Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 17, 2011
Transcript:
Zonker: I can't believe it - I'm almost a Beck graduate! I wonder how many classmates I have... Zipper: Hey, Uncle Zonk! Zonker: Nephew! You're just in time - I'm about to graduate from Beck University! Zipper: Beck? I thought you were a Trump University man! Zonker: No, the state ruled Trump wasn't a real school, and the alumni sued for fraud. So sad, you hate to see a once-proud university brought to its knees like that. Zipper: So you transferred? Zonker: Yup. Beck's a better fit for me anyway. Tuition's only $74.95, and all you have to do is sit through a few nutty videos... okay, here we go! Mr. Beck's about to give his commencement address! Voice: Class of 2011! I... I... *sob!* Zonker: Boom! I'm outa here! Real world, look out! Zipper: Wow! What's your starting salary?
pouncingtiger over 13 years ago
LIke Beck, not on tv.
DylanThomas3.14159 over 13 years ago
Whatta hoot! Trudeau scores again!
bkybl Premium Member over 13 years ago
Why so tiny? It’s hard to read even blown up.
Alabama Al over 13 years ago
Only a slight exaggeration of all too many online colleges. Zonker could have saved even more money if he simply got his degree from the local print shop. About the same validity.
DylanThomas3.14159 over 13 years ago
mpk39, Go to
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip
which is another online Doonesbury strip, and click on “Enlarge” to see the strip blown up for a very easy read.
Doughfoot over 13 years ago
Bachmann finesses her college resume very nicely. She got her B.A. at Winona State University in 1974, her J.D. at Oral Roberts University (of the openly racist policies) in 1986, though it appears some of the work was done at Regent (i.e. Pat Robertson) University. Then in 1988 she picked up a LL.M. (a certificate in tax law) from my alma mater, the College of William and Mary, something the college doesn’t even offer anymore. Yet what you hear is: Michele Bachmann holds a BA, and a JD and an LLM from the prestigious College of William and Mary. Not a word of untruth in that sentence. And I am sure the development office at W&M will be happy to hit her up for donations. But then, I know graduates from the Law School at William and Mary who are highly annoyed that she is credited with being one of them! The following comes from Wikipedia, so be warned: “In 1978, she married Marcus Bachmann, whom she had met while they were undergraduates in college. After she graduated from William & Mary School of Law [sic] in 1988, the couple moved to Stillwater, Minnesota, a town of 18,000 near St. Paul. Bachmann and her husband have five children (Lucas, Harrison, Elisa, Caroline, and Sophia). Bachmann and her husband also provided foster care for 23 other children, all teenage girls. The Bachmanns were licensed from 1992 to 2000 to handle up to three foster children at a time; the last child arrived in 1998. The Bachmanns began by providing short-term care for girls with eating disorders who were patients in a program at the University of Minnesota. The Bachmann home was legally defined as a treatment home, with a daily reimbursement rate per child from the state. Some girls stayed a few months, others more than a year.” “Bachmann and her husband own a Christian counseling practice named Bachmann & Associates. Their clinic, run by her husband, who has a PhD in clinical psychology from Union Graduate School, received nearly $30,000 from Minnesota and the federal government between 2006 and 2010. Bachmann said that she and her husband had not benefited at taxpayers’ expense: the money went to the clinic’s employees, for mental health training.” “In personal financial disclosure reports for 2006 through 2009, Bachmann reported earning $32,500 to $105,000 from a farm that was owned at the time by her ailing father-in-law, Paul Bachmann. The farm received $260,000 in federal crop and disaster subsidies between 1995 and 2008. Bachmann said that in 2006–2009, her husband acted as a trustee of the farm for his dying father and so, out of “an abundance of caution”, she claimed the farm as income in financial disclosures, though it was her in-laws who profited from the farm during that period. In 2009, following Paul Bachmann’s death, Bachmann and her husband inherited a partnership stake in the land. Since then, the land and its buildings have been rented to a neighboring farmer who maintains a dairy herd on the land." “Marcus Bachmann has denied allegations that Bachmann & Associates provides conversion therapy, a controversial approach, repudiated by the American Psychological Association, that attempts to transform homosexuals into heterosexuals. A former client of Bachmann’s clinic and a hidden camera investigator with the activist group Truth Wins Out have said that therapists at the clinics do engage in such practices.”
Shollyman over 13 years ago
I wish I could delete this strip. It goes from poor to very poor!
Sandfan over 13 years ago
A degree from a good trade school or a military tech school will help you out a lot more than a college degree, these days.
Pataruski Premium Member over 13 years ago
print’s way too tiny & too blurry larger when I moved it to iphoto.
corzak over 13 years ago
Bachmann. Typical “Republican Libertarian”. Always ranting and raving about “big government socialism” while on the way to the bank to deposit their big government socialist check.
mkcoontz over 13 years ago
This Sunday strip is too small to read!!!!!!!
Ermine Notyours over 13 years ago
I’ve heard of Juan de Fuca University, or Fuca U. for short.People have complained that you can’t enlarge Sunday strips, until today. Careful what you wish for…
FriscoLou over 13 years ago
Good thing Bachmann never went to Bob Jones University, or she would be prez by now, with all that education.
I know how all those lawyers at Wm & Mary feel, everyone at D W Daniel High School hates it when someone says: “That’s where Lindsey Graham went to school.”
DylanThomas3.14159 over 13 years ago
Because, Richard, it sounds vaguely like what the great educator-of-truth does to the dewey-starry eyed students who take classes there.
Dtroutma over 13 years ago
The strip accurately points out how easy it is to get some pretty fraudulent degrees, like at Oral Roberts or “Regency”- that have no standing. An LLM sounds good until you realize it’s only equal to a training session at H & R Block in tax preparation.
I just find it interesting how indignant “righties” get with GT whenever he whacks their heros. He also has long hit at “lefties” if they do stupid stuff. The problem is the Faux fans can’t HANDLE real “fair and balanced”.
DylanThomas3.14159 over 13 years ago
We hear Glenn Beck’s empire is making a mint selling “I got Bucked at Beck U” teeshirts, baseball caps, totebags, etc., to dewey-starry-eyed grads. Maybe they think, Zonk-like, that if they wear those to job interviews they’ll get starting salaries in the Beck range. Meanwhile, Beck continues to care for his sheep.
benbrilling over 13 years ago
FOCUS!
Greg Johnston over 13 years ago
Today’s strip looks like someone smeared Vaseline on the glass before scanning it. Thx Dylan Thomas for the readable link up above.
cdhaley over 13 years ago
@fritzoid (from yesterday)
Since these forums often stray far from Doonesbury’s strip, which is usually about some canned topic, there’s surely room for us here to continue our discussion of Elizabethan revenge plays and justice. The four plays in your Oxford Classics paperback provide an arbitrary sampling; the standard monograph, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, covers sixty plays. Still, scholars agree that Hamlet is the touchstone or the gold standard of the genre.
Bacon calls revenge “wild justice,” and the Elizabethans, anxious to establish the authority of their new state, held a dim view of someone who took the law into his own hands. (We moderns, far more submissive to authority, glorify the lawless revenger—for example, in Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.) To make the outlaw sympathetic, Elizabethan revenge tragedy gives him a higher motive than merely obeying society’s laws. He’s inspired by family honor, like Bussy or Vindice, or by a ghost, like Hamlet or Hieronimo (compare Orestes in Aeschylus’ trilogy).
The Elizabethan revenger—indeed, even Hamlet on occasion—nowadays is regarded as little more than a homicidal maniac. That’s because we despair of achieving the “perfect justice” that capital punishment ideally represents. In fact, someone who exacts retribution by killing a known murderer is felt to be short-circuiting society’s broader goal of bringing the murderer to remorse for his crimes. (By this logic, bin Laden should have been tried by the World Court instead of being ceremoniously dumped into the Indian Ocean.) In our Judaeo-Christian religion, we prize this hope of regeneration. But in the older and wiser, Greco-Roman view, such misplaced mercy is in fact despair of justice.
Our sentimental, “humane” embrace of mercy relieves us of our human responsibility to seek justice. (Lord Angelo states this responsibility clearly in Measure for Measure: “I show [pity] most when I show justice, / For then I pity those I do not know, / Which a dismissed offense would after[wards] gall.”) In contrast to us, the Elizabethans focused on the tension between public and private justice. This inescapable tension cost the revenger his sanity along with his life. .
Instead of revenge tragedies, we prefer “black comedy” with its insouciant dismissal of ultimate justice. Here, FriscoLou’s example from A Clockwork Orange is to the point. By torturing the killer Alex and mentally castrating him instead of executing him, Burgess shows how we can satisfy our subhuman craving for revenge while at the same time ignoring our human responsibility to do justice.
DylanThomas3.14159 over 13 years ago
Palin Drome,
You wrote, “[S]omeone who exacts retribution by killing a known murderer is felt to be short-circuiting society’s broader goal of bringing the murderer to remorse for his crimes.”
Do you think that for this reason the life of Casey Anthony, recently acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter Caylee, is in danger of being revenge-killed by someone who feels that our system of jurisprudence failed justice? Killing in this case would be considered justifying defense of helpless dependent children everywhere.
DylanThomas3.14159 over 13 years ago
Zonk’s mortar board appears to be on his head in all panels save one, panel Six, the one in silhouette. How come?
Dirty Dragon over 13 years ago
Starting salary? -$74.95, and your name on the mailing/call list for every wingnut out there running a scampaign.
FriscoLou over 13 years ago
Bud Peterson faced the justice/revenge cycle with the clarity of six 50 cal. machine guns @ 800 rpm.
Who knows, maybe Peterson inspired another pilot to seek justice, just as he learned from that Luftwaffe pilot.
wlcary over 13 years ago
So badly focused that it is unreadable.
gamrobi over 13 years ago
too small or too fuzzy to read
Prof_Bleen over 13 years ago
Hang on—now it’s all fuzzy, just like Glenn Beck’s grasp of American history.
yow4zip Premium Member over 13 years ago
Get fuzzy?
privacyinvasion over 13 years ago
Why is this one so fuzzy I can hardly read it? The others are all OK, before and since.
Whitecamry over 13 years ago
And without fainting this time! I think he’s getting the hang of graduating!