For the past year, "Doonesbury" - published by Kansas City, Mo.-based Universal Press Syndicate - has followed the progress of character B.D., who lost a leg to an improvised explosive device while on patrol in Iraq. The story has been praised by groups that work with injured soldiers and derided by others like Fox's Bill O'Reilly, who compared Trudeau to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
It's the latest in a long career of giving politicians and newspaper editors heartburn as Trudeau and his cast of Baby Boomers, reformed hippies, blogging teenagers and one Hunter S. Thompson-esque mercenary named Uncle Duke debate the issues of the day on the funny pages of almost 1,500 newspapers around the world. Wednesday marks the strip's 35-year anniversary.
"Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader," Trudeau said in response to e-mailed questions from The Associated Press. "But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better."
Reason magazine associate editor Jesse Walker said the strip has occasional breakthroughs, but has become more Democrat polemic than satire and Trudeau's best work is decades behind him.
I disagree about that. As Mark Evanier wrote in an excellent column a handful of years ago,
Garry Trudeau is probably a liberal on anyone's Political Preference Chart, but he's delivered a few good body-blows to this nation's more prominent liberals. (I have a friend, conservative to the extreme, who thinks those are the only funny Doonesbury strips. When Trudeau goes after Ted Kennedy, he's a brilliant political satirist; when he targets Newt Gingrich, he's an unfunny, know-zero propaganda monger. This is the kind of thing that convinces me Trudeau is fair, especially since I have liberal friends who think just the opposite.)
I also think Trudeau's work in the last year has been some of his most powerful and admirable. But, to get back to the CBS News story:
In 1984, a week of Doonesbury strips depicting Vice President Bush placing his "manhood in a blind trust" led to this Bush retort: "Doonesbury's carrying water for the opposition. Trudeau is coming out of deep left field."
Doonesbury's 25-year anniversary collection, Flashbacks, contains a collection of quotes marking the evolution of Bush, Sr's public responses to the strip, from "I don't get troubled by Doonesbury because I know who I am," to "So I'm saying, why should I be all uptight, when people don't need a filter, you know?"
Trudeau refutes his far-left, anti-Republican label, saying he's supported "moderate" Republicans over the years and not "mindless ideologues like the ones who who've had a stranglehold on power the past five years."
This can be supported. In 1980 he went so far as to feature his title character working in a series of strips as an advance man for moderate Republican John Anderson.
Internet blogs broadcast a wide range of perspectives and television viewers can tune in nightly to the late show monologues or Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."
Is "Doonesbury" still relevant?
"That's for the readers to adjudge, but I will say that in general public commentators have nowhere near the clout that we enjoyed 35 years ago, the age of four TV channels and no Internet," [Trudeau] said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's all good. You can't have too many voices in a democracy. Talented people will find their audiences."
Christopher Lamb, an associate professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, dedicated a chapter to "Doonesbury" in his book "Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Political Cartoons."
"Satire is ephemeral. It doesn't last. For Trudeau to do it for so long is just incredible," Lamb said. "He may be competing with satirists like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. He rides the cultural, political and social waves. He's a heck of an observer."
And just as a reminder of what all the fuss is about, here's today's Doonesbury. Still funny in my book.
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