Flashbacks: Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1996 by Joshua Wolf Shenk

In the beginning, there was B.D. In the first block of the first strip of "Doonesbury," the football-helmeted, stone-faced character sits in an armchair, with a blank college pennant hanging on the wall. Then Mike Doonesbury walks in. Over time, the rest of the cast-mark Slackmeyer, Boopsie, Zonker and the rest-climbed out of Garry Trudeau's brain and onto his drafting table. At first, their lives swirled around dorms and football fields. Then B.D. dropped out of college to fight in Vietnam. Mark latched onto the war as well-from the other side. (Lucky callers to his radio show received not t-shirts or records but free copies of the Pentagon Papers.)

The characters had entered history. And history answered back. "If anyone is going to find any defendant guilty," The Washington Post scolded after a series of merciless strips on Watergate, "it's going to be the due process of justice, not a comic strip artist." Years later, Trudeau tore into the town of Palm Beach, Florida, where blacks and Hispanics were randomly stopped by police under a law that required domestic servants to register with the police. The law was repealed. The ultimate example of life imitating Doonesbury came out in 1994, when a stolen carton of Brown & Williamson documents arrived at the office of a University of California professor; the return address read simply "Mr. Butts."

"Doonesbury" is a paradox-politico-cultural satire that rans alongside "Marmaduke" and "Cathy" in hundreds of American newspapers (and on editorial or feature pages in others); a comic strip as comfortable with wars and financial crises as with domestic humor. (The Persian Gulf War occupied the strip for almost 250 straight days.) But the principal peculiarity is this: hi a fictional world populated by a car-rot-nosed ad man, a retired sustaining champion, two homeless eccentrics, and two Slackmeyers--the inside-trading, Reagan-loving, tobacco company-lobbying father and his liberal, gay, public radio host son--Trudeau creates a world that is in many ways more real than the world viewed through traditional journalism. Blending actual figures and events with fiction, Trudeau achieves a clarity that often eludes more restricted forms. His portrait of Jimmy Carter manning the White House switchboard or Ronald Reagan carrying cue cards for a cabinet meeting--("Sit down in chair. You unbutton coat (optional). Do not remove shoes")--are strinkingly authentic. By collapsing entire industries into a single character--Sid Kibbitz speaks for Hollywood, Mr. Butts for the tobacco industry, Duke for the sleaze-dujour--and planting his characters at such spectacles as the O.J. Simpson trial, Trudeau achieves a sort of X-ray camera effect, providing a glimpse of the truth behind the vagaries and obfuscations and P.R. campaigns that dominate so much of public discourse. One strip shows a lobbyist in Al D'Amato's reception area trying to see the senator "about my bid on a HUD contract." Rebuffed, he writes a $5,000 check. "I hope I'm not being too ... uh ... forward here," he says. He's told not to worry. "What a relief. I mean, there are senators who would call the police." "Don't be silly," the secretary says. "Let me give you our brochure."

At times, as in the Palm Beach case, Trudeau has demonstrably forced political change. But mostly he has engaged minds, stirred controversy, and provided an example of a popular medium that appeals to the best in us without sanctimony, and preaches without raising its voice above a wry whisper.

Trudeau's success over the last 25 years--the strip now runs in 1,600 daily and Sunday papers and regularly commands the attention of the public figures it features--also should give hope to this country's beleaguered liberals. When he began drawing "Bull Tales" for the Yale Daily News in 1968, liberalism was beginning its sharp descent. Today, "conservative" is a positive modifier and "liberal" an epithet. On "Larry King Live" recently, Hillary Clinton even denied that she was a member of the species.

Many liberals see cause for their decline in the fact that conservative ideas are more easily compressed into soundbites. But if there's anything that "Doonesbury" reminds us, it's that liberal values can be expressed succinctly, powerfully, and with a sense of humor. More importantly, Trudeau's liberalism isn't one of interest groups and hot-button issues, but of broad values of decency, opportunity, and fairness. The implicit and explicit arguments of his strips are that the disadvantaged are human and deserve a hand-up; that well-off businesses and individuals should adhere to standards of decency like the rest of us; that government has a role to play in protecting and preserving a good life for its citizens.

Trudeau punctures conservative fantasies by carrying their ideas to the logical--and preposterous extreme. Like supply-side economics. When the elder Slackmeyer is defending the Reagan economic plan, he beckons his servant, Jonah. "Why, his people are 100% behind supply-side economics! Isn't that right, Jonah?"