Politics & Power Quote by Harvey Pekar

Pekar’s genius was always in the bait-and-switch: you expect “splendor” to mean fireworks, hero shots, the mythic America of movies and campaign ads. Instead he offers the glow of fluorescent lights, bus rides, bills, petty arguments, depression, the humiliations that don’t make it into national folklore. The line lands because it’s both a defense and a taunt. He’s naming his project and pre-empting its haters in the same breath, letting the criticism in without giving it power.

“Some people think” is doing a lot of work. It’s Pekar’s shrug at the culture industry that wants uplift packaged as authenticity. His comics insist that realism is not a mood board; it’s a record of how people actually live when no one’s watching. Calling it “American Squalor” reveals the discomfort his work provokes: if the everyday is grimy, then the problem isn’t the storyteller’s attitude, it’s the country’s self-image. Pekar isn’t romanticizing misery, but he’s also refusing the polite lie that dignity requires gloss.

Context matters: a file clerk in Cleveland turning his own unremarkable life into literature, pushing back against superhero dominance and late-20th-century consumer optimism. The joke has a corroded warmth: splendor and squalor aren’t opposites here; they’re adjacent addresses. Pekar’s intent is to argue that the nation’s real drama is not escape but endurance - and that there’s a kind of stubborn beauty in telling the truth about it.