Elbonia
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The Republic of Elbonia is a fictional country in Eastern Europe from Scott Adams' comic strips Dilbert and Plop: The Hairless Elbonian. It is an extremely poor, "fourth-world" country that has recently abandoned Communism. Most of the nation is covered with waist-deep mud, which the residents use to build houses.
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[edit] Inspiration
Adams has said that many people think of the mud as snow, a limitation of the black-and-white daily strips, but that either way is fine with him. He has commented that Elbonia is essentially based on most Americans' stereotypes of a developing country with immense problems.
Elbonia might be either a conscious or coincidental parallel to one of the venues in Al Capp's long-running strip Li'l Abner: a nation called Lower Slobbovia (based on Siberia), whose citizens were perpetually seen in waist deep snow and ice.
The name Elbonia can be thought of as a contraction of Estonia and Albania, both former Eastern Bloc countries. The French translation is more offensive: the country is called "Zalbanie", which is much closer to the French "Albanie" for Albania. Elbonia also contains a homophone of "elbow", a fact referenced in another fictitious nation called "Kneebonia".
[edit] Government
Elbonia's government is a dictatorship, run by a right-handed military strongman who strives to crush the lefties. Dogbert briefly deposed the President and made himself dictator; he then began a campaign to increase Elbonian tourism by making gambling and prostitution not only legal, but mandatory. He and Dilbert (who acted as his advisor) wound up fleeing the palace when they mistook the Elbonians' coming to them bearing farm tools as an uprising — it turned out they were calling him to preside over a farm holiday. In fact, this was the protracted series during which the "jowly" boss was replaced by the Pointy-Haired Boss.
Some strips reference a "North Elbonia", which is still Communist. It appears to be loosely based on North Korea. North Elbonia was destroyed when they used a giant laser manufactured by Dilbert's employer; the manual had been made by Tina out of anger on how women in North Elbonia are mistreated (at least according to Dilbert).
The national bird of Elbonia is the Frisbee.
[edit] Residents
Virtually all of the Elbonians have beards, even the females and infants, and wear tall grey hats and black mittens. (Plop centers on a hairless, beardless child, a rarity in Elbonia.) Elbonians are commonly portrayed as idiotic and backward.
Elbonian pigs have intelligence and social standing comparable to the humans and are sometimes shown as having a role in the government. In an early Dilbert strip, Wally orders a mail-order bride from Elbonia, only to receive a pig dressed in women's clothing, later cooking it to make a BLT sandwich.
[edit] Economy
Much of the Elbonian economy is mud-based. In one cartoon the Elbonians discover that the mud is caused by an abundance of oil and coal near the surface. Another strip claimed that the Elbonians became rich by selling the mud as a couch cosmetic on the Home Shopping Channel. According to Dogbert, "They sold their country in little jars. Most of the Elbonians perished in the fiery core of the earth".
The Elbonians refuse to do any business which is not corrupt, and in order to attract tourists Elbonia openly lies in its promotional videos, claiming to host five of the seven wonders of the world.
Dilbert's company often uses Elbonia as a source of cheap labor and general outsourcing - the Pointy-Haired Boss approves of outsourcing programming or documentation tasks to them on a regular basis. However, these cost-savings attempts regularly backfire. For example, the computer code developed in Elbonia was only documented in Elbonian, and the debugging costs alone were more than what it would have cost to develop the entire program in-house.
When Dilbert's company won the bid to build a cell phone network for the Elbonians, the Elbonian government would not sign the contract until they were given plans for a nuclear weapon. Dilbert instead gave them plans for a giant toaster, and they were foiled by a lack of highly enriched bread.
Once Dogbert enslaved several Elbonians to make running shoes, as he "just got a huge order" for them. When one tried to get Dilbert to help, Dilbert pepper-sprayed him saying "I like helping people, but I also like inexpensive footwear."
Elbonia is depicted as a technologically outdated country: "phones" are actually cans attached to the ends of strings and the means of "air transportation" (Air Elbonia) is flinging people from a giant slingshot (something Dilbert hates to do because he loses his luggage and gets head-deep into mud). In the TV series, "Air Elbonia" uses planes assembled from what looks like scrap metal and clapboard, and there are no runways, so the plane just lands in the mud. In a recent strip, where Wally goes there, they use planes, but the passengers just jump out of the plane, trying to "land on a plump Elbonian to cushion their fall."
[edit] War
For many years Elbonia has been mired, as it were, in a civil war between the left- and right-handed Elbonians, although the war was mostly bloodless, as the Elbonians did not realize they were allowed to use weapons. Elbonia has also threatened its neighbor, Kneebonia, with nuclear weapons launched by slingshot.
Elbonia was also briefly engaged in a war with France, that erupted when Dilbert's company gave them the bid of launching a French spy satellite, which resulted in the disastrous slingshot launch of the satellite into the French Embassy in Elbonia. After a brief bombing campaign, France ended the war after realizing that there was nothing of value to bomb and the Elbonian GNP tripled when the citizens sold the bomb shrapnel as scrap metal. This temporary rise in wealth caused the Elbonians to try to instigate another war with France by standing in front of the newly rebuilt French Embassy and insulting French wine, which ultimately failed.
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