Doonesbury Passes the Buck
I was going to wait until the end of the week to do this, but I’ve had enough. This week’s Doonesbury strips feature three-war veteran B.D. along with pacifist Reverend Scott Sloan speaking to a group of Sloan’s ethics students, students who are pro-war but “quick to explain why they’re not enlisting.”
Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve railed on Doonesbury for its portrayal of young people, but here he isn’t just misrepresenting the younger generation, but laying the blame for the Iraq War at our feet. Trudeau must realize how truly unlikely it is that B.D., a man old enough to have served in Vietnam, actually saw combat in Iraq. This is not a war that is being fought by baby boomers: the people coming home dead or wounded are mostly between 18 and 23.
And the university students are not the complacent flag-waving SUV drivers that he’s describing here. Young voters turned out in record numbers to vote the Republican Congress out of office. Howard Dean was propelled to stardom because of the enthusiasm of young people. Yeah, young people talk about politics, but we say fuck and shit while doing it. I’ll take the Daily Show over Meet the Press any day, thank you.
This is not our war. This is a boomer war. It was started by boomers, it’s supported by boomers, and the only thing that we have anything to do with is that it’s our friends and our classmates that are out there fighting and dying by the thousands. So fuck you, Trudeau.
I understand that you are also making a statement about class here. That it’s the poor that end up enlisting because it seems like a way to pay for college and get ahead in life. But this isn’t some young trust-fund kid’s excuse for not enlisting, it’s a serious problem, and one that deserves more attention.
I read an article in the New York Times similarly pointing their fingers at the younger generation for never protesting. The fact is we did, hundreds of thousands in cities all over the world. Before the war, back when the Times was beating the drum for an invasion. And before 9/11, prostesters were out in the tens to hundreds of thousands for a global redistribution of wealth.
There’s been no protests because it’s apparently pointless. It didn’t work before the war started, it didn’t work in Vietnam, and we had our minds on bigger and more important problems until the boomers fucked everything up and started another pointless war just like their parents did. Now we’re so desperate to end this bloodshed we’ll try anything, even electing Democrats.