Garry Trudeau opened the 2009-2010 Bryan Lecture series with “Doonesbury in a Time of War.” The Pulitzer Prize- winning cartoonist drew a crowd of over 2000 to the War Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 7.The Bryan lecture completed a series of Guilford events on Trudeau’s work.

The lecture began with a description of the 70’s student activism that reshaped the views he brought to Yale from his conservative Republican family. His senior class had to stay over in the summer to graduate after months spent protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, the National Guard shootings at Kent State and police shootings at Jackson State.

He said of the first baby-boomers, “We were the last generation to consider youth a social burden. Then we hijacked a culture. We were getting rocked, stoned, shot at and arrested. We fell into a movie of our own making.”

He began cartooning in college and soon focused on the Vietnam War. He explained that he knew early on that even with subjects like war, ” I’m responsible for making the reader smile everyday.”

He said that humor could be why even in that polarized time, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes ran “Doonesbury.”

Using slides that were hard to see for some in the auditorium, Trudeau told about his character B.D. as a soldier in Vietnam.

“Mostly,” he said, “I made fun of command.”

Trudeau showed scenes from a musical he wrote about the Reagan administration. saying, “It was hard to use language that a young pilot might use. Military jargon conceals because a soldier’s business is violence and violence is hard to take.”

He showed drawings of B.D. as a soldier in the first Gulf War and then moved to panels of the Bush cabinet during the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Then he paused to explain his fellow Yalie, “The younger Bush’s entire life gives fresh meaning to the phrase ‘assisted living.'”

After the invasion of Iraq, Trudeau continued to satirize the Bush administration and the mainstream media in the character of faux Fox News Reporter Roland Hedley. So he said he was surprised when Pentagon officials invited him to visit the Walter Reed Army Medical Center after “Doonesbury” showed B.D. losing a leg in Iraq.

He told of meeting a former student basketball star at Walter Reed who had lost a hand and her forearm in an explosion.

“She was sent to secure the roof of an Iraqi police station,” said Trudeau. “Her most vivid memory was of her teammates going to the roof against orders and digging through sand to find her hand and remove her engagement ring. They brought it to her and put it in her other hand.”

Trudeau features a military blog on his Doonesbury Web site called “The Sandbox.”

The week he spoke in Greensboro, “Sandbox” bloggers wrote about Afghan women in Burqas, the morale-busting effects of broken toasters in Iraq and choosing a baby name when the other parent is in a war on the other side of the world.

A month-long Hege Library exhibit of Trudeau drawings (also called, “Doonesbury in a Time of War”) set the political stage for the war in Iraq and told the stories of three wounded warriors, B.D., Melissa and Toggle.

The afternoon of the Bryan lecture, Trudeau visited the campus and spoke with students surrounded by his cartoon panels in the Hege Library gallery.

People arriving early for that event moved slowly from one drawing to the next. Two Guilford women stopped in front of the same “Melissa” panels and praised the talent that could make them laugh and cry at the grim topic of command rape.

Junior Matt Clausen called Trudeau’s campus session with journalism and political science students, “A great talk.”

He was interested in Trudeau’s answers to questions about media standards and news reporting now that so much news is distributed online.

Trudeau told the students, “The news industry is going over a cliff.”

“I pray for a miracle.” he said. “Either a major media figure like (Rupert) Murdoch, who would make some news enterprise on the Web that people would pay for, like a news utility. Or, new platforms like Kindle that could create new (reading) habits.”

That night at the War Memorial Auditorium, the man whose “Doonesbury” cartoon strip appears around the world in over 1,400 newspapers said, “My son doesn’t know anyone who reads newspapers.”

Toward the end of his talk, Trudeau drew applause from the War Memorial crowd when he said “A patriot is someone who loves his country all the time and his government when they deserve it.”

Stacks of “Doonesbury” books disappeared from tables in the lobby when the lecture ended.

Freshman Nora Stork waited happily in a long line for Trudeau to autograph books she bought for Christmas presents.

“My parents love him,” Stork said.

Junior Alex Knox said, “I appreciate “Doonesbury” for showing the evil character of the Bush administration.”

“Trudeau brought that out in a way that we were thinking about but not seeing in the news,” said Knox.