Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 29, 2011

Yo Vista Bill!

Looks like everybody’s waiting for you. The stage is bare. Please come back. All if forgiven.

This is getting very ugly. Time for an arc change.

It’ll change after tomorrow — when Jeff wakes up.

The Red Rascal literally took their cr@p.

.H-h-h-hooooly . . . . ..Now I’m glad Vista Bill isn’t here to see this..Trudeau, you’ve got a lot to answer for. That’s all I can say for now.

He disemboweled them and didn’t get his hands dirty.

. N-n-n-night, Leftwing, old pal.

.Still speechlesss,.DT∏

Apparently the answer to the blonde’s question, “How’d you do that,” is magic realism. That’s a confused concept if ever I heard one. But Trudeau is no Garcia Marquez, much less a Cervantes.

I mean, couldn’t he have just, just knocked them senseless . . . . I mean, Clint, John Wayne, Humph, where are you now that we need you? . . . . I mean, aw, I don’t know what I mean . . . ..Trudeau, I fought for you, I fought for Jeff, I believed in you, I, I, I . . . ..And now this! You, you, you—.Aaaargh!

Now I know he’s dreaming

Dang. I was looking forward to him bringing two pickups back to his room at Joanie & Rick’s.

Maybe the point is that Jeff has gone beyond what is healthy fantasy. If so, I think it makes the point well. Just beating them up would not have advanced the story, as it’s already been well established that he’s on an ego trip.

Thanks, Palindrome. Thanks, Bird55. That helps. It’s still before midnight, west coast time. C’mon night owls, weigh in. California? Oregon? Washington? . . . .

They just gotta learn not to mess with Sorkh Razil

Of course he disemboweled them. He is Sorkh Razil and he is just staying in character. Do you really think that in Afghanistan one would just get punched out? The vast majority of the world does NOT live by American niceties. Neither do the ghettos of the US cities. Trudeau is just closer to reality that you want to admit.

Not exactly a dream. It’s the sort of thing he writes on Red’s blog. His Dad’s a mainstream journalist, Jeff’s style is closer to Jack London’s or Mark Twain’s school of journalism.However, appearing to everyone to be such a complete idiot could be a quite effective cover. His clearance could be higher than those who thought he was working for them.

And that is why he IS Sorkh Razil!

No blood? He must have used the Miracle Blade I saw late last night. Won’t rust, bust, collect dust, or bend in the middle. As seen on TV.

Whew! Now my shock has turned to anger. But I still think Sorkh Razil should have used his “magic realism” (MR) weapon just to zap the two thugs into stasus, like on Star Trek, and then wait for the heat. Here are my four reasons:.First: Now he’s gonna be up for at aggravated manslaughter with his MR deadly weapon, just as jurisprudence considers a karate blackbelt’s two hands to be a deadly weapon..Second: The two “ladies of the night” would still have been impressed. Now they’re distraught. And since they don’t love him anyway, when they testify in court, in order to save their own backsides, they’ll have to testify against him..Third: He’s leaving the scene of a crime in a taxi, an additional, after-the-fact criminal “count”. .Fourth: The two thugs are probably squealing like two pigs in hell-flames right now, twisting on chains, dripping scalding lard — food for demons — when they could’ve stayed alive. How’s Sorkh gonna teach ‘em to become better citizens if he deguts them like a space alien deguts a couple of ranch cattle? Huh? Huh? .Or maybe he really is a space alien, after all, a changeling. Maybe he was exchanged immediately after the birth of Joanie’s true baby, who was then whisked away in a UFO to a planet in another stellar system “in a galaxy far far away” while Joanie was drugged our of her gourd with an alien drug that outgassed from her system within seconds. Being a space-alien agent could explain his MR powers. Maybe the CIA is clueless about what it has on its hands with this strange changling “Jeff Redfern”.

..time for the alarm clock to go off…

Two,two fantasys in one.

I’m with roctor. This is starting to feel like “Inception,” where the fantasy begins to fold back on itself.

I don’t know where this is supposedly taking place [NYC?], but in a late night encounter outside a club Jeff would have been in the unfortunate situation of having brought a knife to a gunfight.

Jeff is Pyschotic. Perhaps GBT is presenting another convoluted storyline of menatlly ill characters. Remember the one that saw the ghost? Then there’s Ray with his PTSD, and now Jeff? Perhaps there will be an intervention by his buddies.

Mmmmm. This is not going to end well!

Hmmm,, On the news this morning; “TWO DISEMBOWELED THUGS FOUND OUTSIDE DISCO CLUB!” “Doctors work feverishly to save their lives.”

This, to me, crosses the line from whimsy and fantasy to serious mental health issues. Zonker’s daily waltz with reality had charm…Jeff is turning out to be that guy living in his parents’ basement about whom the neighbors will eventually say "He was quiet; we had no idea that he was capable of (fill in the blank with something dark and sordid.)

I agree with bird55 – this has gone beyond normal fantasy. Jeff’’s a disturbed young man.

Does the CIA provide its former employees medical/psychiatric benefits?

In the earliest Doonesbury’s, Mike D used to have his own inner monologue and fantasy existence. This is sort of the same… except more dillusional and so a little sadder for poor Jeff.

I’m here… 10 hours late, but I did make it! Good morning all…

Actually, reminds me of a Turkish Army officer I knew many years ago (ask Koreans about Turks), and the “straight razor crowd” in Watts or Chicago, also an incident In Long Binh when a dude with a blade in a bar sent a friend home to Letterman. Maybe part of America’s fantasy world “problem” is they’ve never seen reality, and can’t believe it happens even more dramatically than in the “movies”.

Welcome, Vista Bill! I shudder to think what you think of today’s strip. I feel protective, for some reason. But nobody protected me. So maybe we’re both “naive realists” as opposed to the “magic realists” who Palindrome thinks are “confused”..I wouldn’t want to compare Trudeau to Cervantes, though, Palindrome, since the two are writing in such completely different genres and times. Cervantes is great partly because he helped to “invent” the modern novel, or at least the modern “romance” literature. Cervantes is also great because he helped to invent the difficult “fantasy within a fantasy” type of literature, that Trudeau is attempting within the “comic strip” genre. .Duke for President, Jack? Duke’s a Hitler type, yes, just nowhere near as talented as Hitler was. He rubs people the wrong way, whereas Hitler enchanted almost the entire German people in his rise to the power of Reichsführer or “absolute ruler of the both homeland and the world”. .Jeff for President? Yeah, I can see the “National Enquirer” headline now: SPACE ALIEN SEEKS PRESIDENCY FROM BEHIND BARS.

Don’t mess with the Red Rascal, man! He’s CRAZY!

It’s the smaller fantasy (Jeff’s) within the larger fantasy (Trudeau’s) that makes this kind of literature so fascinating, but also so difficult. We readers are ourselves often are confused: Trudeau’s smaller “Jeff fantasy” is contained entirely within Trudeau’s larger “Doonesbury fantasy" which itself is set within and often intermingled within the still-larger “reality world” (or, for some, “reality fantasy”) in which we all live. That’s why it is so difficult for an artist to pull off. We readers often don’t know where the smaller “Jeff fantasy” slip-slides into and out of the larger “Doonesbury fantasy”. But that’s basically Trudeau’s problem, and sometimes he fails, at least in my opinion. Our problem is to try to figure out what message he’s trying to communicate to us his readers..Jack, Maybe we should run a GoComix poll: Should Duke run (again) for President? Get nominated to some whackoid third party, such as the American Reich Party (ARP)? Then run in the general election? And actually win and become President?.Shudder. That would make the current “Jeff drama” look like a gnat’s one-second daydream! Duke could call himself the American Reichsführer, eliminate or make puppets of the Congress (Senate and House) and the Supreme Court, as Hitler did in Germany. He could appoint Overkill as Secretary of State and Jeff as head of the CIA..Readers: Any takers out there wanna weigh in? Jack? Leftwing? Palindrome? No.6? Vista Bill? Pouncing Tiger? The Trout Mama? Susan Newman? Gweedo? Anybody?

Disturbing, yeah, I guess it is, but GBT has dealt with a number of uncomfortable subjects before (witness Ray’s issues crashing at BD’s casa).

I think this is simply Jeff slipping into a fantasy world, maybe in the vein of a dark Walter Mitty.

Considering Jeff’s past, the child of two working career-minded parents, spending most of his childhood in daycare, and wasting away his college years on the Play Station, maybe he’s created a fantasy world, complete with a new persona, that he’s finding harder to let go of…

I would not be the least be surprised to see this arc delve into issues of mental illness (focusing on schizophrenia, perhaps), or maybe, if any of his adventures in Berzerkistan are for reals, this might be another riff on PTSD.

President Duke could invade Iraq and Afghanistan . . . . Oh, wait, they’ve already been invaded. But he could invade Iran. Then launch the biggie: Operation Barbarossa into China! Slurp! Of course, we’d have to gear up; but that’d be good! Since there’d be jobs galore! For everybody! I gotta stop. This is becoming almost, almost orgasmic!

i – i – can’t think of anything to say – i’m stunned – all i can think of is, at least he did it off-screen

Also talks to the hazards of clods like the Norwegian, and way too many post-9/11 ‘patriots’ jacking-up or offing the random Sikh 7-11 clerk, thinking they’re ‘getting even’.We may not know what that really was about for many years (after the main actors are all dead).The 9/11 commission, recall, has admitted the scenario it posited was bogus.Either the entire National Security State was complicit, or incompetent; pick one (sorry, gang – can’t have it both ways!)

Boy if the chicks are impressed now, wait when Raz shows ’em all his scars;

“This one was from the Koregal, this one was from the crash, these two teeth were at the bar, and this big one …”

Don’t you see DT that Raz imagines that the chicks respond positively to his imaginary scars, especially the crooked purple one. “Oooo Raz, that looks like it hurts, what can we do to make you feel better?”

Gotta look beyond reality to get the most out of magic realism.

I always try not to over-analize Trudeau.

Let me be the first to say: “Guten nacht,” Vista Bill, “Schlaf gut ihrem gebrechlichen alten bett.”