Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 27, 2011

Yo Vista Bill! I’m saving a space for you. Where are you?

Waiting fo Bill. Could be a play…

Correction: Waiting for Bill.

Waiting for Bill . . . . Bill? Bill?

Isn’t it Mike that usually has the summer fantasy?

Bad news for Jeff. Ladies can smell a skunk right away.

I remain disoriented whenever Trudeau shifts abruptly between this funny but absurdist business, and the heavy real continuities about Ray’s PTSD.

Poor Jeff!

I’m betting Saturday’s strip is Jeff waking up from his dream. Who’s with me?

This is dreadful to watch. Trudeau should be reprimanded by that Great Comic Command Center in the Sky for torturing a character.

Somebody (Palin Drome?) had this nailed already in commentary on the last strip: Jeff is like Cervantes’ character Don Quixote. Only, only Quixote was pure in heart, loved Dulcinea “from afar” and quested for that “unreachable star” of bringing goodwill to all people. Jeff is out for Jeff. Still, does he deserve to be driven round the bend because of his PTSD? Bad Trudeau! Bad! Bad! Go to your room!

More’s the pity. Jeff’s probably out in his parents’ backyard talking to two bushes, one with yellow flowers, one with orange.

For those of you who don’t think Jeff could have a case of PTSD, catch this:.“Recruited by the CIA as a summer intern, [Jeff] Redfern managed to accidentally launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone, taking out an Al-Qaeda ammo dump. He was subsequently assigned to study Arabic in Spook School and sent back to SW Asia for Gulf War II.”.Source: Doonesbury home page on Slate @ <http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/cast/member/1>

He may just be going over scenarios for his blog.

Believe it or not, Jeff’s condition could be worse than Ray’s, whose PTSD is simpler and more straightforward, and the drugs he’s taking are standard treatment, though they may be doing him more harm than good. .On the other hand, Jeff’ is much more sensitive and artistic than rough-and-ready-Ray, and emotional illnesses like PTSD, depression, anxiety attacks, and bipolar are almost always more severe on sensitive, artistic people — writers, painters, poets, composers, and musicians..I don’t know. I’m no shrink. But I think Jeff may be harder hit and in deeper than even Ray. We can hope that good can come out of evil, that Jeff will write down his fantasies and become, as someone said yesterday, the next J. K. Rowling..We can also hope that he doesn’t get so completely lost in his fantasy world that he’s never able to emerge into reality again. That would be sad indeed.

And be thou entertained!

Ooh, Dylan, I dig your points about Jeff. But then, as an artistic type with my own mental burdens to carry, those words resonated.

Vistabill – I think you have almost as many followers as this comic strip!

Yes, Heidi, good catch. Maybe Mike sold the “summer fantasy” franchise to Jeff.

Don Quixote was in it for himself too. He wanted glory, wanted people to say he was great as Amadis. He didn’t care about the victims he was going to rescue, nor about curing their oppressors; all these were really just avatars in his head. The script that got him glory was paramount. Read it in the Spanish. The Broadway play might have made him a little different. This whole Red Rascal thing is a study in the same subject!BTW, Three Cups of Tea has come under criticism, but I suspect the critics. Krakauer in particular, he thinks Quinn is right!?? Let the critics try to build a school in raw backwater places and see how much of the goods get delivered on the target. This is explained in Mortenson’s book, quite explicitly. Critics! meh. They never build anything and don’t know what the problems might be.

boys not only will be boys, but will never make it to Men. Walter Mitty, a legend in his own mind.

I don’t know, not a bad fantasy. But it’s not all fantasy — parachuting into Berzerkistan and getting held for ransom was presumably real.

So what — is this all fantasy? Is all of the Red Rascal stuff imaginary?

I want to get out of Jeff’s head….

Having clearly demonstrated, in Part I of his novel (1605), that Quixote suffers from what we now call PTSD, Cervantes wrote an even more brilliant Part II (1615) in which Don Quixote meets persons who have read Part I and want to know “what really happened”!

That is, in addition to the alternate perspectives (Quijote’s mad fantasy and our “reality”—shared with Sancho Panza), Cervantes creates a new perspective shared by Quijote and his 17th-c. Spanish readers. It becomes very difficult for us modern readers to hold onto our own “reality” (the fact that we’re reading fiction by Cervantes or Trudeau).

The culmination of Cervantes’ ironical perspective comes when the Duke and Duchess, avid fans of Quijote, welcome the crazed knight to spend two months on their estate. They provide Quijote with a “dragon” that he overcomes in a dark, underground dungeon; and they furnish his squire, Sancho, with his very own island to govern (Quijote had enticed Sancho along with him by this promise).

When you see these sane, wealthy noblemen—the masters of society—wasting all this time, effort, and money to gratify a madman’s fantasy, you can’t help asking why you’re spending your own time reading about it.

I expect Sorkh/Jeff to start one of Quijote’s many narratives whereby the Don held travelers spellbound at an inn—until one of them got up and broke the spell by cracking the knight’s head (no doubt inflicting more PTSD).

But Trudeau’s doing this “fantasy within fantasy” (FWF) stuff in the comic format. Who pioneered this FWF genre in the comix?

Cervantes himself was the artist who created Quixote. Makes me wonder if Cervantes himself had manic-depressive illness, “the artist’s disease”.

In 1993 Kate Redfield Jamison published the book TOUCHED WITH FIRE: MANIC-DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS AND THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT. She holds a Ph.D. and is professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. First, it must be admitted that the historical poets, writers, composers, musicians and painters/sculpters she studied cannot be clinically diagnosed today. They’re dead, after all. But, that said, she classified around 200 of them as having some form of the disorder. Some examples: Famous suicides: author Hart Crane, poet Vachel Lindsay, writer Hans Christian Andersen, writer Boris Pasternak (DR. ZHIVAGO), poet Sara Teasdale, writer Joseph Conrad, writer Ernest Hemmingway, writer Virginia Wolfe, and painter Vincent van Gogh. Sixty-five others spent time in an asylum or psychiatric hospital. The study is horrendous.

Beyond Don Quixote, there are elements of Inspector Clouseau & Emperor Norton.

Jeff may also be in a situation like in Umberto Eco’s “Focault’s Pendulum”, where the protagonists misinterpret everything happening to them in a way that they construct a fantastic working narrative that is totally wrong and the reality mundane, but not from their viewpoint.I had first-hand experience while reading the book that demonstrated how they could believe the fantasy is real. It was coincidence, but reinforced the fantasy. Eco gave a clue to when the events in the book were happening, a month and date on a specific day of the week. I checked the calendar, and found that the only time the events could be happening was at the same time I was reading the book.

Jeff a sensitive artist type? I don’t think so. More like a ne’er do well slacker taking refuge in his fantasies.

So far so good, that Magic Realism is some powerful stuff. Too bad you can’t photograph a dream, I’d love to see the imaginary look on Pop’s face when Jeff shows him the pics.

I can’t see how being kidnapped and held for ransom could be a real part of Jeff’s experiences. Unless we accept that the part where they lowered the ransom just to get rid of him was just his imagination?

but the rest was real??

This one at any rate.

I think everyone’s reading a bit too far into this. Probably Trudeau was just being a little bit careless and was just trying to make the strip funny. After all this is a comic strip.

“Bad news for Jeff. Ladies can smell a skunk right away.”

Well, not always… there’s a few con-men out there who know how to spin the lies. Jeff’s probably dreaming this one, though…

I think the only ‘PTSD’ he has is ‘Penis Totally Stiff Disorder’.

if I hadn’t read these comments, I would have gone mad. thanks, all. I can go on now.