Sex And Politics Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George Magazine. He is author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and is writing a book about Harvard University.
Does Aaron McGruder think that Condoleeza Rice is a lesbian? That's the question I kept pondering as I read this week's "The Boondocks," a comic strip by McGruder that The Washington Post has decided not to publish.
The Post's decision raises that ongoing debate about when not to publish comic strips-most recently several papers suspended a "Doonesbury" stripwhich used the word "masturbate," apparently on the grounds that there might be someone out there who didn't actually know what it meant. In this situation the Post's reasoning appears to hinge on whether Aaron McGruder is implying that Condi Rice is gay.
If you don't know it, "The Boondocks" is a comic strip about the lives and attitudes of several black kids. The primary character is Huey Freeman, described on the Boondocks' Web site as a "radical black scholar." (He's about 14, I'd guess.) McGruder likes to poke fun of both blacks and whites in a way that I find both honest and funny. Others may disagree.
This week's strips revolve around a dialogue between Huey and his friend Caesar, who announces that he has "a simple and easy plan to save the world." Basically, it consists of getting Condi Rice laid. "Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleeza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it," Caesar says. "All that gal needs is some good ol' fashioned lovin'." To which Huey deadpans, "What I really like about this idea is that it isn't the least bit sexist or chauvinistic."
That was too much for the Post, which announced it would skip "The Boondocks" this week. "We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder's assertion that Condoleeza Rice had no personal relationship was true or not," explained a Post spokesperson.
You have to love spokespeople-even at newspapers they twist the truth. Because this flimsy rationale doesn't hold up under even the mildest scrutiny. Since when do newspapers fact-check their comics? For another, the Post could always have found out if Rice was single or not. And if the editors knew that Rice didn't have a boyfriend, would they then have run the strip? Somehow I don't think so.
Let us instead give the Post more credit by assuming that the paper doesn't want to discuss its real reason for not running "The Boondocks": This week's strips could be interpreted as suggesting that Rice is gay. Particularly since there's already scuttlebutt to this effect in Washington, primarily, so far as I can tell, because Rice is single and comes across as a little frosty. The tip-off is the flack's curiously neutral phrasing, saying "personal relationship" as opposed to, say, "boyfriend."
When you look at it this way, the Post's decision is not just wrong, it's offensive. By its logic, any suggestion that someone is gay is so offensive that it has to be yanked from the paper. A "liberal" paper like the Post should know better. McGruder certainly does.
Now, to be fair, "The Boondocks" strip is also a little offensive. Whatever it might hint about what gender, if any, Rice likes to sleep with, the idea that a woman just needs to get schtupped to be happy is laughably sexist. But then, laughably is the key word. This is a comic strip, after all. Would you prefer "Family Circle"?
Ultimately, there's one quite serious reason why the Post's decision is wrong. In his own style, Aaron McGruder is getting at something important-the idea that the psycho-sexual histories of our leaders can affect their decisions regarding war and peace. To any historian, this is hardly a radical idea. (Remember that Hitler guy?) But it's the kind of truth that makes newspaper journalists queasy-it's not "news." To concede such truisms undermines the legitimacy of their definition of what's fit to print-and by extension, the very foundation of newspaperdom.
I suspect that this is ultimately why the Post wouldn't run this week's "Boondocks"-because the strip posited that White House leaders are human beings whose actions are affected by their mental and sexual health. It isn't such a crazy idea, if you consider presidents Clinton, Nixon and Kennedy. But it's apparently too dangerous for the funny pages-or anywhere else-in The Washington Post.