For much of middle America, as well as middle England and middle France and very possibly Middle Earth, the war in Iraq really hit home on April 19 this year. Opening their newspaper comic supplements or turning to the editorial page where some newspapers place the Doonesbury strip, readers were shocked by yet another piece of grisly news from Iraq. And this was news about someone they knew, some for more than 30 years.
BD, aka Brian Dowling, college football star and one of the lead characters in Garry Trudeau’s strip cartoon Doonesbury, lost a leg (and, almost as shocking for aficionados, his helmet). The opening frame, a black box with the word ”Hey!” in a white bubble, was the first sign that something was wrong. The next frame had a tearful GI saying, ”You stay with me, man, you hear me?” It wasn’t until two days later that BD was shown lying on a stretcher, his heavily bandaged left leg stopping abruptly at the thigh. Yet while the injury to BD brought home the savage and random nature of the war, the real furore erupted two days later.
The strip for Friday April 23 shows one of BD’s buddies visiting him in hospital. As the surgeon explains about the denial phase that many amputees go through before reaching the anger stage, the words ”Son of a BITCH” ring out from behind a hospital screen. ”Sometimes they skip the denial,” explains the surgeon.
But it was not so much the obscenity of war that attracted the attention of the right-wing press and talk shows in the United States. It was, absurdly, the obscenity of the language. ”I’m beginning to lose my patience with Trudeau,” wrote Doug Clifton, editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. ”It seems we’ve got to consider pulling the strip or editing it five or six times a year. [Newspapers] inflict enough pain just by covering the ugly realities of today’s world. The funnies ought to be the one refuge from those realities. If Trudeau insists on competing with the front page, he may find himself missing from the Plain Dealer‘s comics page.”
Things soon got worse for Trudeau. On May 6, in a column titled ”Doonesbury crossed line”, the syndicated conservative columnist and Fox News presenter Bill O’Reilly accused him of ”using someone’s pain to pursue a personal agenda”. The charge brought an unusual public response from the almost reclusive Trudeau.
On ABC television’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, the cartoonist — who has given only two extensive press interviews since Doonesbury started in 1970 — revealed some of his motives. His response is worth quoting at length: ”The strips are about sacrifice, about the kind of shattering loss that completely changes lives. In BD, I’ve placed a central character in harm’s way, and his charmed life takes a dramatic turn on a road outside Fallujah …
”I have to approach this with humility and care. I’m sure I won’t always get it right, and I’m also sure people will let me know when I don’t. But it seems worth doing. This month alone, we’ve sustained nearly 600 wounded-in-action. Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can’t tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name.”
Trudeau was one of the first signings to the grandly named Universal Press Syndicate. He is still with the syndicate, which sells his cartoon to almost 1 400 newspapers around the world. Unusually for a cartoon strip, and almost uniquely in the US, Doonesbury thrives on current affairs. The changing cast in the world has provided ample passing trade for the stable cast inside the Walden College campus: Dan Quayle was (and still is) depicted as a feather; Bill Clinton is a waffle who seduces everything it comes into contact with; Newt Gingrich was a bomb that finally exploded; and President George W Bush is an empty Roman helmet.
Bush, not one to flinch from dishing it out himself, has come under savage attack from Trudeau, who has recently mocked him for his vague recollection of his days in and out of the National Guard; the cartoon offered a $10 000 reward to anyone who could prove that Bush had been where he said he’d been (nobody could). And now Doonesbury is sticking it to Bush again, this time with a six-frame cartoon strip that names every one of the 700-plus US soldiers killed in Iraq since the conflict started last March.
Trudeau is unlikely to be fazed by the controversy sure to follow his roll-call of the US dead. After all, he says, he has been in the game a long time, and endured a rough ride from the White House under most administrations of the past 30 years.
”But this has been the most sustained period of strong reaction in recent years, starting with the Bush National Guard strips.” — Â