Jack Ohman go boom!*

Jack Ohman is good. Like the world needs my opinion.

Even after the Internet made viewing the world's editorial cartoons a mere matter of mouse clicks, I liked to pick up the Portland Oregonian anytime I was in the vicinity, mostly to see Ohman's latest cartoon.

(Cartoons are best read in your lap or at the breakfast table, your nose to the ink, examining the work.)

He has a distinct painterly style and a fierce voice. He knows precisely the power of the editorial cartoon; he knows not to waste his space and your time with the visual equivalent of a Jimmy Fallon topical toss-off.

Ohman joined my neighborhood newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, this year, after his best friend, cartoonist Rex Babin passed away. Ohman said he made the leap to help raise Babin's young son.

Babin had a spare, reductive style, as if he was carving away his cartoons from blocks of wood or linoleum. His voice as well was understated and circumspect, with occasional pointed jabs.

Ohman has brought a wealth of explosive devices to the job.

Last week he lit up the sky with the cartoon above.

In the wake of the explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, so horrible and vast and somehow swallowed up in the sensational Boston Marathon bombings, Ohman blamed the explosion on Texas' lax industrial regulations, touted as a benefit to California businesses looking for cheaper operating locales.

Oh, man!

The 'toon went viral, major newspapers reporting that Texas Gov. Rick Perry got mad. Perry told The Bee:

“It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans.
 
“Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster. The Bee owes the community of West, Texas, an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.”

Other letter writers said they failed to see the humor in Ohman's insensitivity.

Damn right it's insensitive — but not for its own sake. Ohman's job is not comic relief; it's sardonic dyspepsia. Ohman upholds editorial cartoons on the same serious level as editorials and columns, and uses the directness with which the written word can't compete.

The Bee stands by Ohman, who defended his work in a newspaper blog:

… what normal person doesn't mourn those poor people fighting the fire and living by the plant? I certainly do. What makes me angry, and, yes, I am driven by anger, is that it could have been prevented. I guess I could have done a toned-down version of the cartoon; I am not sure what that would have been, but I think many readers' objections just stemmed from the fact that I used the explosion as a metaphor, period. The wound is fresh, the hurt still stings.

Texas hadn't inspected that plant since 2006, Ohman pointed out.

To be fair, having to explain oneself in a blog defeats the purpose of a cartoon, but it's helpful in its expansion. Good cartoonists such as Ohman count on informed readers to know the issues, and then stomp around in the playgrounds of their minds, splashing ink.

A toned-down cartoon wouldn't have been worth publishing, much less drawing.

Ohman also gets a Sunday comic-sized space to satirize California politics, particularly the musings and meanderings of Gov. Jerry Brown and his corgi, Sutter, who comments on the lunacy a la Pat Oliphant's Punk. Ohman has an interloper's view of California, without any cows to hold sacred.

Here's a recent one, with entertaining riffs on art history:

His stuff is well worth visiting.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/ohman/#storylink=cpy

*to borrow from the colorful patois of kids (or at least TV commercials) these days …

Hunting goodwill

Might as well join the many memes and morphs
of Britain's 1939 war propaganda poster,
"Keep Calm and Carry On."

Bits of Monday's Boston bombing radiated across the continent to Tuesday's twilight swim at Lake Natoma, where matters tumbled endlessly in my mind as I turned over and over through the cool water.

Old ordinary matters garnered new ashen regard. Crazy thoughts gained credence.

Why? Why commit such a monstrous act at the Boston Marathon except to yank everyone's attention and then deliver your message ("I hate ___________ because ______________!")?

In rapid and tragic succession, one of the bombing suspects revealed yesterday is dead following a gunfight and violent chase that also killed a police officer. The other suspect is still at large.

Why? Unless these, if responsible, are just sick, unable to reason or communicate.

Or unless these sought terror for terror's sake, anonymous (for a few days, anyway) and agile, on secret terms.

Why? For fun? The thrill of the kill?

Introspective almost by definition, swimming lets me wonder and wander. Tuesday night it was about the nature of evil and the product of anger, even as I tried to outswim it.

Late afternoon is the only time lately that my buddy Doug can swim. Otherwise I avoid it. At Lake Natoma, late afternoons are the perfect storm of blinding sun on the homeward leg, wind chopping the surface, collegiate rowing crews and their zigzagging high school counterparts, along with friendly Hawaiian outrigger crews, recreational kayakers, families with their dogs along the beach — and the bane of my swim state, racing kayakers.

I besmudge them all unfairly in their long, sleek Huki-style boats; I've had sharp quick words with a few in the past, because I don't understand why they paddle so fast and close to the crowded shore, which we hug to keep out of the boat traffic. Some have told us in swift passage that they can see us and quit griping. But we can't see them and that makes us nervous.

They mean no harm. I think. They dart around us easily enough, though some have cleaved our swimming group with their sharp boats, it seems, just because they can. They could just as easily paddle to the far shore of the lake and race unperturbed and unperturbing. But they don't.

One paddler in particular races up and down, so close to the beach I'm surprised her carbon fiber paddle doesn't shred against the rocky sloping bottom. She always wears her ballcap pulled low over her eyes, and paddles with her chin set, always looking ahead, not even a sidelong glance at us or children splashing in the shallows as she knifes among us, windmilling fast.

I do not like her very much.

Last week I was convinced she had purposely trapped me along the shore where a tall cottonwood long ago fell into the water. The treefall marks almost exactly 800 yards from our swim starting point, and forgetful swimmers can get caged in its slimy green branches. We have to swing farther from shore to avoid it, then in again.

This paddler came at me just as I was starting to round the tree, and seemed to force me back into its branches. I tried to kick hard and splash water at her, just as I have in the past, but it was futile and I ended up with calf cramps, as always. I think sometimes about overturning her boat.

She was out there Tuesday, just as we were about to get in. "Hey, my favorite paddler!" I told Doug. We had to keep our heads on swivels, as Doug says, in frequent watch for her.

Up and back she went, her presence marked only by the brief close shadow she cast in the hard afternoon glare. Paddling into the sun, her face is a hard cold shadow.

Near the small island where we usually turn around, Doug, far ahead of me, decided to call out to the paddler as she passed.

"Hey, how's it going?" Doug said loudly, his yellow-capped head bobbing in the water, his big smile flashing.

Startled, she nearly dropped her paddle. "Oh! Uh, hello!"

Doug's moment changed everything, revealing she's not the evil Huki paddler I decided she was. She's a driven athlete, focused on her task, to the exclusion of the world around her. A bit irresponsible, perhaps, but not mean.

Whatever she's striving for, she works hard at it.

In Doug's moment, we may have reached détente. Soon may come the conversation that starts, "Why don't you paddle on the other side of the lake?" or "I'll paddle wide when I see you from now on," some measure of understanding.

Was that going on in Boston, a measure of misunderstanding, of anger, of frustration, blowing up literally into hatred? Were moments missed, long ago, somewhere, that would have averted a tragedy?

Was it as simple as what one of the suspects supposedly wrote: I don't have a single American friend?

Simplistic ponderation, perhaps.

Keep calm and swim on.

I agree with the many who said right away the Boston Marathon should continue, would come back better and stronger, that runners should still run and athletes should still play, or else terror wins. I try not to think of the dead and injured, of the moment and these long moments after; I marvel at those who helped, making me examine whether I would or could, and reaffirming the idea that we exist overwhelmingly in goodwill. When you stop to consider how easy it is everywhere, at any moment, to maim and kill, if willing … goodwill prevails.

Goodwill may have its limits and borders, though. The world may say to us, "Welcome to a day in the life of Syria/Afghanistan/The Gaza Strip/Bangalore/Chechnya/Pakistan/Iraq/Mali." Families of children gunned down in Newtown, Conn. may say, "Our children were slaughtered but our Senators care more for their re-election than for even some small measure that would check whether a buyer at a gun show might use the weapon to murder others."

America shows its exceptionalism in the Boston bombing: Not on our soil.

In the novel Watchmen, one of the flawed superheroes in a realistic but alternate universe creates a disaster so horrific that warring nations set aside their hatred to combat the disaster. Thousands are sacrificed to save millions.

In my crazy swimming thoughts, I wondered if these who bombed the Boston Marathon were somehow igniting people's will to help others in crisis. Because that's what happened. Of course, I thought that about the Newtown shootings too, trying to make something reasonable out of insanity, that the shooting deaths of small children would temper our regard for guns. So far, nope.

What will also happen, I fear, is we'll ignore Benjamin Franklin again, who supposedly said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Who knows next where we'll not be allowed to go, and what we won't be able to carry, in defense of so-called liberty. Who knows whom our government will decide misguidedly is a target of our retaliation, and drag us into more bloodshed.

Now as ever, perplexed, I keep calm and swim on, agile and anonymous, on my own terms.