Last week was quite a week for the issue of women in the race for the President. It inspired me to draw the cartoon above.

Whether you want to call it a War on Women or not, the GOP is doing a lot to try to take away rights for women.  When I drew this cartoon, I actually had in mind that the little girl was asking her mother about whether or not she acted to fight against this war on women. But I see now it could be interpreted either way. No matter. Children hear the word war and interpret it any way they can.  It’s just sad we have to have such a word.

I just was listening to Rachel Maddow commentary on the fact that  last night the Newt Campaign released files on his work with Freddy-Mac.  But: they couldn’t find some of them. And apparently, there are no notes, records, written or otherwise, about what he actually did for them. Did the dog eat them?  What do we do with Newt, then? Do we give him another chance? Do we mark his grade down, do we call Callista and see what the truth is? None of this will work, sadly.

Simulataneously, I was looking through my files for a cartoon to post today.  I did this one last week with no obvious thought in mind of politics. But maybe subconsciously I was thinking about politics. I feel like we are in grade school with the GOP field. Doesn’t each of those guys remind you of some guy you hated in High School?

Newt, the know-it-all tubby creep who always seems to wear the same clothes and talks back to teachers;

Mitt, the awkward rich kid who thinks everyone loves him and who you catch looking in the mirror frequently,

Ron Paul, the nerd who won’t stop telling you all about stuff he thinks is important because he knows of no other way to talk to a girl,

Santorum, the religious nut who is looking for people to tattle on.

It would be fun, if it weren’t so scary. No, actually it is fun, I take that back.

If I were a Republican, I would find Mr. Huntsman very attractive. It’s not news that he’s classically handsome, and if I were a Republican, I would find it difficult not to gravitate towards him. If only for his looks. What else is there to go on? Why not make a choice based on looks? Heck, at this stage of the game, they are all not telling the truth anyway.

The lukewarm attitude towards Mitt reminds me of a cartoon of mine that The New Yorker published in 1983. You can just insert Mitt Romney’s name in the fortune cookie caption.  It’s about the Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale, and the cartoon reflects the tepid feelings towards Fritz by the Democratic party. I don’t recall there being such a circus back then as we have now, however. Also, parenthetically, this cartoon was my second sale to The New Yorker, and my first political cartoon for them.

Those of us born before 1990 work hard to keep up with technology, we weren’t born into it.  I love twitter, tumblr, email, FB, and I was born well before then.  But it will be interesting to see how the upcoming generations will be different because of the Internet.  Will they physically be different from bending over phones?  Will their brains work in new, as-yet- to-be-understood ways? Will their handling of cyber-etiquette be so ingrained as to further distance us from them? Just when we were able to trash the music divide that existed with parents when I was young–my children and I share music tastes– along comes the Internet.  I text with my daughters frequently, but I am not able to email my computer-less father.  The Internet is not only changing us in both good in bad ways, it is changing how the generations co-exist.

I guess there’s always something.

The future of print media is, to put it mildly, uncertain. I don’t read any magazines any more (except for, ahem, The New Yorker. I have to say that), and still hang on to reading the paper version of the New York Times, as well as online. It’s not exactly becoming obsolete, but is a different form of news gathering. I read the paper edition of the Times to see what they consider worthy of being in the print edition. The online version is for me up-to-date news.

But my first love for immediate news is, of course, Twitter.

We Americans try to understand and sympathize with what is going on in Egypt.  It’s hard, but the least that we can do is try, like this misguided woman in the cartoon above.

An article in the New York Times recently profiled 26 year old Egyptian protest organizer, Asmaa Mahfouz.  Ms. Mohfouz had posted a video on youtube–a daring act by a woman in that part of the world–explaining her work and passion in helping to organize the uprising in Egypt.  She says,

“I felt that doing this video may be too big a step for me, but then I thought: For how much longer will I continue to be afraid and hesitant? I had to do something.”

How many of us American women have felt that? About anything–asking for a raise, a job, respect. Granted, it is not life-threatening for us to take risks in most cases, as it is in Ms. Mahfouz’s part of the world.  In our country, the decision to wear pants, when you know everyone else will wear a dress, is scary. That’s how different–or similar–we are with women in the Middle East.

I noticed on television, and read in the New York Times and DoubleX, that there are more women involved in the uprising in Egypt than in previous protests in the region. It was refreshing to see their faces on the streets, chanting and hoping for freedom along with their male counterparts. Who knows, could the measure of peace in the protests have anything to do with their presence in the square?  I wonder.

When women take risks, and try to change things, it benefits all.  Amr Hamzawy, a research director at the Carnegie Middle East Center who has spent most of the last week in central Cairo, said,  “It’s very impressive. It’s not about male and female, it’s about everyone.”

Last fall, Chronicle Books published my latest book, When Do They Serve the Wine? The title is based on a cartoon in the book, which is all about the humorous world of being a woman.  I lampoon women of all generations, poking at the many things we do in, and that are done to us by, our culture.  To see me talk about the book and how I came to write it, see the video (link here)  that is posted below or to the right. My blog, whendotheyservethewine.com was started to help get the word out about the book, but has since morphed into writing and cartooning about all kinds of things from politics to pop culture. To see more, go to my blog, or click here.

Zachary Kanin,Drew Dernavich, Barbara Smaller, Liza Donnelly, Roz Chast

November 17th, The Society of Illustrators and Chronicle Books held a fun event to celebrate the publication of my new book,

When Do They Serve The Wine? We began with a round table discussion about style and voice, with the above New Yorker Cartoonists.  Then the party!  For a slide show of photos, go to: http://whendotheyservethewine.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/launch-party/

I met Helen Thomas last year at a conference called “Women and Power” at Omega Institute.  We were presenters on the same panel about women and the media. She was funny, gracious, kind, opinionated. Among her many bon mots, she said (and I love this) that”If you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the comics.” (paraphrase, but close).

My feeling is that as we get older, we women learn to lose our inhibitions in many ways. Helen Thomas represents that clearly. We realize that being careful is not all that it is cracked up to, that being nice at the exclusion of ourselves should not always be the most important quality to have. Her comments on Israel and the Jews, however, went too far in my estimation. She is, of course, allowed her own opinion, but even she realized after the fact that what she said was not right. Her emotions got the better of her–I am not sure if it was because of her age. Maybe after years of being asked questions, she let her inner editor fall away when she shouldn’t have.

I am sorry she will end her career on this note…if in fact her career is ended. Maybe she should do stand-up. Sarah Silverman has shown that raw comments get a laugh from many. In my cartoons, I try to be uninhibited but thoughtful, not hurtful, and not provocative as in pushing people’s buttons. I want to be like Helen Thomas, but not as she was last week.

The cartoon below was done last week (June 10, 2010) and has run in numerous online sites, starting with womensenews.org, then dscriber.com and now salon.com It’s getting a lot of comments, mostly in the form of dialogue between the commenters on their own opinions. As long as the comments don’t get nasty, dialogue is what we need.