By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 10, 2021
A decade or more ago, I entered a retail establishment, noticed a pristine copy of a 2009 collection of Doonesbury comics and purchased it for eight or nine bucks. The 240-page paperback then remained in my dwelling, completely unread, until just a few days ago.
Mind you, I don’t specifically remember doing any of this, but it’s the most likely explanation for the fact that I had a copy of Tee Time in Berzerkistan with an old price tag on it sitting on my bookshelves. (Sadly, I removed the sticker before writing this post, so I can’t give you a definitive price.)
(If at this point you find yourself wondering What is Doonesbury? or hazy on the concept of daily comic strips, I refer you to this post. And if you find yourself thinking that the opening of today’s post is familiar, well, then you’ve caught me doing a little textual recycling.)
Cartoonist G.B. Trudeau’s book itself turns out to be an enjoyable collection of daily newspaper strips from a time that at once was fraught with peril and seemingly quaint. The compilation covers the end of George W. Bush’s second term (public radio host Mark Slackmeyer dons formal wear and directly addresses the reader in a tour of a “final edition of ‘Bushisms,’” that president’s famed and frequent malapropisms); an election year in which Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin broke political barriers (B.D. and Boopsie’s school-age daughter, Sam, gets a talking Palin doll that declaims “France is my favorite city!”); and the unforeseen ascension of Democratic nominee Barack Obama, who shattered a different set of presidential political precedents.
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