In the '80s I was a devoted reader of Bloom County and The Far Side and, since Doonesbury was on the same page (and I've never met a full page I didn't read in its entirety), I read it as well. I had no idea what was going on, but I read it anyway. Even during the mid- to late-'80s, when I was living in Spain and my only source of print news/entertainment was the DoD's own Stars and Stripes, my favorite comics were there. So was Doonesbury, surprisingly enough—on the editorial page.
All claims of political ignorance aside (and I was vehemently apolitical in my youth, as befits a frightened, wannabe metalhead and avid AD&D-dork), the fact that Doonesbury was shifted to the editorial section of the paper wasn't lost on me. Now, before you start thinking that I was super-thoughtful or something, relax. The only reason I noticed is that Bloom County—not entirely apolitical itself, although still very silly—would be shunted to the editorial page on those occasions when Berke Breathed went out of his way to question or lampoon the Reagan administration's authority. I mean, recognizing similarities is something Sesame Street had been training me for since I learned to sing "One of these things / Is not like the other." If Bloom County got moved into Doonesbury's neighborhood because Milo was making fun of Ed Meese, then it stands to reason that Doonesbury must always be making fun of the government!
Even when one perceives one's smartest strategy as anti-intellectualism, one doesn't lose one's grasp on basic, simple syllogisms.
Anyway, I didn't really begin to understand Doonesbury until I went away to college. Actually, this understanding has its genesis before I went away to college, when I stole a bunch of books from a few of the boxes my dad stored in the basement. (Interesting aside: one of those books was Wallace Steven's Selected Poems [pub. 1952], in which both my father and I had scribbled marginalia. Of course my father's grad-student notes are much more interesting than my own, pre-preschool contribution [I think I still have that book, by the way, Dad; no, you can't have it back].) One of the books I kifed was called, I believe, simply Doonesbury, and collected the first couple of years of Trudeau's strips. During one of what I now think of as my "Barbecued Books in Beaver" weekends (I was attending school at PSU's branch campus in Beaver, Pa., had no money, no food, no cigarettes and no friends but was blessed with a bunch of barbecue sauce packets my grandmother'd saved from Arby's and had generously sent along to me in a care package…plus, of course, books) I read the entire thing, sandwiched between Catcher in the Rye and The Lord of the Rings.
And, I don't know…chalk it up to the hunger, or the nicotine withdrawal, or acid-flashbacks caused by burning my nearly-nonexistent body fat, or just plain loneliness, or an artful combination of all those factors, but my reading of the very first Doonesbury strips coupled with my imperfect memories of the poorly understood Doonesbury strips I'd been reading for years gelled in a very significant way. I came to a very basic understanding of my personality: I would never, ever be a Republican. And, if you know me or have at least scanned the other entries in this blog, you know that this is still true and that I'm pretty satisfied with that situation.
Anyway, as much as I might owe to Doonesbury, I knew nothing about the strip's creator himself, other than the well known trivia that he's related to one of the modern Prime Ministers of Canada. That ignorance is gone now, thanks to "Doonesbury's War", a profile by Gene Weingarten that appeared recently in The Washington Post's Magazine section. Hell, I didn't even know that he was married to Jane Pauley!
I urge you to read that link, even if you couldn't give a shit about comic strips or politics. I urge this on you because Garry Trudeau is to comic strips what Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman are to comic books, what The Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen are to rock 'n' roll… he's important, y'dig? He's changed the very fabric of his medium. Plus, he doesn't give a lot of interviews.
On top of that, there's this little, moving bit that happens toward the end, when his wife makes the connection between two things Garry himself won't say a word about—her own well-publicized bout with bi-polar disorder and the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder themes explored in one of the current Doonesbury story arcs:
Pauley thinks the story of B.D. has been something special, the best work Trudeau has ever done. And then she says:Call it self-absorption if you wish, a partner trying to push her own sickness onto her husband. I can see that argument. I almost buy it.
"I don't think he's consciously aware that it has anything to do with me."
With . . . her?
Pauley smiles. "Garry's mind is very compartmentalized. The department doing the strip in his brain is not directly connected to the husband part, but…it defies credulity that on some level it is not present in his work. What is he writing about, really? He's writing about mental illness, and how it's possible to find a way out of it, with help. It's very hopeful."
I start to say that Trudeau has never made that connection to me, in fact denies that his private life ever intrudes into the strip. But Pauley is ahead of me.
"He'll want to say no, but it's hard to argue with. Isn't it?"
But to me, it sounds like understanding. To me, it sounds like love.
But, then again, I've read the profile.
So should you.
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