Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 19, 2011

Why does Trudeau essentially keep repeating the strip. Same punchline, essentially, three strips in a row? Let’s not keep chastening Alex. It’s Trudeau who’s responsible for everything in the strip. Let’s just hope that the good people of Massachusetts who read these Doonesberry strips will understand the vital political points that he’s trying to make.

“Joanie, for the next meeting, make Alex stay in the car!” And break her heart? Do you think it would make her stop breaking the china and LEARN a bit of poly sci on the job? You don’t wanna lose all that youthful energy and smarts,

You don’t get it…those people are the ones who lead the cheers. Once I get you cheering, you belong to the movement. Whatever it is. Happy shouts and war cries are the reason we whoop it up at a ball game or a race…it’s a symptom of mammalian bonding…some people actually show up for the endorphin rush of involvement…the wave, the cheer, the shared moment with other humans, safely…too? whee: Alex is the absolute JUICE of human focused shared interaction…I’ve been a Green Beret, trained to work with the indigenous personell…and worked on political campaigns, and it’s a RUSH to build a working organization, a TEAM, a shared moment in a life of solitude…? not a buzzing piece of electronic circuitry in your ear, but another human, kind of like a school project or something? Americans gathering to solve shared problems…and sometimes that means giving money and staying at a distance, or sometimes it means real skin in the game…go down to the party headquarters and BE AN AMERICAN. I say, until you’v egone through the rituals of growth and acceptance in any savage tribe, like graduations and quienceneras and bar mitzvahs, drivers’ license, military, marriage, etc etc..You’re not really citizens yet, anyof you, not yet,not really..you aren’t thru yet, there’s more accepted inner rituals of the organized society of American citizens, a select club not everybody can be in…: and you ‘get’ the initiation down at the place…PARTY HEADQUARTERS where other citizens have gathered to co-operate to solve a shared problem. Let’s go, troops. Show up, it’s game on, ON. For liberty…who sets the goals? Who sets the choices as to how our lives are lived…us? or them?and More and Better for all of US. We’re the pure-hearted, the keepers of the True American Flame…“Now here’s what we need done here…can you do this? can you come in a couple of hours a week for awhile ?”

Wheee the people. Let’s have GOOD time furthering the Good and smite some ?!@%$&!!…see you at headquarters, and thanks.

A unpolished gem is a good place to start.

did you notice that in the last panel, the glasses are UNDER her nose?

Trolling for stupidity this early on a Saturday? For shame, Gladly!

It’s an action shot! They’re the Steve Jobs model and GT drew them as they fell past her nose.

..I love a runng gag…

Why does the bear keep talking about apartheid? Who would be segregated? I don’t get it.

crosseyed likes Doonesbury because he believes GT will restore him as the Grand Apartheid Pooh.

“Joanie is no neophyte … but GT is purposefully making her act like a rube.”

The only neophyte-like behavior I’ve seen from Joanie is losing her place yesterday. That might have been a one-off shot at Perry, it might have been a simple mistake that Alex exacerbated, or it might have been a real “Senior Moment”. Let’s face it, Joanie IS getting up there, considering that Mike’s generation is getting quite grey and Joanie was, at one time, Mike’s mother-in-law.

Maybe Duke will never age, maybe Roland will never age, maybe Dean King will never age, but Joanie exists in “real-time”, she’s gotta be pushing 70. What seems in some ways as a week’s worth of one-note “Alex treating Gram like an Old Lady” jokes may be a humorous introduction to what will, all too soon, be serious issues.

If Joanie’s decision to accede to Alex’s idea to tag along seems unwise, just remember that political campaigns come and go but family is family.

I’m still looking at this from the standpoint of ageism. I’m now thinking it’s also the myopic perspective youth can have of elder family members. Alex loves and is proud of her grandmother, but cannot see her as anything other than her “gram”. I think she’ll learn Joanie is more than just her grandmother, and the rest of that crowd will learn how wrong they can be when they judge someone by their grey hairs or wrinkles.

Tigre1, love the comments you made, but wondering if you should cut back on caffeine. :)

You put your finger on the crucial point, fritzoid. When he writes about politics, GBT adopts an existentialist irony—-the idea that our truly vital experiences heighten our awareness of death.Their mortality makes Joanie, J.J. (Mike’s ex-) and Alex far more vital than mere cartoon characters. The likes of Duke or Jeff or Honey never have to confront death, but their cartoon “immortality” means they can never live in the actual world of politics—-what we see in an Elizabeth Warren campaign in Worcester.GBT is a great political cartoonist because he never fails to join political reality with the possibility of political death. This combination simply goes over the heads of readers looking for escape from serious politics.

Alex should be forced to spend a year or two going on a walkabout with Zeke…

tigre1 — your writing style is one-of-a-kind (or the “Enter” key on your keyboard is broken)…but you, sir, are one hell of a writer. Kudos.

I don’t think Alex is acting like a rube either, DanD, but I DO think she still qualifies as a neophyte. At least, this is her first time trying to be at the front of a crowd instead of in the middle of it.

I didn’t follow the Dean campaign myself at the time, but at the point of implosion I thought entirely too much was being made of the “War Whoop”; if Dean had been running as a Republican, he could have passed it off as a “Rebel Yell” and carried the South with it. It’s “energizing the troops”, and what plays well in a rally of the faithfull might not play well broadcast to the nation, so perhaps Dean’s only error was forgetting that the cameras were on him (of course, nowadays that IS a huge mistake, for anybody).

Interesting partnership between still idealistic baby-boomers and rarin’ to go millenials. Gen-X, where are you?

@DylanThomas3.14159

I think Trudeau understands his media. If Alex only did it for one strip it wouldn’t have the same effect. Do you think there would be this level of comments? I doubt one strip would correctly give the level of irritation or foolishness displayed by Alex in this arch. Yes it was the ‘same’ strip 3 times, but it fully shows how everyone would feel for a full meeting with that type of person there.

@tigre1Forget PARTY HEADQUARATERS. Go down to Liberty Square.

Notice in the second panel that Alex is the only one smiling her approval. GBT is confirming, as fritzoid implied, that Joanie’s true political heir is not her hippie daughter J.J. but her granddaughter Alex.Or—-to put it in a wider family context still—-Alex is the true heir of both her grandmothers: of Joanie and of the late Daisy Doonesbury.

I wasn’t kidding, DanD, but I’ll own up to being under-informed (as I said, I wasn’t following it closely). If it’s true (and I have no reason to doubt you) that Dean’s “War Whoop” was isolated and amplified, then yes I’d consider that a deliberate torpedoing, with no blame falling on the man himself at all. And again, my sympathies were already on the man’s side; my disgust was that such a trivial issue effectively ended his campaign, not with his whoop (amplified or no).

“GT likes Warren because she’ll force taxpayers to back apartheid” Gladly, you’’re not doing enough to stop the evil Trudeau. Because of YOU he’s already infected Elizabeth Warren with apartheid.

“Just what the senate needs, another Obama licker …”. There are two meanings to the word “licker”, sammysock: (1) one who physically licks another person, as in “bootlicker” (all right, all you gutter minds out there, I know it’s a euphemism). (2) one who defeats another, as in “stomper of Obama”. Which one do you intend?