Kurt Andersen reviews Garry Trudeau’s The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time in this Sunday’s NYT Book Review. If you haven’t already caught this in the funny papers… okay, on the op-ed pages… then you should pick up a copy. Everyone from the blithering right wing to the morally pure extreme left will gain from opening themselves to this work. From the review…
So a story of war and amputation and depression and physical therapy
manages to be funny and, maybe more surprisingly, entirely devoid of
antiwar argument. The merits of the war in Iraq are never questioned or
debated. For more than two years, Trudeau has used ”Doonesbury” to
rail against the war on every ground possible, but none of that
material is here. Missing from this collection, for instance, are the
exquisite Rumsfeld parodies to which one of B.D.’s men defaults like a
tic; the Hunter S. Thompsonesque character, Duke, liberating the city
of Al Amok; and one Army officer’s explanation of the present Catch-22
– that ”we’ve got 150,000 troops in Iraq whose main mission is to not
get killed.”…If one weren’t otherwise aware of his hard-core lefty politics, it
would be reasonable to infer that the author of ”The Long Road Home”
was conventionally pro-military, maybe even a Republican. When he went
on television last year to defend these strips, Trudeau had it exactly
right: ”Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not,” he said to
George Stephanopoulos, ”we can’t tune it out; we have to remain
mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering
in our name.”
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