Doonesbury for Sunday, May 28th makes me very sad.
War is not pretty or funny. Gary obviously knows this.
A youth group at a church here in Topeka started erecting a small cross on the lawn of their church, for each American and allied soldier killed in the current Iraq conflict. They worked hard at it, expecting it to end sooner. There were articles in the paper, and word started spreading amongst the families of the soldiers on the crosses. Some visited, some asked for flowers to be left, etc. They had to give it up when they quite literally ran out of lawn at the church.
The crosses are in storage, in case family members ever desire to claim them. And a different memorial is being erected, one cross for each hundred, while a permanent memorial is being planned.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4179/is_20040406/ai_n11811763
I believe Trudeau has done this every year on the Sunday before Memorial Day since 2004. And he’s been condemned by the Right in past years for “celebrating” the deaths of American soldiers in order to criticize Bush. I can’t really say what I think of that take on Doonesbury’s Memorial Day observance in this forum, however…
For instance, this editorial appeared after Trudeau did his first one of these, back in 2004. The editorial itself defends Trudeau’s sincerity in wanting to honor the war dead, but does quote the letter written by one detractor of same.
Pearls Before Swine has also done a Memorial Day Sunday cartoon that ran in our paper on Saturday - it’s not up on their web-site yet.
Doonesbury is the best modern comic strip, period. As it keeps going, Trudeau keeps making his case for being the best comic strip ever. He can go from serious to silly like no other ever has and his commentary stays at a higher level than any other strip dares even aspire to.
His Memorial Day strips have the emotional impact of the Vietnam Memorial, which when it first appeared was similarly criticized by morons for not properly honoring the dead.
He’s been blackballed by the cartoonist guilds since winning the Pulitzer Prize all the way back in 1975, but I hope that at least once every year these Memorial Day strips make them shut up and think.
I just finished going through that site, and a lot of the cartoons were touching, or funny, with only a few doing a “political” thing.
But of all of them, it’s interesting that the one that moved me the most was the very first one, with the aged veteran looking at graves, and that verse out of Binyon’s “Ode” that was quoted.
Oh, crap, when I got to the one at the top of p. 5, with Lady Liberty at the Tomb of the Unknowns, I just teared up.