on the workings of punchy observations

Concerning the aforementioned remark– “Dick was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” One thing is clear: it comes off as a compliment.

This is probably because Dick’s visionary futurism is so beyond any revocation that it adds to his aura rather than taking away from it. In other words, when we read the blurb we don’t think: “Good point, I guess Dick was really just a product of his age. Never thought of it that way before.” Instead, what we think is something like: “He understood us better than we understood ourselves. It took a visionary to unlock such horrific things behind the banal facade of 1960’s/1970’s America.”

But try the same phrase while plugging in different nouns in place of Dick’s name, and notice the very different effects.

“Deleuze was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” Where would you find such a sentence? Probably in a “critical” survey of recent French philosophy by a non-fan… “Deleuze and his followers presented him as a visionary, but really he was just a typical symptom of May ’68 Paris.”

Or this: “Cézanne was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” This would be a bit of a head-scratcher, and we would have to wait for the explanation.

“George W. Bush was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” This could be witty, but only if given context as a rejoinder to false claims– preceded by recollections of how Bush thought his response to 9/11 heralded a new wave of proactive responses to terrorism, when in fact he was merely replicating an existing imperialist logic rather than innovating, etc. etc.

Here’s a banal option: “Pizza Hut was not ahead of its time. Rather, it was scarily in sync with it.”

And this one is downright odd: “Dr. Seuss was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.”

Here’s another weird one: “Jesus was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” I’m not even sure what short of historical theory would be behind that one.

My question would be, how many people/things other than Philip K. Dick could fit into that sentence and still have it sound like a compliment? Even “Lovecraft was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” does not sound to me like a compliment. It sounds here as though Lovecraft is being pigeonholed as just a typical pulp writer of the era.

At the moment, I can’t think of anyone else who looks better if plugged into that sentence, though there must be other examples.