Wisdom of the age(s)

Two lessons emerged between last week and 28 years ago, when this cartoon was published.

1. Politicians never really fall from grace.

Joe Biden bowed out of presidential contention for the 1988 election after revelations that he plagiarized from a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party at the time.

I know: Quaint, right? After the long sordid parade of political wrongdoing we've put up with since? That's what derailed Biden's political hopes?

(By the way, I ran this 'toon earlier in this blog, but the statute of limitations has run out, so it's OK to reuse.)

By the way, the joke in this 'toon is that I have Biden plagiarizing Richard Nixon's infamous line when he lost the 1962 race for California governor: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." If you didn't get it, you're way too young.)

The point is, we did have Nixon to kick around, and we had Joe Biden.

Back when I was way too young, I meant this cartoon to be the nail in the coffin, my don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out goodbye to a marginal figure in the political panoply.

I could claim that I used Nixon's stolen line to mean that Biden would bounce back and continue his political career, rising ultimately to vice president, but that would be giving me way too much credit.

I'm not that smart, then or now.

Biden did bounce back. It was only last week that he finally bid farewell to his lifelong dream of becoming president. Biden bowed out of contention without having ever really stepped in.

Biden never went away, and will not go away, for good or bad. That is the way with politicians.

Even after politicians fall by election trouncing or personal transgression, someone will always make sure they land safely and comfortably, pick them up and put them in a place of prosperity and patronage. If the evil rival party has taken over and booted your butt, your butt will always be covered by some benefactor with a board on which to put you, with generous stipend and travel expenses and speaking fees. Or your party machine will keep you in office, if that's your desire.

I've seen it time and again with politicians, locally and nationally. No matter what they've done, they land somewhere safe, and benefit despite everything.

Be politicians, my children.

2. Occasionally it's good that politicians never fall from grace.

Joe Biden achieved elder statesmanhood, having served as a longtime Democratic Senator from Delaware. He amassed the foreign policy experience that made him viable as President Obama's running mate, which made them viable for two terms.


He became the wishful hope of those who wanted another option in the Democratic race, an actual flawed human, a well-intentioned gaffe generator, who hugs women in official ceremonies a bit too gladly, who bears the burden of having buried his first wife and toddler daughter long ago, killed in a car wreck, and having buried his eldest son Beau, who died of brain cancer.

Biden was the antidote to the say-every-stupid-thing-that-comes-to-mind Republican front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

But now we really won't have Biden to kick around anymore.

I wouldn't worry about him, though.

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.

Guns versus mutter

Two beacons for radical change crossed this week, one gone cold, the other burning hot.

•••

Robert Bork died. He's why Supreme Court nominees don't say much more than "We gotta play 'em one game at a time" and "I'm just happy to be here" and equivalent clichés during Senate confirmation hearings.

Because when Bork opened his mouth during his hearing, out spilled arrogance and contempt for all of us. Supposedly charming in social settings, Bork might have made it onto the court were it not for his public demeanor — he somehow had popular support — and would have died on the bench trying to put all women back in skirts with minimum hem, and everyone back to before civil rights.

Bork was one of the original "originalists" who argued that we must follow the Constitution as its creators intended. By the looks of his Shaker beard and wild ringletted hair, he could have been one of those creators.

President Nixon's hatchet man in firing Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox (when attorney General Elliot Richardson refused and resigned in protest), Bork was a Harvard professor specializing in antitrust law — which he opposed.

He also opposed your right to privacy, because it's not explicit in the Constitution. Nor is civil rights, he said, though a poll tax, designed to prohibit blacks from voting, wouldn't OK; it wasn't in the original Constitution, just the 24th Amendment, I suppose.

"In the subsequent quarter-century," after most of the Senate voted against his confirmation in 1987, The New Yorker said, "Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along."

Ahhh, Bork and Ollie … key players in the Reagan administration, second
only to the Nixon administration for its dark melodrama …

To paying choirs, he was a libertarian who preached against individualism, and railed against our social sins ruining the country — sins sent forth by the free market he loved, even if it wasn't free enough. He tried to turn back time and tide rather than deal with the inexorable change.

"Bork" became a verb in his time, meaning to vilify publicly. Better to bork than be borked, I guess.

•••

In sincerity and silliness, debate over what the country does next after Sandy Hook still burns hot.

California's retired teachers' investment program plans to divest itself of a company that owns a gun maker (noble and immediate, though why didn't it do so long before?). Gun owner advocates, led now by the National Rifle Association, continue to urge we arm teachers, or at least post an armed guard at every school. Armored children's backpacks are selling briskly at $200 per.

NRA director Wayne LaPierre blamed violent video games and movies and said today the next Adam Lanza is planning an attack on a school. (Buy more guns, by the way! Become a member, before it's too late!) As much as I hate the video games — what's fun about shooting people, even for pretend? — I doubt they're the cause. How many millions play? Are we going to enforce ideas now?

News reports this week remind me that Patrick Purdy's Stockton schoolyard shooting in 1989 prompted a ban on assault weapons — that wasn't enacted until 1994, and not without guarantees to lift the ban in 2004, nor without loopholes that guaranteed assault weapons could still be sold legally.

The Bushmaster assault weapon — one was used at Sandy Hook — is popular, I learned, because the makers stripped it clean of all the features that would have banned it under that 1994 law. It's sleek and cool and fun, I've heard gun advocates say more than once.

Of mental health, President Obama said access to it should be at least as easy as access to guns. California's Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg urges early mental health treatment.

That's it so far.

Talk should shift almost entirely to mental health, not just in money to provide it but in the way we all think about it. And certainly not just for people who would shoot up a school.

Suicides in the U.S. military run almost one a day now, and most who kill themselves never deployed, never saw battle, as we expect. Many face isolation in the military, and try to survive in a culture that frames mental issues as weaknesses.

But as far as we know — and we don't know what we don't know — the Adam Lanza got his weapons from his mom, who would likely have gone through meetings and training to procure them. They were legal; the shooter got them by some means, and police say he shot his mom before driving to the school. His mental health was known, his troubles known, as far as we can tell. His mother was trying to do something about it.

That's where the talk should focus.

Some of the reaction this week is … reactionary. In what is shaping up to be an Internet meme, dads of elementary school children are donning their military or police uniforms and standing guard outside their children's schools. It's a sincere Hands-Across-America gesture that poses troubling questions:

• How long are you planning to stand guard?
• Are you armed? Please say no.
• If you aren't armed, how are you planning to stop an attack?
• Who are you? How do we know?

Already, at least one self-appointed guard may not be the Marine he claimed, and the gesture suddenly becomes absurd.

At the school where I teach a weekly art lesson, nothing had changed, to my surprise. The office staff sits far back from the front counter. Most of the time they don't ask who I am with my cart full of papers. I fill out my adhesive nametag, sign in on the visitor log, and sign out while I'm at it, since it's easier to go straight back to my car after the lesson.

It's no different now, a week after the Sandy Hook shooting. In fact, I forgot to peel off my nametag yesterday; it was still sitting there on the label sheet when I thought twice and went back to the office, just to see if anyone noticed. No, still there. No, no one looked up to see me pass.

Maybe that's as it should be. Horrible as it is, statistics show school shootings are rare, the danger extremely low. That's small to no comfort.

The real epidemic, requiring radical change, remains our mental health.

Joe, we know ye too well

Last week Vice President Joe Biden was caught napping (or at least closing his eyes for a long period) at President Obama's here's-how-we-fix-our-budget-mess news conference. It was much ado about very little, the kind of thing the news media converge on because the real issues are too hard to understand and report.

Joe was sleeping way back when too, when he was caught plagiarizing, word for word, a speech by British Labour politician Neil Kinnock during his run for the presidency; that was the end of Biden's campaign. I drew Joe Biden borrowing from Nixon as his parting shot, thinking that was the last of him. But politicians never do quite go away, do they?

This is one of a bunch of cartoons that I drew in a square format. I must have been shopping the cartoons to a publication with a square hole in its editorial page, but I can't remember which.