder then, as I wonder now, if being an influencer means that you will instead offer yourself up to being influenced.

Still weighing in on the life and times of Scott Adams after he’s dead strikes me as a kind of evasion, a cowardice altogether unfitting of the man who is choosing to spend his final days with the audience he has built up. Oh yes, there’s a real gallantry to doing Coffee With Scott Adams until he signs off out of this life.

Do say all the things you’ve always wanted to say, Scott. Even and perhaps especially if those things are more than a little messed up.

If you’re going to end your life, consider live-streaming it. Why not? Go out with a bang as you drift off. If you’re an activist on this death with dignity thing end your life on your live stream. Why not?

Or maybe not…

There’s a deeper question here of whether or not he’s dying or being killed off but I won’t go there. That’s too dark even though knowing Scott I’m sure it’s something he’s thought about.

I warned Scott that I thought he, too, was being captured by some of the Israelis seeking to influence Trump. To his credit he agreed and began to let them know that they weren’t welcome in his orbit. He leaked his text messages between which exposed an Israeli plot against Congressman Matt Gaetz — and he never apologized for it.

During the first Trump presidency I listened to Scott nearly every day, especially during the pandemic. It was a lonely, very online time, and Scott filled up the silence in my Texas apartment, miles away from my family and friends elsewhere. Scott, to his credit, apologized for encouraging everyone to get the vaccine.

There was something kind of fun about watching Adams interact with his fans who had become a sort of family he never really had. We had had some discussions there but those I’m taking to his grave and mine. Suffice it to say Adams has had a tough life and I don’t think I even know the half of it. It’s a cliché to talk about how funny people often are depressed.

Still, as I got older I didn’t really want to have other peoples’ frames in my head. The truth is many of us live with other peoples’ frames in our head. What we think we know isn’t so and what we know isn’t ours. It’s a tricky thing to be original and it’s rare. Adam knows this more than most. I think the irony of what Adams was doing in talking about brainwashing was, in effect, freeing us to see the brainwashing everywhere.

If you want to be hypnotized it requires your consent and Adams has more or less showed me that it’s far better to create than it is to consume. That’s the real trick: realizing how many people want to be led, how many people want to be brainwashed, how many people want to escape. I wish Scott every happiness and joy in his corner of the Internet, long as he may keep his voice alive.

He once said to me that mine was an autography he most wanted to read “but only if it’s truthful.” It was an extremely kind thing to say and I treasure the books of his he has signed over to me.

Strangely as my life gets stranger and stranger, all I want to do is write novels. There is a kind of safety there when you can claim, plausibly enough, that it’s all fiction. Maybe I’ll finally become a novelist. Adams has taught me how you can shift between careers and take on new and surprising roles even late in life. He one time said to me that he had always wondered if he could do it again and the election of Trump had convinced that he could — that he could remake himself from mere cartoonist to public commentator.

Of course you have to be terribly careful about what you write about, lest you summon people to come for you—or to try to arrest or capture your voice. I should know a thing or two about that as my recent court cases make all too clear. Mustn’t worry, dear reader, I’m going to win both of them though mum’s the word until I do. I do love surprises, as you know.

Dilbert is iconic. There simply aren’t enough words to talk about its cultural impact so I won’t bother. If you worked in corporate America you couldn’t go two feet without seeing a Dilbert cartoon on some cubicle or in some break room. Every place I have ever worked which had an office had Dilbert.

There are Dilberts all over this country, certainly more of them than there are Charlie Browns. I think that’s how Adams really knew that Donald Trump would win. Adams, who was his small town New York high school valedictorian, came from the sort of place that narrowly votes for Trump. A place where white and bright people are ignored.

To be fair there’s no airport named after Scott Adams as there is with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. Adams did not care for Schulz nor apparently Schulz for Adams.

An airport is cool and all, but you know what President Trump should do?

Give Adams the Presidential Medal of Freedom.