alexander's office where the republican lawmaker talks about his public service and the stories behind some of his political momentos. then a look at a reconstructed blacksmith forth on wheels built over the course of two years using 19th century plans from the national archives. after that artifacts from the american revolution from a knew museum in philadelphia set to open in early 2017. and later, a look at the civil war medical history at the maryland national museum of health and medicine. the c-span cities tour visits historic sites across the nation to hear from lickal historians, authors an civic leaders every other weekend on c-span book tv and american history tv on c-span 3. and this month with congress on the summer recess the cities tour on c-span each day at 6:00 p.m. eastern. today we head to key west, florida, and visit the earnest hemingway house, learn about the cities jewish history and talk with the author of a book titled, quit your job and move to key west, the complete guide. four months after the terrorist shooting at charlie hebdo in paris, a panel of american cartoonists discusses the role of satire in journalism.the ge the george polk seminar hosted this event in new york city. f >> let me quickly introduce our panelists. tomorrowne gary trudeau will receive the george polk career award. his doons bury comic strip has obtained the status of a great s american institution. years for 45 years, he has spared no public figure or ill-conceived y policy in the unique approach to political commentary. he stands alongside such cartoonists as walt kelly, paul conrad and our next panelist, jules feiffer at the end. jules feiffer, brilliantly cartoons apilled in the village choice for 42 years. author of 35 books. he's written novels, plays, movie scripts and an acclaimed e autobiography. he received a george polk award way back in he1961. th he said to me just the other awr minute this wasd the first majo award he received.at it took our colleagues up at her columbia university another 25 years to see the light and recognize him with a pulitzer prize. [ applause ] >> the crabapples crit wal canb writing can be found in "the new york times," paris review, and the permanent collection of thee museum of modern art. she has drawn in guantanamo baya abu dhabi migrant camps an the rebels in syria. the guardian has characterized her as equal parts bosh, williau s. burrow and cirque du soleil. i would add that francis goya and lenny bruce to the mix. t django goala will not be with ou us. he got stuck in chicago where there iswithwe bad weather and problems with planes flying out. our moderator is ron rosenbaum, the distinguish journalism and author. alll i i will say about him ist it is said that he wrote an article in 1971 that interested a man named steve jobs in i want computers. i want to askry everybody to please, if you haven't already,f turn off your cell phones.e a there will be a q&a later on. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, ralph. you a thank you all for being here.i' i'm honored, myself, to be among these artisans since i'm a person who has a trouble drawing stick figures. but at least we have some of tht best and brightest at what is really a crucial moment in the history of free speech. once there were sensors and ate state laws and they would jail dissident cartoonists and graphic artists and now we have murderers. we're meeting just three months after 12 people were murdered in paris and i read yesterday thatt there are police still in paris newsrooms. and so it makes it even more an honor to be with these people tr because they are brave, they arh talented, and they are facing af different kind of world, i think. so the first thing i wouldn't to say is respect to all of them. george packer and the new yorker recently said the problem of free speech is that it is hard.c self-censorship, hitting the mute button is easy.ly and you not only have to be brave, but you have to be smart and you have to be funny and that ain't easy. so i would like to start with i the polk honoree gary trudeau who had the honor to be at yale with when he started writing his cartoons. and he's done something in response to charlie hebdo that i think is a brilliant slate of hand, pull the rug out from th under these people's job. and gary, could you walk us through what you've done. >> sure. sure. are we going to be seeing it back here? >> yeah. >> i suspect you can all read that clearly enough. the problem that i thought this presented for all of us as american cartoonists, at least c in talking with my colleagues, was that we were so am biff leaplyt professionally and don' really relate to the sat eric t culture of the french and we don't have a charlie hebdo in this country. and jules is more of the world of edgy cartooning just being in alternative newspapers his whole life. i had my career -- it was in li. family newspapers.ne so i have a different set of constraints and a different set of imperatives. and if talking with my colleagues, we agreed on a cole number ofag things. one, obviously, we're all horrified by these murders.hese more so because they were part i of oured small global family of political cartoonists. but secondly, we couldn't identify with what they had done. and i'll get to that in a but moment. but let me read the cartoon first because this expressed --n it took me weeks to figure out how to do this. so up at the top mike is saying, what a motley crew. folks, the murdered french cr cartoonists may have slipped from the headlines but their creations leave on. bonjo andur say bon jour to the panda and el [ speaking in a foreign language ] . then in theanff last panel you - muhammed -- may i join -- no. and put some clothes on. it was not hilarious, but it was important for me to figure out how to honor the cartoonists ho without necessarily honoring the specifics of what they did.i wol i would not have drawn muhammed. now that is not to say that i s stay away from the issue. for years i've written about rot islamics terrorists. and t all the way back to the satanic verses which earned me a bodyguard for a while. it is not that i think -- i hate to speak for a group so i shouldn't but it is not that american cartoonists don't love the edginess, the fight, the of doing battle in the name of im things we think are important, it is just that the american tradition, as was the french hee traditionnc at one time, is alws to punch down -- i mean to punch up. not to punchun chdown.and th and the big mistake that we felt our colleagues in france made was that they created a very insidious situation in which they actually caused mainstream muslim public in france to align itself with and to sympathize with their outliers, the orists terrorists.. there is enormous sympathy in oh france fore them. and this is not a great accomplishment. plauded ot something to be applauded. and this happened because theirh approach was one of provocation, notas challenging, not lenging, confrontation, not to start a dialogue but to provoke and y to simply to hurt. we don't have quite the same tradition. now maybe jules feels somewhat differently speaking from the alternative world. but -- >> well, um, i never saw myself as part of the alternative wh world.en because there wasn't one when i began. i was just looking for an outlet in which i could express what t liberals back in the '50s, most mccarthy, days they didn't know what they have which was first o amendment rights when people went around saying what they hat to say t on a specifically possibly dangerous level, only l in small rooms or small bars ang over big drinks when they felt brave. because it felt l like a very dangerous time in this country. and because they might lose their jobs. and since i was unemployable ant had nothing tohe lose, i could whatever i damn pleased. and felt giddy and excited abou doing that.th there was a -- the thing i felt about the cartoon then and i feel about the cartoon now is in is not so muchot commenting on l particular political point at the moment or particular -- it h was something happening in the e news. it is bringing along an audiencc that has been groomed to think in a certain way and teaching them by the method of humor. and in my case panel by panel by panel, how to think in a in different way. how to look at a different perspective. how to consider another point of view. so itview wasn't necessarily abb slamming an over the head, whether it was somebody i hated like nixon or someone else. it was making people think. it was all about -- because we -- a bunch of our lives there and more of our lives now were being brain washed. and try to cut into that crap a and point to an alternative true and to do it through humor, too which took away the defensiveness of people who didn't -- who weren't about ato allow their point of view to be- attacked without getting defens defensive about it.ll, if well, if you are y funny, they tend not to be defensive.ng so doing all of these things and trying to turn it into -- on oe specific issues one week after another and learning as i went along. and so that -- that is basically how i saw it.t was i didn't think it was about democrats or republicans or this guy or that guy.hat i thought it was about what this country was, what it had become and what it should be and what i hoped it would be and what was certainly wasn't.ly and what it certainly isn't now. >> molly, what was your reaction to the charlie cartoon? >> oh, my god, i was on a personal level devastated. as gary said, cartoonists are a small global family. and even though i didn't know y the charlie hebdo cartoonists personally, i did know people who knew them. after that i was angry at so many different people.it w it was this very complicated at anger. i was angry at the murderers and the prancing, preying politicians from every single g repressive country in the world and every country that spies oni dissidents from the u.s. to saudi arabia were using the rn murderers of cartoonists as a way to posture on their still warm bodies.ry i was angry at the crackdowns in in france after the cartoonists were murdered.s actu there was actually a parody cartoon of one of charlie hebdo's muslim members that someone was who can't speak french because americans very often don't learn other languages who are ticans commenting on these cartoons an making it seem like, you know, some regrettable choices by menf with very, very long careers os were the totality of who they were as opposed to, you know, one regrettable choice out of a lifetime of thousands of eoice cartoons. yeah, i mean, a lot of the rage, i would say, was my reaction. i >> you know, there's a question i meant to ask of all three of you.re's it comes sort of before the whole charlie thing, which is, is there something -- this is a question for each of you -- that made you an oppositional kind of person growing up? where you could see through theo pieties and it made you angry and it made you funny? >> well, jules knows i like to blame him. his work was very influential in my finding a career path. i can't blame him entirely because it was kind of accidental.his be i was doing a strip in college for -- as a kind of sports strip, and i was scouted in the first five or six weeks i was doing it and offered my current job.doin it's a story my kids hate. on every level. i put in maybe 30 hours. maybe and was given this opportunity. so i had to put in the 10,000, i ended up putting in the 10,000, but it was -- >> yeah, yeah. >> -- kind of after the fact. kd and i was making all my mistakes in full public view.ull but jules was very influential for a number of us. influen his was the first strip, at least that i was aware of, where the main point of the strip wash about the idea, was about a e subject, a serious subject. and i always imagined and jules may have a different explanation for it, but there wasn't much xi change in the artwork from image to image in early cartoons in the '50s. i and i always thought, oh, that'o just to get my attentionn. pay attention to the words and pay attention to what's being said. and that i thought, you know, maybe came from your love of th theater as well and that you love dialogue. l but i really took all that to heart. and of course i was of the counterculture, i was in college at a time when people were pushing against every institution. and so when i graduated from college i thought it was colleg perfectly normal that i would take those interests and those i concerns, politics, rock and roll, sex, drugs, all the thing, that had bubbled up to the surface in my life during those four years and take them into the comics page. most editors were unfamiliar with those subjects on being on their comics page.ub so there was a lot of crossing of red lines early. lin that's why i find it so difficult to be talking about aa red line now with "charlie hebdo" because, you know, i had that debate over and over again with editors. at one point this is just how clueless and young i was, i gotr so tired of getting thrown out o of newspapers that i sent out a questionnaire to editors, i don't know if i ever told you this, jules.ir told and i said which of the jects following subjects should i not address in the comic strip? and i put a list of things. com a is for abortion and a whole long list.an and sent it off to like a dozen leading editors.ed and amazingly almost all them took the bait and checked the boxes and this is forbidden and this is not. and finally i heard from a wiser head. and he said this is just bull. it has nothing to do with the st subject, it's how you treat it.u it's how seriously -- are you serious as a satirist?bj if you can convey that, if you can convey that seriousness of purpose that you're trying to if move people to thought and conv judgment, there's nothing you can't write about.ey e's not and i think, you know, one of the proudest moments of my t ne career was two or three years os ago where i wrote about the whei texas sonogram law and transvaginal probes, language not usually in the comics, and i was kicked out of about 70 papers. but all temporarily. all those papers i'd built up enough sort of credibility as a serious commentator that they said, okay, this one isn't quit, right for our community for any number of reasons, but -- and, you know, that doesn't mean you have to go away. -'t mea just means we can't hear your voice this week. well, i'm not entitled to have my voice heard in hundreds of communities every day. of that's a privilege. lots of times i get that. but sometimes i don't. and it's called editing, it's not called censorship. i've always defended the editors that for the most despicable reason throwing me out of their newspapers, because that's their job.ed make dozens of decisions every f day as to what belongs and what doesn't. >> how about you, molly?io >> i think form for the quality? control, you're still being affected around everything you do. you must be doing something wrong. ing >> it shows you're still dangerous a little bit. yes. fectou >> or that you have touched a sore point for that particular community. s. >> yeah. >> not all my smoking mr. butts strips made it into north carolina papers. in when i wrote about frank sinatra, i went dark in las brgas.s jerry brown, same thing inow n, california. so they're going to be regional' most recently i did something about jeb bush. s and the dallas paper threw it o out because it was too political.the too political? pout the man's running for president >> though i think one of the interesting things we're seeing right now though is the death of that sort of context. the death of seeing anything targeted for any particular of.munity.re because once things move to print towards the line n everything gets decontextualized. that's what happened with at's "charlie hebdo." w these tiny knockoff 1% of the th paper, i think pretty awful, d very often cartoons, were decontexturalized and made to stand in front of an american audience. w no one anymore is seen as the u. whole body of their work or seen as reaching a particular community. v everyone is speaking to everyone and it's very strange and it's doing something very disconcerting to art, i think. c >> yeah, except the charlie on artist did highlight specific things they did.>> they said we're doing this for a very particular reason. ht >> yes. >> and i think just because you can say something doesn't necessarily mean you must. >> i agree with you. >> rights do come with responsibilities. >> absolute agreement.tiesemenhe i think there's a huge difference between what you should legally be permitted to say, which is everything in my opinion, and what makes you a horrible human if you say it.ffn i think that tabloids exist to shame women for how they look in bikinis, things that should be legal and work of disgusting humans.at s and i don't think these two things are contradictory at all. >> jules, you had some fairly strong words to say about the state of american cartooning, particularly newspaper cartooning in recent years. >> well, gary, you may know the figures better than i, but i kn think we're down to something like under 200 editorial cartoonists, does that sound right to you?200 >> more like 45. >> more like 45?cartoo >> yeah. when i started it was 200 editorial cartoonists who made their living from a home paper.d >> yeah. ts w >> where they got salaries and benefits. g >> yes.. benefits? >> health insurance, whatever.n if you're trying to cut a budget of a newspaper, a full salary versus paying $5 for syndicated work. f >> i would venture out of those 45 across this vast nation maybe five of them are worth looking at. it's always been a small minority.been a not everybody was as brilliant as paul conrad or herb locke or hugh haney in louisville or some of the others, bill maulden who was extraordinary and in the ingly '60s was doing such strong cartoons unlike most of the cartoonists in our midst on racm and civil rights that his edits are on the paper. i don't know whether it was the "post dispatch" or the "sun times" at the time told him to go to work for the daily worker because he was -- he was actually talking real stuff about civil rights going on. and this was unheard of at the time. >> you know, you included in one of the things what i thought was a brilliant take on liberal nt hypocrisy over civil rights. could we see that one now, jules? >> oh, yeah. it's a -- i guess this is early '60s.says black man with shades. you know, says i love jazz and what he picked up on it. i dug hip and what he picked up on it. i dug rock and what he picked up on it. i dug freedom, finally lost whitey.vailable what i love among our american races is that every part of black culture is available they will pick up, but not blacks. they'll pick up the music, they'll pick up the style, up,th they'll wear their hats backwards.ey'l they will act cool. you know, certain sway to their hips.o but actually acknowledge that there are other races, not just black, but other races that are worth tolerating, that's a no-no.st so you can plunder -- and that's what whites have always done. you can plunder other cultures. in this case black culture. but you can't let them into the club.s that's a no-no. >> and did you get backlash froo liberals who didn't like to see their hypocrisy exposed?ba >> the answer to that question is i don't know. i didn't get that much feedbackt you get a lot of feedback. i didn't get -- the readers didn't basically -- didn't communicate with me except on very weird issues which had nothing to do with anything.mm i didn't get much feedback. which was both disappointing to me but also allowed me to just p pay attention to what i wanted to do.o i got wonderful attention from figures in the black community and that made me feel good. and when i finally did a good. collection of cartoons on civill rights, it was byron rustin who wrote the introduction to it as which i found a great honor. this is the man who not only organized the march on washington, for me on a personal level taught me everything i knew about race.ng i when i was editor and looking to meet girls at left wing places e because that's the only place when you got to go -- and i wenu to a pacifist group called the fellowship of reconciliation where an unknown speaker was speaking on civil rights and i thought what the heck can he tell me? i know everything about civil rights. lynching is bad. and then he started talking in t a way i changed my entire life and the way i looked at things and the way i worked. he said that the most important issue in america is not the cold war and the fight with the soviet union, it's that we never resolve the issues of the civil war. we are still fighting the civil war.meri eh and this is not about how whitet liberals should give blacks a break. this affects everybody, the fate of the negro as they called them then, it's about all of us. and what he had to say then is familiar now because it's becomw accepted rhetoric, but it was radical and revolutionary and blew my mind apart.nd and i got to know him and learn from him. and really affected not just the cartoons on race that i did, but everything. we tried to figure out what areg they telling us and what is wht really going on and how do i broach this in a way that it communicates to a reader. >> something i was thinking reae about this morning when i was rh watching the video of that black man scott who was shot eight times while running away. ru are there some things that aren just too awful to caricature to capture in visual terms or juste i don't know, break out of the frame? visu >> well, as awful as that was, let's wait for the trial and se' whether he's found not guilty. which is the american way. ot >> the shocking thing is just is that they're even putting him o> trial in the first place.y're ee that's only because of the bravery of that guy who filmed it. irst >> and the story of that guy, this young man, from the dominican republic was first he thought of erasing this, his first thought, in a free country of america. erasing because he might get in trouble.ou then he took it to police headquarters. and the way they treated him he said do your stuff.e he got out of there knowing that if he turned the tape over to them -- first of all, he'd never get his phone back. he and that tape would never be seen again. 'dhisand >> how about you, gary? are there some subjects -- not necessarily this one -- >> i'll give you an extreme example of that. and i'm sorry jangel is not here because it's his organization. when 9/11 happened pretty much i there was a moratorium on humor. in fact, essays were written ont is irony dead.da and the late-night shows went dark. and all of us, you know, were s stunned and didn't know how to respond in a way that would be socially useful. t a very interesting thing, they said, you know, comedy is not the opposite of serious. comedy is the opposite of despair. so how do we direct a response that confronts that despair?s tt so their headlines two days later were -- i wrote them down just because -- >> like the jerry bruckheimer movie. >> i don't remember that one. god clarifies don't kill rule. hijackers surprised to find selves in hell.ulselv they got thousands of letters es from people, all positive, who weren't shocked that a response to horror would be humor, because humor, that's the salvation. the reason humor exists is precisely because life is such a pain. h so this was a wonderful response. so there are thousands of letters that poured into "the a onion." dave letterman, everybody else figured it out a couple days ot later and got back on air and, oh, yeah, we have a job to do. we're part of the healing skbl n th >> you see the same thing throughout syria and lebanon right now where activists are ib having their lives threatened by isis. t and instead of in giving in to despair, they have reacted with vicious mockery, vicious, hilarious mockery.ctcihilariou there's a syrian-produced web series of like actors dressing up like al baghdadi and making s fun of him, there's a rock band in beirut that sing songs and want to put bras on cows.cow there's this incredible tradition of parody in the middle east. and that's really been turning to great effect toward isis right now. the thing is authoritarian throughout the world of every stripe, religious or secular, but authoritarians, they hate ng humor, they hate cartooning, it gets under their skin.n. there's something viscerally irreverent about it. this kills them. when hitler was in power, one oa the things he made a specific list of was a cartoonist in st a england who had drawn mean pictures of him.ooni he specifically wanted to find these people and kill them to because they had hurt his peopla feelings just that much.gs jus i had an interesting incident in terms of someone i had angered,f i went down to guantanamo bay io the summer of 2013 -- th >> can we just show molly's guantanamo -- oh, there we go. great. -- oh, >> when i was in guantanamo i was forbidden from drawing the faces of anyone who worked there, which is why i drew these.e who because i don't believe in hiding the fact that you're being censored.lieve i think if you're going to be y censored you draw the censorship. but when i went to guantanamo, o made a lot of fun of the press tour, the way they sort of tried to ingratiate themselves as conservatives and the military was so angry at me.so one press officer called up my t editor and said that i, quote, made him look like a tool.i, >> it's interesting.de him l do you think there's something s about the visual that is more, well as you say gets under the skin, or even in the best verbal satirist is it the fact of caricature make you look ugly? >> well, it's the immediacy of it.ly? you have to read a whole essay,f it hits you and see it. but also there's no barriers to it. there's no linguistic barriers. you don't have to speak french to know that the picture you had at the beginning of the thing a was a really mean caricature of someone. begin they laugh through borders, they laugh through time, they laugh through languages and straight into your eyes. that's why they have that visceral impact. >> all of our hero and precursor in the 19th century most of his audience was illiterate.r >> people are -- >> great cartoonist in new york. and, in fact, the mayor, his nemesis fled new york. he was captured in spain, wasn't he? >> yes, yes. >> william mossy tweed who saide you know, in his rage he said, "i don't care what they write about me. nobody who votes reads.re but them damn pictures." and pictures were extraordinary. there were a number of extraordinary people at the pic time. kepler and some others. >> do you think there's a -- at all a fine line between caricature and sort of offensiveness or over simplifying or stereotype? or is the best kind of visual representation one that somehow evades a stereotype?ow >> well, again, i think it requires a brain and an opinion. not just lyndon johnson had a big nose, so i'll do a big nose and call it lyndon johnson.i the best lyndon johnson was by g david levine, the greatest levi, caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century, most often new york review of books, lbj had aj famous gallbladder operation ana there was a photograph of him fs because he was a famous -- as ba well as famous everything else. and in the picture he's holding up his shirt and he's showing his scar from his gallbladder.tf in the "new york review" it's a wonderful caricature of lbj, same picture, but the scars of vietnam that he's probably showing. and that seemed to sum up the vulgarity of the president, hise personal position of the vietnad war, which is why we kept escalating.en i mean, it seemed to be a profound comment on so many things that were going on at tht time and nobody -- and a cartoon got it all in one, one shot. t e >> do you think there are anything that any of you are beyond the limits or that you wouldn't touch?tof li >> well, it's always a personal question.mi and i think that what you can do a good job touching very much depends on who you are. i mean, i think that i would never draw mohamed myself. >> you would never what?would >> i never would have drawn mohamed myself. mohamed certainly not like "charlie hebdo" for me, it would be punching down, as gary said. but if someone who was muslim or living in a muslim country did a picture of mohamed, or if they even published the "charlie hebdo" cartoons like in bangladesh did, one of whom wasa murdered recently, that's not punching down, that's d challenging a power structure.g it's always fundamentally hallen different to criticize a community from within and without.commun i think the producers would have been fundamentally different thing if it was a bunch of ave germans, you know, doing it. well, i mean, imagine if the dw producer was an all blond germal cast and crew writing team it would have had a different feel to it. so, yeah, i think that what you limits are and personal limits should be very often they come from who you are and what sort o of place you occupy in a power structure. y >> i agree with that.so i don't think -- i'm not quite sure where your question is donh coming from but certainly no subject that i stay away from.sj the subjects that i have not collided with on my drawing board are really a failure of a imagination, not of nerve.aginao they're just i can't think of anything that's either entertaining or inciteful to say about the subject. it's not because i fear the repercussions. >> it's interesting you mention your drawing board.threpe i think people might be rc interested in just what the physical layout of how you produce these -- you sit at a i drawing board and do you do first drafts and then revise? >> no, i do the work the same way i've done it since i was ine grad school. and i was doing the strip while i was a grad student. i just draw the pencil and send it to an assistant who inks it in, if it's sunday it goes to a third assistant who does the color work on it. >> so really first draft. >> that's it. f and it's always in the nick of time.it. there's no time -- you know, there's no time -- you know, i think some artists are -- need to have that kind of structure.- and need to have once a week s when i can say that's good we enough and have -- th >> do you have like a special room where you do it?at >> well, i do have a studio, yeah. but i've worked everywhere through the years. w we have portable skills. we can work anywhere. >> how soon after you write thee script do you think you have to sit down and draw it? you i mean, do you leave any time? r is there any time to leave because of deadlines? >> no. no. l i mean, for that reason i have to take the ideas as they come in order.in so say there's a story art that goes from a monday to a saturday. i may come up with thursday first. and then i have to reverse with engineer it and figure out how i got there.rst. so you create your own problems. but the desperation is such that if you have an idea, any idea, you got to use it. i'm sure you're asked all the time what do you do when you don't get an idea? o you and the answer to that for most of us is thanks for not noticing.a? >> how about you, molly?notici for instance this seems like a o work of much time and effort. >> that took about i want to say 20 hours maybe.fort. so i started with these rough sketches that are illegible to everyone in the world but myself. t they're almost like the shorthand version of drawing.let and something like this i take a big piece of paper, put it on the floor then soak it with water and drip dye into it to get the texture. then i start drawing. in -- and i use old skill like proquill little steel nibs and dip the pen in -- >> i don't know but sounds interest. he p >> you dip the pen in ink i bottles. so i ink. >> little house on the prairie. >> i think so. sort of sepia tone. so i ink it. i pencil simultaneously because i'm too distractible to sort of sit down and ink. but, yeah, i'm compulsive.but, drawing for me is like picking scabs or something. >> did you do this while you were at gitmo? >> no, i did this when i was at home. i kept a really detailed sketchw book while i was at guantanamo,y including the basis of this. i actually developed those tualy smiley faces because i was in iy the courtroom and they had an official court censor there who would sticker and look through o my sketch book.d he's allowed to cut out anything he didn't like. bo >> really?owed >> yeah. >> what sort of things didn't they like? of >> well, one of the things was faces of anyone who worked there. we >> i see. oops. >> that's what i did instead. it's interesting because the t second time i came back i think that they realized how grim it e looked to only have these blank masks for faces. so they found me the most so thy attractive soldiers i've ever seen in my life and they said iy could draw their faces. the most attractive nurses involved in force feeding, they presented to me. >> oh, that is wonderful. y ar >> those aren't exactly smiley faces. >> they are from the eyes up. >> through a nightmare of some nightmare. >> and jules, did you start with pen and ink -- tell us -- >> i started with pen and ink because that is what i was mostn comfortable with. i would first write pencil notes or ball point pen in dialogue rt and trying to figure out the idea. and for me it was always the idea that had to come first. and after a while, i discoveredf what was -- what worked best iss not knowing where i was going, knowing what i was upset about and wanted to comment on, what i was pissed off about. but not how i was going to do it. not and did what classic improv did. which they did at second city and mark and elaine did. you start with an opening line. and sometimes that remains the opening line and sometimes it doesn't.ov but with the opening line, that is panel one.n't. and then panel two follows.is pl and it begins to write itself. and it begins to take you on the tripri. and by the third panel i figured out where i'm going and it goesm some or it has to be thrown out and start all over again. over but so it is a constant trial and error. but there is a point.ror. and i kind of know what the point is. and when -- in my case, the kind of cartoon i did, it often had to do with the use of language,t official and unofficial language. it is -- you know, the distrust. for government and the contempte for government and hatred for government that we now find witr the tea party and on the right, really began on the american left. the and it was that the belief from the american left that nothing they tell you is the truth. not nothing government says is true. what i believed in part to be so.i beli and there was enough evidence to back it up.ar at the time i was starting, there were nuclear tests, underground nuclear tests and e the government was bringing up s statistics to show there were nh harmful effects of radiation ist from the leaks that came as r sheep and cattle were falling over out west and john wayne eventually got cancer from hanging out there.ha so i did a cartoon called boom on which the government is govr announcing, as people fall over, there are no harmful effects of radiation. harmful and to take the language that we use to fool people, to lie to t people, to mislead people. and to satirize way out of hand to make it funny, what was to m really going on in a way that would make people, i hoped, think about it and consider it. that was the game. and >> that was the ad man coming up with an ad to convince people that -- >> fallout is good for you. i fell for fallout. [ laughter ]i fel that was one of them. >> it was a bad ad kind of thing. >> that was the thing. it w >> here is a question. i guess you're probably aware o the whole question of trigger warnings that has come up recently in discourse. are people familiar with this, survivors of trauma feel that el they should be protected from -- from being reminded of it because it would cause ptsd and therefore a lot of traumatic tsd things that happened to people from beatings to rape, to whatever, those who bring up that subject are responsible for warning people who may want to leave the room or something like that. do you think this is something that is going to eventually affect your work?effe >> i mean, as i understood it from people who -- my friends who do work on trigger warnings, they view it more like having an ingredients label on food so yor know what is in it and if you in have an allergy, if it contained peanuts.gr i think trigger warnings make sense in specific communities. if you are on a web forum of people recovering from anorexia, they might have a trigger warning if people mention their weight. f but i've also heard really amazing critiques of trigger ly warnings from people like roxanne gai who worry it will be used by college students to tuds avoid engaging with material that makes them uncomfortable. i think it is a complicated issue. but in a college class you mig e warn students if you are k it i discussing rape doesn't seem yu particularly onerous on anyone.c it doesn't seem particularly bad. >> there is this phrase that -- called grown-up, which assumes that after a period of years where you get kicked around and disappointed and this and that d happens, you arrive at a condition within yourself where once you had to open a bottle h and throw -- pour it down because somebody said something .r did something you are able to -- oops, shrug it off and say -- it and go on. if we are so sensitive and so watchful as to not hurt people t who are hurtable in so many ways, we get a generation and wa get several generations that atn never grow up and i'm looking at all of you. and i think one of the things h we've given up on is the notion of behaving like grown-ups. our leaders don't. and often in families, we don't. and it is something to aspire to and the only way you do that isy to take the hurt -- i used to to get bitter and angry and pissed off and not speak to people. now who will -- me off and we'll have a wonderful conversation ten minutes later that i'm no r longer into grudges or getting mad for very long.m no getti it doesn't make any sense.g. and it doesn't win anything.sn't and the only one who loses is your -- yourself. >> gary, i guess you were asking for trigger warnings of the list of the boxes to check or something like that?, what are the biggest scary subjects for editors these daysh >> well, i can only talk about my own experience because i don't know what they are setting down in other strips.do and i know there is a double standard.nvention and sort of this -- i"m not quite an editorial cartoonist or conventional cartoon artist and they are held to other standards and i can't tell you what they are being -- what kind of constraints their under. otheir i haven't heard, you know, any amber light warnings from editors in years, you shall not write on any specific subject. d >> is religion okay? >> religion is fine.religi reproductive issues are fine. drugs are fine. >> but given up on -- >> it is how you deal with it. > >> they just threw up their hands. >> i think the only thing you are really not allowed to do in america for the sake of your ll career is not allowed to say american soldiers are bad. ica >> you are not what? >> allowed to say american soldiers are bad? >> i've done that a few times but not generically. n in specific for specific reasons.at and my very -- among my very pse first strips were depicting behavior of our armed forces in vietnam. of now admittedly it was told from. a kind of hippie fantasia perspective, why can't we get i along and the vietcong terrorist who befriends the soldier. and i had a view of what was going on over there.so but that is a rich source ofld material for me, trying to understand the military issues. and obviously if i make blanket statements about troops, that is not going to help me in trying to deal with their issues.atem so i've written about ptsd and e many of the other sorts of tsd wounds that warriors come home with. and it is not that i try not too antagonize them, it is for me, for the brass, because i'm a liberal, there is no reason fore me to be welcomed on military bases and such.ra but enough -- we got enough feedback from the field, the guys writing about our issues. my break through was in 1990 when i got a letter from the then chief of staff in the army gordan sullivan before desert storm saying we're getting good strong response from the field from the soldiers who feel you are connected to their issues, which i was, because i was getting a lot of letters from them.om t so i was invited over and . brought over by a tank commander and first i couldn't get out ofr the country because i -- to get to -- in theater in those days,a you had to go through saudi arabia and you needed a visa. and i had the misfortune of timing of spending a week writing about how the saudis were sitting out of the war and the young men were in country clubs while we had 500,000 ward troops in the desert so i couldn't get a visa.vis and this went on for weeks.a.isn there were 2,000 journalists down range and i couldn't get ae visa. and so i get this call from a guy named bill nash, the t commander of a tank brigade hi outside of kuwait and he said i hear you have trouble getting here and i said yeah, kind of. so come on any way. 2:30 >> so i got on a plane with no visa and arrived in read at 2:30 and i got closer to the immigration desk and i thought this is not going to go well and a side door and a couple of giso came out and got me and stuffed me in a helicopter and -- and when 9/11 happened, and h the given reason, everybody forgotd this, bin laden's state reason was the military presence in saudi arabia. there is no question they owned the country at that particular moment. they could do whatever they wanted and they acted like it.ee but i was flown to this base and i was met at the helipad by thee colonel and he said, you know, i was reading you when i was in vietnam and i was a lieutenant and i was trying to manage this mismatch conscripts and keep t them alive in a hateful war and i was curious about you and it would be good if you wrote aboul military issues and you knew something about it. [ laughter ]riou and y so i'm going to fly you around u the battlefield and you can plai with the toys and hang out toys and -- and enjoy all of that y stuff, but you've got to go into the barracks and go into the nto dining facilities and spend time talking to these guys and try to understand what they've been through.talkin it is a professional force. i think you'll find they are sil very different than the soldiers of your era. and so that was the beginning of my introduction. so when bd, the character loses his leg in the subsequent war, i heard from the d.o.d. right away and they said okay, amputation, that is a long story arc, that is not something you can blow off in a week. come find out what that means. t and so they -- long story short, they got me into walter reed and i came and went for years tryinr to tell the stories of wounded warriors. wound what they were suffering, having performed their duty in our ng, names for a war i found hateful, that is an interesting balancing act because i'm trying to keep , both things alive in the strip at the same time. tryin >> so a lot of the best cartooning in some way is investigative. i mean, you sneaked into a -- >> a migrant workers camp in abu dhabi. >> tell us about that. >> i was doing an investigative case on the migrant workers in the u.a. t he building the branch of these amazing cultural institutions. right now the louvre and the int guggenheim and nyu are buildinge branches on this island in abu dhabi. the is and migrant labor has long been exploited in the gulf.een a construction worker in the gulf might make $200 a month to work for 12 hours a day doing just brutal, physical labor.lab. and this is long been an issue and long been known that the workers have their passports confiscated so they can't chango their jobs or leave the country. however what was happening these western institutions are saying oh, no, we're different. we're not like that at all and it wasn't true. not at all. and it wasn't even a little bitv they were like just every other company doing construction in the uae. and so with the help of a young construction worker i was able g to sneak on the labor sites and into migrant worker camps and just talk to these guys and talk about their ambitions, talk tak about what it was like to be a h worker there, talk to them about whether or not they were happy.e there was a lot of this idea that because these men come froe poor countries that they are just passively accepting of ac getting paid $200 a month but actually i found that wasn't true. they were going on strike and just getting arrested and kicked out of the country when they did. so, yeah, i tried really hard to get to know people.he and also with that story, a lotd of times when it was covered in the western press, there was an idea these guys were like ress, cattle, easily fooled peasants u who got taken advantage of. and i was like no, these guys are brave by their family and they are being repressed and they are fighting against it ane i want to portray that against complexity and make them the men they are. com and i truly believe that good art is a cliche. what cliche does is it robs people t of their humanity. and turns them into objects and stereotypes and good art is punctuating that. and doing art that is good and thoughtful and rigorous, and yot are cutting away at cliche and trying to get to the human truth f the matter. >> jules, you have revolutionized the comic world. did you invent the graphic novel? >> no.n speaking of the graphic novel, what gary is doing now and has c been doing for the last few ast years, without being called a graphic novel, just doing a series of graphic novels. b in doing real characters with real wounds and in a real world. and day by day we find out a rl little bit more about them. dayw it is a great tradition the old newspaper comic strips going back to gasoline alley, delved into. and once you put them together and read them as one piece, you read it is a novel. day by day, you are not aware of it. but it is characters developing. it. however satirical it may be or humorous it may be. it is a story. and it is a story that one follows.hu i loved from the beginning, the adventure strips as a kid.pa the strips that ran in the daily papers in the 1930s and sunday supplements and 12 panels in glorious color, particularly tha work of milton and the pirates and some others. and these guys were my masters.d i couldn't draw like them. i didn't know how to draw like them.ters. so i sort of backed in overthrowing the government as a fallback position. [ laughter ] and back a few years ago i just got tired of doing politics andd commenting on commenting on what i've commented on before and ito starting again from scratch and how we replay the same record and the same issues and i said e screw it, i'm going to do something -- i can't do this any more. i'm too old.ing -- i and i began working on graphic novels and that is what i do now. old. >> what was your first one? >> it just came out last springr called "kill my mother." [ laughter ] ] and it is a graphic novel, starting off in 1933 and ends , during the war in 1943. on and now i'm at work on a prequel that started in 1931 and there will be a third book which will finish it all up about the e a r blacklist years in hollywood. >> "kill my mother." well nothing is off the table for you.ou are >> you are just finding out? >> i guess that is something i've always admired about your work .>> i want to take some questions but i want -- not knowing you well, is there something you would like to add or subtract to the discussion so far? >> look at the pressure here. >> well, i was very moved by molly talking about her work and how she goes about it.ed and gary talking about -- the level -- people, even though they are impressed with the different forms of humor and satire, don't really think of , the degree of thought and insight and seriousness and theh artist trying to figure out how do i present this. figur what is the best way of communicating this. i don't want to make a speech. i don't want to yell at people.a how do i get across the point i want to make, which isn't being made somehow. i mean everybody -- you talk about the serious journalists, they aren't very serious because they write the same crap that everybody else writes. how do i get across my point of view and make it work and make it work as a combination of ac words and picturesro. combina it is a whole idea of words ando pictures as a comic is a whole different form and we think differently about it. w and what you do, we think differently about iter.you and what you do, and what you . do, it is just an extraordinary example of what is out there. and there is some wonderful, ot wonderful talent out there today all over the place working in alternative forms. and it is terrific to me, as 86 years old, an old fart, to see in a field that i adored as a kid and i -- and i adore every a bit as much or even more today, this is what i think of as the new golden age. i am really grateful for it. nw >> well, i'm always grateful to be on the same stage as jewels and my new friend molly. jules just reminded me.ugh and my first exposure to his work was not as a cartoonist, i even though it was cartoons i was hearing. i was a theater nerd and we did a lot of plays in my high school and the different dorms had different plays.dt s and i went to see three short di plays that somebody was putting on. and they were hilarious and funny and moving.pl >> what were they? >> well one of them was "monroe." and one of them was -- they werr cartoon stories that jules had written.now and i didn't know them as cartoons. as i thought you were a playwrite and that rang my bell because i was a theater guy. and what i didn't understand, as i circled back to my childhood d interests, that how much these two art forms had in common. and so i'm doing -- i've been doing a tv show the last couple years called "alpha house."le and the work we do every day is such good preparation, there is characters and dialogue and story art.nd d it is just television now, which is such a wonderful space to work in is so close to the stor telling except you don't have the absolute control that you do -- >> no, but you have great actors. >> yeah, we have great actors who make you seem funnier than you are. ou bre >> these guys are legends. i'm honored to get to share a stage with them. yeah, that's all i have to add.e >> well on that note, before we take questions, maybe a round of applause for these people. [ applause ]>> >> so i guess you want to line i up at the mic here for questions. >> or just shout them out. you are pretty close.out >> i have a question.e. >> it is not going to register unless you go to the mic.e >> [ inaudible ]. >> don't be shy, people. we're with you. we'll wait. >> i beat 'em. my question is for molly. i'm curious as a woman, when you go overseas and try to sneak iny places, are there challenges that you face because you are a female trying to get into placei ges that a male cartoonist wouldn't face. >> everybody has been courteous and respectful to me. has b people in the middle east are ee some of the most hospitable and courteous people on earth to be honest.ous peop and i've never been in a situation personally where i felt that i was at a sonall disadvantage because i was a woman in it. i >> thank you.it. >> though i have to say i have always been with male wi translators, but always treated with utmost respect.most >> i have a question based on ethnicity and politics. from what i heard earlier, you seem to suggest that most of the brilliant satirists in the s political vein are leftists and comic strip artists seem to be primarily jewish even though jews are a small portion of the population. and so mr. pffeifer can you comment on your jewish left background? >> i don't know what you are talking about. mmen >> i tell you because i have your book here and i would like you to autograph it and it is e filled with jewish left commentary. >> i never saw that book. i never met a jew. >> backing into forward. >> it's -- well you got me. that is a jewish posture. the comic strip artists of my childhood were mostly irish catholic like wool kelly. but the jews were mostly in the comic books. they came from new york and -- >> cleveland. ew yor >> beg your pardon? >> cleveland.cle >> cleveland shuster. yes. but they came to new york. and i broached the notion many years ago that superman didn't come from the planet crypton, hy came from the planet minsk. i don't think that is true any more. cartoonists are not necessarily jewish any more, the comic book artists. they come from all over the place.arti but it is a generation, four orl five generations away perhaps pl from where i am.fi so anything i really have to comment about is about stuff that happened so far back that if you wanted to know what, where i came from, why, because there was a great depression and out of the great depression de people formed political alliances in order to survive. there was a great comic named milt kaymon, a nightclub artist, who said when i was a kid during the depression, and he was my age, he said i lived in andklyn, there was a community -- communist and socialist party and american labor part and i moved to manhattan and 22 years old before i heard of the democratic party. does that not answer your question?y. >> well i thought you would comh up with a mort salt quip. i was new in the community and wanted to meet the girls. alt >> also true. >> next question over there. >> hi. so it is really cool that you can all do work in the field like going to all of these n alo places and getting really hands-on experience of all of these different people. of i'm wondering when you are not in the field, in other fiel countries, what news sources do you like or do you feel like yoe trust because there are a lot ue of, like, the media skews things one way or the other and how doh you feel like you're making a good, informed viewpoint on certain subjects?jects? >> oh, man, it is a lot of failure and trying. a lo just the act of writing something is almost always skewed.mplex bu because reality is complex, but you have 500 words. and what you take from reality and jam into the words, it is biased.ou there is no unbias.biased. camera-like source of anything. in terms of what i read, i like "the guardian," and i like the "london review of books." bbc is good. buzzfeed has great reporting actually and some great farm reporting.admire but i tend to follow writers i admire. and it is easier now to do that now. si the idea of the single cohesive platform is dead and it is better to find writers i trust. and sometimes you look at twitter and follow people on the ground in those areas. that is not always accurate.n te there are things that are wildly inaccurate with that. but it is often the most inaccua unfiltered way to find out what is going on at a certain place at a certain time.t theplac >> cool. thanks. >> you're welcome. >> next question. >> hi.thanks it seems that -- t >> can you speak up a little bit? >> i believe it was during the k swift boating times, during the bush-gore election that the ingh studies came out saying that denying a lie tends to increase the public's ability to believe the lie in the first place and the more you try to fight a lie the less effective you would be and it seems that to defeat anl idea, the only way to defeat something is to discredit it ant that is where satire comes into. do you feel additional responsibilities because of that, the importance of satire,s to discredit ideas that are f false or harmful in your works? does that come into play in your mode of thinking, that you are performing a service discrediting ideas that are h harmful? >> well, in my case, there is ae lot that has to be accomplished in a comic strip. that you have to front load it with information that the audience trusts on some level and my thereafter tell a story premisee on what is contained in the acc first and sometimes the second panel. there is a lot you have to do, t in my case, about 100 words or e 150 words at the most. stor and so you have to create a kind of rhythm that the audience cana anticipate to understand what is true and what you are making upe and i don't quite know how -- ia guess from doing it over and over and over again. i figured out how to set up -- this is what -- and in the caseo of what you are describing, thie is a set of facts that is now widely believed or it is known that certain people are n expressing this point of view, even though it is not true. tho whatever it is, however complicated it is, you have to do it right away and set it and then discredit it and ridicule it and then have fun with it. so if i reverse engineer any arv particular given cartoon, it would be exhausting. it would be deconstructing it d and it is a good thing i'm not a public intellectual that i worke more intuitively or i would never get anything done. j i just have to trust my instincts. and of course that is where editors come in and say, well, you are wrong about this or it i is misleading. i don't get that any more, not because of my standing but know simply because i know how to doa it now after all of these years. but, yeah, that is an interesting observation about s one of the responsibilities of t humor. and particularly in a reality-challenged environment like now. i have a character who does hisl job -- his job is to supply an alternative set of facts to is clients who need a different lya reality than the one that scientists might have observed a or independent might have observed. so you call up this company and he provides you with arguments to beat your wife into comp submission with. your own set of facts, because hers are inconvenient.your o but it is never in a coherent way. it is more intuitive. and the artists that i've related to, and we were talking about robert altman, i got to work on a show. and it was entirely from his gut. and sometimes to his detriment., sometimes it wasn't clear where the story was going. but i do think that not being as smart as everybody else or as tt some other people who actually think things, it is probably part of the job description. pe you have to be able to simplify it to reach a broad audience.y >> thank you. >> next question.. >> for mr. trudeau. audi >> speak up. >> you wrote 45 years and counting long novel.d i and i've wondered do you have in the back of your mind how the story ends and what the last thy strip would be?

Related Keywords

Vietnam , Republic Of , New York , United States , North Carolina , Germany , Brooklyn , Texas , Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , Dominican Republic , Florida , California , Syria , Columbia University , Russia , Lebanon , London , City Of , United Kingdom , Beirut , Beyrouth , Bangladesh , Dark In , Karachayevo Cherkesiya , Minsk , Belarus General , Belarus , Alpha House , Hollywood , Saudi Arabia , Maryland , Ireland , Dallas , Paris , Rhôalpes , France , Spain , Chicago , Illinois , Kuwait , Americans , America , Saudi , Germans , New Yorker , Saudis , French , Soviet , German , Irish , American , Charlie Hebdo , George Packer , Charlie Hebdo Muslim , Al Baghdadi , Lyndon Johnson , Gary Trudeau , Dave Letterman , Frank Sinatra , Jerry Bruckheimer , John Wayne , Abu Dhabi , Walt Kelly Paul Conrad , Gordan Sullivan , Lenny Bruce , Jeb Bush , David Levine , Robert Altman , Jerry Brown , Ron Rosenbaum , George Polk , Cleveland Shuster , Byron Rustin , Roxanne Gai , Las Vegas , Hugh Haney , Francis Goya , Walter Reed ,