Word: washingtoon
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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Stamaty is the creator of "Washingtoon," a cartoon featured in each issue of The Village Voice, and reprinted weekly in The Washington Post. Congdon & Weed has published the serialized strip in a book, giving readers a prolonged look at Stamaty's notable knack for capturing in detail the mood and idiosyncrasies of our nation's capital during Reagan's tenure. As a chronicle of the reign of the New Right, the book is as depressing as it is funny...
...what is really funny here is that "Washingtoon," as any good satire, is so true to life. Like an audience watching a very good impersonator, we see the antics of everyday Washington, and the Administration's social Darwinism emerges: Defense Department officials order a new bomb that "will kill only those people who do not carry a credit card"; the President announces a policy called "The New Deferralism": "that we, at the federal level, defer all responsibility for social problems for a period of eight years"; and Reagan justifies high interest rates, explaining: "We just recently received word...
Trudeau was right, of course, and though "Washingtoon" will probably never make it to Broadway's floorboards, the strip is one of the few that ably captures the irony of a liberal perspective on Washington in the '80s. One effort that comes close is James T. Pendergast's "Mrs. Gipper," which began appearing on the letters page of Rolling Stone last year, and portrays the adventures of the First Lady, surrounded by a full entourage as she galavants through the capital city, stopping off to order fast food and advise husband Ronnie on the issues of the day. Few other...
...Cynicism," wrote H.G. Wells, "is humour in ill-health." By this scale, "Washingtoon"'s humor is on the brink of terminal cancer. Like his colleagues at The Voice and every other American of liberal bent, Stamaty demonstrates that survival that which has become vital in America in the '80s; cynicism...
...attitude spawned and fed by the kind of thinking. Stamaty satirizes in "Washingtoon" when a Pentagon official testifying at a committee hearing says: "At present, Soviet defense spending causes 85 percent more damage to the Soviet economy than U.S. defense spending does to the U.S. economy. The gap is unacceptable, it must be closed...