Doonesbury compares Bankster Life in the U.S. vs. Iceland

DOONESBURY

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by Ken

Although the first thing that popped out of me in today's Sunday Doonebury strip was interviewer Mark's white hair, I suppose that's a parochial response, which called to mind the recently rerun series in which our old companion Joanie Caucus came out of retirement to join the staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (of whose campaign she had been a zealous supporter), only to find herself feeling like a dinosaur amid the toddlerish other staffers. (We really should take a look at that whole series one of these days.)

Meanwhile, in the course of rummaging around online, I happened upon this classic Sunday strip.


IN A NUTSHELL: A BANKSTER'S VALUES

I don't have the original date for this amazing strip tracing "A Banker's Progress," but Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau reprised it as a "Flashback" in April 2011.

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TO RETURN TO MARK'S WHITE HAIR

Simpsons creator Matt Groening, you'll recall, made the conscious decision at the outset that his characters wouldn't age, that they would remain pretty much locked in time. Garry Trudeau has taken the opposite tack. I don't know of any comic strip whose cast of characters has been subjected so thoroughgoingly to the vicissitudes of time. (The website has long had a Flashbacks page, where on any given day we can see the strips that appeared 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, and 40 years ago.)

Still, as I noted above, what first grabbed me in today's strip was Mark's white hair. Mark's "official" bio, like many of the bios reachable via the webpage "The Cast," has an update promised ("coming soon"), but in its current state it gives an especially good feel for Mark "then and now."

MARK SLACKMEYER

Few aging agitators are as unreconstructed as Walden Commune Alumnus Mark Slackmeyer, and fewer still are as proud of it. Known as "Megaphone Mark" during his campus activist years, he was on the national organizing committee for the Vietnam Moritorium, and was interviewed after the massive anti-war demonstration by Dick Cavett. Adopting the on-air moniker "Marvelous Mark," Slackmeyer created a distinctive campus radio program that was influential during the Watergate period, though he was widely censured at the time for some of his editorial comments. After stints as a bricklayer, a computer operator, and a part-time bartender, Slackmeyer returned to broadcasting with a post at WBBY. Sensing there was nothing wrong in Nixon's America that wouldn't become even more deplorable in Reagan's, he chose to stay permanently and professionally mad, and went to work for National Public Radio. Activist folklore is the richer for it. Still making waves on air, he combines probing interviews with "Lite 'n' Easy Rock," for the generation that still gets down but can't catch up. Mark is the only major FM disc jockey known to have outed himself on the air. He and his life partner -- conservative commentator Chase Talbott III -- appear together on NPR's "All Things Being Equal."

For an update to Mark's bio we can turn to his grammatically adventurous Wikipedia page (yes, Mark has a Wikipedia page), which tells us that Mark and Chase, who were "united in a ceremony in Pago Pago, American Samoa by MacArthur, one-time assistant to then-Governor Duke" (you'll find Duke's bio here; he also has a Wikipedia page),

have more recently decided that they are not very happy with their relationship, and are thinking of getting a divorce, but are unable due to no documentation of the marriage taking place. In early 2007, Mark was forced out of the house by his partner Chase and began bitter rants of him on his radio show. He has since reconciled somewhat with Chase, and has had him on his radio show since their divisive. They are friendly, but not "together".

He has recently allowed his advancing age to show by "ceasing to dye" his hair brown, and is now grey-haired.

(Maybe it's just the light that makes Mark's hair look white rather than "grey"?)

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