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Pluggers, 10/27/08

It’s well documented that the definition of “plugger” is notoriously slippery. For instance, before today, you probably didn’t realize that typical, average Americans who sit around the kitchen table out of their minds on a psychedelic mix of prescription medications are in fact pluggers! The shocking revelation that even pillheads can be pluggers leads us to ask: who else is a plugger?

Apartment 3-G, 10/27/08

Alan’s parents are probably pluggers! That’s why they hate and fear the great city of New York, refusing to bury him there, instead taking him home to a simple, all-American rural Maine cemetery. This move on their part has put an end to Margo’s brief experience of something resembling human tenderness, as she prepares to leap to the defense of her home city, and I have to come in on her side here. After all, it’s not as if Alan’s going to overdose at his own funeral, seeing as he’s already dead and all. And if his burial service is thronged by crazed junkies who ultimately pull his body from the casket and attempt to grind it up and smoke/snort/inject it so as to enjoy the residual dope still in his veins — well, isn’t that what he really would have wanted? It would certainly be more fun than the “private service” his parents have planned, with the glassy-eyed, pill-numbed plugger hordes drooling aimlessly in the pews.

Wizard of Id, 10/27/08

The peasants in Wizard of Id are also pluggers, because they’re staying cheerful and making do with what they’ve got! In this case, “what they’ve got” is their rickety wooden furniture, and “making do” involves burning it for heat. Because they live in desperate, crushing poverty, you see! Ha ha! The nonstop larfs will continue as they turn first to prostitution and then to cannibalism.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/27/08

The Funky Winkerbeaners are perpetually glum and despondent, so they do not in fact qualify for plugger status. I find it interesting that Les needs to consult the yearbook so as to successfully navigate his high school reunion. True, everyone in the cast has aged horribly, due to various cancers and general soul-blighting depression, but as far as I know, virtually all of them have remained in town, so it’s not like their current wizened state should be a surprise to Les. Hell, half of them work with him, either at the high school or the pizzeria, Winkerburg apparently being a black hole of misery from which no joy can escape.