Notes From Walden Puddle

Propped against the computer in my Lowell House room is a plastic figurine of a bald little man wearing sunglasses, army boots and a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt bearing the words "death before unconsciousness." His presence is not an ode to Hunter S. Thompson, nor to any passion of mine for hallucinogenic substances; instead he stands in homage to G. B. Trudeau, the creator of the political cartoon Doonesbury.

The figure is Uncle Duke, the Thompson-inspired ne'er-do-well of the strip whose exploits have included countless drug trips, a brief stint as Governor of American Samoa and a classic turn as dean of Caribbean medical school, where students pioneered the transplant of a liberal heart into a conservative body (doctors were sure it was liberal heart because the body had been pulled from a Volvo). I often turn to Duke, my Trudeau talisman, for inspiration when writing papers, studying Greek or just seeking the meaning of life. For in my opinion, the answers to all the big questions lie in the panels of Doonesbury.

If you don't agree, you haven't been reading the strip as religiously as you should (there's no excuse--it appears daily in the pages of this newspaper), or perhaps you find its relentlessly liberal bent tough to swallow. It's true that Gingrich was immortalized as a ticking bomb icon, Dan Quayle as a feather and Phil Gramm as a producer of low-budget porn flicks (wait, that last one was fact, not cartoon fiction). Republican presidents, in particular Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush, have been subject to cuttingly funny mockery.

But Trudeau has also captured Bill Clinton as a waffle dripping with maple syrup, combining in one small image both the president's indecisiveness and his passion for food, and portrayed Vice President Al Gore '69 as a young child sitting on the lap of his Senator father, waiting to be spoon-fed the presidency. This year, though, the images will be harder to make new. The current presidential race is shaping up as the embodiment of the old proverb: history the first time is tragedy but when repeated is farce.

We know that the founding fathers didn't envision a caste of professional politicians, but the current mixture of off-the-wall potential candidates like Warren Beatty (shades of Ronald Reagan) and light-weight legacies like George W. Bush (we've already enjoyed more than 12 years of insightful depictions of his father in the strip) give us a sense of dj vu and will be a real test of Trudeau's innovative genius.

He's doing okay thus far--readers are probably already wondering if Warren Beatty, asked here last night about his possible run for the White House, has gotten any real donations from the Doonesbury-dwelling "Former Girlfriends for Warren" fundraising group. Asked if she was a real member or just a groupie who imagined her liaison, central cast-member Boopsie (whose enthusiasm for reincarnation reminds us of Beatty's sister, Shirley MacLaine) told her husband, "I have proof, B.D. He left a sock."

If Beatty doesn't raise enough money from his old girlfriends or convince anyone that "Bulworth" was a sign of good things to come, though, the presidential race will most likely come down to a Yale vs. Harvard rivalry. But we've already been there, done that. In 1988, Yale's secret society, Skull and Bones (of which Bush Sr. was a member) featured prominently in the strip, as did analysis of Gore's political and familial pressures in the Democratic primary. All the former Yale Daily News cartoonist has to do now is print re-runs for the next 12 months. He may have covered George Bush's bubble icon with a large empty cowboy hat for his son, but it otherwise seems like the same old story.

I have real hope, though, that the less attractive the material, the more Trudeau will be able to turn the farcical into the humorously serious. The collected works of Doonesbury, the only political strip ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, will one day make a great curriculum for a U.S. History class (Watergate, Iran/Contra, Desert Storm, etc.). Over the last almost 29 years, Doonesbury (through Trudeau), tackling such social issues as AIDS, homelessness and education, has put together a visual and verbal compendium of life's great questions and answers: how to treat people justly in a changing society, how to keep public figures honest, and how to laugh at issues that, without the help of humor, would otherwise overwhelm us with grief and despair.

The current state of the presidential race might give the average citizen reason to despair and might even challenge the creative genius of the world's greatest political cartoonist, but as I sit at my desk, I see Duke, dragging on his cigarette, saying, "Things could be worse; Zonker could be running." On second thought, that doesn't sound so bad.

Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.