Ron Who? And who is this "Doonesbury" you speak of (was that before Bloom County?)? The elderly are funny. :)

Just as I read this, this cartoon
http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx
came in the e-mail (Feb. 25th strip).

{creak} I definitely feel the need for a nap, if my decrepit old knees can carry me that far. {/creak}

...well...umm..I guess I could make the same observation at Tapped, with the only difference being I read those same cartoons when they were brand new, along with reading the same newspaper stories that Trudeau was mining for his ideas...
...oops, look at the time; gotta go do my morning Metamucil/prune juice hit....

You realize there's a whole generation of us quiet ones who spent our study halls in the library learning recent political history from those big Doonesbury books.

That's one sweet legacy, you stop and think about it.

Simple arithmetic. Anyone now under 40 first voted, nationally, no earlier than the 1984 presidential election. Most of this crew would have only dim, adolescent or pre-adolescent memories of a Carter administration widely portrayed (whether accurately or not is beside the point) as feckless and would have come to political consciousness during the triumphalism (again, whether accurately portrayed or not is beside the point) of the Reagan years. Perhaps this explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of swaggering can-do conservatives (whether they actually "do" or not) among young voters whose interests are systematically betrayed by those same politicians. Their earliest memories of seemingly effective government (if you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain or actual results, which may vary) begin with Sunny Ron and his tough guys.

CJ Colucci comments on the political coming of age for those under 40... he's probably drawing the line a tad too high.

I'm not quite 40 (this year, dammit) and have very distinct memories of the Carter presidency, but was six months too young to vote in the 1980 elections. (I was *so* POed when Frank Church got bounced in that election.) But then, I have distinct memories of the Nixon and Ford administrations and of delivering newspapers the day of South Vietnam's surrender.

Perhaps I just started paying attention a little earlier than others. People a year or two younger than me at college did seem obsessed with money-making career-paths (read, engineering rather than science) and most seemd totally unimpressed with Fritz and Gerry in the 84 election. A smaller number were unlikely to vote for the guy who was older than their grandparents and less coherent.

Doonesbury, though, I had to buy at the bookstore, in the smaller annual collections. It was way too leftwing for the comix section of the hometown rag.

My images of college life had been formed in equal measure by Doonesbury and by my parents' early-50's University of Rochester yearbooks... Thus when I started school, I found it vaguely unsettling -- something was missing -- there were no ivy-covered quads, & no massed student protests! Clearly a weak imitation of the real thing.

Kate Yule
class of '82

"The part of the baby Jesus will be played by a hidden forty-watt lightbulb."