There was a time when editorial cartooning was a job a young artist could aspire to. In 1900, there were an estimated 2,000 editorial cartoonists at work in the United States. They still numbered in the hundreds by the late ’70s, when—at the start of my career—I briefly became one of them.

It’s probably just as well that I moved on to other things. Since then, the American editorial cartoonist has become an endangered species, right up there with the pygmy elephant. The total in  the U.S. is reportedly below 25 now, and falling. Just in the last two years, two Pulitzer Prize-winners—Nick Anderson at the Houston Chronicle and Steve Benson at the Arizona Republic—were dumped. In June, following an uproar about a cartoon full of anti-Semitic tropes, the international edition of The New York Times followed the example of its national counterpart and fired its last two cartoonists—neither of whom, by the way, had drawn the offending cartoon.

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: Iran now boasts more editorial cartoonists than the U.S.

I thought for a while that editorial cartooning would be my life’s work. Old-timers like Herblock and Conrad were giving way to subtle, innovative artists like Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly. Strip cartoonists like Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau were blurring the line between the Sunday comics and the editorial page. These young guns were transforming the medium—putting irony and satire, artistic style and sly visual humor ahead of blunt-force commentary. It was an exciting time to be an editorial cartoonist.

And I loved the actual process of creating a cartoon—the immersion in the news, the joyous flash of inspiration, the inner howls of laughter as I did my preliminary sketches, the knowledge of famous faces that allowed me to draw Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton without conscious thought and the feeling of working without a net each time I wielded my ink brush to create the final product.

Over the years, I must have done hundreds of drawings of Clinton, then governor of the state where I lived, including one, shown here, that was completed shortly after he was first elected governor at the tender age of 32. It’s without a doubt the most prescient thing I’ve ever produced.

Part of the fun of it was the pure joy of poking fun at powerful people. I used to joke that we editorial cartoonists were the last of the yellow journalists—the only purveyors of the news who still had license to use caricature and exaggeration to distill complicated situations down to a single, simplistic metaphor. Our work was full of open mockery —an artform that intentionally stretched the limits of polite discourse.

And that was probably a big part of its undoing. In a time of heightened sensitivities and social media mobs, caricature has become a dangerous sport. As Australian cartoonist Mark Knight (whose caricatures are uniformly brutal) learned when tennis player Serena Williams’s husband accused him of a racist depiction of her, there’s a fine line between the kind of harsh visual exaggeration that caricatures depend upon and the perpetuation of cruel stereotypes. Add in the decline of newspapers as a profitable industry, and it’s not surprising, I suppose, that cartoonists have become, at best, expendable and, at worst, potential liabilities.

Given all of that, the number of young American artists who now aspire to become the next great editorial cartoonist is probably on a par with the number who plan to repair steam engines. But while the bell is clearly tolling for American editorial cartooning, I have to admit that I was wrong when I said we were the last of the yellow journalists. Yellow journalism, I’m afraid, is viciously alive and well on social media and talk radio—minus, of course, the redeeming humor.

There was a time, not so very long ago, historically speaking, when everyone assumed the future would look pretty much like the past—if they were lucky. Any sort of significant change was something to be feared and avoided, because it probably meant invasion or plague or something equally likely to send your life up in flames.

The modern concept of progress—the notion that advances in science, culture and social organization are feeding a steady improvement in the human condition—was a product of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. As an ideology, the cult of progress may have reached its peak in the optimism of middle-class America in the ’50s and ’60s, when new medicines and a parade of shiny and suddenly affordable labor-saving gadgets seemed to promise an end to drudgery and dread.

But as the pace of change has continued to accelerate, we’ve become a bit more world-weary about what it all means. The optimism of the ’50s and ’60s has curdled into fatalism. We expect change—and a lot of it—but we don’t necessarily expect progress. We’ve reverted to our historic default—viewing change with a high degree of trepidation.

Maybe that’s why anticipating the next big change has become such a fascination. We’ve all become futurists of a sort. Not that planning for tomorrow is in any way new. Indeed, some believe the ability to think about the future is what made us human in the first place. But predicting what tomorrow may bring has now become a central facet of our lives.

Did you check the weather forecast this morning to see if you needed an umbrella? Did you read the election polls or watch a TV pundit discuss the possible fallout from a recent Supreme Court decision? Did you put off buying a new computer or a new car because you read that the next iteration will be amazing? Did you, just for fun, fill out a World Cup or Final Four or MLB, NFL or NHL playoff bracket? Did you invest your hard-earned money in a stock you think/hope might be on the rise?

Yeah, so did I.

To do all of this future-gazing, we employ a range of cognitive tools, some more effective than others. We use the science of statistics with a remarkable degree of success—when we do it right. We use deductive reasoning with rather more mixed success. And of course, we use lots of guesswork and magical thinking, with just enough accidental success to make us superstitious.

We’re wrong a lot—or else Hillary Clinton would be president, cars would fly through the air, and we’d all be fabulously rich.

So, when we at PCM asked Sagehen experts in a variety of disciplines to make some daring predictions about what’s next in their fields, our purpose wasn’t really to give you a preview of the future, though we hope that you’ll take away some interesting ideas of what may be in store for us down the road.

The main reason we sought these predictions, and the reason our experts offered them, was as a kind of thought experiment. Thoughtful, informed predictions tell us as much about the present as they do about the future. Whether or not these predictions turn out to be right, I hope you’ll find the reasoning behind them intriguing and enlightening.

Of course, if you shake the dust off this issue of PCM a decade from now, you may find that some of these predictions were dead wrong. A few may even seem quaint and funny.

Like the science fiction writers of the ’50s whose spacefaring heroes went rocketing about the solar system while navigating with slide rules, sometimes we know something revolutionary is coming, but we pick the wrong revolution.

That’s the danger of prediction, even for experts.

Remembering Martha

If there was one person more than any other who personified what made my experience of Pomona extraordinary, it was Professor Martha Andresen. The brilliance of her intellect was matched by the openness of her heart, and she instilled in me a love of literature that remains alive after more than three decades.  I know that I am far from unique in that regard; a number of my classmates who have gone into teaching have spoken of drawing on her example years later. She challenged her students in the best possible way, confronting the flaws and unexamined assumptions in our thinking not to make us feel inferior but to push us to become the better readers, writers and thinkers she believed we could be.

I had the great good fortune of continuing a friendship with Professor Andresen long after I had graduated, corresponding about our lives, art, politics, and most of all writing.  We would discuss the books we had recommended to each other, explicating what a particular writer had achieved or failed to achieve.  This was never dull academic pontificating, at least on her end; everything she wrote burned with her love of the written word.  I have kept every one of those letters from her, and I cherish them.

Pomona will of course go on, with other talented and dedicated professors to lead it into the future, but it will never be the same.  Martha Andresen will never be replaced.

—Eric Meyer ’87
Lake Oswego, OR

Wilds of L.A.

Thanks to Char Miller for his review of the natural systems that have shaped Los Angeles (“The Wilds of L.A.,” PCM Spring 2018). But I think he’s misreading the city when he calls it “concretized and controlled” and claims that it’s “nearly impossible to locate nature” in Los Angeles, except in the earthquakes, fires and floods that he describes in almost apocalyptic tones.

In contrast to many large cities, wildlife and nature are a wonderful, unavoidable part of everyday life in Los Angeles. At our home just two miles north of Downtown L.A., we are frequently visited by coyotes, bobcats, possums, raccoons, skunks and snakes. Birds of prey like red-tailed hawks and screech owls share the trees with woodpeckers, finches, warblers and hummingbirds.

I was especially chagrined that Prof. Miller dismisses the Los Angeles River as an “inverted freeway.” The channelized River is indeed a concrete ditch for much of its 52-mile run, but it is also a habitat for much wildlife, especially in the three “soft-bottom” sections of the river (the Sepulveda Basin, the Glendale Narrows, and the Long Beach Estuary). I recently published a novel set on the L.A. River (The Ballad of Huck & Miguel), and the fugitives in the book encounter many of the same animals that I’ve encountered down there, including herons, egrets, turtles, fish and snakes.

What’s more, millions of LA residents live less than an hour away from mountain waterfalls, desert oases and ocean tide pools. For nature lovers who also want access to the cultural diversity (and economic opportunity) of a major urban metropolis, there is no better place to be than Los Angeles.

—Tim DeRoche ‘92
Los Angeles, CA

A Rural Voice

As a longtime “Rural Voice” from Beaver Dam, Wis., I was especially interested in Mark Wood’s piece on Rachel Monroe ’06 and Marfa, Texas, because I had just been reading Possibilities by Patricia Vigderman.  In the chapter “Sebald in Starbucks”  she writes about sitting in Starbucks in Marfa and reading W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. She explains how Marfa got its name: In 1881, a Russian woman came with her husband, a railroad overseer,  to an unnamed whistle stop. She was reading a novel published the previous year, The Brothers Karamazov, in which Dostoevsky gave the name Marfa to the Karamazov family servant—and the unnamed town in Texas got its name. The essay is delightful, as is the book by Vigderman.

—Caroline Burrow Jones ’55
Pasadena, CA

Dwyer Passing

Thank you, PCM, for publishing news of the passing of former Pomona College Assistant Professor of History John Dwyer.  He served at Pomona for only a few years, but the quality of that service was unmatched in my experience.  I remain grateful beyond words for his friendship and guidance, for his love of history and Africa and for his wonderful family.  Saturday mornings will always bring memories of the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, accompanied by a proper pot of tea.  Thank you, Mr. Dwyer, for everything.

—David Beales ’73
Elk Grove, CA

A Barnett Fan

Okay, maybe the good part of being a children’s author is that Mac Barnett’s (’04) kid audience doesn’t “fanboy” over him…but the adults reading his books definitely do! I was so psyched to open the Spring 2018 issue to “Ideas That Feel Alive.” We are HUGE fans of his work in our family, and we read one of his books with our 2½-year-old Lyra almost every day. We particularly love his collaborations with illustrator Jon Klassen—Extra Yarn and The Wolf, The Duck & The Mouse are our most beloved favorites. We’d actually just bought Triangle for Greg Conroy’s (Pomona ‘00) son Malcolm’s third birthday on the same day the PCM arrived in the mail! It’s super refreshing to read kids’ books that are quirky and smart: Barnett doesn’t talk down to kids or dumb down his stories, even when they’re a little dark or offbeat (in the best way possible). We can’t wait to keep reading everything he writes!

—Chelsea Morse ‘02
Astoria, NY

Kudos for PCM

Pomona College Magazine continues to be readable, relevant and enlightening, thanks to your creativity and hard work. We look forward to each issue and read it cover to cover.

—Bonnie Home ’62 and
DeForrest Home ’61
San Jose, CA

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.

POMONA IS EXTRAORDINARY. We remind ourselves of this proudly when we marvel at the brilliance of our students and faculty, the accomplishments of our alumni, the talent of our staff, the amazing marks Sagehens leave on the world. How many high-achieving people, people who never give up, do we see every day?

What a wondrous thing! Yet I wonder something else, too. How much room do we give ourselves and each other to slow down? To choose which amazing thing we are going to do—today? There’s a lot of pressure on everyone to take advantage of all of the gifts and opportunities in front of us. We advise each other to excel.

Maybe we can talk about excelling wisely.

Sometimes people ask me for advice, and this column seems a good place to give some, if you’ll let me. Most of us acknowledge that you have to seek balance in life; equally, we acknowledge that finding such a balance is hard. This truth deserves more than lip service.  We need to tell ourselves and each other that we can achieve and excel without taking every drop of energy from our reserves. That we all need to take some time to laugh.

Parents, friends, professors, bosses, coworkers and mentors routinely use language that raises expectations: We challenge, we press and we exhort. Even this magazine—always full of stories about people doing extraordinary things—can sometimes seem to be ratcheting up the pressure to achieve. There’s good reason for all of that. Everyone needs to be reminded that they can do great things. But we also need other reminders. Creativity requires freedom, space and room to grow. And achievement isn’t the only thing that adds meaning to our lives.

This issue of the magazine is, as usual, about some amazing Pomona people, but it’s also about the sometimes blissful, sometimes thorny relationship between the work we do and the lives we live. It’s about achieving lifelong dreams and coping with life-or-death stress. It’s about life-changing choices and what happens when everything falls apart.

Most importantly, the stories in this issue are about dealing with timeless, and timely, questions. I hope you pause and give yourself permission in your work, your studies and your relationships to make the life you desire.

—G. Gabrielle Starr
President of Pomona College

“Hidden Pomona” and the Whartons

I was recently visiting my mother (Mayrene Gorton Ogier ’49) in Atascadero, Calif., and noticed the cover photo of the Spring 2017 issue of PCM depicting Pomona’s first Black graduate, Winston Dickson 1904. The magazine was doing secondary duty under a flower pot, but the water-stained photo nevertheless looked familiar.  And indeed, it depicts Dickson boxing with my great-uncle, William Wharton 1906.

Then, inside on pages 28 and 29, was a wonderful double-page photo spread of Dickson a year and a half after his graduation, socializing with the 1905–06 Pomona College football team—evidently relaxing and recounting plays following a hard-fought game. (In those years, Pomona routinely beat USC, among others.) The gentleman immediately in front of Dickson in profile with his back to the camera wearing a disheveled suit coat is very likely Seaborn Wharton 1901, who stayed on at Pomona as football coach for a number of years before returning to Tulare, Calif., to manage the family farm.

The two gentlemen sitting in the dirt talking with Seaborn and Dickson are almost surely William, who was team captain in 1906 and strikingly handsome, but who tragically died in a mining cave-in soon after graduating, and likely, Charles Greene (Charley) Wharton 1907, my grandfather, who later became a urologist in the Sierras silver-rush town of Bodie, Calif., and then in downtown Los Angeles, after graduating from medical school at Bowdoin. All three of them were distinguishable from their Pomona mates by their six-foot-plus height and wild curly hair—as was their sister, Minnie 1902, who taught school in Pomona and was vice president of the Pomona Alumni Association after World War I.

If I knew how to communicate with those Whartons now, I would ask about Winston Dickson, as per the wishes of the hosts of the “Hidden Pomona” podcasts, who had little information to work with aside from old photographs. The Wharton family surely knew him very well.

By the way, that early 19th-century Wharton family “thing” about Pomona College (the entire family moved to Claremont for a decade so the children could attend) has persisted. If my children had matriculated at Pomona as I hoped they might (they chose Princeton and Occidental instead), they would have been the 31st and 32nd extended Wharton/Alexander/Ogier/ Gannon/Wyse/Wiederanders family members to do so (counting also my father, Walter T. Ogier, who chaired the Physics Department for many years). To further the Pomona cause, my grandfather, Charley Wharton, and my grandmother, Aileen, in addition to being substantial direct donors to Pomona during their lives, also contributed financially and otherwise to the successful passage through Pomona of my siblings, Thomas Ogier ’82 and Kathryn Ogier Lum ’88. How I managed to miss Pomona’s siren call is not clear.

—Walter C. Ogier
Williams College ‘78
Winchester, Mass.

I Do Belong

I’ve been meaning to write since reading the touching, inspiring article by Carla Guerrero ’06, “I Do Belong Here,” in the Summer 2017 PCM. Then, this week, President Starr asked us to write our Pomona stories to her, and I responded. It was only right that I also write to you, for it was Carla’s story that inspired me to be in touch with Pomona College again after over 60 years.

In 1952–54 I was a freshman and sophomore at Pomona College. As the only Japanese American in my class (there were two other Asians—no Blacks or Latinos) and coming from an immigrant, working-class family in Los Angeles, I was very aware I did not fit at Pomona in terms of race or social class. I was even invited to join the International Club. I suppose the well-meaning people who invited me did not understand that people of color were not necessarily born outside the U.S.

Your story, the information that more than 50 percent of this year’s new class are domestic students of color and President Starr’s appointment fill me with joy. Pomona has always been a fine academic institution. I’m glad it is also moving toward being a welcoming home for multicultural students who reflect the current demographics of our country.

Congratulations and thank you to Carla and others who were part of the wise group of people who brought President Starr to Pomona College.

—Amy Iwasaki Mass ’56
El Cerrito, Calif.

I was very touched by Carla Guererro’s column in the most recent PCM entitled, “I Do Belong Here.”  I graduated from Pomona in 1998, and as I read her piece, I was transported back to my days as a student. I could completely relate to her experience as an awkward first-gen Latina daughter of proud immigrant parents trying to find her place at Pomona. Like Carla, I found a good group of peers, and with the support of wonderful faculty and staff, I thrived.  The excitement she described at the hiring of Gabi Starr as Pomona’s new president is felt well beyond Claremont.  I’ve talked to many of my Pomona friends, and we all agree—we’re so very proud of Pomona and can’t wait to see how President Starr will influence and inspire the entire community. Thank you, Carla, for writing a piece that truly captured not only a shared experience of the past but also a shared enthusiasm for the future of the college we love.

—Juliette Cagigas ’98
Whittier, Calif.

The Mind of a Psychopath

I enjoyed reading the article titled “How to Understand the Mind of a Psychopath” in the Summer 2017 PCM. I was impressed with 2017 graduate Kaily Lawson’s view on cognitive science and what goes on inside the mind of what many consider to be a “serial killer.” I found it interesting that many prominent figures in today’s society have traits found in psychopaths.

Now, when it comes to famous serial killers whose acts spurred an utter disturbance among Americans, it is hard to determine how the legal system should treat these individuals. An example of this is Ed Kemper, infamous as “the Co-Ed Butcher.” Although he was found guilty of his horrible crimes and received seven years to life in prison, he turned himself in to the police and ultimately felt remorse for what he had done. In his most recent parole hearing, he rejected attending it because he deemed himself unfit to return to society. He suddenly recognized that his crimes were morally wrong and confessed his guilt. But what caused this sudden change in intuition? Lawson obviously has a great interest in this branch of psychology, and I completely understand when she says there’s a “continuum” for psychopathic traits, where people may be placed on a spectrum of “good” or “bad.”

Once again, I enjoyed reading this article, and I hope Ms. Lawson finds success in her future career. I also wish her the best in her efforts to influence public policy in today’s legal system.

—Jules Winnfield
Inglewood, Calif.

Extreme Individualism

The summer issue of PCM contains three letters from readers shocked by the simplistic right/wrong mentality of the modern occupants of Pomona College. I studied philosophy with Fred Sontag and W.T. Jones in the ’50s and sang in the glee clubs. But for the last 15 years I have been a student of Sanatana Dharma, the timeless path of the ancient riches in India. Before that I was interested in Chinese thinking for decades.

My background leads me to see what is going on at Pomona as an extreme form of individualism in the still-adolescent culture that is the United States. What we need today is the ability to open our hearts to everyone and use our minds to try to understand what our hearts tell us about others. Pomona is of course a bookish place.

I take issue also with the idea that climate change is the major issue. Doris Lessing’s futuristic novels suggest what the world might look like after catastrophe: They are lost but surviving. However, I would say that the major issue is the fallout from unregulated socially irresponsible capitalism and our apparent inability to live together in a crowded landscape without resulting in wars between city blocks scaled up to nations.

There are so many good people in America, although one might think money is the main value for most people. So I also hold the thought that Trump may save us yet by pushing us so close to self-destruction that we may suddenly experience a mass epiphany and find in our midst unknown new leaders who can lead us, hopefully without too much humor about how foolish we were to be taken in by our dogmatic old beliefs.

—Thomas (Megha) deLackner, ‘58
Concord, Calif.

I hope certain letter writers in the Summer 2017 PCM learn someday that what they call “political correctness” is simply treating those different from them with basic dignity and respect. They should try it sometime.  They might learn a few things that four years at Pomona evidently failed to teach them.

—Bruce Mirken ’78
San Francisco, Calif.

Correction

In your obituaries in the Summer 2017 PCM, you listed Robert Shelton as Robert “Bob” H. Shelton ’47. He was always known as “Robin” Shelton at Pomona. I should know because I married him.

—Miriam Cross Shelton
Laguna Beach, Calif.

Alumni, parents and friends are invited to email letters to pcm@pomona.edu or “snail-mail” them to Pomona College Magazine, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Letters may be edited for length, style and clarity.