What would Pat do?

After a while, I just stopped clicking …

Published after months' long absence, in response to the Paris killings …
from GoComics® Universal Uclick.com

Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, my favorite, was no longer drawing, it seemed. His weekly output had dried up at his syndicate's Website.

His last 'toon had been mid-August, a variation on the discord between Congress and President Obama, whom Oliphant often portrays as aloof, a human non sequitir.

Then, nothing. Click — nothing. Click — nothing, click — nothing.

Oliphant is 79. I figured he could be sick or have retired by design or default. I sincerely hoped not. More likely, as a painter and sculptor now ensconced in Santa Fe, N.M. and far from his old Washington, D.C., hunting grounds, he was taking a lengthy break to pursue his personal art.

After 50 years of cartooning in the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize (only one?!), Oliphant doesn't have to prove anything. I'm not the only one who regards him as the best in the business, eloquently savage, a master in black and white — ink and opinion — and the next true challenger may never come.

Then, in the after-madness of the killings at Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere in Paris last week, I wondered if the events had provoked Oliphant.

Click.

Jean Jullien's fast-trigger response

Up came the cartoon above. Dark and morose, unfunny, grim. Oliphant is great at dark and morose, at not needing to joke.

Is it the most striking response to the violence, the most memorable? No. My pick is Jean Jullien's (right):

The London-based French designer almost immediately produced the quintessential cartoon response, powerful and still somehow playful in its immediacy.

Both cartoonists commented viscerally to the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the controversial satirical weekly which seemed intent on offending everyone. The killers took deadly offense to cartoons lampooning Mohammad, Islam's prophet.

Jullien drew, by intent or instinct, from the 1967 photo of a Vietnam War protester placing flowers in the barrels of National Guard soldiers' rifles near the Pentagon.

Oliphant simply drew from his gut, speaking out as a cartoonist, leveraging his inking mastery. By dry-brushing the edges of the killers' black uniforms, Oliphant invoked an evil, ethereal tone — is this just a nightmare? — and signaled his jagged anger.

Oliphant followed up a couple of days later with this riff of Eugène Delacroix' 1830 masterwork, "Liberty Leading the People:"

From Universal Uclick.com

Eh.

More pencils.

As much as I love Oliphant, I think the world was by then already done with pencils as a metaphor for the unsinkability of free expression.

This vacuum of time after the killings has filled with eloquent written arguments pointing out not only (1) was this not really about an attack on free expression, but (2) this freedom we espouse is ephemeral at best and illusion at worst.

One had only to witness the world leaders who linked arms in Paris in (distant and symbolic)  solidarity with protesters elsewhere in that city, to know the hypocrisy of freedom.

Critics literally went down the line of leaders, pointing out who — whether directly or through their sovereign states — had quashed freedom of expression by jailing, torturing or killing journalists and critics. Who really knows why the United States did not send a high-level emissary, if not the president himself, but he or she would have fit right in that line.

At the same time Saudi Arabia was condemning the shootings as a "cowardly terrorist act" through its official news agency, it was beginning its weekly beating of a blogger jailed for criticizing Saudi rulers and the kingdom's strict application of Islam.

Raif Badawi was not given his second set of 50 cane lashings last week — a doctor decided he was not healthy enough from the first beating to bear up to the second, at least not yet. Badawi is supposed to receive 50 lashings each of the next 19 weeks.

I'm giving Oliphant a pass on the second 'toon, and waiting anxiously for what he, or any prominent cartoonist with a wide reach, may come up with this week.

No more pencils: Hammers.

Cartoonists need to hammer away at hypocrisy, to match the eloquent words with pointed pictures. One cartoon won't do. This hypocrisy over freedom is practically codified in our government and corporate structures — and absolved by virtue of world leaders marching in Paris. Cartoonists need to point out hypocrisy and lampoon away with both ink barrels.

They need to hammer away at those policies that create egregious plenty amid horrid want, and lead not only to the killings in Paris, but the slaughter of hundreds of Nigerians by the radical and violent Boko Haram (meaning: "Western education is forbidden"). The attention paid to Paris nearly obscured the holocaust in Nigeria.

Good cartoons can teach us, can lead us to the news that inspired the art. We need that.

We also need cartoonist to hammer away against the coming storm: The vacuum of time after Paris has exposed an undercurrent of tension over, if not hatred of, Muslims. I can't tell you how many times I've heard or read of people who equate the Charlie Hebdo or Boko Haram massacres with all Muslims, and I'm at a loss why reasoned people can't draw a distinction between a religion of 1.6 billion adherents, and a relatively small group who interpret their religion as violent tyranny.

Unless they aren't reasoned people, and their potential multitude scares me.

After intense pressure last week, for example, Duke University in North Carolina declined to allow campus Muslims to use its chapel tower to broadcast weekly calls to prayer. The university's ministerial staff had offered use of the tower as a friendly — I'll even say Christian — gesture. Duke is a private Methodist university.

But Franklin Graham, influential son of influential Christian evangelist Billy Graham, denounced the gesture, igniting a wave of complaints by Duke donors, and Duke quickly withdrew the gesture. Graham could have limited his argument to pointing out that Duke is a Christian-founded private school and within its rights to control use of the chapel. It would have been awkward to say so, but Graham went way beyond awkward and straight to hate.

He condemned Islam and its followers.

"We as Christians are being marginalized, and Islam … which is not a religion of peace," Graham told reporter Mark Becker of WSOC TV in Charlotte, North Carolina. "There's nothing peaceful about Islam at all. Just look at the Middle East and every country where Islam has the majority is in turmoil. They behead people, they rape women, they kill Christians, they burn churches."

Franklin said Muslims are taught violence in the Quran, have not denounced the killings in Paris — remarks that are remarkably easy to refute — and that American Muslims only denounced the killings because they're outnumbered.

"Violence is there and it's coming," said Graham. "And it's going to come to this country and it has nothing to do with what I say. I'm trying to warn America as to what's coming, warn Duke University. Islam is not a peaceful religion."

We are at war with Islam, he said.

Do you hear what I hear? The belltower clang of bigotry, trying to upraise one people by demonizing another? Is it not the same rhetoric that ingrained slavery into our American fabric, that laid waste to Native Americans in this country's founding and expanse, that tore Jews asunder in Nazi Germany, that imprisoned Japanese-American during World War II out of our baseless fear and sanctioned hatred?

People listen and follow this stuff, God help us.

It's past time to combat these words with pictures. Get out your hammers, cartoonists. You've got work to do. Are you free, Mr. Oliphant?

Mad man

Satire, that thing currently agitating much of the world, saved me from eternal damnation 41 years ago.

So far, so good.

Forty-one years ago, The Exorcist came out in theaters. I was 12, doing my best in sixth grade, despite growing certainty the devil would soon possess me.

Mind you, I had not seen The Exorcist. I still haven't, except by accident, in snippets from old-movie channel promos. The head-spinning scene, usually. After so many horrific horror movies since, The Exorcist seems quaint, like an effect small children might have no trouble seeing in a Disneyland®™ ride through Sleeping Beauty©™'s castle.

The mere mention of the movie back then, though, froze my blood.

It didn't take much: Blurbs about the movie, complete with stills, in Time Magazine … news of the film's success on the TV news … the iconic poster of a dark figure standing under the spectral light of a streetlamp.

And the devil's own fanfare, Tubular Bells. It was impossible to escape Mike Oldfield's theme for the film, especially because even the devil couldn't have kept me from my Saturday appointment with all three hours of Casey Kasem's "American Top 40."

Three hours of waiting for Bennie and the Jets to get played, finally, just to hear the rising whistle from the crowd at song's end — which was my self-imposed "permission" to leave my room and play or do chores (why do we kids think and do as we do?). But all that waiting meant I had to endure Tubular Bells.

As if from a dream, the music seems to start in the middle, echoing distantly, the single phrase on the high end of a piano repeating, driving, repeating, louder, broader, supported next by a serpentine bass line. Closer and closer, coming for me. Though the song sweetens toward the end, suggesting salvation, I was sure none would come.

Maybe it's no coincidence that a "rock" version of The Lord's Prayer, by an Australian nun, Sister Janet Mead, was chasing Tubular Bells on the pop charts. Maybe someone sensed I needed protection against dark forces, and the discordant "Our Father" was designed to cancel out the devil's relentless tinkling.

I was taking whatever help I could get.

Human Play-Doh®™, I was so malleable. I had just conquered fears of being swallowed by earthquakes — not unreal where I grew up — and seared by nests of belching volcanoes (an idea our neighborhood babysitter planted in my head, while also trying to convince us kids she was a witch).

All I knew about The Exorcist:

• It was based on a true story
• The girl in it throws up and talks in a monstrous voice, not her own — the devil's
• Catholic priests fight the devil possessing her, and it's not going too well

Therefore, as a Catholic kid still attending weekly catechism, and the only person in my family at that point still going to Mass, a sinner venial and maybe grave, I was eventually going to be possessed. I was a conduit, a lightning rod.

It was the same little-kid logic I applied to wearing short sleeves whenever I could, so teachers and other grown-ups could see right away I didn't have needle tracks on my arms and therefore didn't use drugs. In case anyone was wondering.

As The Exorcist grew in popularity, I carried my doom with me, refreshed every day by the constant radio play of Tubular Bells. If I told my mom about my fate — I don't remember — she would have kindly advised I was being ridiculous, and of course I wouldn't have believed her.

On into the summer doom went with me, up to South Lake Tahoe where we vacationed regularly at my aunt and uncle's cabin. Tahoe was no paradise for a lazy 12-year-old — it was too far down the bluff to swim in the lake, and back then I didn't like swimming; too many steps for too little fun at the giant metal slides at the playland down the road.

I was too young to pad around the casinos, of course, but just old enough to look after younger cousins.

Our one unsupervised adventure was going to the corner market for candy — and there I found my salvation.

MAD Magazine.

I invested my Chick-O-Stick™® and baseball card money into my first issue that summer, and absorbed my lazy self in a new world — where cartoonists made fun of the great big bad real world.

Don Martin turned convention on its absurd jug ears and cucumber nose. Sergio Aragonés drew in the margins, hilarious at only a half-inch tall. Dave Berg was like reading Laugh-In in comic form, as he held a mirror to social and sexual politics of the time. Big stuff for a little kid.

MAD Magazine usually bookended each issue with parodies of hit movies or TV shows, with dozens of deft and dead-on caricatures by Jack Davis and Mort Drucker, and mocking titles such as "Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid" and "On a Clear Day You Can See a Funny Lady Singing 'Hello Dolly' Forever."

I studied the drawings but didn't read those parodies — too many words, and I hadn't seen any of the movies or shows to understand the jokes.

Summer became fall, and despite the revelation of MAD's satire, despite the delight of realizing life needn't be so serious and scary, my doom weighed heavier. Those damned Tubular Bells.

Then came October, high holidays for possessive demons. Hooked on MAD by then, I bought that month's issue. On the cover: A parody of The Exorcist, renamed The Ecchorcist. Mad's own gap-toothed mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, graced the cover, his likeness dressed as a devil (with pencil moustache) and printed on a barf bag. The tagline, "In this issue we gag up The Exorcist."

You … you can you do that?! And not become a double-jointed, pustule-pocked meat puppet of Satan?

I dove in.

Cartoonist Drucker and writer Larry Siegel, a TV comedy writer, unmasked the horror that had haunted me all those months, for a movie I had never seen. They pointed their fingers and laughed — laughed at the devil! — and I learned about the movie while laughing right along with them.

"Hear that vicious foul language?" the possessed girl's mother tells the priest in one panel. "See the smoke pouring out of her mouth! Have you ever seen anything like that before, Father?"

"Only ONCE!" the priest replied.

"You've met ANOTHER child possessed by the devil … ?!?"

"No, I was visiting a Public School," said the priest, "and I accidentally walked into the Girls' Bathroom."

That sort of classic MAD banter. And Drucker even recreated the iconic scene of the exorcist himself, silhouetted in the lamplight:

"Who's out there? Are you the Exorcist?" a voice from the house cries out.

"No, I'm the AVON lady —POSING as a priest. Who do you think I am?"

See the parody lovingly archived here, with the added comfort of yellowed paper.

It wasn't Shakespeare, or even Neil Simon, but it was good medicine. And it saved me, exorcising my demon. Satire saved me from irrational fear, and began teaching me to laugh at myself and regard life with a second, skeptical eye.

So far, so good.

•••

You want a great take on Charlie Hebdo and the Paris killings from a cartoonist? Read Joe Sacco, a reportorial cartoonist and one of my cartooning heroes.

Scabrous

Voltaire never said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

He said, "What a fuss about an omelette!"

I found the second quote while looking for the first, and like it much better for expressing my disgust over the execution of cartoonists and editors and their police protectors at Charlie Hebdo Wednesday in Paris.

It sounds insensitive. It is, I hope you'll see, wildly appropriate.

Voltaire was defending, if a bit backhandedly, a contemporary's book, De l'esprit, in 1758. The French Parliament ordered Claude Adrien Helvétius' book burned, and him exiled from Paris, after the French ruling class and church hierarchy decided they were insulted. Man can improve himself, and become equal to his peers through education? Religion is largely ineffectual?? Indeed!

Voltaire didn't like Helvétius or his book, but supported its publication, the flowering of ideas, and found the fallout excessive, so much omelet fussing.

A Voltaire biographer 150 years later repackaged the philosopher's omelet remark into the quote we have stuck in Voltaire's throat ever since, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Until the sad and vicious and cowardly act Wednesday, I didn't know Charlie Hebdo from Charlie Brown, the comics character for whom the satirical weekly reportedly is named ("hebdo" being French slang for "weekly"). That's a sad admission from someone who frequently professes love for editorial cartooning and the power it possesses.

I have learned so much since.

Charlie Hebdo is an equal-opportunity offender, its official slogan translating to "dumb and nasty." U.S. cartoonists and satirists have nothing on the satire of Charlie Hebdo or the rest of the world, for that matter, where the risks of offense are high and real and immediate.

Cartoonists and journalists are threatened, injured and killed throughout the world; we pay attention to this incident, I'm afraid, for its brazenness and body count.

It's ironic that in the United States, with our relative freedom of expression (I said relative: you can name me many, many instances of censorship and restraint in my country), we have nothing that approaches Charlie Hebdo for raw and unrelenting provocation.

Why? I wonder. Being free(r), are we more tolerant, or just more complacent? Do we have no more big ideas to skewer, and instead tilt at the niggling nuances of wrongs in a democratic society? Do we censor ourselves as a people? Do we bow to power, to money?

Cartoonists and reporters and journalists in the United States face opposition to their work, of course, though vary rarely has it resulted in death — Denver radio host Alan Berg was murdered by members of a white nationalist group in 1984. Who else?

Two cartoonists — Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee and Nick Anderson of The Houston Chronicle — today described the death threats they have received over the years for their work. Typically, though, opponents' weapon of choice against published opinion is an angry call or letter, typically containing a demand that the offending commentator be fired. Sometimes those offended protest or boycott. That's how it should be: I don't like your idea, and I get to say so.

Would a journal the stature of Charlie Hebdo in the United States publish cartoons depicting Muhammad, Islam's prophet, just for the sake of doing so?

Or would we in the U.S. just shrug at a Charlie Hebdo, write our letters, make our calls, demand firing, and move on?

Taking Charlie Hebdo's cartoons together, I infer that its overarching aim is that no idea is sacrosanct, every viewpoint is open to criticism and lampoon. Its cartoonists persevere on this point, pushing it purposefully in the face of death — to the point of death.

Would we? Would I? Am I Charlie?

I agree with The Sacramento Bee editorial today:

Sometimes, more mainstream journalists and artists find themselves aligned with practitioners who walk beyond the bounds of good taste and civility. Opinion journalists are out on the end of a very long branch. The far twigs of that branch are inhabited by publications such as Charlie Hebdo, and far less secure.

Or, as Pat Oliphant commented in 1988, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine's satire of televangelist Jerry Falwell:

Oliphant's version of Voltaire, anthologized in "Nothing Basically Wrong."
Oliphant's additional commentary: "A landmark decision by the Supreme Court.
If Falwell had prevailed, this book would have ended on the previous page."

Though literally surrounded by pens and pencils and ink — though passionate about cartooning — I do not see myself willing or able to carry a point as boldly as Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists. But I honor and appreciate that they do, because they extend the boundaries of freedom and keep light on the truth, where you and I can roam, arms flung wide.

And I honor those who will pick up the pen for editor/cartoonist Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), and cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut (Cabu), and Bernard Verlhac (Tignous), some of France's most famous cartoonists killed in Wednesday's attack.

"The real question," said diplomatic editor Julian Borger of The Guardian, "is whether anyone is going to pick up the baton, and being as brave and being as in your face as Charlie Hebdo. That is no small challenge. It is a lethal challenge."

Someone — many someones — must pick it up and keep going, keep expressing, for all of us. And we must enable them, we must help them hold the pen. We must be Charlie.

"We have avenged Muhammad!" the gunmen reportedly shouted. "We have killed Charlie Hebdo!"

But of course they didn't. Instead and instantly, they scattered its spores around the world. Acting on their bizarre and perverted interpretation of religion — Think as I, or die! — they accomplished the opposite of their goal. Charlie Hebdo cartoons zoom now around the world; controversial parodies of Muhammad proliferate.

May the spores of free expression flourish in our good soil.

Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill.
There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

— Alan Moore, V for Vendetta