Good night Opus. ACK!

by liza

Opus the Penguin is gone.

I remember when Berkley Breathed started Bloom County back in the 1980s. It was a breath of fresh air and left-wing perspective in a world taken over by Ronald Reagan's right-wing dementia. From the Iran-Contra affair to the myth of the welfare queens, there was nothing sacred in the Berkley Breathed canon of satirical targets.

For this Puerto Rican girl who could navigate "Anglo" culture with an inquisitive yet critical eye, Bloom County gave me the kind of political commentary I could find nowhere in the MSM exports of Time and Newsweek, needless to say in our island's papers either.

Actually, back in the 1980s, all the Anglo political irreverence I was getting through the mainstream media that reached our island, came in the guise of comedy or cartoons : Bloom County, Doonsbury, Pat Oliphant, Jules Pfeiffer and the stand up comedy of Steve Allen, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Don Rickles, Bill Cosby. My life was never the same after watching Whoopie Goldberg's one woman show on HBO at the end of the 1980s.

ACK!


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