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I respect your criticism but feel compelled to speak up in Berkeley Breathed’s defense. What Mr. Breathed has managed to do for decades now is infiltrate the mainstream Sunday rags with a subtle and ongoing progressive critique. There are plenty of sources for sharper satire—click next door on Tom Tomorrow. The genius of Breathed is that his satire slips in beneath the radar. By sugarcoating a bitter pill in the soft exterior of a cute penguin, Breathed has managed to sidestep the progressive ghetto of alternative weeklies and the opinions section, and infiltrated the living rooms and headspace of a younger, more mainstream and/or more conservative audience. As a child of Bloom County now in his 30s, I recall that Bloom County was the first place I heard names like Jeane Kirkpatrick and saw critiques of Reagan era politics—critiques that stayed with me as I began to develop my own political consciousness. You, Mr. Owen, are not his target audience. His target is the very “26 percent” (and their kids) who wouldn’t otherwise entertain criticism of the Iraq War.
