![[]](images/spot_h.gif)
Confessions of a pope fan
DOUG MARLETTE, Newsday's editorial cartoonist, believes we'd have to make up a Pope if we didn't have one.
I have a confession to make right up front: I like the Pope. This is not easy for a Southern Baptist political cartoonist to admit, but it's true -- I am a secret admirer of Pope John Paul II. Cartoonists should be, by definition, anathema to Popes. We are, after all, professional heretics, blasphemers and questioners of authority. Irreverence is our business. Authority figures are red meat to us, from Popes to Presidents, and the worst sin a cartoonist can commit is to harbor affection for our targets. It can blur your aim, skew your accuracy. So you can imagine the discomfort and embarrassment I feel right now revealing this. I could have my India ink recalled. I can see it now: "Cartoonists who can't hit their targets. Next on Geraldo."
It's not that I always agree with the pontiff. Last year I drew a cartoon critical of him for barring the ordination of women. It showed the Pope close-up, wearing a button saying, "No women priests" with an arrow pointing to his forehead and the legend, "Upon this rock I will build my Church." It lit up the switchboard at Newsday. This cartoon brought down the wrath of legions of conservative Long Island Catholics upon me and my newspaper. My editors apologized in print for the cartoon. I defended it in print. My publisher was displeased. The staff was divided. Relations were strained, and it took quite awhile to mend. It wasn't pretty.
As you can see, religion is a dicey topic for cartoons and usually prompts hate mail -- and not just from my editors. Over the years I've probably had more cartoons on religion spiked than on any other subject -- from one showing Christ carrying an electric chair up Golgotha to another drawn when New York's Cardinal John O'Connor hired a public relations firm to bolster the Church's worldly image in regardsto abortion. It showed a Cardinal O'Connor figure commenting on the Crucifixion to a Roman soldier saying, "He should've hired a good PR firm!"
Nevertheless, as a true son of what Flannery O'Connor called "the Christ-haunted South," I have never shied away from religion or its symbols in my drawings. I grew up in small towns so backward even the Episcopalians handled snakes. Religion was as much a part of my Southern childhood as iced tea and fried okra, although Catholics seemed as exotic and foreign to me as garlic and pizza. ( I did hear recently about a Blessed Virgin sighting in rural Georgia that prompted an enterprising barbecue joint across the road to put up a sign that said, "Eat, Drink and See Mary.") Naturally, being raised Southern Baptist gave me a special radar for the foibles of tinhorn Protestant pontiffs -- those sawdust-trail divines like Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart -- and I go after them with gleeful abandon. In my comic strip "Kudzu," a preacher, Rev.Will B. Dunn, is featured prominently. But since all public figures are fair game for political cartoons, Pope John Paul II, this most public of pontiffs, has shown up in my crosshairs a few times over the years.
There is a rich tradition of Pope-bashing in American editorial cartooning. Thomas Nast, the father of political cartooning in this country, made his reputation as a reformer with attacks on Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, but he was a rabid anti-Catholic as well, and his deep suspicion of the Church's influence on politics bordered on bigotry. One of his most famous cartoons, "The American River Ganges," an attack on sectarianism in public schools, showed reptilian Catholic bishops slithering ashore, heads down with their mitres distorted to look like the razor-toothed jaws of crocodiles. Nast contemporary Joseph Keppler, another pillar of American graphic satire, a birthright Catholic and founder of the satirical weekly magazine Puck, was staunchly Pope-a-phobic. His cartoon "Pope Leo XIII, a Physiognomical Study," showing among other grotesque details the Pope's hair drawn as tiny serpents pecking out from beneath a skullcap labeled "propaganda," left little to the imagination as to the artist's attitudes toward the Holy Father.
Let's face it -- Popes are eminently cartoonable, especially this one. I have skewered him for his stand on birth control and women priests, but I have also drawn cartoons supporting him as he stood courageously against the communists in Eastern Europe. He dares you to draw him. Check out the outfit -- the mitre, the staff, the vestments. Won't it be refreshing to see a man wearing a gown in New York besides RuPaul? And how about that deep-set squint, his wide mouth and potato nose and, yes, his hard head -- immutable, like a rock. It's irresistible. In this day and age the Pope is a fixed point, like the North Star. He helps us navigate. He tells us where we are and where we aren't -- Catholics and pagans alike. If we didn't have a Pope, we'd have to make one up.
In short, he's everything Bill Clinton is not. You know where the Pope stands. You may not like it, but he isn't going to change to please you or anybody else. He doesn't cave in or pander to special interests. Bill Clinton, another Southern Baptist by the way, has elevated pandering to an art form. He shifts positions hourly, from gays in the military to prayer in schools; Clinton even makes Bob Dole look resolute. (Dole recently told the Republican National Committee, "I'm willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that's what you want.") They'd rather be President than right. Politics today is a video game, a virtual reality landscape populated by holograms like Clinton and Dole, virtual leaders who abdicate their autonomy and their integrity to the marketing survey, the focus group, and the exit poll with its wet-the-finger-and-hold-it-to-the-wind morality and politics. And voters are furious. Third-party grumblings abound. Kooks take potshots at the White House and dive-bomb it with single-engine planes. Our collective fury and frustration, expressed in radio talk show rage and burgeoning right-wing militias, lashes out at the self-absorbed, mealymouthed First Family parent figures in charge. It's like we're trapped in a John Hughes movie -- we're all Home Alone and Father Knows Zip.
But why blame the Clintons? They mirror and represent the ethos of our generation and the time we live in perfectly -- an age of shaky values, shifting morality, flabby conviction when nobody stands for anything -- except Pope John Paul II, who looms out of the mists and vapors, the gases and flatulence of our "anything goes" secular culture, like a marble sculpture by Michelangelo. There is a there there.
OK, I could do without the garish spectacle of vendors selling Pope paraphernalia -- blessed rosary beads and scapulas in Central Park ("Holy watah! Gitcher holy watah heah!"); I mean, what is this -- Pope-ahontas? And with overpopulation and half of Africa dying of AIDS, I wish the guy would lighten up on birth control But I'll take the Pope's riffs on sex any day over screenwriter Joe Esterzhas' cynical hype of Showgirls as "a deeply spiritual morality tale," or Calvin Klein's coyly characterizing his pedophile ads as a "message about the spirit, independence and inner worth of today's young people." Please. And in a country where Nicole Brown Simpson's killer may go free, where male athletes drop-kick their women as often as they do the football, where gangsta rappers routinely refer to women as "hos" and "bitches" and Bob Packwood blames it all on alcohol, they could all stand a dose of the Pope's devotion to the Blessed Virgin.
Sure, he seems like an anachronism, like a voice from another country, because he is -- his faith is 2,000 years old. His hard head and hard line are hard won, forged from a life on the front lines of the 20th century, and he knows what this century teaches you -- from Auschwitz to the gulag -- that if you give it an inch ,it will take a mile. If anything goes, then everything goes, so the line must be held. And his stubbornness is both maddening and comforting. Go figure.
Years ago I spent one unforgettable summer day in the North Carolina mountains with novelist Walker Percy, a Catholic and, until his death, an admirer of this Pope. Percy used to send me occasional cartoon ideas, but this was our first and only meeting. We talked about everything that day, as I pummeled him with questions about his books like The Moviegoer, life, literature, existentialism and his Catholic faith. How had he, a doctor, a scientist, an intellectual, come to convert to Catholicism at the age I was then -- 29? After patiently enduring my bone-drill interrogation through lunch and a stroll down to the lake and back onto his deck where we sat sipping iced tea into the late golden August afternoon, he looked at me, sensing my frustration with some of his answers, and said, "It's not something you figure out."
"What?" I asked.
"Faith." He answered. "You're trying to figure it out. It's not something you figure out."
"It's not?" I said.
"No, it 's not."
"Oh," I said.
There was a pause as he let it sink in. Then he added, "It's a gift."