In November 1978, as protests against his regime escalated, the Shah of Iran instituted military rule and clamped down violently on street demonstrations. In an interview with The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, Shahriar Rouhani, an Iranian anti-Shah activist and a doctoral candidate in physics at Yale, described the situation in Iran as “a mere calm before the … Continue reading “An Experiment in Holy Fascism”: The Iranian Revolution Comes to Walden College
Category: Uncategorized
“A Cautionary Recap of the Life of a Genuinely Awful Human Being”: Donald Trump in Doonesbury.
In his introduction to a 1968 compilation of cartoons about Lyndon Johnson, Jules Feiffer quoted an 1831 essay describing political cartoonists as those who “insult inferiority of mind and expose defects of body … [and] aggravate what is already hideous,” about their targets. Good political cartoonists, Feiffer continued, had “a blackmailer’s savvy,” allowing them to … Continue reading “A Cautionary Recap of the Life of a Genuinely Awful Human Being”: Donald Trump in Doonesbury.
Interrogated, Brutalized, and Rarely Heard from Again: Doonesbury Goes to Iran.
Montreal Gazette, 26 January 1981. Thanks to Zan for the help getting this image. On 26 January 1981, the Montreal Gazette, the newspaper my family subscribed to, ran a front-page story about a comic strip that, at the time, I, like most young readers, had always skipped over on my way to Peanuts or B.C. … Continue reading Interrogated, Brutalized, and Rarely Heard from Again: Doonesbury Goes to Iran.
Doonesbury in the Carter Years. Prelude: A Nation in Crisis
(Recently, I’ve been looking at the history of underground comix in preparation for an eventual exploration of Doonesbury’s roots. I’m still working on the next instalment in that series: in the meanwhile, I want to get back into writing more directly about the strip itself, so here’s the first in what I expect to be … Continue reading Doonesbury in the Carter Years. Prelude: A Nation in Crisis
“Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul”: Comparing Watergate and the Trump Impeachment in Doonesbury
The most popular post I have written for this project – by far – addresses how Garry Trudeau updated his famous Watergate-era “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” strip to comment on the parallels between Richard Nixon’s corruption and that of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Every revelation of Donald Trump’s wrongdoing, from Robert Mueller’s inability … Continue reading “Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul”: Comparing Watergate and the Trump Impeachment in Doonesbury
The Gonzo Chronicles, Part I. “That Place Where the Wave Finally Broke and Rolled Back”: Reconciling Duke and Hunter S. Thompson.
In 1984, I was a first-year student at John Abbott College in suburban Montreal. In my last year of high school, I had heard about a John Abbott English teacher named Rod Smith, who taught a course titled “The Vision and the Apocalypse," which focused on books and films that came out of, or dealt … Continue reading The Gonzo Chronicles, Part I. “That Place Where the Wave Finally Broke and Rolled Back”: Reconciling Duke and Hunter S. Thompson.
This Week in Doonesbury: Student Poverty and a Brief History of Walden House
On 7 April 2019 Doonesbury drew attention to an issue that largely goes unmentioned in the media, but is, if we zoom out a little bit, closely related to one of the biggest (non-Trump-related) stories of 2019. The issue is student homelessness, and while it may not be on the public radar, thinking about young … Continue reading This Week in Doonesbury: Student Poverty and a Brief History of Walden House
“Where a Man is Judged by His Moves”: Doonesbury Goes Disco
Recently, I watched Studio 54, a documentary film by Matt Tyrnauer that chronicles the rise and fall of the famed Manhattan discotheque that was the hottest spot in New York City in the 1970s. In its heyday from 1977 – 1979, the club, owned by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, attracted crowds that included A-list … Continue reading “Where a Man is Judged by His Moves”: Doonesbury Goes Disco
Reading Doonesbury 