Charles Pierce writes this about some newspaper publishers’ fainting over this week’s Doonesbury comic strip:
Apparently, as has happened about once a decade or so, Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” is once again giving the vapors to the people who run our nation’s newspapers. The important thing to remember is that nobody is objecting that the facts of the Dildos Mandating Dildos laws on which Trudeau is riffing here are in any way untrue. The guardians of the marketplace of ideas are having problems with how directly Trudeau is expressing his opinion on those facts.
The reasons for this is that many of America’s newspapers, large and small, are now in the hands of bean-counting poltroons who wet themselves at the prospect of angry phone calls from wingnuts, or that the local mini-Rushbo on their evening drivetime station will get a hold of their names and say mean things about them.
Here, for example, is the mewling from the Oregonian. Trudeau, apparently…
“…went over the line of good taste and humor in penning a series on abortion using graphic language and images inappropriate for a comics page.”
The graphic language? “Transvaginal,” which is apparently banal enough for the Virginia House Of Delegates, but not for the delicate souls who read newspapers in Portland. Inappropriate images? Who in hell knows, although the suggestion by the Oregonian that all that graphic language, and all those inappropriate images, are okay for their readers of experience online, but not on the sacred corpses of their dead trees, gives you some idea of why newspapers are in so much trouble these days.
(click here to continue reading Doonesbury Abortion Strip Censored – Screaming Yellow Zonkers – Esquire.)
Sounds about right. More reactions from other newspapers compiled by Jim Romenesko
Mouth breathing still-governor of Texas, Rick Perry, was not amused, once someone read the strip to him out loud:
And Trudeau stands by the strip. “To ignore it would have been comedy malpractice,” he told the Washington Post. It’s also apparently the first time Trudeau has tackled abortion. “Roe v. Wade was decided while I was still in school” he said. “Planned Parenthood was embraced by both parties. Contraception was on its way to being used by 99-percent of American women. I thought reproductive rights was a settled issue. Who knew we had turned into a nation of sluts?”
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office is not amused, calling the comic tasteless. “The decision to end a life is not funny,” Perry spokesperson Lucy Nashed told TPM. “The governor’s proud of his leadership on the sonogram law … and being a staunch defender of unborn life.”
(click here to continue reading Doonesbury Comic Series On Abortion Rejected By Several Newspapers | TPMDC.)
Might this rumble of reaction in a sense be a proverbial steam cloud rising from a live but silent volcano? I seem to be reacting to it with my gut and my heart, as opposed to my political nerve. First, I wonder what women have to say about the “rumble.” Second, I wonder if an issue that is so far getting no attention is the following. If we as a species could demonstrate to one another that we live in a society that knows how to treat its ‘living members’ with dignity, then maybe those of us who actually own a vagina and possess the ability to carry a fetus to term might be inclined to freely raise children in anticipation that they and their children will thrive in such a society.
A few things occur (in my limited awareness). Society as a whole either benefits from, or is stricken by (in the case of psychotics, murderers, terrorists, etc.) the individuals born into the whole of society. Yet, it is the sole responsibility of most especially a young mother of ‘child bearing age’ to financially and emotionally support the child. I’m suggesting that society as a whole does not take an interest in the child for several years before formal education and socialization through preschooling begins, except in terms of state run healthcare facilities, or of consumerism (diapers, formula, car seats, stollers, cribs, toys, you name it). And I’m suggesting that two-parent families having the ability to financially, emotionally and socially contribute to the rearing of offspring, may no longer be the norm.
I leave many holes of thought and argument to be considered in the above paragraphs. It would be my hope to hear a woman’s point of view on the matter of having or of not having children – in a society that places the burden of having children squarely on a woman’s shoulders, and that also struggles to eliminate the “glass ceiling” of income from a woman’s livelihood. A basic question I would enjoy seeing addressed might be, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how terrifying is it to consider birthing and rearing one or more children in the U.S.A.?” God knows, we’re not exactly a Nanny State.