MemeMachineGo!

Funny paper reviews the funnies.

DOONESBURY: On the ground for Gulf War II, B.D. reunites with his Gulf War I buddy Ray Hightower. “Today we got the whole planet wicked off at us—” Ray says Tuesday , “all because a half-dozen power drunk chicken hawks want to get their empire on!” Funny Paper can remember when lots of characters in Doonesbury used to talk like that. Nowadays, only a minor black character is able to tear down the U.S.A. That line would seem ridiculous coming from prosperous Republican Mike, or Beltway insider Joanie, or even—especially—happily domestic-partnered public-radio host Mark. So dies the dream of the ’60s—that the world could change, that hypocrisy and greed and deceit might be flung down in the name of freedom and justice , that the president would not send troops off to kill and die while lying about the cause . The angry young Yalies, fictional and real, slowly absorbed a grim (yet comforting) truth: The System that maimed Vietnamese babies, that starved the poor in ghettoes, that denied basic dignity to billions of human beings around the world … why, life under that System wasn’t too uncomfortable, after all, was it? You could live pretty good, and there wasn’t much point yelling about it.

Except life hasn’t been so good for everybody, in those years since graduation and Watergate. So the black man has become a symbol of the project that Trudeau’s generation wandered away from, of the people left behind the color line or the poverty line. Ray Hightower speaks as the Soul Brother Voice of Conscience, saying things that would be platitudinous or hectoring coming from the mouth of a white person (hello, Michael Moore). Like the court jester, he has license to utter the stinging truth—which is to say, he plays the fool. And the king and the court wince and chuckle. And when the sun goes down, the king is still king.

(Via Cogito Ergo Sumana , where Sumana cites MemeMachineGo! as her source. A Tangled Web!)