Doonesburied

The decline of Garry Trudeau -- and of baby boom liberalism.

Jesse Walker from the July 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Neither Rove nor Bush felt the need to respond to the cartoon, and no newspapers refused to run it -- or if they did, doonesbury.com uncharacteristically fails to mention it. Instead, the site has printed a selection of e-mails attacking the strip. "Garry, the blood of the Sept. 11 victims is on your hands," says one. Another asks, "What junior college did you drop out of?"

So Trudeau still has the power to piss people off. It says something, though, that he has to publish their complaints himself.

Controversy and quality are not the same thing, of course. But there is a direct link between Doonesbury's declining relevance and Doonesbury's declining merit, a common cause for both afflictions. Trudeau's career arc mirrors the evolution of baby-boom liberalism, from the anti-authoritarian skepticism of the 1970s to the smug paternalism of the Clinton years. In 1972 the strip was engaged with the world; in 2002 it is engaged with itself.

I mean that literally. In 1972 Doonesbury rewarded intelligence; in 2002 it rewards familiarity with its own mythology and conventions. In 1972 it trusted readers to know the politics and pop culture of the day; in 2002 it trusts us to understand that a floating waffle represents Bill Clinton, a floating bomb represents Newt Gingrich, and a floating asterisk represents George W. Bush. The strip has grown so self-referential that it makes jokes about its own self-referentiality, with Sunday strips devoted to charting the relationships among the characters. And so Doonesbury folds in upon itself, and Trudeau ends up producing his own fan fiction.

This becomes even more obvious at the Web site -- not just because it is filled with trivia games and the like, but because it now includes every single Doonesbury since the strip was launched in 1970 (plus the two years of Trudeau's college strip Bull Tales, featuring the same characters, that preceded that). The result is one giant hypertext novel, a nearly complete guide to the Doonesbury universe. Only a 1977 TV special, a 1983 Broadway musical, and some Web-only material produced during the 2000 election are missing.

One effect of this is to put the oldest and most recent strips on the same plane, to let one jump easily from the '70s to today and back. The results do not flatter the modern cartoon. True, the drawing is better-crafted now, though that's not necessarily an improvement: There's something to be said for the static poses of the strip's first decade and a half, at least when compared to the sometimes self-indulgent shifts in lighting and camera angles that prevail today. In its art as in its humor, the early Doonesbury combined understated irony with bursts of absurdity. The later strip never stops hitting you over the head.

A subtler change: how young people talk. Trudeau was in his 20s during the strip's early run and thus had no trouble imagining that college students -- at the time, most of his major characters were in college -- would be smart and engaged with the world. (Or, in the case of Zonker, smart and engaged with his own world.) They have the same self-awareness as the strip, and they speak like educated people. When draft registration returned in 1980, for example, the cast discussed it like this:

Zonker: It's not fair! Why is it we 20-year-olds have to pay for the failures of U.S. foreign policy?

Mark: That's the way it's always been, man.

Mike: Well, it's not like we've been drafted. Carter's just trying to send the Kremlin a message.

Those characters, like their creator, are now middle-aged, and they still speak the same way. Meanwhile, there's a new crop of college kids in the strip, and they don't know much about the world. They speak the way an older man expects teenagers to speak: They say "yo" a lot, and they ask questions like, "Can you teach us how to get shaggy with the babes?" If Trudeau no longer captures the Zeitgeist, it might be because he's started writing about it from the outside.

But the biggest change is political. There was a libertarian streak to '70s liberalism: Disillusioned by Watergate and Vietnam, invigorated by the rebellions of the '60s, it was socially tolerant, supportive of civil liberties, suspicious of executive power, ready to investigate and dismantle the national security state, and even open to deregulation when it was presented in populist garb. (Few remember that it was Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader, not Ronald Reagan, who pushed through airline deregulation.) Needless to say, this current quickly disappeared -- banished from the Democratic mainstream by the '80s, its last gasp in that party was Jerry Brown's presidential campaign of 1992. But it had an effect on popular culture, not least with the pox-on-all-houses tone of the younger satirists and their outlets: Trudeau, the Rolling Stone that published Hunter Thompson in his heyday, the early Saturday Night Live. This obviously wasn't a strong strain, or else it wouldn't have vanished so quickly in the '80s, either capitulating to the new political tone or adopting the anybody-but-Reagan stance that flung liberals back into the arms of Hubert Humphrey. (Walter Mondale, actually, but for practical purposes they're the same thing.) Still, for nearly a decade, an anti-authoritarian style was regnant within American liberalism.

Not, mind you, that Trudeau was a libertarian then, any more than he was a Clintonite 20 years later. But there was an unmistakable shift in the strip's political tone, even when the strip's politics stayed the same; it moved from the clever to the loud, from the smart ass to the ass. If there was a turning point, it was the late-'80s introduction of Mr. Butts, the enormous talking cigarette who soon came to embody the entire tobacco industry. ("Hey, teens!...Getting hooked on cigarettes is fun -- and surprisingly easy! For just a few dollars a day, you'll have a glamorous new habit for life!") Similar characters followed, notably Mr. Jay, Mr. Brewski, and Mr. Dum-Dum, representing pot, alcohol, and firearms.

What did this mean for the strip? Consider one issue where Trudeau's opinion hasn't changed but his tone has: gun control. First examine this 1981 exchange between the strip's resident outlaw and a flunky from the National Rifle Association, set in a Washington bar:

Springfield: Duke...it's me, Springfield! From the N.R.A., remember?