Losing Doonesbury loses dialogue

Doonesbury? Why be incensed over the loss of a mere comic strip? You’d think it would not be important.

After all, we daily workers sell our muscles and our time to keep the rent or mortgage paid and food on the table. Most have little time to analyze the state of the world. Laying tile, frying hamburgers, smiling through a bank drive-up window while carefully counting cash, cleaning someone else’s house, pouring cement: all require focus—and faith that all management and government folks are doing their job as well, namely looking out for us.

These days, though, we are also weighed down by the constant nagging worry, and even downright certainty, that this just ain’t so. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that we are in, as my Vietnam-days drill Sergeant Dzubak used to say, a world of hurt.

And we deserve to know why.

Only a few of us are lucky or dedicated enough to have, find, or take time to read or listen in depth. We have a good idea what’s up, but many of us rely on short bursts of information to piece together this jigsaw picture.

That’s why we listen to talk radio, watch TV, or read the comics, which often amounts to the same thing. It’s their messages that differ.

Many comics from Dagwood to Peanuts reflect a “normal” world. It is, however, not.

If you disagree, consider recent Art Center Cinema documentaries regarding climate change, peak oil, health care, and the ongoing, soon-to-be-trillion-plus-dollar, tragic occupation of Iraq.

Supposedly the right-wing simplementarians dominating commercial radio offer solutions. We all wish it were that simple. They offer plenty of chance to vent, but little in the way of humanitarian solutions to our world crises. After this kind of heavy, give us light. After this kind of heat, give us light.

Peanuts is one antidote, light and delightful. It contains bits of philosophy helpful for managing the world. But it is a children’s world. Contemporary adult lives and issues are not part of its mix.

That’s why Doonesbury is both light and enlightening.

It offers humor while challenging authority. It’s not just a bumper sticker. And it’s been a non-partisan Authority Questioner for over 30-plus years. It has beat the Bushes, but did not back off from Clinton or Reagan . It talks about the WAR, amputees returning home, gender identification, the CIA, the media, college students making their way in a commercialized academia, the internet, facebook and myspace. It’s about growing up, and grownups.

Dilbert, by contrast, gives us cubicles. Workers and even managers like the Journal’s publisher, dealing with the daily sanitized insanities of the corporate world, find Dilbert funny because it reflects those realities.

That alone may be enough to merit publication. But Dilbert-elicited laughs are an avoidance mechanism, a shrug-your-shoulders, that’s-the-way-it-is method of avoiding the problem.

Most characters in Doonesbury are not just going along. They confront real issues in their lives. One relevant example is B.D., former football coach, returning from Iraq with only one leg, and finding in recovery a fellow PTSD sufferer, a woman raped by a higher-ranking abuser in her own platoon. Doonesbury deals with issues like war and its destruction, both external and internal.

Doonesbury’s commentary is more cutting and relevant than many editorial page columnists. So, perhaps one answer to achieving “balance” on that page is to bring back Ann Coulter.

Then people could see an incisive columnist masquerading as a cartoon, side by side with a cartoon masquerading as an incisive columnist. Readers could easily tell which is which.

Regardless of the rationale for Doonesbury’s return, however, both we and the Journal are poorer every day it is absent. Please bring Doonesbury back.