Young, who is the son of the strip's originator, Murat "Chic" Young, and who co-creates the strip now with artist Denis Lebrun, goes on: "And I think a lot of that has to do with the love that Dagwood and Blondie have for each other in the comic strip. Look at all the dysfunction that's going on everywhere, and here's a man and wife, they love each other and they've loved each other all these years. The passion continues undiminished. And hopefully it's funny, too."
Here's an ostensibly lighthearted newspaper story about a slice of cultural Americana ... yet Mr. Young tosses off a reference to "all the dysfunction that's going on everywhere." What's up with that?
The July 25, 2005, issue of TIME magazine contains a feature story by Lev Grossman, "J.K. Rowling Hogwarts And All," wrapped around his interview with the famed author. Rowling's much-anticipated sixth of a planned seven Harry Potter novels, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, has just skyrocketed — as everyone expected — into the annals of bestselling children's literature.
Rowling tells Grossman, "As I look back over the five published books, I realize that it's kind of a litany of bad fathers. That's where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn't get good fathering."
The absence of good fathering leads to the flowering of evil: if that isn't the epitome of dysfunction, I don't know what is. Mr. Dithers may find Dagwood a slacker at the office, but at home there's no question. He's always been there for offspring Alexander and Cookie Bumstead:
I think it's about time we woke up to the dysfunction in our society — the rot in our culture, in ourselves — and realized that our current attitudes toward sex, love, marriage, procreation, parenting, and the like lie at the root of it!
Evil is what happens when we make bad choices, period. Dysfunction is what happens when we make the wrong choices about our most important relationships. They're two sides of one coin.
Rowling on her stories' morals:
Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. "I don't think that it's at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don't," she says. "I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?"
"Although," she adds, "undeniably, morals are drawn." But she doesn't make it easy. ... . People aren't good and bad by nature; they change and transform and struggle. As Dumbledore tells Harry, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
We seem to be stuck in a Catch-22. We're shortchanged on our ability to make good choices if, as youths, we don't have at least a Professor Dumbledore as a wise father substitute. So we grow up to make some terrible choices about sex, love, marriage, procreation, parenting, etc. Then, if a pregnancy we don't want happens anyway, we use the prospect of a fatherless (and perhaps motherless) upbringing for the child as a rationale for abortion instead.
What's wrong with this picture?
Why can't we do it right?
What needs to happen before we start making better choices?
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