That was Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America.
I would like to end this story here, but I can’t do it in good conscience. Tocqueville confronted everything, however distasteful.
Jérôme and I are still standing in the cemetery, and something happens that must be reported.
Jérôme has taken the Lane family of Whitney, Texas, away to be photographed against the cemetery wall. As they are shooting, Allan Lane mentions how much his whole family likes Paris. Really, he says, they have only one complaint. They’ve had to wait too long for their meal at McDonald’s. What’s wrong with Paris, he says, is that it needs more McDonaldses, so the lines will be shorter. Also, he says, some Burger Kings would be nice.
Doonesbury’s War
The most perilous prejudice a writer can have—the prejudice most likely to sabotage his story—isn’t some sort of personal or political antipathy. It’s hero worship. When you are writing about someone you admire enormously, you are in serious danger of the sin of adoration. You sometimes have to force yourself to be nitpicking, faultfinding, caviling, hypercritical.
Garry Trudeau pronounces the t in “often.” No, you won’t see that minor affectation exposed to ridicule in this profile of him. I put it in the story, but my editor deleted it because he said I was grasping at straws. Which I was.
October 22, 2006
IN THE BANQUET room were men who were blind, men with burns, men with gouges, men missing an arm, men missing a leg, men missing an arm and a leg, men missing an arm and both legs, men missing parts of their faces, and a cartoonist from the funny pages. We were just a few blocks from the White House, at Fran O’Brien’s Steak House. Fran’s was hosting a night out for casualties of the current war, visiting from their hospital wards.
It’s hard to know what to say to a grievously injured person, and it’s easy to be wrong. You could do what I did, for example. Scrounging for the positive, I cheerfully informed a young man who had lost both legs and his left forearm that at least he’s lucky he’s a righty. Then he wordlessly showed me his right hand, which is missing fingertips and has limited motion—an articulated claw. That shut things right up, for both of us, and it would have stayed that way, except the cartoonist showed up.
Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, hunkered right down in front of the soldier, eye-to-eye, introduced himself, and proceeded to ignore every single diplomatic nicety.
“So, when were you hit?” he asked.
“October twenty-third.”
Trudeau pivoted his body. “So you took the blast on, what… this side?”
“Yeah.”
Brian Anderson, twenty-five, was in shorts, a look favored by most of the amputees, who tend to wear their new prostheses like combat medals. His legs are metal and plastic, blue and knobby at the knee, shin poles culminating abruptly in sneakers.
Trudeau surveyed Brian’s intact arm. “You’ve got dots.”
“Yeah.” Dots are soldier-speak for little beads of shrapnel buried under the skin. Sometimes they take a lifetime to work their way back to the surface. At this, Brian became fully engaged and animated, smiling and talking about the improvised explosive device that took his vehicle out; about his rescue; his recovery; his plans for the future. Trudeau, it turned out, had given him what he needed.
(“In these soldiers’ minds,” Trudeau will explain afterward, “their whole identity, who they are right now, is what happened to them. They want to tell the story, they want to be asked about it, and you’re honoring them by listening. The more they revisit it, the less power it has over them.”)
Trudeau has been talking to injured vets for a couple of years now. It’s partly compassionate support for people he has a genuine regard for, and it’s part journalism—the damnedest sort of reporting, for a professional cartoonist.
This was April 25. On the comics pages that day, Dagwood fixed himself an absolutely enormous sandwich; Garfield kicked Odie off the table again; and in Beetle Bailey, the only military-themed comic strip, Lt. Fuzz accidentally dropped a glass of water and cussed in funny cartoon hieroglyphics.
In Doonesbury, this was the story: B.D., the football coach and Vietnam vet who went to Iraq with the National Guard and lost a leg in a rocket-grenade attack near Fallujah, has been shamed into entering therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder because he overheard his little girl, Sam, tell a friend that she’d become afraid of her daddy. On this day, B.D. will begin to relive the battlefield event he has repressed, the one that made him a moody, alcoholic paranoiac and that torments him with guilt and shame that he does not understand. Through the rest of the week, B.D. will retell what happened when his armored vehicle came under attack from insurgents and—desperate to escape and save himself and his men—he gave the order to flee through a crowded marketplace, mowing down civilians.
Not many of the injured vets in Fran O’Brien’s were where B.D. was yet. Their deepest wounds, like the dots, had not yet surfaced. On that day they were jovial, mostly, and indomitable, all of them, stolid and impervious, more so than the moms, wives, and girlfriends who hovered at their elbows, lovingly kneading shoulders, patting thighs, holding on, looking bravely upbeat and just a little overwhelmed.
Trudeau bellied up to another vet.
“So, when were you hit?”
IF YOU DON’T know much about Garry Trudeau, and you probably don’t, it’s because he has done his best to keep it that way. With the exception of the time in 1980 when his island wedding to America’s Sweetheart, TV personality Jane Pauley, turned him into a sullen bridegroom hounded by paparazzi in boats and helicopters, Trudeau, now fifty-eight, has managed to remain comfortably obscure. Aside from a couple of semirecent TV interviews, he’s had almost no public presence for three decades. Considering the extraordinary reach of his comic strip, and the role it has had over the years in analyzing, reflecting, and even helping shape American culture, he may be the most famous unknown person in the country today.
IT’S AN ODD type of fame, one that attaches hungrily to what you do but not at all to who you are. Take this woman here, at a lunch counter in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Her name is Connie Dubois. A candlemaker, Connie lives in Ethel, Louisiana, population 2,000, a fleck on the map of East Feliciana Parish, which itself contains only two traffic lights. Connie, who is fifty, has just flown on a plane for the first time in her life, heading to a trade show for candlemakers.
“Do you know what Doonesbury is?” I ask her.
“Sure,” she says, putting down her sandwich. “It’s a cartoon. In the paper. Been around a long time. It’s a little off-center and radical, and I like that.”
“Do you know the name of the guy who draws it?”
Dubois scrunches up her face, thinking.
“Nope. No idea.”
Dubois says she wouldn’t know the cartoonist if she saw him, which is undeniable, since at the moment Trudeau is sitting 4 feet away. He is head-down, digging into his Caesar salad, doing his best to disappear. He hates things like this.
Trudeau is so viscerally averse to self-promotion that he once threw up before a scheduled interview for a Time magazine cover story, then canceled it. (Time wrote the story anyway.)
I’m at Trudeau’s elbow on a trip out West because I’m doing the first extensive profile of him in the thirty-six years since he began the comic strip that became an American icon. That’s reason enough, but the fact is, something astonishing has happened to Doonesbury in the last two and a half years, after the United States invaded Iraq and Trudeau made the startling, uncartoonish decision to mutilate one of his characters.
It was not just any character. B.D. had been a Doonesbury fixture since Day One. Literally. On the day the strip debuted in twenty-eight newspapers nationwide—October 26, 1970—B.D. was alone in the opening panel, sitting in his dorm room on the first day of school, football helmet inexplicably on his head, wondering what kind of roommate he’d get. To his everlasting annoyance, it turned out to be Michael D
oonesbury.
That was so many years ago—a generation and a half, really—that the strip has outlasted even its original cultural references. Does anyone remember that “B.D.” were the initials of Brian Dowling, the hotshot quarterback at Yale when Trudeau was there in the late sixties? Or that in the eastern prep-school lexicon of the time, a “doone” was something of a doofus?
It’s Doonesbury that 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.
But for simple dramatic impact and deft complexity of humor, nothing else in Doonesbury has ever approached the story line of B.D.’s injury and convalescence. It hasn’t been political at all, really, unless you contend that acknowledging the suffering of a war is a political statement. What it has been is remarkably poignant and surprisingly funny at the same time. In what Trudeau calls a “rolling experiment in naturalism,” he has managed every few weeks to spoon out a story of war, loss, and psychological turmoil in four-panel episodes, each with a crisp punch line.
Here’s one:
It is a cliché, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain—from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration. Usually, though, the laughter comes through indirection—acknowledging that death awaits us all, for example, by joking about memory loss as we age. But there’s been nothing comfortably oblique in these episodes of Doonesbury, no comic exaggeration, no use of metaphor. There is no distance whatever between the pain and the humor.
Over the years, Doonesbury has been remarkably consistent in its quality, if not universally beloved. Republicans can make a reasonable case that Trudeau’s lefty politics sometimes make him seem a water boy for Democrats. He is not above the occasional cheap shot, such as when he devoted an entire week in 1991 to a felon’s unsubstantiated charges that Vice President Quayle had been a pothead. At times, he has seemed to lapse unattractively from political satire to political advocacy—lending his characters’ support to John Anderson in 1980 and Howard Dean in 2004. Some feel he has occasionally been tone-deaf to popular culture—buying too readily, for example, into the notion of a slacker Generation Y. Undeniably, the strip’s edge dulled a little in the mid-1990s, when a Democratic ascendancy left him without a meaty political issue to lampoon. But there aren’t many people—especially among experts who read and critique comics for a living—who are calling the continuing saga of B.D. anything other than genius. “What it is,” says comics historian R. C. Harvey, “is breathtaking. Just a stunning body of work.”
SO, WHO IS Trudeau, really?
It turns out he’s not afraid of publicity so much as he’s horrified at being perceived as the kind of person who wants publicity. He treasures his literary license to kill but feels a twinge of guilt that it isn’t really a fair fight. He’s a genuinely humble know-it-all. His regard for injured soldiers is sincere, his knowledge of their lingo profound, almost as if he’s one of them; watching this, you can’t help but hear faint, soul-rattling echoes of Vietnam, which he escaped, like many sons of privilege, by gaming the system. He’s got the greatest job on Earth—no boss, his own hours, enormous clout, public adulation, a seven-figure income, absolute creative freedom—but he speaks with longing about a different career altogether, one that the huge success of Doonesbury ensured he’d never have.
Also, he’s a smartass.
But you knew that.
IT’S MONDAY NIGHT out for the meatheads, as they call themselves. These are Trudeau and some of his best friends, who assemble irregularly on weeknights in Manhattan to attend excellently terrible movies their wives won’t see with them. Today’s choice is Poseidon. They’re pumped for a real stinker.
“A lot of research goes into this,” Trudeau explains, “so we don’t make many mistakes. We get these movies when they’re dying, so we have the theater to ourselves. We like to talk to the screen.”
“And throw popcorn.”
This is David Levinthal, fifty-seven, who looks like the manager of a Jiffy Lube but is an acclaimed modern artist. Levinthal’s medium is plastic toys: He arranges them in unusual ways, photographs them in intriguing lighting, and sells the pictures for thousands of dollars. Not long ago he had a show entirely of made-in-Japan erotic dolls.
Levinthal is not the most unusual guy here. That would probably be Fred Newman, fifty-three, who is, at this very moment, barking like a dog. It’s the best imitation bark you’ll ever hear. Newman’s a professional sound-effects man, author of a popular how-to book called MouthSounds, and is a regular whistle, boing, and honk man for Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. When you’re doing a woof, Newman is saying, the rookie error is to blow out. You’ve got to suck in.
We’re sitting outdoors at an East Side Manhattan burrito joint, so Newman is entertaining more than just our table. He once taught Meryl Streep how to convince a radio audience that she was lighting a cigarette and blowing out the match, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The guy with the graying ponytail is David Stanford, who handles the elaborate Doonesbury.com Web site and edits Trudeau’s Doonesbury books.
Trudeau is the normal one. He “travels incognito,” as Levinthal says. It’s true. The guy could blend into a room of waiters. He dresses with an elaborate lack of vanity. He is a millionaire many times over, but Jane cuts his hair.
Dinner over, the meatheads assemble in the second row of a mostly empty downtown Manhattan theater as the credits for Poseidon are beginning to roll. The meatheads are hoping this one will be a lot worse than the last film they saw, Good Night, and Good Luck, which turned out to have some disappointingly redeeming qualities. The best worst recent choice was a Lou Diamond Phillips flick where a car exploded and then, in a later scene, the same car drove off a cliff.
In the opening minutes of Poseidon, as the characters are being introduced, Trudeau and his friends start to loudly handicap who will live and who will drown. “You think Kurt Russell will live?”
“No, he’ll die, because the kids are the future.”
“Okay, right, he’ll die, but he’ll die saving people.”
Popcorn is definitely being flung.
“The nasty guy’s gonna die in a really bad way.”
Fred is making excellent glub-glub noises.
“Richard Dreyfuss is suicidal? If he wants to die, then he won’t die.”
“Right, he needs to learn that life is a gift.”
If you’ve seen the movie, you know the meatheads were right about everything.
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 indicted former 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 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 eighties 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).
At times, his prescience seemed more clairvoyant than calculated: During the waning years of the Reagan administration, Trudeau sent his trench-coated TV newsman, Roland Hedley, into the president’s brain, where he confronted a desolate, soupy wasteland of fizzling synapses. It seemed funny
then, if mean-spirited; if you look at those strips now, they’re chilling.
Most recently, Trudeau was right about Iraq. As the invasion began amid optimistic forecasts of a quick and decisive victory, before mandatory re-ups became routine, National Guardsman B.D. matter-of-factly informed his stunned wife, Boopsie, that he’d see her again “in five to seven years.”
Surely, after three decades of being right, the man is bound to be a little smug. I went searching for signs of this in his studio, an airy fourth-floor walkup in the East 70s. Though the walls are covered with original classic comic art—Saul Steinberg, Jeff MacNelly, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland—there is no Doonesbury visible anywhere. Just… nothing. “Why would I have my own art up?” Trudeau asks. “I want to show the work of people I admire.”
The quality of Trudeau’s drawing has been a matter of some debate in the cartooning world since the strip’s debut. Back then, a common joke was that Trudeau had “made the comics pages safe for bad art,” which was, in a sense, true. Before there were Dilbert and Pearls Before Swine and other strips drawn with meticulous infantilism, there was Doonesbury, which resembled, in its early years, the sort of thing someone’s moderately talented kid brother scribbled into the flyleaf of his textbook.
There was nothing meticulous about it. Trudeau was consciously trying to imitate Jules Feiffer’s sparsely sophisticated style, but he didn’t progress much past sparse. Sometimes he just didn’t bother giving his characters mouths. They never had feet—their legs would just flutter off the page in mid-calf. Heads would swivel in physiologically irreproducible ways.
Over time—particularly after Trudeau’s famed twenty-month hiatus in 1983 and 1984, when he allowed his characters to ripen into reluctant adulthood off the page—he seemed to learn the fundamentals of cartooning, and then some. The art in Doonesbury became far more professional, with inventive angles, cinematic shading, even intimations of an occasional foot. This led to a widespread suspicion that Trudeau was getting major help from the man who ostensibly just did his inking—a suspicion nudged into an assumption a few years ago when Entertainment Weekly stated flatly that Trudeau wasn’t drawing it himself.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 23