..."Doonesbury" ...survived and metamorphosed over the years into what is essentially an episodic comic novel, with so many active characters that Trudeau himself has been known to confuse them. "Doonesbury" has always remained topical, often controversial. Unapologetically liberal and almost religiously anti-establishment, Trudeau has been denounced by presidents and potentates and condemned on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He's also been described as America's greatest living satirist, mentioned in the same breath as Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce.
As I've mentioned once or twice in the past, I think Stephen Colbert and especially Jon Stewart may be gaining on him; I think they're national treasures. But they've still only been doing it for a handful of years against his 30+.
But I like the "episodic comic novel" conceit. Makes him sound a little like Dickens-a comparison he'd no doubt disavow, but which doesn't seem to me completely wrongheaded.
LIKE ANY SATIRIST WHOSE WORK ENDURES, Trudeau has been right about a lot of things. From the moment that hippie college deejay Mark Slackmeyer looked at the reader and gleefully declared that an as-yet-unindicted Attorney General John Mitchell was "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" Trudeau has shown a world-class instinct for piercing a babble of crosstalk and nailing the truth. He was right about Vietnam (When a conservative columnist said that he saw a "a light at the end of a tunnel," Michael asked him: "When you've dug yourself into a hole, why do you always insist on calling it a tunnel?"). Trudeau was right about the greed of '80s big business, about the cynicism of the marketing industry, about Bill Clinton's flippy-flop, polls-based approach to governance ("Doonesbury" regularly portrayed Clinton as a greasy waffle).
"Occasionally, people accuse me of courage," he says. "And that's wrong. I'm sitting on a perch of safety. Cartoonists have a tar-baby immunity. The more people react to us, and the more angrily they react, the better it is for us. So we're invulnerable. It just doesn't seem fair."
Incidentally, here's where I show what a "Doonesbury"-nerd I am. Near the end of the profile the writer looks at a strip in which
B.D. appears to be considering cheating on Boopsie, which hasn't happened to our knowledge in 20-plus years of an eccentric but strong marriage.
B.D. cheated on Boopsie during his service in the first Gulf War, with a girl named Meg. They broke it off when she learned she was his superior officer but, after he'd come home, she returned to make a play for him and almost broke up said "eccentric but strong marriage."
When I say nerd, I mean nerd.
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