2010 elections continue 1960s battles

2010 elections continue 1960s battles

http://www.peoplesworld.org/2010-elections-continue-1960s-battles/

by: Sam Webb
October 26 2010

I just returned from two weeks of travel around the U.S. At one stop
on my journey someone asked me where this election fits into the
scheme of things.

Here is what I said.

With a narrow-angled lens it is the latest round of a political clash
triggered by the election of the first African American president and
the economic meltdown in 2008.

One of these momentous events might have been enough to set into
motion a clash of contending forces. But when both occurred nearly
simultaneously the ferocity of this clash became tsunami-like.

It hasn't ebbed, and, in fact, with the midterm election around the
corner, the rage of the right is surging to a new level.

And if you are hoping that the politics of rage, obfuscation and
obstruction will ease in the election's aftermath, think again. These
politics are deep in the political DNA of right-wing extremism - it
won't give up something that works, at least so far!

In any event, one side will gain momentum on Nov. 2, while the other
side will have to regroup to one degree or another.

But with a wider-angled lens, this election and the rage connected to
it (racist and anti-immigrant especially) are traceable to two periods.

One is the so-called "culture wars" of the 1960s - which were in
reality a period of unprecedented social upheaval and struggles, not
since matched - over poverty, racial equality, student, women's and
farmworker rights, the Vietnam war, and other issues. These powerful
and overlapping movements arose to challenge the status quo of that time.

The other is the sharp turn to the right a decade later. If the
"culture wars" of the '60s were the opening round of a new era of
struggle, the 1980 ascendance of Ronald Reagan to the White House
(and the decision of then Federal Reserve Bank chairman Paul Volker
to spike interest rates to nearly 20 percent and thus induce a deep
recession) signified a reconfiguration, intensification and extension
of this struggle to a broader swathe of the population, especially
the working class and labor movement.

With the transfer of the main levers of political power to Reagan and
his hit-men, the barbarians of the right initiated an all-out class
war from above. It was ideological and cultural as well as political
and economic. The gloves came off. There was no place for compromise.

Right-wing extremists and the most reactionary sections of monopoly
and financial capital ganged up against the working class, racially
oppressed, women, youth, seniors, and other social groups.

And guess what? This turn to supercharged class warfare, steeped in
racist appeals to white people, largely succeeded.

The wealth of the top income tiers ballooned, while income for the
lower tiers either stagnated or plummeted.

Neoliberalism, deregulation and financialization became the new
economic orthodoxy.

The use of force became the option of first choice in matters
domestic and foreign, and the organizations of the working class and
people beat a retreat.

But a retreat isn't a rout. Though weakened, the working class and
people lived to fight another day, and another day, and another day ...

Much time has passed since the "culture wars" of the '60s and the
turn to the right a decade later, but the distant voices of George
Wallace, Bull Connor, Richard Nixon, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan
and Reverend Jerry Falwell can still be heard. The past, as someone
said, is never past. The intensification of class and democratic
struggle that occurred then continues today, combining the old
issues, protagonists and rhetoric with the new issues, protagonists
and rhetoric.

Most strikingly new is the election of President Obama, and the
massive and spontaneous surge of democratic-minded people and
movements that backed him. This loose coalition of diverse forces,
broader than anything before it, is the main vehicle that will drive
the nation to a more just and decent future.

It won't be easy. The 2008 election tipped the balance of forces in
the direction of democracy and progress, and pushed the right onto
its heels. But the blow wasn't a knockout.

The right regrouped, faster than most anticipated, and turned
obstruction, division and demagogy into a vicious and powerful weapon.

Next Tuesday, Election Day, the right hopes to continue its journey
back to political dominance.

But if it does make gains, let's remember that gaining a momentary
advantage is miles from reclaiming the main levers of political power
and even more miles from bringing a final resolution to this
longstanding conflict - a conflict that in my view can only be
settled when one side vanquishes the other.

The differences are irreconcilable. Each side has a diametrically
different vision of what America should look like.

One vision - the vision of labor, minorities, women, youth and other
social groups and movements - believes in an America that raises
living standards and guarantees jobs at livable wages, expands
opportunities and rights to the disenfranchised, alienated and
marginalized, embeds human equality and diversity into the social
fabric, and seeks peace through mutual understanding and cooperation,
establishes robust regulation of the economy and democratic public
and cooperative ownership when necessary, aggressively addresses
global warming and environmental degradation, respects all forms of
life on our planet, and embraces the cultures and peoples of other lands.

The other vision - that of right-wing extremism, the tea party,
sections of corporate capital, groupings of medium and small
businesses, and their grassroots constituency - is exclusionary,
fears outsiders, worships a dog-eat-dog unregulated capitalism,
insists on global dominance, subordinates people of color and women,
turns same-sex relationships into a sin and psychological disorder,
blames the poor for poverty, possesses a strong anti-Semitic strain,
poisons the environment, and cynically manipulates our nation's most
noble freedom moments and traditions.

Which vision will come out on top and when that will happen is not clear.

Nevertheless, and regardless of what happens on Election Day, the
possibilities for progressive advance are real and palpable. With
unity, outreach and persistence, the movement that crystallized two
years ago and rallied in Washington in early October can expand on
the legacy of earlier periods of struggle and meet the new challenges
of the 21st century.

But right now, every democratic-minded American should go to the
polls on Nov. 2 and mobilize others to do the same.

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Can you grow organic marijuana?

Can you grow organic marijuana?

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/politics/stories/can-you-grow-organic-marijuana

Prop 19 could allow ordinary people to legally buy and grow their own
weed in California. But growing it organically can be tricky.

Oct 29 2010

The state of California is abuzz with, well, the possibility of
getting legally buzzed. On Tuesday, Golden State voters have a lot
more than a new governor to consider as they decide to pass or nix
Prop 19, a measure that would legalize marijuana use for people 21
and older. If it passes, residents can grow marijuana, too, so long
as it's within a single 25-square-foot area.

California law already allows medical marijuana, and the new
proposition, if passed, would allow government to regulate and tax
cannabis sales, which are estimated to generate billions of dollars
in revenue. And this movement is not about hippies and
back-to-the-land types. It's about everyday people, a budding
industry (so to speak), and, apparently, world-class athletes, too.
At Game One of the World Series in San Francisco on Wednesday night,
pro-pot fans held up big signs featuring the team's young ace, Tim
Lincecum (who was previous busted for pot possession), reading, "TIM
IS NOT A CRIMINAL. VOTE YES ON PROP 19."

With the election just days away, and with several other states
considering legalizing medical marijuana, the countrywide cannabis
conversation made us wonder…is it possible to find certified organic pot?

THE DETAILS: The short answer, technically, is "no." Here's why.
Marijuana use, medical or not, is illegal under federal law, so the
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) refuses to certify organically
grown pot under its National Organic Program. Still, even though you
won't find the green USDA-organic seal on jars displaying marijuana,
organically grown pot is actually on the market in California,
although it's not nearly as common as nonorganic.

Stephen DeAngelo, executive director of Harborside Health Center, a
nonprofit medical-marijuana dispensary in Oakland, California, notes
that there is another certification for organic marijuana. It's known
as the Clean Green Program. Garden inspectors check out cannabis
operations, looking at inputs, pest control, nutrients, and other
sustainability related issues. Growers can be certified two ways:

1. Clean Green, meaning growers follow all the USDA-organic guidelines.

2. "Best practices," meaning it's not an entirely organic operation,
but growers are using any more harmful substances "safely" and sparingly.

DeAngelo's center is heralded as the gold standard of cannabis
dispensaries, thanks in part to its third-party lab testing for
potency and molds. It does offer some Clean Green­certified cannabis,
and he pays these types of growers $100 more per pound for their
organic efforts.

Still, most marijuana growers use products banned in organic
agriculture. "To maximize yields, growers typically use
petroleum-based fertilizers," explains DeAngelo. But small-scale
organic can pay off. For instance, he says people pay up to $425 an
ounce for beautiful, organically grown cannabis grown by a master
gardener in a small plot. Mass-produced, it would cost at least half
of that. "Cannibus is much like wine. If you do not give it very
careful tending and personal attention, you'll end up with a product
with substantially less value," says DeAngelo.

WHAT IT MEANS: Should we be surprised that marijuana, the herb long
regarded as a natural remedy for everything from nausea and
nervousness to chronic pain and spasms, is usually grown with
chemicals? Perhaps not. Although pretty resilient, the herb is
susceptible to powdery mildew, and spider mites are common infesters.
DeAngelo says his customers tend to go for cannabis grown indoors
because the flowers are in pristine condition, since they were
shielded from the elements. With indoor growing, chemical inputs are
often used. "It is possible to grow organic indoors, but the costs
are higher and the yields are lower," explains DeAngelo.

No matter how it's grown, different strains of cannabis are offered
in different forms for different ailments. Insomnia and/or chronic
pain? A cannabis capsule is your best option, says DeAngelo. "It
passes through the digestive system, so the effective life of
cannabis is extended to six to eight hours." Early-morning nausea? A
liquid under the tongue might do the trick.

We'll find out soon enough if California will soon be abundant with
windowsill marijuana plants­and if legitimization leads to a surge in
commercial growers who add more toxic pesticides to the soil and
water. For more information about the state of legalizing marijuana
in your area, look for it on this map. To learn more about marijuana,
check out High Times. And if it's legal for you to grow, visit
OrganicGardening.com for basic gardening techniques that will give
you healthy plants without the use of toxic chemicals. (Just don't
tell them we sent you!)

.

Reefer sadness for pot farmers

Reefer sadness for pot farmers

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39914211/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

Marijuana growers in California find legalization could be worst
thing that ever happened

By Sheelah Kolhatkar
10/31/10

To reach Jason's farm you drive south out of the small town of
Arcata, in Humboldt County, Calif., and plunge into the forest that
gave the region its "Emerald Triangle" nickname. After passing
through hilly ranch country and a stretch on a dusty dirt road, a
wooden house peeks out of the fruit trees on 150 acres of land,
completely off the electrical grid. Jason is in the kitchen, stuffing
cannabis leaves into a juicer.

"Everyone around here is involved in some way," says Jason, a
professional marijuana grower. What he means is that a large
percentage of people in town, and every other town for miles, is
either directly or indirectly subsidized by dope, from the young
parents cultivating a few seedlings in the backyard to the owner of
the sushi restaurant where seemingly unemployed people eat dinner,
always paying in cash.

"I think we're in the middle of a boom time," says Jason, clomping
over to a leather sofa with his juice. He's in his late 30s and
wearing camouflage pants with a small knife clipped to his belt,
heavy-duty work boots, and just enough chin scruff to keep him from
looking groomed. Despite its rustic accommodations ­ personal
business is conducted in an outhouse down the path ­ the house bears
many signifiers of high household cash flow: gleaming new appliances,
lots of products made by Steve Jobs, a Droid satellite phone. He got
into the pot business almost by accident. After several years
drifting hippie-style through California, Jason fell in love with the
pastoral lifestyle and realized that he had to earn money to sustain
it, so he became a businessman. He agreed to explain the economics of
his trade, provided Bloomberg Businessweek withheld his full name.

The 1996 passage of Proposition 215, which legalized the possession
and cultivation of marijuana for medical use in California, ushered
in a green golden age. The legislation permits use of the drug by
anyone with a 215 prescription, which can be dispensed by doctors for
ailments ranging from cancer to a stiff neck; the Marijuana Policy
Project estimates there are 355,000 patients in California who have
been advised to use medical marijuana by a doctor. Selling marijuana
for a profit is still illegal under state law, and there is no
specific definition of how much a person can legally grow or what
constitutes a profit, while all marijuana sales remain prohibited by
federal law. The very vagueness of the rules created opportunity:
Midlevel entrepreneurs such as Jason who were willing to live with
the risks and ambiguities of a semi-legitimate market rushed in and
thrived, though there are no reliable estimates of how many there are.

Now a new set of variables has thrown the business into even greater
uncertainty. On Nov. 2, California will vote on Proposition 19, the
"Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010," a ballot initiative
introduced by an Oakland pot enthusiast named Richard Lee that
proposes to legalize marijuana for personal use. The new law would
permit individuals to possess up to 1 ounce and cultivate 25 square
feet worth of plants at private homes, with no medical requirement.
Beyond that the initiative's language is murky. Regulation of
commercial production and sale of cannabis would be done by counties
and municipalities, leaving the mechanics of how it would all work undefined.

One thing seems clear, though, if the measure is adopted: A
quasi-black market will be replaced by a much more legal one, and
prices for pot are likely to go down. It's impossible to know by how
much, but a 2010 Rand study called "Altered State? Assessing How
Marijuana Legalization in California Could Influence Marijuana
Consumption and Public Budgets" estimates that retail prices could
eventually drop by 80 percent. First, suggests Jonathan Caulkins, a
public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a co-author
of the Rand study, there would be a "honeymoon" period of several
years when production would ramp up as California product began to
push out inferior Mexican pot across the country. Once that happens,
you could have "a real change in industry structure," according to
Caulkins. Growers would have to professionalize their operations and
become even more industrial-scale to squeeze out smaller margins of
profit. In such an environment, people probably won't make the
$150,000 or so Jason says he clears every year, and "mom and pop"
farmers will be wiped out. Jason is planning ahead. "You wanna go up
top and walk through them fields of glory?" he asks. "If you can grow
twice as much, you'll make the same amount of money, even if the
price is half."

Above ground-underground market

For decades, the Emerald Triangle was sustained by logging and
fishing, but both eventually died off. In the 1960s and '70s, hippies
and counterculture types fled San Francisco and other cities to get
"back to the land," and were drawn to the area for its potential as
an agricultural utopia. The ideal was to be dependent on no one:
Build your own house, grow your own food, and slap solar panels on
the roof. It turned out that big redwood country was almost as well
suited to the cultivation of cannabis as southern France is to Côtes
du Rhône grapes. The region's inaccessibility made it suitable for
growing in greenhouses, while the climate and exposure were conducive
to agriculture. It was easy for people to nestle a few pot plants
back behind the tomatoes and bring in a little extra money to pay the
property tax bill.

Proposition 215 elevated the trade to a new level, spawning
businesses to uphold and profit from it: an aboveground-underground
market. Growers hire manual laborers to cultivate, harvest, and trim
the crops. Others are brought in to transport the bounty to
dispensaries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and across the state, or
to out-of-state middlemen who inject the product into the black
market. Doctors write prescriptions authorizing patients to purchase
what they need from a dispensary; lawyers provide defense services;
bail bondsmen help people get out of jail. In Arcata, a tidy college
town with a population of around 17,000, there are many more shops
selling fertilizer and greenhouse supplies than there are people
growing orchids. And then there are the arteries the drug proceeds
flow through: booming truck dealerships, organic food markets, and
the electronics store.

Humboldt County has a small population base relative to its
California neighbors­129,000­so it's easier for the pot industry to
have a dominant effect on the local economy, Caulkins points out. At
a moment when Americans don't seem to actually make anything anymore,
domestic producers have quietly distinguished themselves in the
cultivation of high-caliber weed, demand for which has proved to be
almost recession-proof. Jobs cultivating, harvesting, and selling the
plants can't be sent overseas, and the profits are usually reinvested
in the community. Caulkins calculates that anywhere from $1.5 billion
to $2 billion worth of marijuana might be sold in California each
year. The wholesale price per pound is below $3,000, according to
locals familiar with the market.

Advantages at risk

The question that looms over the growers is whether the economic
advantages they've built up can survive a more radical legalization
policy, like that being put forth in Prop 19. "One thing that
interests me is to what degree large-scale production can lower
costs," says Erick Eschker, a professor of macroeconomics and U.S.
economic history at Humboldt State University who directs the
Humboldt Economic Index, a monthly indicator for the county. "If
economies of scale do exist, small operations are going to be at a
significant price disadvantage." Humboldt County could also lose the
geographical advantage of its remoteness, which makes it ideal for
producing an illegal product, as production moves closer to where
most of the customers are, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. With
taxation and regulation happening at a county or city level, there
could also be a race to whichever area has the friendliest rules.

The new proposition was initiated by Richard Lee, a marijuana
entrepreneur who founded Oakland's Oaksterdam University, the first
college for training students in cannabis commerce, and who helped
push the city of Oakland to start taxing marijuana dispensaries.
According to a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of
California, voters now oppose Prop 19 by 46% to 44%, after favoring
it slightly in September. Last year, California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger announced that it was "time for a debate" on
legalizing marijuana (although he recently came out against
Proposition 19, calling it a "flawed initiative"). Shifting public
opinion has already led 14 states, plus Washington, to approve some
form of legalization for medical purposes.

The cause has found interesting supporters in the business world: Two
co-founders of Facebook, Sean Parker and Dustin Moskovitz, donated
$100,000 and $70,000 respectively, to backers of Prop 19 this fall,
according to campaign filings, and, in a Wall Street Journal opinion
piece, investor George Soros announced that he was backing the
initiative. The State Board of Equalization, which collects sales,
property, and other taxes such as those on tobacco and alcohol,
issued a report estimating that if marijuana were taxed at $50 per
ounce it could lead to $1.4 billion in new revenue for California,
which has been suffering from a $19 billion budget deficit. Jeffrey
Miron, a Harvard economist, estimates that if the drug were taxed at
rates similar to alcohol and tobacco it could create $8.7 billion in
national tax revenue.

Different parts of the cannabis plant contain varying levels of
tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive ingredient. The
highest concentrations are found in unfertilized buds of the female
plant, which yield the most expensive strains. Much of what is grown
in Humboldt County is of this type, and the price (followed by all
the grades below) has been dropping for the last several years. As
the price slid, more people rushed into growing, farms became larger,
and the market became glutted. It also attracted what some locals
describe as outsiders and criminal elements, including members of
drug cartels. Home invasions are more common than they used to be,
and there are reports of shootings ­ six so far this year in Humboldt
County, up from one two years ago, according to Mike Downey, the
incoming sheriff. Many houses in Arcata have been taken over by
indoor marijuana-growing outfits. "I've been involved in the drug
wars for 25 years," says Downey. "My personal view? It's not worth
it. We've spent a lot of money and it hasn't made a difference. It's
been a frustrating issue. A lot of people have been killed. We've got
bodies in these hills we've never found."

Land rush

"I'm probably selling more land than anyone else in the country,"
Charlie Tripodi says as he bumps along the highway in his mud-crusted
Dodge Ram. Tripodi says he's sold $21 million worth since January, to
be precise. "We missed a bit of the bullet of the real estate market.
No real estate agents are out peddling hot dogs." And why might that
be? "The marijuana industry," Tripodi says without hesitating.
"That's obvious. It definitely kept us afloat."

Tripodi, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker who calls himself "The Land
Man," specializes in selling remote parcels of former timberland to
buyers who want to farm or live the so-called rural-residential
lifestyle. A former white-water rafting guide, he has chin-length
brown hair and a boyish cowlick. He spends his days cruising around
in his truck with laminated aerial maps on the front seat and a
fortified laptop on the console. Tripodi says that land prices in
Humboldt have gone nowhere but up. "In the last eight years, the
price for 40 acres has gone from $59,000 to $150,000," he says.

A good portion of the demand comes from people trying to diversify
their assets. Over clam chowder at the Waterfront Cafe Oyster Bar in
Eureka, Calif., the sister city to Arcata, which has a brand new
waterfront and the lively air of a rich little boomtown, Tripodi
slips into his sales pitch: "We're facing a devaluation of the
currency," he says. "If there's another terrorist attack, people are
going to be fleeing here. It's a safe haven.…Where are you going to
put your money? Land has much more of an intrinsic value."

Of course, the demand has as much to do with high times as end times.
"I hate to emphasize that," he says, but "hopefully most of them grow
under the guidelines of 215; some of them do, some of them don't. I
don't ask questions, it's none of my business." During the last few
years, he's seen much more of this second type of buyer passing
through town. "It's the end of the gold rush. People will be
clamoring to be a part of it until the last nugget is taken out of the river."

Uncertainty for small business

On a quiet side street, just beyond Arcata's main square, sits a tidy
white building that could pass for an insurance office. The Humboldt
Patient Resource Center is a dispensary where people with 215 cards
can sidle up to the counter and order one of the pot strains ­
Redwood Kush, and so on ­ that are on view in little clear plastic
jars. If the clients don't feel like smoking, as many patients don't,
according to Mariellen Jurkovich, the proprietress, they can buy one
of the goodies in the display case: ganja pecan pie, "special" peanut
butter truffle cups, and rainbow Rice Krispie treats ­ "Consume
slowly!" the package warns. Chelsea, the perky blonde nutritionist,
sits at a table by the door, offering paper cups of sunflower seeds
and tamari roasted almonds.

Jurkovich has been here 11 years and is just the sort of small
business owner who could see her world changed by the passage of the
new bill, but she doesn't know if it would be for better or worse.
"When you run a business, you need to know the rules. Here the rules
are constantly changing," she says, sounding like a beleaguered
member of the Chamber of Commerce.

Jason isn't sure how the shifting legal landscape will affect his own
small enterprise, but he tries to be optimistic. As he finishes his
carrot-and-cannabis cocktail and moves on to beer, he breaks down his
business: He spends around $50,000 a year on labor, he estimates, and
thousands more on "bourgie" organic nutrients that he orders from
Chile and other far-flung locales to make his plants more high-end.
"I just put an 18-wheeler's worth of soil in the ground," he adds,
which amounted to about $12,000. There's a lot of spray and
fertilizer. "The plants are pretty water-hungry," he explains.

Harvest party

At harvest time, which starts in October, he hires trimmers to cut
the buds off plants for $200 a pound. "Somehow I tapped into this
endless lesbian crew. They come out from North Carolina or Idaho,
jumping trains the whole way," he says. "One year I had a CPA from
Paris." He hires a cook to feed them and provides music, wine, and,
of course, plenty to smoke. "It's a party," he says, bouncing up and
down and making Edward Scissorhands motions with his fingers. His
plots are scattered around the forest along with a collection of
greenhouses that are visible from overhead but, he hopes, aren't
numerous enough to invite a raid.

Jason says he clears $150,000 to $200,000 a year in profit from the
land surrounding his house, depending on how good the crop is. He
earns more from other plots he owns nearby. He doesn't pay taxes on
the income because he doesn't file a return ("I don't lie about it.
That's when you get in trouble"). Spending all that cash in the
middle of nowhere can be a challenge. He and his wife eat
all-organic, and he's got a few trucks to play with as well as a
$28,000 Kubota backhoe. Some of the money is "seasoned" slowly into a
bank account, so as not to draw attention.

Inside one of Jason's greenhouses, eight 10-foot-tall plants salute
the sky, like big, smelly Christmas trees. Each is encased by a metal
hoop of the sort used to grow tomatoes, and hoses snake along the
floor to provide water and nutrients. He says the big strains this
year are called "Chemdog" and "Green Crack." Jason is also working on
his own concoction, called "Triple X." "Here, squeeze this," he says,
indicating one of the spongy buds, about the size of a golf ball. It
leaves a sticky, pungent residue. "Ha! You can't go back to New York
with that!" he smirks.

The conditions surrounding Jason's industry may be about to change
dramatically, but he's determined not to worry about it until it
actually happens. For now, life is almost too easy. Occasionally he
even feels nostalgic for the bad old days, when the feds were focused
on crushing the domestic pot trade, before they decided to spend most
of their energy on crystal meth instead. Back then, the choppers were
always roaring overhead. Sometimes he had to dive into the mud with a
rifle. "It used to be sexy," Jason says, half joking. "Now it's just boring."

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Battle Over California Marijuana Initiative Goes Down to the Wire

Battle Over California Marijuana Initiative Goes Down to the Wire

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/politics/31pot.html

By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: October 30, 2010

OAKLAND, Calif. ­ It is the home stretch in the battle over
Proposition 19, the ballot initiative that would legalize and
regulate marijuana in California, and at "Yes" headquarters in
downtown Oakland last week, young volunteers were hustling for votes.

But while the setting was laid back ­ what with the couches, the
Frisbees on the walls and the ample snacks ­ the mood was anything
but, as a computerized system dialing potential voters kept phones
ringing constantly.

"This is one of our generation's most important issues," said Evan
Nison, a junior from Ithaca College in New York who has spent the
last five months helping to coordinate the campaign on 40 campuses
statewide. "Students are going to be the deciding factor, and I'm in
charge of colleges. Talk about stress."

On the "No" side, opponents are at a financial disadvantage but have
been using deep political muscle to spread their message, including
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and Senator Dianne
Feinstein, a Democrat who joined a statewide tour in Los Angeles on
Friday. They have also been hammering the proposition on the radio,
saying it will endanger children and short-circuit federal school
financing and painting its backers as under the influence.

"Wow," a new advertisement concludes. "Maybe the proponents should
have waited to celebrate until after they'd written the legal language."

Still, with a growing number of Americans favoring legalization ­ a
Gallup poll released last week found a record high 46 percent
approving of legalizing marijuana ­ perhaps no ballot measure in the
country will be more closely watched on Tuesday.

And while some polls here show the "yes" side on Proposition 19
trailing, even a close loss could have national impact, as groups
seeking to change drug laws watch the results and consider backing
legalization measures in other states.

"Win or lose, this thing has moved the ball much further down the
field than anyone could have imagined," said Ethan Nadelmann, the
executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports
Proposition 19. "It's transformed the debate not only in California,
but nationally and internationally."

Even opponents concede that their efforts to stop the measure do not
necessarily mean that legalization is deeply unpopular, just that it
is a bad idea to pass Proposition 19, which would allow anyone over
21 to possess and cultivate small amounts of marijuana but would
leave many of the details concerning the sale, production and
taxation to local governments.

"We have members of the coalition who are opposed to legalization of
any kind, and we have members who say, 'We could see it,' " said
Roger Salazar, a spokesman and strategist for the opponents. "But the
hodge-podge of 'let's legalize use throughout the state, and then
figure out if we want to legalize its sale, or tax it' ­ it doesn't
seem to work for a lot of folks."

Backers of the measure have spent more than $2 million getting it on
the ballot and campaigning for its passage, an effort that has been
assisted in recent weeks by several large donations, including $1
million from the billionaire George Soros. That late influx of cash
has helped pay for a spate of advertisements.

The opposition campaign ­ run by a pair of experienced political
consulting firms based in Sacramento ­ says it has raised only about
$350,000 in donations. But they have found substantial support from
well-connected, well-organized groups like the California Police
Chiefs Association and the California Chamber of Commerce.

Not that many donors on both sides were initially interested in
giving money to an initiative that was seen as a long shot.

"It wasn't even on their radar screen," said Tim Rosales, the "No on
19" campaign manager.

Mr. Nadelmann concurred, saying many big pro-legalization donors,
like Mr. Soros, did not start to consider giving money until it
became apparent that the measure had a fighting chance.

"They didn't quite believe that the polling would hold up as well it
did," Mr. Nadelmann said.

While the "No" campaign has been bare-bones ­ no phone banks, no
direct mail ­ it has used big names and some shocking images to get
attention. The Web site for "No on 19," for example, depicts a
crumpled car and an overturned school bus and warns that
"recreational marijuana use in fatal crashes will increase if
Proposition 19 passes."

"It will be legal for a driver to get high right before taking the
wheel," it says.

Mrs. Feinstein echoed those themes in her appearance in Los Angeles
on Friday, saying Proposition 19 would not increase tax revenue for
the state and would not curb violence of drug cartels, both arguments
that proponents have made in its favor.

"These, I believe, are false promises," she said.

California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996
and would be the first state to legalize recreational use. But this
month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the federal
government would vigorously pursue criminal prosecutions of those who
possess, manufacture or distribute the drug, regardless of
Proposition 19's outcome.

Despite uncertainty, strategists for Proposition 19 say they have a
number of factors in their favor, including the enthusiasm from young
voters, a large get-out-the-vote effort and what they call a "great
silent majority" who approve of legalization.

"Voters have increasingly become angrier and angrier at the
establishment," said Chris Lehane, a longtime Democratic strategist
who is working for Proposition 19. "And this is the most
anti-establishment initiative in the land this cycle."

Much of the ground game for Proposition 19 is centered in Oakland,
where the measure's co-sponsor, Richard Lee, has built his marijuana
trade school ­ Oaksterdam ­ into a small empire, with a three-story
headquarters in the downtown core. Mr. Lee, a former roadie who
founded Oaksterdam in 2007, says he expects the vote to be close, and
influential.

"I think we've made the issue a lot more legitimate," he said, adding
that he suspected several others states would consider votes on
legalization in 2012, including Michigan, where Oaksterdam has a
satellite campus.

And while Mr. Lee's investment has been serious ­ about $1.4 million
­ the tone of the campaign has sometimes been looser.

At campaign headquarters in Oakland last week, volunteers worked the
phones and their laptops, some dressed in sweat pants and others
wearing flip-flops. "Yes on 19" pickets lay about, and a collection
of "Yes on 19" Frisbees hung on the wall. In the back, a "war room"
had been set up, with a white board counting down the days to Nov. 2.

One volunteer, Doug Greene, said he had flown to California from Long
Island because he "wanted to be part of history."

"If it passes here, the whole map is changed," said Mr. Greene, a
legalization advocate. "And even if we don't win, we've had a
discussion that most didn't think possible."

.

Dutch weed growers seek their fortunes in California

Dutch weed growers seek their fortunes in California

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-weed-growers-seek-their-fortunes-california

31 October 2010
By Margot Minjon

Dutch weed growers and coffeeshop owners have already flown out to
California. They are waiting for a referendum on the legalisation of
marijuana, which will be held next week. They anticipate an
opportunity to become rich men if the citizens of California vote in
favour of legalisation.

The Netherlands has been a major source of inspiration for both the
supporters and opponents of legislation. Supporters point to the
success of the Dutch policy of tolerating the sale of small
quantities of hashish and marijuana in so-called 'coffeeshops'.
Opponents also use statistics from the Netherlands to support their view.

The man behind the referendum is 47-year-old Richard Lee. In 1991 he
visited Amsterdam for the first time: "Fantastic. A wide variety of
shops with coffeeshops paying tax and creating jobs. And it attracts
tourists. We had to have that here too."

Coffeeshops with an Amsterdam feel

In 1999 he opened a Bulldog coffeeshop in Oakland, near San
Francisco. With the same logo as the Amsterdam Bulldog and the same
atmosphere. A sidewalk cafe, loud music and a smoking room where
people with glazed expressions stare at a TV with the sound turned
down. Of course you can't buy weed there yet, because of the police.
However, they do tolerate you bringing your own stash along.

There is now a second coffeeshop in Oakland, the Blue Sky, which
sells medical marijuana and has a similar Amsterdam feel.

In 2006 Richard Lee opened Oaksterdam University, modelled on the
Cannabis College in Amsterdam. This gives courses relating to weed
growing and is expanding fast. Compulsory subjects include law, the
history of marijuana, and commodity studies. You can go on to train
as a weed topper or coffeeshop manager. If California decides to
legalise, this is where the experts will come from. The university -
an unprotected title in the United States- has already awarded 12,000 diplomas.

'Oaksterdam'

The entire district in Oakland is known as Oaksterdam. Just like
Amsterdam, there are bikes for hire and a cannabis gift shop. And
there's an Amsterdam-style hashish museum. One of its most valued
exhibits is an old price list from an Amsterdam coffeeshop, with the
prices still in guilders!

Richard Lee came up with the legalisation referendum and paid for it
out of his own pocket. It cost him 2.7 million dollars.

If it succeeds, the local authorities will issue licences for
large-scale growing to supply the coffeeshops. The place is already
swarming with Dutch coffeeshop owners and growers hoping for
licences. "There's no doubt the Dutch weed industry would do very
well here, since they have so much experience," says Lee. He plans to
set up hundreds of Dutch-style coffeeshops.

Opponents also point to Amsterdam

Opponents of legislation also point to the Dutch model. Their main
spokesperson is drug information officer John Redman.

"The other side are always talking about how weed does no harm and
how wonderful it is in Amsterdam. So, let's look at the experiences
in the Netherlands: the easier it is to get hold of weed and the more
normal it's regarded to light up a joint, the greater the consumption."

He points out that marijuana addiction has caused serious problems in
the Netherlands. However the figures for hashish and marijuana use in
the Netherlands are actually lower than in other European countries
with tougher legislation.

28.5 grams and four plants

Redman claims the amount of hashish and weed that coffeeshops are
allowed to sell has been reduced due to problems with drug abuse.

"If the referendum succeeds, as much as 28.5 grams would be permitted
in California and it would be legal to have four plants. Imagine how
much worse it will be than in the Netherlands, where 0.5 grams has
already cause problems."

Is he sure about these figures? "Of course, the drug information
service in the US has been saying this for ten years." I google the
Dutch figures for him: thirty grams is allowed for personal use,
coffeeshops can sell five grams at a time, and you are allowed five
plants. John Redman's face turns pale. Just at that moment a van
arrives to take him to the airport. He leaves hastily without further comment.

The knock-on effect

If the legalisation proposal is accepted, US President Barack Obama
will be faced with a serious problem. The federal laws making
cannabis illegal are still in place, as are the international
treaties. Sending federal agents to California to bring weed smokers
before the federal courts would cost an enormous amount of money and
he risks damaging his popularity in California. If he does nothing he
will alienate other parts of the United States.

So far, the opinion polls predict the referendum will be a neck-and-neck race.

.

Jean Genet in the USA Conference

Jean Genet in the USA Conference Held at NYU Maison Française

http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Jean_Genet_in_the_USA_Conference_Held_at_NYU_Maison_Franaise_20101027

October 27, 2010

French novelist and playwright Jean Genet came twice to the United
States: the first time, illegally, in 1968, to attend the Democratic
convention in Chicago; the second time two years later, for campus
lectures accompanied by his new-found friends, the Black Panthers.

Using Genet's travels to the U.S. as its theme, La Maison Française
of New York University, located at 16 Washington Mews (at University
Place), will host a conference of scholars, authors, playwrights, and
theatre directors to celebrate the centennial of Jean Genet's birth.
Jean Genet in the USA will feature discussions and roundtables about
Genet's influence on the political, social, and artistic scenes in
the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s. All events are free and open to
the public, and take place at La Maison Française. For further
information, call 212.998.8750 or visit www.nyu.edu/maisonfrancaise.

By the time he turned to writing for the stage, with four startling,
brilliant, remarkably theatrical plays-The Maids, The Balcony, The
Blacks, and The Screens-which were to make him world famous, Jean
Genet was already notorious in France. A writer of finely crafted,
poetically provocative homoerotic fictions and autobiography, his
criminal past and assertive homosexual practices were as scandalous
as his fiction.

A schedule of events follows:
Thurs., Nov. 11, 7-9 p.m.
Roundtable: 1968: Chicago Democratic National Convention, with publisher
Barney Rosset, author Jeannette Seaver, and Associate Professor of
French Phil Watts (Columbia).

Fri., Nov. 12, 2:30 - 4 p.m.
Talks: Playwright and director JoAnn Akalaitis on her production of
The Balcony; Professor of performance studies (NYU Tisch) Richard
Schechner on his productions of The Balcony and The Maids

4:30 - 6 p.m.
Roundtable: The Blacks in 1961, with novelist and Genet biographer
Edmund White, producer and director Christopher McElroen, theatre
director André Gregory, Professor of French (NYU) Tom Bishop, and
director Marianne de Pury

7:30 - 9 p.m.
Talks: Ralph Heyndels, Les Noirs sur la blancheur livide: ou le sens
possible de l'Amérique; and Véronique Lane, Jean Genet et la Beat
Generation. In French.

Sat., Nov. 13, 2:30 - 3:30 p.m.
Talk: Albert Dichy (IMEC Archive), Notes inédites de Genet sur
l'Amérique: Lecture commentée. In French.

3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Roundtable: 1970: Genet and the Panthers, with Professor of French
(CUNY) Tom Spear, NYU's Tom Bishop, Marianne de Pury, and Professor
(SUNY Stony Brook) Robert Harvey.

The conference is made possible by the generous support of the
Florence Gould Foundation. Reporters interested in attending must
RSVP to Tim Farrell, NYU Office of Public Affairs, by phone at
212.998.6797 or by email, Tim.Farrell@nyu.edu.

.

Doonesbury Turns 40

Doonesbury Turns 40

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/226848

Garry Trudeau reflects on his days at Yale, his Pulitzer
Prize-winning comic, and how he envisions it ending

By Chip Kidd
Oct 27, 2010

This October marked the 40th anniversary of Doonesbury, the comic
strip that Garry Trudeau started as an undergrad at Yale. Over the
past four decades, the strip has chronicled virtually every major
political and cultural shift, from Vietnam and Watergate to
Afghanistan and the Tea Party. When viewed as a single, uninterrupted
work of historical fiction, the collected Doonesbury reads less like
14,000-plus reasons to chuckle over your morning coffee and more like
this era's War and Peace. Trudeau achieves this the same way Tolstoy
did: by methodically constructing a large cast of complex and
intriguing characters whom the reader comes to care about, then
letting the great tsunami of current events envelop them all. The
cumulative result is as affecting and richly felt as any narrative
produced by an artist of Trudeau's generation.

Two new books released this month commemorate the milestone. 40: A
Doonesbury Retrospective includes 1,800 strips that encompass most of
the major story arcs of the series, from Zonker's early pothead days
to the budding romance between Mike Doonesbury's daughter and a
wounded young Iraq vet named Toggle. And Doonesbury and the Art of
G.B. Trudeau provides a rare glimpse of the artist's original
drawings and sketches, as well as the numerous projects that have
spun off from the strip.

On a recent morning, Trudeau sat down in his studio in midtown
Manhattan to discuss everything from his student days at Yale to the
challenges of tackling Obama. "What's wonderful about a comic strip
is the stories unfurl in such a tiny, incremental way that you can
keep a story alive for weeks," he says. "If I were writing a piece
for a newspaper or magazine, it would be a one-off ­ people might
read it that day and then move on. So I can insinuate some of these
issues under the skin of the body politic in a way that is not
possible for people working in other media."
--

You grew up in upstate New York and attended Yale at the height of
the Vietnam War. What were you like as a kid?

Because I was a diminutive, arty kid, I felt like a misfit in high
school ­ but who doesn't? Then, in college during the Sixties, it was
a time of great change and upheaval. There was so much going on, the
academic piece seemed beside the point. It wasn't, of course, but it
felt that way. So for grad school, I deliberately chose a place where
I would get a kind of structured discipline and formal training,
which I felt I sorely needed.

Did you wind up getting it?

One of my first teachers at Yale was Richard Lytle. I waltzed into
his drawing class with the bravado of a freshman art jock who thought
he was going to make an impression on his professor, and I did. I
whipped off the usual kind of drawings I was accustomed to making,
somewhat effortlessly. One day, after about three weeks of this
nonsense, we were working from a model, and he came over to my
drawing board and ripped the drawing I was working on into pieces in
front of the class. "Yes, yes, I know you can draw," he said. "But
what I want to find out is if you can see." He wasn't going to put up
with this sort of facile art-student sketching that I had taken such
pride in ­ he wanted me to do the hard work of actually looking at
what I was drawing.

How did you react to that?

It was humiliating, but it certainly got my attention. Thereafter I
took a long time looking at what I was preparing to render and to
break down my attack. I tried to understand how I was going to convey
something worth conveying, not just pretty little outlines.

How did Doonesbury come about?

I started the strip as a junior. I had no expectation that it would
continue. My goal was to be a graphic designer. After I graduated, I
opened a design studio near the Yale campus. It was a going concern
for about three years, but by then the strip had gained some real
momentum. I finally had to make a decision about whether I was going
to be a designer or a cartoonist. It was the middle of Watergate.

So the decision was made.

The decision was making itself with every passing day.
--

Do you regret not pursuing your dream to be a graphic designer?

One of the reasons I stepped away from design was I didn't think I
could get there. The first time I heard the Beatles, I thought,
"That's going to inspire 10,000 bands, and it's going to cause
another 10,000 bands to leave the business immediately." They would
just be overwhelmed at what it sounds like to get it right,
note-perfect, every song.

Charles Schulz used to speak as if the characters in Peanuts were
the ones writing the strip, as opposed to him. He'd be asked, "Is
Charlie Brown's baseball team ever going to win a game?" and he would
say, "I don't know," as if the characters were in control.

Certainly, I relate to "I don't know." I haven't a clue where my
characters are going. Now it's not that I feel they lead me ­
obviously, my imagination is what leads me, and often it will lead me
in tiny little increments. Occasionally, it will jump ahead and I'll
have to reverse-engineer it. I'll say, "Oh, yeah, this is where
they've got to go," and I've got to figure out how to get them there.
Usually I'm moving forward at such a snail's pace that there's not
much thinking far ahead, because there's no time. Sparky worked,
what, three months ahead? He was, like, a full season ahead, so in
the summer, he'd be writing Thanksgiving stuff. That was his comfort
zone, to be that far ahead. I think he just felt more comfortable
knowing that if catastrophe struck, he had a real cushion.

Were you friends with him?

We were acquaintances. I think he was a bit skeptical from the very
beginning about what I was doing, whether the kind of work I was
doing belonged on the comics page.

What were your favorite comic books growing up?

All the superheroes. I started, as most kids in the Fifties did, with
Batman and Superman, and then the revelation of what Stan Lee was
doing at Marvel took over, and I fell into that rabbit hole with
Spider-Man and his peers. But a very heavy influence was a serial in
the Sixties called Phoebe Zeitgeist. It was written by Michael
O'Donoghue, who later became the head writer of Saturday Night Live,
and it was illustrated by Frank Springer. It was an absolutely
brilliant, deadpan sendup of adventure comics, but with a very edgy
modernist kind of approach. To this day, I hold virtually every panel
in my brain. It's very hard not to steal from it.

You've made a point of having your original characters grow and
change over time. Which ones were the hardest for you to evolve and
bring into the present?

I'm not sure degree of difficulty really enters into it. Fictional
characters obviously can't act independently of their creators, so
how or even whether they evolve is simply a matter of artistic
choice. Of course, in real life, some people learn more from the
journey than others, and I hope the strip reflects that. Zonker is
stuck in adolescence, but that's because it's fun to have his
sustained innocence in the mix. Certainly, I know plenty of recovered
hippies and could have made him one of them. On the other hand, I
literally blasted B.D. out of his life of settled complacency.
Exposed to sudden, brutal loss, B.D. became vulnerable in a way that
was unfamiliar and frightening to him. He had to change to survive,
to rebuild his resilience and create a new normal for himself.

None of this is planned, by the way. I just try to get through the
week. There really isn't any time to worry about how well everyone is aging.

After 40 years, you have so many different characters. Do they live
within you? Do you wake up and Joanie says, "Hey, it's time to pay
attention to me"?

No. I don't live with them at all. I'm never happier than when I'm
not working. The strip is a job ­ that's why I take money for it.
It's a job I'm passionate about, but it's a job I totally leave in
the studio when I walk out of here, unless I'm late and I have to
work at home. I never think of the strip unless I'm compelled to.

On occasion, as I'm thinking about my characters, I do feel that one
of them has been underserviced, and that their story line needs to be
developed further in some way. If I start with a topic, then I will
cast it. If I start with "Oh, I want to write about the Tea Party.
How can I find an interesting way into that?" I'll choose the least
likely character, which is Sam, Boopsie and B.D.'s daughter, who has
a Sarah Palin action figure. While Sam sleeps, the action figure has
little tea parties with the other toys. That came to me as I was
watching Toy Story 3.

Is that the kind of training in conceptual thinking you got at Yale?

[Laughs] I do tend to break things down into a set of problems, but I
think any artist does that ­ they create problems that they then set
out to solve. Perhaps I became less chaotic as a cartoonist as a
result of that training, less anarchic. I didn't want to get rid of
it altogether, though, because that was part of the fun of the strip.
It came out of nowhere, and it dealt with material that had never
been on the comics page in such an overt fashion. Little Orphan Annie
and Pogo and Lil' Abner had certainly brought political themes to the
comics page, but I was the first to play around with the idea of
moving beyond allegory and just having politics be part of the
everyday lives of the characters, as they were of my peer group. My
cohort in the early Seventies was primarily interested in sex, drugs
and rock & roll, and politics. When you're young, you don't feel
iconoclastic ­ you're just kind of doing what seems natural, what moves you.

And filling a void that you felt.

That turned out to be true from a marketing sense. When John McMeel,
my boss, who was then selling the strip, went out into the
marketplace, the way he framed it was: Yes, it's crude. Yes, it's not
what you'd expect to see in a comic strip. But these are scribblings,
dispatches, from the front lines of a generation that you care about
­ that you, the newspaper editors, care about, because you're trying
to reach them. This is somebody who is, at least generationally, on
the bus, this is somebody who is, in fact, living this right now. So
these reports have a certain authenticity. I certainly never
pretended to be a spokesman for a generation. But my journey, to some
extent, reflected that of my generational cohort.
--

What about now? What motivates you to keep doing it after so many years?

In the beginning, I was floundering. I wasn't quite sure what the
strip was meant to be. It revealed itself to me over time ­ the strip
is an eyewitness to a generation as it comes of age and as it defines
itself. That is so inherently interesting, no matter what generation
it is, that now, 40 years later, I have 73 or 75 characters, because
I'm also trying to pay attention to the subsequent generations and
how they all interact. As the times demanded, I created new
characters to reflect them.

Many of the original characters who started off as kids now have
kids of their own.

In 1983, I moved the characters out of this time warp they'd all been
in and moved them into real time, so that they started to age. They
would intermarry and have children, so it became necessary to think
about what the subsequent generations were going to be like and what
the forces were that were molding them. Alex Doonesbury, Mike's
daughter, has actually become the animating force in the strip now,
way beyond what her father is. When I go to him, I go to him as the
Everyman. He's utterly predictable; we know basically how he's going
to respond to almost anything that happens. His daughter is still in
the act of becoming, she's still evolving.

How old is she now?

She was born ­ in the strip ­ in 1987, so she's 23, and she's a grad
student now.

In terms of research, is there somebody you turn to to find out
what's on a 23-year-old's mind today?

I occasionally check in with my three kids, but mostly I just try to
pay attention to them, to their friends, to younger colleagues. I
don't expect other people to do the anthropology for me. I just try
to stay alert to the world, to read widely. That actually constitutes
about 80 percent of what I do, simply front-loading. Now that my kids
are gone, it's a lot easier for me to get out into the world. They
moved off to college just as I got involved with the issue of wounded
warriors, which required a lot of travel and research. That wouldn't
have been possible when they were still at home. So I've gone back
out into the world in a way I haven't been able to since the Seventies.

What drew you to the issue of wounded soldiers?

What primed me for it was the first Gulf War. A commander of a tank
brigade, Col. Bill Nash, invited me over to Kuwait and took me on a
tour of a battlefield that was still smoldering. He said, "Here's the
deal: You can go out to all the places where we saw action, you can
have the run of the camp, you can play with our toys, you can go
check out the Humvees and the M1A tanks and drive them if you want,
get a feel for the physical culture. But then I want you to go talk
to my guys ­ that's the deal."

That was a fabulous deal. Because Desert Shield had lasted so long ­
and they'd been stuck in the desert for something like six months
before the war began ­ the troops didn't have much to do other than
stay fit and hydrated. They had a lot of downtime, and they read
Stars and Stripes, which was one of my first clients, so they were
familiar with all the strips I'd been writing about the war. They had
a lot to say to me, both good and bad.

Stars and Stripes was one of the first subscribers to Doonesbury?

Yes.

Why?

I don't know their reasoning.

Weren't you the antithesis of what they were looking for?

I frankly haven't a clue, but I was thrilled when they bought the
strip. Later on, in the mid-Seventies, there was a movement to get
rid of it, but by then it had become entrenched and the soldiers liked it.

As I gathered from talking to Vietnam vets years later, it wasn't
that I got it right. How could I? I was 21 years old, I was a hippie
college student, and I created in the strip this kind of fantasia in
which the Viet Cong, represented by Phred, and the U.S. soldiers,
represented by B.D., came together in a counterculture sensibility:
"Can't we all get along?" Obviously, that had nothing to do,
whatsoever, with the reality of the American GI in Vietnam. I think
the soldiers were drawn to it because it was evidence that somebody
was thinking about them, that they were on somebody's radar screen,
and it was appreciated. Many Vietnam vets have told me that. It
baffles me, because it didn't really reflect their experience, but at
the same time I'm delighted that it made an impact.

And now the Pentagon brass has embraced the work you're doing on
injured soldiers.

When I made the decision during the Battle of Fallujah that B.D. was
going to suffer this grievous wound, some old friends at the Pentagon
called up and invited me to Walter Reed hospital. They wanted to make
sure I got it right, and everyone was enormously helpful. It is odd
for an old peacenik like me to have so many people with "colonel" and
"brigadier general" in front of their names in my Rolodex.

I think of you, in some ways, as our generation's Bill Mauldin ­ the
cartoonist who chronicled World War II from the soldier's point of
view. The military has so much to do with the strip, and you're
entirely sympathetic.

While at the same time not trying to obscure my views of the war and
why they're there. I've tried to keep the politics pretty much out of
the strips about the wounded warriors in any direct fashion. My only
agenda is to encourage people to think about the responsibility that
this country owes not just its fallen warriors but all of its
veterans and soldiers. I've seen far too many Vietnam veterans still
in treatment for the psychological wounds they received in Vietnam,
and we owe them better. There's a real disconnect in this country
between most of the population and its military culture.

More so than in the 1960s?

Yes, because in the Sixties, everybody theoretically had skin in the
game ­ anybody, theoretically, could be drafted. Now we've
emotionally outsourced the war. We've asked the warrior class to
fight a war that many people have just put out of their minds. No
leaders have asked us to make any sacrifice, other than budgetary.
--

As you've worked to keep the strip relevant, have you come to see
the current generation as different in any fundamental ways than your
generation was back in the Sixties?

Well, to begin with, there's no "generation gap." In the Sixties, few
families were spared the turmoil brought on by profound changes in
society. All in the Family, the number-one TV show when the strip
launched, was premised on that generational divide. Boomers generally
seemed to have learned from that experience, and the good news today
is that families have never been closer. But that could also be the
bad news. All the hovering may have taken a toll on self-reliance and
resourcefulness.

In any event, I really like this cohort. Some of them don't think I
do, because my younger characters can act like such idiots, but so
can my older characters. No one should look to a comic strip for role models.

How has your relationship with readers changed in the age of Facebook?

Most of the mail I used to get has almost completely evaporated. When
people have something to say, it's all online now ­ it's on blogs,
it's on chat groups. I think it's very dangerous for people who do
anything that's public to venture on the Web and check out what
people are saying about them. Yes, you're bound to find things that
will delight you ­ but you also find things that will make you brood
and feel bad about yourself. Why would you intentionally invite that
into your life?

That's what school was for.

That's what high school was for.

Does the Obama administration make your job easier or harder?

Like a lot of my cartoonist peers, I find Obama difficult to get a
handle on as a subject. He doesn't have salient features, either
physically or in terms of his temperament or his policies. I know
there are people who think he's a fascist or a socialist. I happen to
think he's a raving centrist, so in that assessment of him, I find it
difficult to find things to exaggerate as cartoonists do.

How do you produce the strip each week?

I do it with pencil and then fax it to my assistant, who puts it on a
light table and traces over it. Then all of this other stuff is
filled in by computer, all the zips and the blacks and the dialogue.
The shame of it is that I no longer have originals I can do anything
with. For the first 20 years I had original ink drawings, but my
ritual at the end of every workweek was to take them and tear them up.

You destroyed the originals? I can't fathom that.

It finally stopped when Jonathan Alter did this piece and told me I
was mad. After a while I realized, "OK, maybe I should be holding on to them."

Are you worried about the comic strip becoming an obsolete form as
more and more newspapers disappear? If you were getting out of Yale
today, would you be thinking of doing a comic strip?

As you note, it's not really comics that are becoming obsolete ­ it's
newspapers generally. We're all going off the cliff together. Up
until now, strip syndication was the closest thing to tenure that pop
culture offered. If you got your foot in the door and developed a
readership, you had a career. Today my client list is eroding, but
since it's so large to begin with, I can probably look forward to
several more years of this. I'll be one of the old dudes they ask to
turn out the lights.

Needless to say, I no longer advise anyone to get into the business.
Even online comics are so far mostly a bust. The future is with
graphic novels or animation or something no one has imagined yet. If
I were graduating now, I'd be standing with my portfolio outside of Pixar.

Did you ever get tired of the strip and decide, "OK, this is enough,
I'm done"?

Comics have always been treated as something of a public utility ­ we
were required to produce this product 365. After Bill Watterson
retired from doing Calvin and Hobbes, I got a call from my editor at
the time, Lee Salem. He said, "There's something not quite right
about how we take care of our creators as opposed to how we take care
of all the other employees, that you don't have any kind of break."
He said that he was going in front of the board and proposing that
anyone who had been there for five years or longer would be entitled,
at his or her option, to take vacation weeks and send out reruns.

When I brought this news home, there were great hurrahs throughout
the house. As soon as the kids went to bed, or they'd go down for a
nap or get up early, there was always a deadline hanging over me ­ it
was a real quality-of-life issue. Having this gift of several weeks
of downtime over the year changed my life for the better, and had the
intended effect of keeping me in the saddle longer. I don't feel
nearly as stressed out as I did in the old days, because I know there
are these vacations on the horizon.

How long do you plan to keep doing it?

I feel like I'm good to go for as long as my imagination supports the
work. Certainly, there's no absence of things to inspire me as I move
through the world. There's no shortage of subjects for me to write
about. The one innate quality that I have is curiosity, and that
doesn't seem to have abated. I wake up in the morning and I can't
wait to get to the paper downstairs. As long as that interest in
what's going on in the world stays with me, I can't imagine giving up
the strip. This is my small contribution to the national conversation.

So will Doonesbury live on after you're gone, like Dick Tracy or
Gasoline Alley?

What my generation of creators introduced is the idea of an auteur as
comic-strip writer ­ that it's a signature voice that would be very
hard to replicate without changing the strip dramatically. Plus, I
was able to wrangle my own copyright, so I have no legal obligation,
as many artists do, to surrender the strip. I don't know if I'll do
it until I drop. I don't know if I'm a lifer. But the strip will
perish with me.

.

Civil Rights museum in its early stages

Civil Rights museum in its early stages

http://www.annistonstar.com/view/full_story/10029185/article-Civil-Rights-museum-in-its-early-stages

by Laura Camper
Oct 24, 2010

Moving forward with plans to organize a civil rights museum, the city
of Anniston is looking into establishing an office at the city-owned
Project Pay Building on 13th and Moore for former councilwoman Debra
Foster to head the effort.

At its Oct. 12 informal meeting, Councilman Ben Little, who has been
spearheading the project, brought up a discussion of creating the office.

"I'm very hopeful that we can get started on building that next
year," Little told the other councilmen during the meeting.

Little campaigned on creating the museum in 2008, a project which
Foster, his opponent in the election, has been trying to get off the
ground for years, she said.

"I think history is so important," Foster said. "Anniston has a lot
of rich history that needs to be recorded and remembered ­ not for
the sake of dwelling on the (negative), but dwelling on the fact that
we know where we come from and to show how progressive the community
has been in eradicating injustices."

She is not an expert on building museums, but she lived the civil
rights movement in Anniston, and under the tutelage of Rev. John
Nettles, her pastor, has worked in the movement since she was in high
school. She remembers protesting on downtown Noble Street because
merchants weren't hiring black employees.

"We live in a society that is not free from racism and all of us at
some point has to deal with racism in some form or fashion," Foster
said. "My involvement came so early because I was under the auspices
of Dr. John S. Nettles who had a love for people, all people, and for
dealing with unfair practices."

Foster sees the museum documenting not simply local civil rights
events, but also the broader movement. Little sees the museum as a
kind of introduction to the local sites important in the movement,
such as the site of the infamous burning of the Freedom Riders' bus.

To bring those visions to reality, the city will need a plan, which
has yet to be created, along with money ­ and lots of it. Little
estimates it will cost between $6 million and $7 million by the time
the museum is finished.

So far, although the council members have granted Little's requests,
the city hasn't invested a lot of money.

At its March 9 meeting, the council allocated $5,000 to create a
video archive of recollections by people who witnessed the civil
rights movement in Anniston, which will eventually be part of the
museum. Little also has requested the council allocate $75,000 seed
money to organize the museum. The council decided to appropriate $40,000.

That is far from the dollars it will take to get the museum from the
planning stages to reality, but Little believes the city should
commit to the project at least in a show of fairness.

"If the city of Anniston can build two museums from public funds ­
not one, two, two museums from public funds ­ and after building
those two museums, fund to the tune of $525,000 to $550,000 a year
plus," Little said. "Then the black community should have a museum, a
civil rights museum-institute in Anniston."

Alabama has a rich legacy of the civil rights movement and Anniston
had a hand in that, he said, and it's important to educate people
about it. The museum would also be an important addition to the local
offerings, he said, as it would create a package of entertainment he
believes is unrivaled in the South.

The local museums, the Chief Ladiga Trail, local golf courses all
together in one location have the potential to bring tourists into
the area for vacations and extended weekend stays.

However, although Little has been actively promoting the museum, it's
still in the very early planning stages, and that's worrying
Councilman John Spain. He asked at the meeting about specific plans
for the museum.

"My intent was to use this entire amount of money strictly for
planning and then be able to put together the money for a
full-fledged implementation once we had a plan," Spain said.

Foster would be the one working on creating that plan, Little said,
noting that the botanical garden now in development near Anniston's
other museums already has a board behind it.

"We need something for her to start pulling information together to
get to the council and things of that nature," Little said. "That's
what this is about."

But Spain was not convinced. He asked about having someone with
experience create the plan.

"What I was hoping we could do with a good deal of this money is find
someone that had experience with this before, who knew just exactly
how to put together strategic plans, do a rendering of the place,"
Spain said. "So that, when we went through this money we would have a
strategic plan, something that was ready to be implemented and go to
town with."

Little mentioned that Foster would be contacting Dr. Lawrence
Pijeaux, the director of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, to
request he act as consultant on the museum. She also would be
applying for a grant in January to help fund the project, Little said.

The council did appoint Foster, but she is still waiting for the
go-ahead to get started.
--

Star staff writer Laura Camper: 256-235-3545.

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1961 Freedom Riders Call For Prisoners' Release

1961 Freedom Riders Call For Prisoners' Release

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/10/26/3132256/1961-freedom-riders-call-for-prisoners.html

By Freedom Riders to Free the Scott Sisters
Oct. 26, 2010

As Freedom Riders from the summer of '61 prepared for a 50th reunion
visit to the "New Mississippi" with a red carpet welcome by governor
Haley Barbour, some were appalled to discover last week that a piece
of the "Old Mississippi" still exists.

Set to visit Parchman prison and see what it has become, they learned
of two women, the Scott sisters, who have been incarcerated there for
almost 20 years, each serving two life terms for the theft of $11.
The victims of the crime and the perpetrators have all sworn that the
women were not involved.

Why the draconian sentences? There is speculation that the sisters'
father had declined to pay off the sheriff.

Scott County, Mississippi, is a dry county. According to court
records, the sheriff secretly allowed night clubs to serve drinks
privately for a fee - $100 a week. The sisters' mother, Evelyn Rasko,
says that when Jamie and Gladys Scott's father arrived with his
family from Chicago in the early 90's and bought his nephew's night
club, he declined to pay the fee.

"I will get you one way or the other, even if it is through your
daughters!" deputy Marvin Williams, now deceased, is reported to have
said. And it would appear that he did. A trio of teens was arrested
for a minor robbery. By coercing testimony from a 14-year old,
telling him, according to the victim, that he would be sent to
Parchman and he would "be made out of women" - raped - if he did not
implicate the Scott sisters, deputy Marvin Williams appears to have
built a phony case. The sisters were arrested, told by their
attorneys not to speak during the trial, and were sent directly to
Parchman, where they still sit today, almost 20 years later. One of
them is dying.

Inadequate treatment for diabetes can cause both kidneys to fail.
Jamie Scott's kidneys have both failed. She is going to die soon if
she doesn't get proper treatment. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour
has referred the whole matter to his Parole Board. But he can release
the sisters tomorrow, he has that power.

On behalf of the sisters, the Freedom Riders to Free the Scott
Sisters committee has just released the following request to Governor Barbour:

"As we plan to celebrate our 50th Freedom Rider reunion next May in
Jackson, we respectfully ask you to commute the Scott Sisters'
sentence or pardon them well before then. We hope to see that,
because of your justice and compassion, these two women are no longer
imprisoned in the very place where we did time.

In the words of the Prophet, Isaiah 42:7, we call upon you, [t]o
bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, them that sit in darkness
out of the prison house."

Whether Jamie Scott dies in Parchman for a trumped-up offense depends
now on Governor Haley Barbour's signature.

Press contact:

Philip M. Posner
Freedom Riders to Free the Scott Sisters
268 Bush Street, Suite 3602
San Francisco, CA 94104
(210) 200-8879
chatrabbi@aol.com

The full text is online at http://www.frwg-ss.blogspot.com.

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Me and Uncle Duke

Me and Uncle Duke

http://www.slate.com/id/2272185/

What happened when Hunter Thompson told me Garry Trudeau was spying on him.

By Nicholas Von Hoffman
Oct. 25, 2010

Slate and Doonesbury.com have compiled a list of Doonesbury's 200
greatest moments. Read David Plotz's interview with Garry Trudeau.
See Slate's complete coverage of Doonesbury's 40th anniversary. [See
URL for links.]
--

Comic-strip people are supposed to stay on the paper or the screen.
Any reader of Doonesbury has a legitimate expectation that Mike or
Jeff or B.D. or Zonker or Joanie knows his or her place and will adhere to it.

It goes without saying that if any one of them might break the rules,
it would be Uncle Duke. A character with his jump-the-shark
personality would be the one to bust out of his two-dimensional
confines to call me on the telephone one night.

The call came during an Uncle Duke episode in the strip. The caller
was Hunter S. Thompson who, through a long druggo-gonzo literary
career, was unable to separate himself from fictional characters, his
own and others.

Uncle Duke was in no mood for conversation. He was calling to have me
deliver a message to "Garrybaldi," my moniker for Uncle Duke's
creator. I was to tell Garrybaldi that Duke was on to him and that he
was prepared to take steps to stop him.

The ultimatum was outlandish enough to convince me that it surely was
Uncle Duke­aka Raoul Duke, aka Hunter S. Thompson himself­at the
other end of the line. Worried lest Uncle Duke, with his love of
firearms, turn up at my door, I offered to give him Garrybaldi's
telephone number.

"No," he said. He wasn't going to let Garrybaldi trap him through a
phone. I asked something to the effect of, "What in Sam Hill are you
talking about, Uncle Duke?"

Duke answered that Garrybaldi had surrounded him with spies and
informers who had infiltrated his home and violated his family's
privacy. He said that every domestic secret, everything that took
place between him and his wife, Sandy, was being relayed to
Garrybaldi, who was putting it all in the strip. (Here's one of the
strips about Duke's wife.) http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/1978/02/13

The gist of Uncle Duke's paranoia was relayed to Garrybaldi, who made
a noise I could not interpret. "Uncle Duke," I repeated, "says that
you know the intimate details of his life that you could only have
learned by spying on him."

Garrybaldi explained that he obtained the intimate details of Hunter
Thompson's private life by reading his books and articles.

"True facts," I asked, "that anybody can get by going to a public library?"

Yes.

When Duke was told that he himself was the source, he called me a
liar, mumbled, and hung up. I told Garrybaldi that accuracy had no
place in Doonesbury. He didn't exactly say, "Amen to that," though we
agreed that while sticking to the truth might make you free, it also
can get you into tight situations.
--

(See the strips that ran the week of Hunter Thompson's death.)
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2005/03/07

.

Doonesbury quickly became a cause of trouble

Garry Trudeau: 'Doonesbury quickly became a cause of trouble'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/26/garry-trudeau-doonesbury-40

The creator of America's first and best satirical daily newspaper
cartoon talks about 40 years of upsetting politicians and editors

Ed Pilkington
26 October 2010

The first Doonesbury strip, published 40 years ago today, seems naive
looked at through modern lenses. It begins with a character so
sparsely drawn he barely exists, though you are intrigued immediately
by the American football helmet he is wearing while sitting in an armchair.

He is joined by a scraggy-haired young man with a pencil for a nose
and the letter O to represent his glasses. This is Michael Doonesbury
and the helmeted football player is his new college roommate, BD.
Little did their creator Garry Trudeau know when he sketched out that
first awkward encounter between them, published on 26 October 1970,
that he had just made comic history. Nor did he have any idea that he
was embarking on a journey that would stretch into the indefinite
future and that those scratchy beginnings would turn into a chronicle
of modern times.

The strip had come about almost by chance. Trudeau had been having a
bit of fun as a third-year Yale student, dabbling with a sports
cartoon called Bull Tales based on a real-life quarterback in the
local team called Brian Dowling. Trudeau expected the strip to die at
the end of that football season. But the cartoon was spotted by a
book editor who thought he'd take a punt on it. Out of the blue,
Trudeau, at the tender age of 21, was invited to turn the strip into
a syndicated newspaper feature, an extraordinary privilege given the
national exposure and the almost tenure-like terms it offered ­ with
contracts lasting 20 years.

"I had given no consideration to a career in cartoons," Trudeau says
now. "I thought I was on track to become a graphic designer. So I
asked for a one-year contract. My editors howled with laughter."

You could say that was the first Doonesbury joke, and readers have
been howling with laughter ever since. And not just laughing. They've
been frowning, shouting, crying, blushing ­ the full gamut of
emotions ­ as a result of a strip that broke the mould of the comic
page and shattered countless conventions. Over the last four decades
Doonesbury has established itself as so much more than a traditional
cartoon. It is a soap opera, a tragedy, a comedy, an investigative
agency, a liberal political commentary, a scourge of pomposity and
corruption, a humanitarian exercise, all rolled into one.

We are sitting in the east-side Manhattan apartment that Trudeau uses
as a studio. I'd expected some scruffy garret quarters, a sort of
scraggy-haired bricks-and-mortar equivalent of that first Doonesbury.
Instead Trudeau welcomes me into a very light and pleasant space with
a wonderful view over Roosevelt Island. The room is richly carpeted
and the walls lined with pictures by New York artist David Levinthal.
The centre of the room is dominated by a draughtsman's board, on
which the latest strip is being crafted.

Trudeau's working day has changed remarkably little in 40 years. He
begins it by what he calls "marinating the news", devouring the New
York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal at home a few
blocks away in the company of his wife, former television journalist
Jane Pauley. "Mostly I'm just waiting for something to happen, in me,
and mostly it does."

He starts with a subject, and from that the week's offering evolves,
produced as a block of six days' strips. The one he's currently
working on sees Jeff Redfern in Afghanistan trying to sell the
products of his company Overkill to Hamid Karzai. That's pretty
typical of what he does, Trudeau says, "taking these highly
improbable characters and having them collide with real events".

Trudeau takes me to a back room where volumes of his past work are
stored in a cupboard, with his original pencil drawings stacked
alongside the inked versions that are done for him by an associate.
"In the old days I didn't much value the pencil originals," Trudeau
tells me. "So for the first 20 years my Friday ritual would be that
as I faxed the last one I would take the six drawings and throw them
in the trash can."

Lining this back room are framed magazine covers, six Newsweek and
two Time, each one devoted to Doonesbury. That in itself tells a
story. When Trudeau began his syndicated cartoon he entered a world
where the comics page was almost entirely non-topical and devoid of
any political reference.

That was partly the result of logistics ­ strips had to be drawn six
weeks in advance in order to circulate them to newspapers across
America ­ and partly because cartoons were meant to be just that:
politics-free, family-friendly fun.

Within a year of those tentative beginnings Trudeau had torn up the
rules of the cartoon strip and begun rewriting them, one strip at a
time. His work was risque, spikey and above all of the moment. "I was
writing about the issues of my day ­ sex, drugs, rock'n'roll,
politics. That was wholly new to comics, which were broad in their
humour and rarely touched on anything remotely topical."

Was he aware of what he was doing? "One of the great things of being
young is that you're not aware, you lack self-consciousness," he
says. "I was wholly clueless about the things I was not supposed to
be doing. I didn't set out to be a troublemaker, though quite quickly
the strip became a cause of trouble."

That's an understatement. In contrast to his fellow cartoonists, who
were busily drawing fluffy animals and naughty schoolchildren,
Trudeau waded into Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, abortion, hypocrisy
in the White House, pot smoking and sex. Though he himself came from
a moderate Republican background, Trudeau found himself manning the
barricades of the counter-culture.

"It was the cauldron, the late 60s, when I began to think as an
adult. All hell was taking place, the Black Panthers were on trial,
students were shot in the Kent State protests, war was waging on the
other side of the globe, it was very hard not to be swept up in all of that."

Printers loved him. He pushed his deadlines further and further back,
to make the strip more and more live. One printer in Kansas City,
Trudeau learned years later, did so much overtime setting his strips
that he bought a yacht with the extra earnings and called it Doonesbury.

But editors had kittens. And the owners of local newspapers had fits.
Several began cancelling the strip altogether, or censoring its
wilder equence in which Zonker extols the virtues of "fine, uncut
Turkish hashish" to a young child.

Dozens more dropped the sequence in February 1976 when Andy
Lippincott was introduced, the first gay character to appear on the
comics page. In November of that year more than 30 newspapers
scrapped a four-day tease in which Joanie and Rick Redfern (who later
spawned Jeff) end up lying in a postcoital embrace in bed. The Bangor
Daily News blocked out that final frame with the weather forecast
("Fair, cold, highs in the 30s").

Censorship was straightforward, and Trudeau never complained because
he says "I knew the editors were caught between a rock and a hard
place". More sinister was the decision of about a third of the papers
that carried him to switch him from the comics to the editorial page
alongside their political commentators. "We resisted the move,"
Trudeau says. "For the simple reason that there are far more readers
on the comics page than on the comment page and you want to be where
the reader is."

Watergate was the point of no return. Trudeau provoked indignation
and adoration in equal measure when his character Mark Slackmayer, a
radical DJ, declared Nixon's former attorney general, John Mitchell,
"guilty, guilty, guilty!" even before he had been charged. The
Washington Post commented sniffily that "If anyone is going to find
any defendant guilty, it's going to be the due process of justice,
not a comic strip artist."

But the Washington Post hadn't counted on the tenacity and the thick
skin of Garry Trudeau. As he wrote on the 25th anniversary of
Doonesbury, "Satire is unfair. It's rude and uncivil. It lacks
balance and proportion, and it obeys none of the normal rules of
engagement. Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended
target reacts, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. And as
if that weren't enough, this savage, unregulated sport is protected
by the United States constitution. Cool, huh?"

But it must have been scary, I ask him, having such opprobrium thrown
at him when he was still so young and so new to the trade.

"Yes I suppose it was. And very distracting. I found myself crisis
managing almost as much as I was creating. I made a decision about
three or four years into it, that I better step back from giving
interviews. Once I did that I found it quite suited me. I found that
not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me
up to be the satirist I wanted to be. It also had the unintended
consequence of creating a mystique of Trudeau as a hermit, but that
wasn't it at all."

Trudeau has maintained that publicity blackout, and with it the
mystique of the silent artist, right up to this day. Our meeting
marks something of an emergence for him, out of the cave into which
he crawled in the 1970s and back into the glare of a public existence.

The reason for his decision to end his almost four-decade-long state
of purdah is that he wants to lend his support to a new collection of
his work, 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective. The book is a vast tome
that runs to 695 pages, yet it contains just 13% of the total strips produced.

Trudeau explains that he and his collaborators decided to focus on
the characters and their relationships, rather than the more topical
storylines, which in many cases would now have lost their relevance.
"There is nothing worse than annotated humour," he says.

The characters resonate over the years, starting with that initial
odd couple. Trudeau invented the name Doonesbury by combining doone ­
boarding-school slang, he says, for "a good-natured dufus, a clueless
sort without any mean to them" ­ with the ending of the name of his
friend Charlie Pillsbury. "Charlie was like that, innocent but with a
kind of grace, and to my amazement he's been perfectly happy with
this association, which just proves he's a doone."

Then there was BD, the original star of Bull Tales. Trudeau's BD was
as obtuse and arrogant as the real BD was admirable and
self-effacing. Trudeau didn't know Dowling, but much later they met
and became friends, and the former quarterback has been supportive of
his fictitious namesake.

Such positive feedback was not forthcoming from the model for Duke,
the self-obsessed, utterly unscrupulous epitome of evil who has sent
a chill down readers' spines for all these years. He was a parody of
gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, who was deeply resentful of it,
seeing his Doonesbury appearance as a form of copyright infringement.
Thompson sent an envelope of used toilet paper to Trudeau and once
memorably said: "If I ever catch that little bastard, I'll tear his lungs out."

"One never knew quite how seriously to take that, though he did shoot
his assistant in later life," Trudeau notes.

Other public figures whom Trudeau targeted were no less undignified
in their responses. Donald Trump called him a "jerk" and a "total
loser". When Trudeau invoked Frank Sinatra's links with the mafia in
an astonishing strip that ended with a photograph of the singer
cavorting with his mob friends, Ol' Blue Eyes made the mistake,
during a concert at the Carnegie Hall, of attacking not just Trudeau
but also his wife ­ who was a big television sweetheart at the time.
"Well, that's the first rule of the neighbourhood, you don't go after
the women and children," Trudeau says. "The audience booed him, which
must have come as a shock to Sinatra."

The lesson of all this is that when Doonesbury comes calling, do not
react, no matter how hurtful the things the strip says about you. It
will only make Trudeau redouble his attack if you do. It was funny
how few of his victims understood that basic principle, not least the
politicians. Dan Quayle, whom he depicted as a feather, wailed that
Trudeau had a vendetta against him. George Bush the elder was
incapable of not responding, saying he wanted to "kick the hell out
of him". Jeb Bush once came up to Trudeau at a Republican convention
and cautioned him to "walk softly". "And of course that just
encouraged me, I knew I was on the right track. I could never
understand why they took it so personally. Satire is a form of social
control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job."

Trudeau is now on to his eighth president, who turns out to be one of
his hardest. Obama he sees as a "raging moderate"; and satirists
don't do well with moderates as "there's not a whole lot to get hold of".

He's also on to the third generation of characters. Doonesbury and BD
have both procreated and now, he says, "it's about time for the
second wave of characters to have children. That's a frightening thought."

Though the original duo have grown older, they continue to be anchors
of the strip. BD led the way into Trudeau's current passion,
exploring the traumas and travails of the wounded warrior. It's been
Trudeau's device for dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanisatan ­
opposing the wars, yet honouring the men and women who have given
everything to them. BD's loss of a leg at Fallujah, followed by his
removal, finally, of his helmet, was a poignant symbol of sacrifice.
"He had had his helmet on him for 35 years. When it came off it
conveyed that he was now vulnerable and his life had changed for
ever. I had to figure out who the new BD would be."

So many years, so many characters, so many strips. Fourteen thousand
in all. Doesn't he ever fear he will grind to a halt, lose his edge,
have nothing more to add? "I try not to permit myself that feeling.
It's like climbing a mountain ­ you don't look down. I don't want to
contemplate the possibility too deeply that one week I'll come up blank."

Has that ever happened?

"Oh yes. All the time. Thanks for not noticing."

.