Bringing War Down to Earth: The Dialectic of Pity and Compassion in Doonesbury's View of Combat Trauma

Abstract

Post-traumatic stress disorder among returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has invoked all manner of public responses, not least of which is a sense of pity that begins and ends with the moment of recognition. As such, the publicity of soldier sufferance ironically mitigates the need for a more complex socialization to the pain of war that might be animated by a more nuanced emotional response rooted in the disruption of common narratives about sacrifice, service, and heroism. This essay argues for the potential of Garry Trudeau's trilogy of cartoons, collected under the titles of The Long Road Home, The War Within, and Signature Wound, to depict a dialectic of pity and compassion while underscoring the inadequacies of discourses of trauma through the use of bathos—a verbal–visual descent that emphasizes the commonplace in the seemingly extraordinary through the trope of the ridiculous.

Keywords:

• PTSD
• Trauma Culture
• Pity
• Compassion
• Bathos

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the National Communication Association Convention in 2013. The authors wish to thank Claire Sisco King for her advice on this project.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the National Communication Association Convention in 2013. The authors wish to thank Claire Sisco King for her advice on this project.

Notes

[1] Thomas E. Ricks, “Doonesbury’s Take on the Troubles of Vets: A Response from Garry Trudeau,” Foreign Policy, June 14, 2011, http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/14/doonesburys-take-on-the-troubles-of-vets-a-response-from-garry-trudeau-2/.

[2] Chip Kidd, “Doonesbury Turns 40,” Rolling Stone, December 2, 2010, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/doonesbury-turns-40-20101027.

[3] For just a snapshot of Doonesbury’s influence, see The Washington Post’s “An Illustrated Chronology of Impact,” which demonstrates how the cartoon “has consistently helped steer the national conversation” while earning everything from “angry commentary to military commendations.” “Doonesbury’s Timeline: An Illustrated Chronology of Impact,” The Washington Post, http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/timeline/1970. See also Jack Lule, “On Doonesbury,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1 (2007): 77; Christopher Lamb, “Changing With The Times: The World According to ‘Doonesbury’,” The Journal of Popular Culture 23, no. 4 (1990): 113–29; and Martin Barker and Roger Sabin, “‘Doonesbury Does Iraq’: Garry Trudeau and the Politics of an Anti-War Strip,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 3, no. 2 (2012): 127–42.

[4] “The Pulitzer Prizes: 2004 Finalists,” The Pulitzer Prizes, http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/2004; “The Pulitzer Prizes: 2005 Finalists,” The Pulitzer Prizes, http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/2005.

[5] G. B. Trudeau, The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2005); The War Within: One More Step at a Time (Kansas City, MO; Andrews McMeel, 2006); and Signature Wound, Rocking TBI (Kansas City, MO; Andrews McMeel, 2010).

[6] Raymond Carlson, “For Trudeau, Road to Comic Fame Began on York Street,” Yale Daily News, April 11, 2008, http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2008/04/11/for-trudeau-road-to-comic-fame-began-on-york-street/.

[7] See A. Chris Gajilan, “Iraq Vets and Post-Traumatic Stress: No Easy Answers,” CNN, October 24, 2008, http://articles.cnn.com/2008-10-24/health/ptsd.struggle_1_ptsd-post-traumatic-stress-anxiety-disorder?_s=PM:HEALTH; Alex Quade, “Dealing With the Unseen Scars of War,” CNN, November 11, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/ptsd.military.treatment/index.html; Mark Thompson, “A Soldier’s Tragedy,” Time, April 2, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2055169,00.html; Robert Wilbur and James L. Knoll IV, “PTSD: The Soldier’s Private War,” truthout, January 9, 2013, http://truth-out.org/news/item/13788-ptsd-the-soldiers-private-war; and William M. Welch, “Trauma of Iraq War Haunting Thousands Returning Home,” USA Today, February 28, 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-02-28-cover-iraq-injuries_x.htm.

[8] Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

[9] Elizabeth D. Samet, Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (New York: Picador, 2007), 14.

[10] Phil Klay, “Treat Veterans With Respect, Not Pity,” The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303980004579576423045207210.

[11] “A Year at War,” New York Times, last updated 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/battalion.html?_r=1&#/NYT.

[12] Craig F. Walker, “Photos: Welcome Home, The Story of Scott Ostrom,” Plog: Photo Blogs from the Denver Post, January 5, 2012, http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2012/01/05/captured-welcome-home-the-story-of-scott-ostrom/5172/.

[13] At War: Notes from the Front Lines—New York Times Blog, last updated February 10, 2015, http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com.

[14] Erin P. Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD Among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 99–112.

[15] Michael Hogan, “Why Homeland’s Nicholas Brody Is the Wile E. Coyote of Cable TV,” Vanity Fair, December 1, 2013, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2013/11/why-homeland-s-nicholas-brody-is-the-wile-e-coyote-of-cable-tv.

[16] Christopher J. Gilbert, “Standing Up to Combat Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2014): 159.

[17] Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20, 22.

[18] Robert L. Ivie, Dissent from War (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007), 205.

[19] Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57–59.

[20] Trudeau, War Within, 9, emphasis in original.

[21] Scarry argues that pain is quintessentially private and, hence, unshareable. Our argument assumes that the share-ability of pain is not about experiencing another’s subjective anguish but rather the social process of making pain intelligible. Pain might “destroy” language; however, it also calls language into action insofar as the body politic tries to understand how others feel. See Elaine Scarry, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

[22] Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “strip, v. 1,” accessed December 11, 2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/191679?rskey=GiiJWZ&result=5.

[23] Bacevich, New American Militarism, 22.

[24] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London, UK: Verso, 2009).

[25] Kerry D. Soper, Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 122.

[26] Joshua Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 4.

[27] Gunn, “Speech,” 4.

[28] Elizabeth Gettelman, “Garry Trudeau: What a Long, Strange Strip It’s Been,” Mother Jones, January/February 2007, http://www.motherjones.com/media/2007/01/garry-trudeau.

[29] Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 317.

[30] James P. McDaniel, “Figures of Evil: A Triad of Rhetorical Strategies for Theo-Politics,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (2003): 549.

[31] David Wood, “Beyond the Battlefield: From a Decade of War, and Endless Struggle for the Severly Wounded,” Huffington Post, October 10, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/beyond-the-battlefield/.

[32] Nina Berman, Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq (London, UK: Trolley Books, 2004).

[33] Rachel Hall, “Of Ziploc Bags and Black Holes: The Aesthetics of Transparency in the War on Terror,” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007): 319–46.

[34] Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 38.

[35] Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15.

[36] Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 3.

[37] Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 51.

[38] Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 285–306; Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Humanity of War: Iconic Photojournalism of the Battlefield, 1914–2012,” Visual Communication 12, no. 3 (2013): 315–40.

[39] François Debrix, “The Sublime Spectatorship of War: The Erasure of the Event in America’s Politics of Terror and Aesthetics of Violence,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 3 (2006): 767–91.

[40] Deepa Kumar, “Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 48–69. See also Roger Stahl, “A Clockwork War: Rhetorics of Time in a Time of Terror,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 1 (2008): 73–99; and Barbie Zelizer, “Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 10, no. 3 (2005): 26–55.

[41] Dora Apel, War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 112–48.

[42] James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 213.

[43] Roger Stahl, “Why We ‘Support the Troops’: Rhetorical Evolutions,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (2009): 550.

[44] Stahl, “Support,” 553.

[45] Robert Hariman, “Cultivating Compassion as a Way of Seeing,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 199–203.

[46] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[47] Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion: “Thumos,” Aristotle, and Gender (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000), 147.

[48] Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999), 154–74; E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 87–100.

[49] Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 91.

[50] Dana LaCourse Munteanu, Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138.

[51] Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14.

[52] Whereas sympathy entails strictly emotional responses, empathy involves the adoption of new emotional and cognitive frameworks. This tracks with therapeutic approaches that advocate “connected knowing” and “becoming experiences,” and enables a public to become more compassionate as it connects us to socialities underwritten by felt understandings of civic life.

[53] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 21, emphasis in original.

[54] Emeka Christian Obiezu, Towards a Politics of Compassion: Socio-Political Dimensions of Christian Responses to Suffering (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008), 20.

[55] Lauren Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding),” in Compassion: The Cultural Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4, emphasis in original.

[56] Ahmed, Cultural, 25, emphasis in original. See also King, Washed, 15.

[57] William Morris and Mary Morris, s.v. “bathos/pathos,” in Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 47.

[58] Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 61.

[59] Alexander Pope, “Peri Bathous: Or, Martinus Scriblerus, His Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” in Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 195–238.

[60] Ghostbusters, directed by Ivan Reitman (1984; Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2002), DVD.

[61] “How to Recognise Different Parts of the Body,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 22, aired November 24, 1970 (British Broadcasting Corporation).

[62] Franco V. Trivigno, “The Rhetoric of Parody in Plato’s Menexenus,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42, no. 1 (2009): 30.

[63] Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 123.

[64] Timothy Krause, “Covering 9/11: The New Yorker, Trauma Kitsch, and Popular Memory,” in Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre, ed. Véronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 16.

[65] Lule, “On Doonesbury,” 77.

[66] Soper, Garry, 78.

[67] See “Trudeau Reflects on Four Decades Of ‘Doonesbury’,” NPR, October 26, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130815184.

[68] Soper, Garry, 121.

[69] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 16.

[70] Soper, Garry, 165.

[71] Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 35, no. 4 (1984): 209.

[72] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 29.

[73] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 48.

[74] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 89.

[75] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 25.

[76] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 36, 41, 81.

[77] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 66.

[78] Trudeau, Long Road Home, 76–80.

[79] Trudeau, War Within, back cover.

[80] Douglas Kellner, “Brecht’s Marxist Aesthetic: The Korsch Connection,” in Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Betty Nance Weber and Hubert Heinen (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 31.

[81] Trudeau, War Within, 12, 15, 39.

[82] Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2, 5.

[83] Soper, Garry, 160.

[84] Trudeau, War Within, 76.

[85] Trudeau, War Within, 80.

[86] Martin Barker and Roger Sabin, “‘Doonesbury Does Iraq’: Garry Trudeau and the Politics of an Anti-War Strip,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 3, no. 2 (2012): 140.

[87] Trudeau, War Within, 89.

[88] Trudeau, War Within, 87. See also Julianne H. Newton, “Trudeau Draws Truth,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1 (2007): 81–85.

[89] Trudeau, War Within, 86.

[90] Trudeau, War Within, 79.

[91] Trudeau, War Within, 103, 110.

[92] Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 92.

[93] Tony Kushner, “Mother Courage is Not Just an Anti-War Play,” The Guardian, September 8, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/sep/08/tony-kushner-mother-courage.

[94] Trudeau, War Within, 77.

[95] Trudeau, Signature Wound, back cover.

[96] Trudeau, Signature Wound, foreword, emphasis in original.

[97] Peter Alexander Meyers, Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 122, emphasis in original.

[98] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 24.

[99] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 37.

[100] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 50.

[101] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 44.

[102] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 61.

[103] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 86–87.

[104] Barbara A. Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 397.

[105] Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “toggle, v. 1,” accessed February 2, 1015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/202886?rskey=LzwmAl&result=2.

[106] Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 173, 166, 168. This entire line of reasoning unfolds in the section entitled “Comic Correctives.”

[107] Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 77.

[108] Haraway, Species, 78.

[109] See Barbara A. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 147–69; Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’”; Jeremy Engels, “Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 131–54; Jeremy Engels and William O. Saas, “On Acquiescence and Ends-Less War: An Inquiry into the New War Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 225–32; and Lee Pierce, “A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 1 (2014): 53–80.

[110] Haraway, Species, 82, emphasis in original.

[111] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 115.

[112] Haraway, Species, 82, 83. See also Biesecker, “Remembering.”

[113] Haraway, Species, 83.

[114] Keston Sutherland, “What is Bathos?” in On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, ed. Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls (London, UK: Continuum, 2010), 13.

[115] Haraway, Species, 300.

[116] Trudeau, Signature Wound, 96.

[117] G. B. Trudeau, Red Rascal’s War: A Doonesbury Book (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2011); “The Sandbox,” The Washington Post, http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/.