Hope as a four-letter word

How fascinating is this week's work by World's Best Editorial Cartoonist Pat Oliphant? Let me count the ways:

(Fanboys and girls of editorial cartoons — ye tiny but zealous lot — commence salivation …)

1. It's vintage Pat Oliphant:

Artistically, it's the cartoonist, two or three bottles of ink and a brush, and get outta the way! The result: A maelstrom of lines and squiggles and scribbles and scratches and the blackest blacks and the most delicate and telling of details, gelling into a complex serving of cold gall that few besides Oliphant can pull off.

Politically, it's Oliphant in the dark recess of his citizen heart.

Cynics could say Oliphant, the elder statesman of great cartoonists at 77, simply wanted an excuse to draw the villains of the Golden Age of editorial cartoons; I know it's a trope among several top cartoonists who joke they wish they had Nixon to kick around some more.

But here Oliphant unearths this lot for grave purpose. In fact, I think this cartoon is a personal appeal to President Obama; he's not trying to mess with the minds of the shrinking op-ed reading public; he's trying to mess with the president.

At heart, Oliphant is a patriot who regards his work as duty, ever vigilant to our country's flaws, ever hopeful that we do what we can to mend those flaws.

This cartoon suggests to me that Oliphant is about to give up hope in the president — as I am about to — dismayed that rather than ushering in change and progress and rescue of the Constitution, Obama instead carries on more of the same opaque imperialism he replaced, only moreso.

Oliphant has penned one (last?) wake-up call. Will President Obama see it from Senegal, where he's traveling?

Oliphant has been moving toward this statement for a while. Shortly before calling Obama out as just another crony, he produced this one:

Completely devoid of laugh lines, this cartoon is simply a severe interrogation, questioning President Obama's grasp of his office. It is cold and hard and cutting. Oliphant is fed up.

2. J. Edgar is wearing high heels. An Oliphant never forgets, and never foregoes a chance to pierce with his fiercest stereotypes.

3. It's raw art, no attempt made to erase pencil lines or to scan and Photoshop®™© it for clean clean contrast. It's as if the cartoon missed a step toward reproduction, as if Oliphant or an assistant rushed it to dissemination. It's full of smudges and extraneous pencil lines, reminding me of editorial cartoons I've seen in museum exhibits, warty and coated in Wite-Out™® blobs to hide mistakes from the press; we've been let in to where the wizard works the levers.

•••

So appropos of nothing you'll miss it: Suppose California voters passed a proposition outlawing interracial marriage. You'd be horrified, or should be. But say it passed anyway, and proposition supporters argue (without any proof) that children deserve to be raised by a mom and a dad of the same color, that parents of different races will just not provide the correct upbringing required. Then let's say the governor and the attorney general decide that the proposition, though approved by voters, violates the Constitutional protections for all under the law, and do not support it.

Then say U.S. Supreme Court decides that since the governor and California attorney general will not defend the proposition, there's nothing to decide on and the proposition has no merit. Then say the proposition's supporters decry the Supreme Court's decision, saying the court has taken away our vote. Wouldn't you counter that even though the majority of voters approved the measure, it's still blatant discrimination and violates the Constitution? Wouldn't you? (The answer is yes.)

The same for the Supreme Court's take Wednesday on Proposition 8, which would restrict marriage to between a man and a woman. Now I'm hearing the same arguments, that the high court has taken away our vote. Ah, the essential barely fathomable beauty of our democracy: That just because most people may vote for clear discrimination against those they find different or loathsome, checks and balances protect us from our stupid selves.

Moreso utterly appropos: Why do people take pictures of the foods they're about to eat and post them on facebook, et. al? You could explain it to me, but it won't make any less silly.

For good men to do nothing

A funk permeates the week, for reasons concrete and ineffable.

One canary in my coalmine is this blog, for which ideas normally abound. This week it feels like blogging for blogging's sake, fulfilling nothing more than a small disciplined rite.

What I would write feels even more trivial. I'm temporarily tired of talking about open-water swimming (as tired as you may be of reading about it) this week, and even tired of swimming open water (or tired from it). Though I hold a trove of drawings, and await a time soon in which I can show-and-tell new work, I don't see the value this week in posting them.

I've been thinking, and that's dangerous.

Thinking that this week, among many, the government of Syria is bombarding its city of Homs,  News sources whom I judge credible cite sources who say government agents are detaining and torturing children as part of its campaign to suppress opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. That's in addition to relentlessly shelling the city against any and all. Just sheer, plain, open (as close as the news media can get) bloody repression.

You could rightly ask, "Where ya been?" Atrocities go on all the time, in the Congo, in Iran, in Egypt, Pakistan. Where was I during the ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims, you could ask? Probably where I am now, at my desk, letting the news trickle in and out my ears.

This week, for some reason, it jolted me to stupefaction.

This week, an investigator for the United Nations reported that Sacramento violates the human rights of its homeless, restricting access to water and public restrooms. Of course, open urination and defecation is a crime; so the city forces homeless to add to the complex nefarious factors that render them homeless, the daily undignified crime of evacuating their bowels. And I in stupefaction and indifference, let it go on.

One TV news station interviewed a homeless woman who said she goes to the bathroom in plastic grocery shopping bags, and tosses the filled bags into trash bins. She looks matter-of-factly at the reporter as she says this, with just a hint of hesitation, gathering up what dignity is still hers to tell an unseen public what she must do to get through her day.

Up to that moment, I had not even thought of her indignity. It's so easy for me to choose not to. I know children live on the banks of the American River, without a place to call home; I know that each morning a van for the Mustard Seed School drives on the levee roads, calling out to the hidden encampments that school will soon start and would you be able to come today? I've known it for years. I choose to forget.

This week, a reason to celebrate a freedom still hangs under threat. A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California's Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional.

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," wrote a judge in the majority opinion. Clear as day.

Gay marriage is still banned, the court decided, citing the inevitable court appeal to come, and the expected hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

My congressional representative, Republican Dan Lungren, advanced Prop. 8's basic argument, that the people have spoken and marriage should remain only between a man and a woman. The elusory beauty of our system of government is that it's designed to save us from ourselves: True, the majority of people could also vote that Islam should be outlawed or that redheads should be interned or that some children for this or that reason should receive an education, but that wouldn't make it right.

We have legally oppressed our citizens by the color of their skin, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation. We are beginning anew the oppression of citizens by their religion. Yet our rule of law has painfully, slowly turned on itself to erode those oppressions.

Dan Lungren does not represent all whom he is duly sworn to represent, and by extension, does not represent me.

And what, for god's sake, is so much better about marriage being between a man and a woman? The evidence for its hypocrisy is piled high, and a society made richer and more complex by a myriad of family dynamics, good and bad, turns the argument for tradition into cheese cloth.

I still can't fathom the harm gay marriage does to anything or anyone, except by the creation of vitriol in those who have decided all of us should live in their mold and fashion. It does not interfere with traditional marriage. It instead accords rights already inherent, that law up to now has denied.

I offer no solution for any of this. It vexes and perplexes, and I am impotent in my apoplexy. What little I was doing to help anyone else's unease has given way to a weird worklife lately. Excuses, excuses. But somehow I have the energy for semi-public self-flagellation? Hmm.

One of my favorite cartoonists, Art Spiegelman, who laid bare his own barely bearable guilt when he created the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a Survivor's Tale, said "Perhaps guilt is a useful civilizing agent that keeps people from behaving worse than they otherwise might. Guilt can be an explosive thing to live with, but it may be the price we humans must pay for civilization while trying to learn true Empathy."

The hell of it is, for reasons plain and impenetrable, my funk will lift and I'll examine the totems of my life with new vigor. And children will still scream in torment in Syria and elsewhere at the hands of those who see them as weapons. A woman mere miles from my warm home will find no other choice but to shit in a bag and throw it in a Dumpster™©. Gay and lesbian couples will still truly wonder if their day of acceptance will come.

Where ya been?