It’s been my intention to try to steer clear of political issues here. If you know me personally, you know my politics. If you don’t, you’re probably not that interested. I don’t find myself surfing the web in search of the random political rants of unknown individuals. That having been said, I’m going to deviate, slightly, from this unwritten rule today.
If you’ve drawn breath in North America any time in the last three decades, you’ve heard of Doonesbury. The comic strip Garry Trudeau started at Yale is consistently both anti-establishment and humorous.
Most of the time. Sometimes Mr. Trudeau gets a bit more serious, as he did this week in a strip where longtime regular BD gets seriously wounded in Iraq.
This is, to my mind, poor form. Not because I’m one of those people that thinks citizens must blindly or even happily obey the whims of a current administration. Not because of my personal politics, or because I’m directly involved with the conflict. My beef is that Doonesbury is a comic strip. While the comic/cartoon medium certainly can create serious, thought-provoking art (check your newspaper’s editorial cartoons), Doonesbury isn’t usually in the serious genre. It’s widely circulated as entertainment and people read it for an irreverant, offbeat, humorous look at issues.
This subject stirred up some response on the MFI Forums this week, you can read the meat of my objection there. Whether or not you think the war is a good idea or bad idea, righteous or wrong, informed or misguided, Mr. Trudeau, you are a public figure that writes humor. The family of a KIA soldier may pick up the newspaper after hearing the grim news and turn to the funnies for some distraction. How will they feel? Did you think about that possibility? If you want to make these kind of statements (and by God I’ll defend your right to do so), I think you should demand your strip be run in the editorial section. You can’t yell “FIRE!” in a theater, and I think that if you want to be humane, you can’t yell “PURPOSELESS DEATH!” on the funny pages.
As they say, “Hate the game, not the player.” A little nod to the individual as you deride the situation into which they are placed is the truly humane thing to do.