Down In The Boondocks!

Since I moved to the Geezer Capital of Texas, my daily fishwrap is now the Austin American-Statesman which is a far cry from the fishwrap in my former hometown: the Amarillo Globe-News. The Amarillo fishwrap—predictably conservative—did not place "Doonesbury" in the funny papers (as my grandparents called them). Instead, Garry Truedeau's offerings (except Sundays) were placed on the Op-Ed page because they were too potent for kiddies. Now, even though I live in one of the reddest counties in Texas (Williamson), I am adjacent to one of the bluest counties in Texas (Travis and its seat: Austin). As a result, the Austin fishwrap offers some of the most diverse offerings in the Lone Star State. One of the keystones of this diversity is a strip by Aaron McGruder in the funny papers. McGruder's "Boondocks" is astounding because its main characters are black. Just as the film—"Barbershop"—was sensational because one of its black characters attacked Martin Luther King, "Boondocks" is sensational because McGruder's characters do not mouth the conventional wisdom that passes for white understanding of black views in the 21st century. McGruder's characters are—for the most part—children: teenager Huey Freeman (radical scholar), younger brother Riley Freeman (gangsta), friend Michael Caesar (hip hop artist), friend Jazmine DuBois (biracial girl), Granddad (relocated Huey and Riley from inner-city Chicago to a white suburb), Thomas and Sarah Dubois (Jazmine's interracial parents), and Cindy McPhearson (a clueless neighbor girl). "Boondocks" is tough and unsparing. McGruder attacks W, his administration, Black Entertainment Television, and white assumptions with equal satiric bite.


Huey Freeman comments on the 2004 election to his friend, Michael Caesar.
Copyright © 2004 Aaron McGruder [Click on the image to enlarge.] 

Power to Huey Freeman! If this is (fair & balanced) resentment, so be it.


[x TomPaine.com]
Sex And Politics
by Richard Blow

Does Aaron McGruder think that Condoleeza Rice is a lesbian? That's the question I kept pondering as I read this week's "The Boondocks," a comic strip by McGruder that The Washington Post has decided not to publish.

The Post's decision raises that ongoing debate about when not to publish comic strips"most recently several papers suspended a "Doonesbury" strip which used the word "masturbate," apparently on the grounds that there might be someone out there who didn't actually know what it meant. In this situation the Post's reasoning appears to hinge on whether Aaron McGruder is implying that Condi Rice is gay.

If you don't know it, "The Boondocks" is a comic strip about the lives and attitudes of several black kids. The primary character is Huey Freeman, described on the Boondocks' Web site as a "radical black scholar." (He's about 14, I'd guess.) McGruder likes to poke fun of both blacks and whites in a way that I find both honest and funny. Others may disagree.

This week's strips revolve around a dialogue between Huey and his friend Caesar, who announces that he has "a simple and easy plan to save the world." Basically, it consists of getting Condi Rice laid. "Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleeza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it," Caesar says. "All that gal needs is some good ol' fashioned lovin'." To which Huey deadpans, "What I really like about this idea is that it isn't the least bit sexist or chauvinistic."

That was too much for the Post, which announced it would skip "The Boondocks" this week. "We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder's assertion that Condoleeza Rice had no personal relationship was true or not," explained a Post spokesperson.

You have to love spokespeople"even at newspapers they twist the truth. Because this flimsy rationale doesn't hold up under even the mildest scrutiny. Since when do newspapers fact-check their comics? For another, the Post could always have found out if Rice was single or not. And if the editors knew that Rice didn't have a boyfriend, would they then have run the strip? Somehow I don't think so.

Let us instead give the Post more credit by assuming that the paper doesn't want to discuss its real reason for not running "The Boondocks": This week's strips could be interpreted as suggesting that Rice is gay. Particularly since there's already scuttlebutt to this effect in Washington, primarily, so far as I can tell, because Rice is single and comes across as a little frosty. The tip-off is the flack's curiously neutral phrasing, saying "personal relationship" as opposed to, say, "boyfriend."

When you look at it this way, the Post's decision is not just wrong, it's offensive. By its logic, any suggestion that someone is gay is so offensive that it has to be yanked from the paper. A "liberal" paper like the Post should know better. McGruder certainly does.

Now, to be fair, "The Boondocks" strip is also a little offensive. Whatever it might hint about what gender, if any, Rice likes to sleep with, the idea that a woman just needs to get schtupped to be happy is laughably sexist. But then, laughably is the key word. This is a comic strip, after all. Would you prefer "Family Circle"?

Ultimately, there's one quite serious reason why the Post's decision is wrong. In his own style, Aaron McGruder is getting at something important"the idea that the psycho-sexual histories of our leaders can affect their decisions regarding war and peace. To any historian, this is hardly a radical idea. (Remember that Hitler guy?) But it's the kind of truth that makes newspaper journalists queasy"it's not "news." To concede such truisms undermines the legitimacy of their definition of what's fit to print"and by extension, the very foundation of newspaperdom.

I suspect that this is ultimately why the Post wouldn't run this week's "Boondocks""because the strip posited that White House leaders are human beings whose actions are affected by their mental and sexual health. It isn't such a crazy idea, if you consider presidents Clinton, Nixon and Kennedy. But it's apparently too dangerous for the funny pages"or anywhere else"in The Washington Post.

Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George Magazine. He is author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and is writing a book about Harvard University.

Copyright © 2003 TomPaine.com