A conversation with illustrator Steve Brodner (The Nation, The New Yorker, Esquire, more).

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE, MOUNTAIN GAZETTE, AND FREEPORT PRESS.

When your boss tells you to track down an amusing Steve Brodner factoid to open the podcast with, and one of the first things you find is a, uh, a “dick army,” welp, that’s what you’re going to go with.

Lest you judge me, I can explain. Brodner’s drawing of this army was inspired by a guy who was actually named Dick Armey (A-R-M-E-Y)! He was Newt Gingrich’s wingman back in the nineties. I thought to myself, The people need to know this.

However, with the election now a few days behind us, maybe the time for talking about men and their junk is over?

What you really want to learn about is this Society of Illustrators Hall of Famer’s career. Brodner’s work, which has been called “unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass, and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion,” has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and many others.

In this episode, Brodner talks about how the death of print has led to the current misinformation crisis. As it gets harder and harder to tell what’s true, the future becomes increasingly uncertain. Even his most biting drawings are rooted in truth.

“Satire doesn't work if you are irresponsibly unreasonably inventive. If satire doesn't have truth in it, it's not funny.”

A production note: This episode was recorded exactly one week before the election. As our conversation began, we took turns telling stories about memorable election night parties, and our plans for November 5th. Here’s Steve, talking about his plans…

“These days ‘illustrator’ doesn’t cover it, because what’s happened to our profession is that we’ve all gone off into wildly different areas of expression.”

Steve Brodner: The Nation invited me over for an election night party and people say, what are you doing on election night? And I said, I’m just going to crawl under the bed and stay there for a long time. But I’m going to go there because I think they’re going to have a lot of beds and a lot of people just under the bed drinking. I don’t know how many election parties you all have gone to where everybody walked out as if they’ve just had their heads chopped off and in a state of unremitting horror. And if you’re old enough to remember 2016—that was the last party we threw.

George Gendron: We talked to David Remnick about The New Yorker’s election parties. And he said they had a big one planned for 2016, but he had to leave early to go back and redo the cover. So anyway, I just want to tell you I’m thrilled that you’re here. I usually just do editors. But I’ve done a bunch of photographers, some great ones. But I think you’re my first illustrator—and my favorite.

Steve Brodner: Thank you. I think these days “illustrator” doesn’t cover it. Because what’s happened to our profession is that we’ve all gone off into wildly different areas of expression. And so for me, I am an editor and I am a writer and I am a designer—I wear all those hats, because I’m bald and it’s cold up there. Anyway, those of us who used to just sit at their studios—and I still have a studio, obviously—I couldn’t live in a place like this!—and wait for the phone to ring. But the phone did ring because there were tons of publications and a lot of work for a lot of people.

And then long about—the period from about 2008–2012—was the big die off. And publications either completely disappeared or they shrank to a place where they couldn’t call illustration in or photography the way they used to. And certainly they didn’t have budgets anymore. And I am in total gratitude for the publications that exist, notwithstanding all of the publications trying to destroy themselves this week. Those happen to be, by the way—the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post—happen to be clients of mine.

George Gendron: I was going to ask you about that.

Steve Brodner: But my clients now are people I call. I don’t wait for the phone to ring. I call them up and I say, “Hey, let’s do this, let’s do that.”

George Gendron: You’ve always done some of that, right?

Steve Brodner: Yeah, I always have, but I was always juggling that with all these other things that I sort of wanted to do, kind of wanted to do, liked doing, but really I wanted to pay bills.

And I had a family. My daughter was still growing, and had needs, and hadn’t gone off on her own. And I was in my first marriage—we don’t have to go into all that. And now I’m in a much more organized, comfortable place. My studio here is three blocks away from where I live, so when I’m done with you, the shmoo [Brodner’s dog, Jazz] over here. He’s not looking at me now. The shmoo over here will guide me home, even if I forget the way. And we’ll have dinner and have a relaxing evening.

George Gendron: Let me interrupt though. I want to go back to your daughter. She’s created something of a reputation for herself as an illustrator.

Steve Brodner: She has.

George Gendron: Do you ever find people saying to you, “Oh my God, Steve Brodner—” the first time you met them. “Do you know who—”

Steve Brodner: —Terry Brodner is?

George Gendron: —“Who Terry Brodner is?”

Steve Brodner: Yes, I do know Terry Brodner.

George Gendron: Isn’t that great?

Steve Brodner: It is. And she works very hard. And like me, she’s a teacher. And she’s a very good teacher. And I’m very proud of her.

George Gendron: You should be. Now I want to go back to something you were just talking about, which is the fact that, at a certain period in time that you just identified, illustrators of all kinds really had to diversify, if you will. But you were doing that long before you had to. I can’t think of anybody I know, including Art Spiegelman, who I think of as much as a reporter as I do think of you as a political artist. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steve Brodner: It just went that way. It's a good thing if you allow the things that excite you and interest you to take you someplace. And I fight that. And quite often in life, we do fight that, because sometimes the thing that we really love the most doesn’t pay a lot of money, and you are stuck in a situation. And I felt stuck with that, that earlier life, because the kind of life I’m living now is, if I had known it was possible, I would have chosen to do that.

George Gendron: But where did the idea first come from, for you to go off and actually, let’s say, cover a political campaign?

Steve Brodner: The first thing that happened was I told myself that it was okay to want to do that. I gave myself permission before anything happened. Nobody called and said, “Hey, why don’t you go cover the farms in the Midwest” when they were under crisis. I threw myself into that story.

George Gendron: You did that for The Progressive, right?

Steve Brodner: Wow, you’re good. Oh my god!

George Gendron: No, you’re good!

Steve Brodner: You’re remembering something that happened 40 years ago, George.

“My clients now are people I call. I don’t wait for the phone to ring. I call them up and I say, ‘Hey, let’s do this, let’s do that.’”

George Gendron: I do my research. And I actually found the story because I wanted to see how they set up the byline. And there you are. It’s your story. It’s not like you were with a reporter and tagged along like [Ralph] Steadman with Hunter Thompson. This was your story.

Steve Brodner: Ralph could have covered all that stuff himself, but that was a gig that was put together for him and Hunter by, I think, JC Suares. And that’s how that magic collaboration was born. I had no such luck. I would have loved to have traveled with somebody like Thompson. Or anybody.

In 1988, I was sent by Esquire to cover the political conventions. And I covered the Democrats with someone whose name I can’t remember anymore. And for the Republicans, I did it with Martin Amis. And Martin was there in New Orleans with me. We met three times the whole time.

And the thing that I was worried about was the previous guy said, “Don’t do anything until you read my piece.” He had no sympathy, understanding, or interest in the art. It was his story, and What’s this guy doing here?

Amis, who was a Brit—I think that helped—and also very worldly, well-read, and knew the history said to me right off he said, “Listen, do whatever the hell you want. Don’t worry about what I’m writing. Just go.” And I did. I bumped into him at the convention, but I did a whole load of things. And I’ve covered a lot of political conventions.

George Gendron: I have to ask you—I’m a huge Martin Amis fan as well as a Steve Brodner fan—what was it like working with him?

Steve Brodner: I think he was as you would expect him to be, if you’ve ever seen an interview with him. He was always himself. And he was completely unaffected and unimpressed with power and circumstance and flummery of any kind. He was there to pull it apart, dissect it, and mock it at the same time.

George Gendron: We could have used Martin Amis for this election, boy.

Steve Brodner: Yeah, or Chris Hitchens. We’ve had a lot of great people—we still have a lot of great people today. So anyway he went and he found all kinds of interesting things. He was interested in the confluence of the way things looked and the way things meant. And if you read the piece in Esquire, and I believe that article is collected in The Moronic Inferno by him where he quotes me, 35 years ago, telling him what I knew about Ronald Reagan’s facelift.

And Reagan absolutely had a facelift. And I told Martin that you could see the difference in photos from 1976 and 1980. He’s much older-looking in ’76. And it was unreported. I think it was key. It changed his whole appearance. And Amis wrote about the conversation he had with me in the book, or in the article first saying that, “In America,” as Lincoln said once, “be careful after age 40—you’re liable to get the face you deserve.” And Amis said, “In America, you don’t get the face you deserve. You get the face you can afford.”

George Gendron: Enough said.

Steve Brodner: Yeah.

George Gendron: So, after that, did you start getting queries? You want to go do Rolling Stone? Did you want to go do another election?

Steve Brodner: I was always pitching. I didn’t need queries. I always had something. I always had two, three things in the air. I still do.

George Gendron: Things that you’re initiating?

Steve Brodner: Yeah. That’s my career now. My career is just about, What is it that I want to do? Does it make me happy? And the best part of an assignment is just getting the idea at the beginning. It’s, “Let’s do this. Wow” It’s, “Come on, let’s cover that thing. Let’s do a story on this.”

And so The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are key places, along with The Nation, where I pitch things. And I’m terribly afraid that their cachet has been diminished tremendously. Maybe their revenues will be degraded now, meaning they’d be less able to pay—or less likely—for such projects.

But I can’t worry too much. I’ve established things. This thing called Substack, which a lot of writers have and some artists have, which is a way to monetize your daily output. So I am pouring out stuff every day onto Substack. And I have thousands of subscribers and it’s not paying all my bills, but it’s a way for a freelancer to supplement their income.

And so anybody who wants to subscribe for free—you can have a free or paid subscription—steve brodner.substack.com. That’s the way to find it. And if you want to toss a few dollars in, that helps. But basically—this week especially—I’m doing like two, three, four illustrations.

“We are depending on a misled, confused, befuddled, uninformed American public to choose [its leader]. And either they can’t figure it out, or they actually choose [Trump]. And unless we figure out what dynamic is working here, we are fucked.”

George Gendron: Yeah, I know. I have to confess, I’m a free subscriber.

Steve Brodner: This is the week where I’m just not going to sleep much. There’s too much going on. There’s a huge firehose of news. And I’m just trying to run with it saying, “Oh, I better change the caption on this now because this just happened.”

George Gendron: But you know, despite the firehose of news, you did something that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on Substack before. You asked your subscribers to, in essence, pitch ideas. Because, you said, you want to up the volume and you want to be careful you’re not missing anything.

Steve Brodner: I want them to tell me stories that they’ve seen that I haven’t seen.

George Gendron: And what’s the response been?

Steve Brodner: Not too big. It was okay. They gave me plenty to use. But I think maybe of all the people who are, kind of, news junkies—I’m like, probably in the higher percentile—I was seeing a lot of things that I had already seen two days ago.

George Gendron: I’m married to one, so I know what it’s like.

Steve Brodner: Yeah. My wife puts up with me. She’s the opposite of a news junkie. So after dinner, I say, “Do you mind if I turn on the news?” Because I want to see what the mainstream has got. After reading it all day. Now I want to see what they think of it.

And she says, “No, not at all.”

And I’m doing the dishes and she’s gone. The dining room completely. She’s in the bedroom with the door closed reading or watching her programs.

George Gendron: Now, I have a question for you that really is both about you, but it’s also about your marriage. Your wife is an acupuncturist, if I’m not mistaken. And I guess I would say on the spectrum, you’re a pretty intense dude. And so I guess my question is—

Steve Brodner: —I’ll tell her you asked this question!

George Gendron: My question is, has she ever applied acupuncture to you in an attempt to get you to chill out a little bit, man?

Steve Brodner: Acupuncture—have you ever had it?

George Gendron: I have.

Steve Brodner: Okay, so you know it’s trippy, right?

George Gendron: All I know is I went to someone who was a legend up here in the Boston area. He was a legend in China, and then he came here and got his MD at Johns Hopkins. And I went there to give up smoking, and I ended up having the most restful sleeps I have ever had in my life, after which I would get in the car and light up a cigarette.

Steve Brodner: At least you got a good nap out of it.

George Gendron: I did.

Steve Brodner: You got a hell of a nap!

George Gendron: I did.

Steve Brodner: Yeah. No, she’s “thrown needles” into me many times. But it’s not to change my personality. I think she’s in a state of acceptance of how I am. We’re together 17 years, so we’re like an old married couple now.

George Gendron: Yeah, but don’t ever take that for granted, man.

Steve Brodner: No, I know. I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. Anyhow, she’s not trying to change me, but I have lower back issues. I’m 70 years old, but my back is 89. And also I have terrible allergies. So she helps somewhat with the lower back, but the real thing that helps with the lower back is swimming, which I have to do two, three times a week. And then that straightens that out, thank God.

And then the other thing that happens with me is terrible allergies. In the fall I have sometimes, not in New York, but if we’re traveling to some place where there’s the wrong kind of vegetation, I am a mess. She knows where to throw the needles in—somewhere over here, above the hip. She throws needles in and it cuts it off like you flip a light off.

“If there’s a man in politics whose name happens to be Dick Armey, I’m thinking, ‘Somebody’s got to do it.’”

George Gendron: I want to come back to your intensity again. When I think of your work as a caricaturist—and I’m not going to use that word too often because it’s just inelegant to say. Excuse me if I call you an illustrator, but you’re a caricaturist. Your work is fierce, really fierce. And I guess my question would be how often do you come up with ideas that you feel are just a little bit over the line and decide, I’m not going to do it. Our intern, Ali, who you just met, unearthed a priceless “Army of Dicks.”

Steve Brodner: It’s the “Dick Army”!

George Gendron: “Dick Army,” yes.

Steve Brodner: Okay, so this is my answer to your question. If there’s a man in politics whose name happens to be Dick Armey. All right? That’s his name. I’ve been hearing his name a long time. And I’m thinking, Somebody’s got to do it.

He was the right hand man for Newt Gingrich. If you remember, Newt Gingrich was the precursor to Trumpism. He was the first modern speaker of the house to operate as if he were fighting a war. Not interested in cutting deals, but interested mostly in “owning the libs.”

This is the nineties. So that would be 30 years ago. And his nemesis was Bill Clinton. But Clinton was such a smooth operator that he wound up sweet-talking Gingrich and winning the war that way. But still you could say they won because they did push the country in a right direction unlike it had been before when the Democrats had dominated the Congress with people like Tip O’Neill and Dan Rostenkowski and Jim Wright.

Anyway, Dick Armey was his number-two man. And I forgot what the story was, but the moment had arrived. I think that your ferocity should match the feeling you have in here. The degree of upset and anger and threat assessment that you see around you should be reflected in an honest way.

Satire doesn’t work if you are irresponsibly, unreasonably inventive. Like the man last night, I don’t know when this is going to be broadcast, but there was this guy the other night at Madison Square Garden who made this joke about Puerto Rico. That is the kind of non-satire that comes strictly from hate.

It is not a tweaking of reality to make it clearer. The humor must come from something embedded in truth. If satire doesn’t have truth in it, it’s not funny. Even the crowd of angry racists didn’t laugh at his stupid joke. And he flopped. He was a comedian, and he was flopping.

But for something to really be brilliant, think about David Levine’s brilliant drawing of Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt up and showing the map of Vietnam on his abdomen. And it was famous at that time that Johnson had a gallbladder operation and it was his style to—

George Gendron: —show his scars.

Steve Brodner: —greet the press on the White House lawn and lift his shirt up to show this ugly scar on his abdomen. And Levine took a look at that and made the connection. He said, “All right, let’s take that and use it for something.”

Today I did a floating island of hate. I took what the comedian said and what Madison Square Garden looked like to me, and I just combined—that’s what satire is, it’s a mashup.

George Gendron: Where is that on your Substack?

Steve Brodner: Yeah, I just posted that a few hours ago. What you want is the mashup. You want the thing where two things that are happening at the same time, and we recognize them, and they don’t belong together. But suddenly, they do! If you can create that, then you’ve got a spark that goes off and you’re successful.

But there are a lot of cartoonists whose names I won’t mention—like Ranan Lurie, who’s dead now, who was forcing it all the time. And that is the hallmark of a bad cartoon. I will only speak ill of the dead because I don’t want to speak ill of any living cartoonists who I don’t like. And there are some I don’t like. I don’t like anybody who calls themselves “an equal opportunity offender,” and that they can somehow make a false sense of equivalence between Trump and anybody else. There is no equivalence.

George Gendron: Yeah. You’re talking about fabrication, right? And a lack of authenticity. There’s a lot of that around.

Steve Brodner: And playing up to your audience who wants something to be true. So all together you believe something is true. And so you make a joke based on that understanding of something that’s not true, but it pleases the mob. And I won’t do that. I know I have a mob, but I’m happy to say that it’s a mob that reads books, reads a diversity of publications.

Many of them, as I do, subscribe to The Wall Street Journal and also subscribe to The Economist, conservative publications—something that MAGAs will never do—and subscribe to Mother Jones or The Nation or The Progressive or Rolling Stone.

And that’s my mob. I’m proud of them. I’m proud that they call me out when I get it wrong. I’m trying to stick with what makes sense and tell as much of the truth as possible. Even though I draw cartoons.

George Gendron: Okay, now I want to go back, though, to Dick Armey.

Steve Brodner: You do, huh.

George Gendron: I do. I want to ask you, can you give us an example of something that you really wanted to do, but you thought, “Nah, I just can’t. I just can’t go there.”

Steve Brodner: I really can’t.

George Gendron: That’s good, that’s fine. Okay.

Steve Brodner: I’ve always figured out how to do it. Because in the old days—I worked 19 years steady for The New Yorker—and I did one cover and a whole lot of back pages before they had the cartoon contest. And I knew The New Yorker. I knew what you couldn’t get away with there. The New Yorker has a style. And the style of humor is, in their minds, very sophisticated. And misdirected in a British kind of way, where if you want to make a joke about this thing over here, you have to hit that thing and have it ricochet off to that other thing.

“Satire doesn’t work if you are irresponsibly, unreasonably inventive. That is the kind of non-satire that comes strictly from hate.”

George Gendron: I agree completely, except they just got rid of Barry Blitt and Andy Borowitz.

Steve Brodner: They got rid of Barry? When?

George Gendron: In terms of his regular work there. I think he’s probably still on call for covers.

Steve Brodner: Yeah, he does covers. He does covers like once every six weeks or something.

George Gendron: No, they got rid of him in terms of, I think, his regular contract. I’m not exactly sure how to explain it. But if you look at it—because I’m a subscriber to The New Yorker, I used to check their humor all the time—I think they’re trying to appeal to a younger audience. And it’s working because I don’t get it anymore. There isn’t a single thing that I get back there.

Steve Brodner: I don’t understand what you mean. Barry is younger. I think Barry’s about three years younger than I am. He’s a kid. I think he’s just, like, a kid.

George Gendron: Okay, so now I’m going to shift gears again, because if I didn’t know anything about your background at all, having been born in Brooklyn and grown up in New Jersey, I would have guessed that you had been born in Brooklyn and cut your teeth at a really shitty New Jersey newspaper. How’s that?

Steve Brodner: My teeth are deeply cut.

George Gendron: The Hudson Dispatch, man. Holy jeez!

Steve Brodner: Did you know about this publication? Have you heard of it?

George Gendron: Yes, I did. Yeah, I knew about it. I knew about it retrospectively from newspaper friends of mine whose early career was made by The Bergen Record, which was an extraordinary newspaper. Maybe it still is.

Steve Brodner: The Bergen Record was always a real newspaper, so was The Jersey Journal. The Hudson Dispatch was a joke. And it was a very unimportant publication in terms of the state, but important to the people who lived in Union City. It covered local news.

These little papers had tremendous value. They covered the local baseball team. They covered high school sports, which is very important. They covered community board meetings. Even still, even if the editors were all on the take by the local democratic machine it was a given that the democratic—

George Gendron: Whoa! Whoa! Wait! The editors were on the take?

Steve Brodner: Oh, yes. They all had swimming pools. Can you imagine, like, a dinky editor of a 50,000-circulation newspaper lives in a beautiful house with a swimming pool? You didn’t fool around with satirizing those politicians, the wrong ones. And I made that mistake right off the bat and immediately I realized I was in the wrong place.

It was a very steep learning curve. And so I was there for six months in Jersey after I graduated. And it just so happened that I was sending cartoons that they would never run in that newspaper, that were about national issues, to different people. And one of them was Steven Heller at The New York Times Book Review who had been there for 20 years. A legend.

George Gendron: One of the themes that surfaces in many of our conversations is what people often refer to as the “big break.” And I’ve got to believe Steve Heller and The New York Times Book Review was, to some extent, your big break.

Steve Brodner: There were a number of big breaks. I didn’t have one really big break. And they were all breaks that were the result of the little artist kicking the door down with his foot. Nobody looked at my illustrations in The Hudson Dispatch and said, “I think that young man has promise.”

George Gendron: I was wondering whether Steve Heller was a subscriber.

Steve Brodner: No! You have to promote. All these movies about artists who get inspiration from looking at clouds and listening to birds—it’s bullshit. Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, any artist who’s super famous. What’s the movie about Johann Strauss where “Tales from the Vienna Woods” comes to him as he’s in a carriage—this is an old movie—and the birds are singing, “Da da, da, da.”

“Oh, I have to write this down! Wait!”

It’s not that way. You work your ass off. You pull your hair out. That’s why I have no hair. I kicked the door down at The New Yorker. I first tried at The New York Times. And then I went knocking at Harper’s.

George Gendron: Yeah, Lewis Lapham calls you “a born arsonist.”

Steve Brodner: We just lost him at a great age. He was a wonderful man. I loved him. I was so lucky to meet these people. I worked there for two years. Same thing with all these places—Bang down the doors! Don’t be a mystery! And I was very good at self promotion. So I got into The New Yorker.

But all the freelance guys were like this. It defines freelance, that the job ends and you don’t have a job anymore. So now you have all these other publications, you just keep knocking on those doors. So there was no real single break for me.

The big break was having the graphic arts industry there, as it was in 1977, when I decided I was going to leave Jersey and come back to New York and get work in publications. And so that really is the beginning of my freelance career—although in publications in ’71 in Brooklyn. But really ’77 was when I became a real full-fledged freelancer.

And look, what was there? Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. I got into all of them. And it was exploding. And it just so happened, by ’88, there was tremendous resistance for a while, because it was still post-Watergate, and people would say to me, “No, we used all this stuff during Watergate, we’re not going back to use satire and parody and caricature again.”

But I found my people. I found Harper’s, I found Mother Jones. I found The Washington Post Magazine. I was a regular in those places. And then I had this big fat portfolio of all these things. And when Esquire in ’88 had a whole new regime. I walked in at the right moment. You could say that was really the break.

I walked in at the right moment and I showed Rip Georges and Lee Eisenberg my portfolio. And they said, “We found this guy.” I was not a kid anymore. I was 34 years old and I was just ready. The whole thing came together. And at Esquire I did a back page every month that I wrote and drew. They let me do that, for some reason. And then I covered these conventions. I did literary caricatures. It was a glorious two year period of coming out.

“I don’t like anybody who calls themselves ‘an equal opportunity offender,’ and that they can somehow make a false sense of equivalence between Trump and anybody else. There is no equivalence.”

George Gendron: That was also a period where it was possible—not popular, not frequent, but it was possible—for illustrators to do that. And David Levine and The New York Review of Books were incredible. It’s almost part of their brand identity. I hate to invoke that phrase—

Steve Brodner: —look, it’s a business. This is all a business. And so two years at Esquire, then all these people left their job and then I had to go. But that’s the way it goes. And then a couple of years later, I'm still drawing for everybody and then I’m a regular in Spy, which was a very hot magazine.

George Gendron: Oh my God. It was amazing.

Steve Brodner: If anybody remembers that. That’s about 30 years ago. And it was marvelous to be with them because I was in that sensibility, that kind of snide—but it was reportage with a twist. They reported on Trump, but they called him a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

George Gendron: He never forgot.

Steve Brodner: And then from there, The New Yorker. And that really was, I think, as high as you could get.

George Gendron: I want to go back to something that’s obviously really clear from this conversation already, and that is the fact that you think of yourself, as you said right at the top of the conversation, as an editor, reporter, kind of analyst—you’re very analytical—designer, illustrator, caricaturist. When you went out and actually were on the campaign trail, did that influence how you thought about politics? What you saw when you were out there?

Steve Brodner: Wow. That’s a good question. Yeah, everything was visual. The whole game and the exciting part of it is to try to match what you were seeing like with what Martin Amis did, where he talked about facelifts. I was doing it with pictures.

George Gendron: That’s what I was wondering. When I think of you, I think of theater. It’s a form of theater, right?

Steve Brodner: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of a suspension of disbelief. I’m giving you not what I saw, but what I think I saw. And what this person very subjectively relates is going to relate back to you as an honest appraisal of something.

George Gendron: Since the election has not occurred yet, first, I’m going to ask who you voted for.

Steve Brodner: I don’t know what to say to people who’ve already been through the election, which we have not yet, because this will run after the election, right?

George Gendron: Yeah.

Steve Brodner: What I think we can say about this whole campaign is a couple of things. One is that we have reached a new point in American politics where it’s no longer important what’s true. Not that it ever was terribly important, but we have reached a new situation where Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping can waltz in to this election with a firm understanding that about half the people in this country have no idea what the fuck is going on, and feed them lies aided with computer technology—which will only get more sophisticated—to change reality so that they can grab more of the pie that journalism has always kept them from grabbing.

George Gendron: Yeah.

Steve Brodner: So we have the knocking down of journalism. So when we say “print is dead,” what really is dying here is the ability of people, from all these new media that we have, from getting information. And if we can figure out this problem, then we can solve the other thing.

But we are depending on a misled, confused, befuddled, uninformed American public to choose between an accomplished public servant, highly intelligent, who has her values on straight with a backbone of steel, and a man who is a quivering, racist, misogynistic, fascistic piece of shit. And either they can’t figure it out, or they actually choose the latter.

And unless we figure out what dynamic is working here, we are fucked. We are really screwed in the long run. Because the economy happens to be good. The positives, the things that you would think of in terms of having a strong country and a strong economy and having a program of opening up society to those who have been kicked around and are upset about it, that kind of a program is extremely vulnerable to a truckload of lies.

What happens when we have a recession? What happens when we have the next pandemic? What happens when, God forbid, somebody sets off a nuclear bomb in the world? There are all kinds of things that can happen here that would take the door that has been opened by the fascists even just so much, assuming that the fascists don’t win this time, giving them ever greater opportunities going forward.

This is what I feel we need to be doing. This election ends this week, but really the true battle for democracy and freedom in this country is just beginning. This is just the beginning of something where we’re either going to wake up to the forces massing to take over, you know, egged on financially and politically by all these very powerful men—and they are men—or we’re not. And we really have the capacity to do this.

George Gendron: You know, as you’re talking I’m sitting here looking at a book of yours that I adore, it’s called Living and Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020–2022. And that was literally your daily response to what was happening during the pandemic. And when I open it, two things happen to me, to this day. I hadn’t opened it in a while, but I picked it up this morning, just getting in the mood for talking to you. And the same thing happened that happens every time I open it up, which is I tear up. I can’t open this book without literally crying. At the sense of loss, number one. And number two, the effect it has on me is it makes me feel as if this country still hasn’t come to terms with what we lost during the pandemic.

Steve Brodner: Right.

George Gendron: It’s almost incomprehensible. What you’ve managed to do by doing these sketches–and I urge people to take a look at this book. It is extraordinary. It’s a combination of many illustrations of unknown people who died during the pandemic. And it brings to life the actual cost in a way that the only other thing I could think of that was even remotely comparable is The New York Times front page, when all it consisted of was the names of people who had died. It took your breath away.

Steve Brodner: And this is the man who says drink Clorox! And think of all the millions of people who lost loved ones who are going to pull the lever for this man. And somebody did write an article about how many thousands were actually identifiably his responsibility in the time when shots could have been distributed, the vaccinations were available. And he realized that spreading the lie was a bigger dopamine hit for these people who needed a story about the government than the importance of getting vaccines in arms.

George Gendron: One of the pages that just still takes my breath away is the one that features a fellow, and I forget his name now, but he was the CEO of a company who contacted the White House and said, “I can make millions of masks for you.” And the simple response was, “Nope. No, thanks.” So we ended up with shitty imports, initially, from Asia that weren’t working. We ended up with people like a guy that you talked about a hospital worker where people were, all they were doing was they were using plastic—

Steve Brodner: —garbage bags, yeah! This went on for a long time. I live on the upper west side of New York. And so over here, out this window, is Riverside Drive. This is a tiny studio. And then three blocks east of here is where Cynthia and I live, which is on Amsterdam and 94th. And I’d sit at the dining room table long into the night drawing these people.

And I would be listening to the ambulances fly down Amsterdam Avenue. And I think a lot of people had this experience where you just, you’re crushed by the sound of these ambulances. And then you see the pictures of—you know, there’s no room for the bodies, and they’re building refrigerated cars, and they’re burying them in Potter’s Field because they don’t know who these people are. And it’s just one thing after another.

And in New York, anyone who’s been to New York knows the Upper West Side is a very busy, bustling place. And I’d take my dog out. There’s nobody there. I could walk him down the center of Amsterdam Avenue. He could do his business right there. No cars, nothing.

George Gendron: Yeah. I did a podcast with Mark Seliger, the photographer, and Mark published a book of photographs that he took walking around with his camera everywhere in Manhattan. And, same thing. At most, you might see one person in the background, otherwise deserted in a way that was chilling.

Steve Brodner: Just before we put this to bed, I just want to say to anybody who’s listening, who is an artist, I had no idea that this would turn into my Substack. I had no idea this would turn into a book. I had no idea that doing a drawing every day was going to define the next part of my life. If you have something that you need to do: fucking do it. Don’t wait for permission. Just do it. And if it comes from your heart, it will be good.

And if it’s good, it will connect with other people. As you’ve heard George respond to this work. It’s not because I put anything external in it or tried to be like this or tried to do like that. Something I saw or something I’m imitating. It was just, “How do you feel, Steve? How does it feel to be here?” Let’s get into the lives of these people. This person who died. This 30-year-old nurse, this 92-year-old rabbi, this famous musician, Bucky Pizzarelli, who I saw many times at jazz clubs. I loved him. There were many sports figures, writers.

George Gendron: The ones that affected me the most were the people who weren’t well known.

Steve Brodner: Yeah. Someone’s mom. Someone in their family who died. The father and the daughter died. All these things. And so I’m just saying there are a lot of stories out there right now that need to be covered. Anybody who wants to do a story of women affected by Dobbs, there’s a book for you. That will be a book. That will be a Substack.

If you’re Arab-American and you want to discuss Palestine and what’s happened in Gaza, there’s a book there for you, too. If you’re Jewish and you want to do that, there’s a book there, too. I’m Jewish, and when Gaza happened I did many drawings from the standpoint of giving a damn about human rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Israel was the first country to sign in the very beginning.

Brodner’s 2022 book, *Living & Dying in America*, is a Covid-era chronicle of those who died and those who honorably served the living―as well as an indictment of those institutions and political figures who betrayed the public trust.

So follow your passion. Follow the heart. I know that sounds like a cliché, but that’s how this book happened. That’s how my whole career happened. Everything I do, I do because I feel I want to do it. It’s important to me. Even if it’s not important to anybody else. And there are many days when that’s the case!

George Gendron: Yeah. It’s the same as magazine editors. You really end up creating a magazine for yourself with the hope that you find an audience. That’s what really good editors do. It’s not about market research and analytics—it’s your sense of passion about something. A place, a city, a theme.

Steve Brodner: How much do you care about it? If you care about it deeply, you’ll find other people who care about it. It may not be everybody, but you’ll find your people.

George Gendron: You don’t need everybody though.

Steve Brodner: You don’t need everybody. In fact, when you think about it, you don’t want everybody. You want the people who are, I think, reachable and keyed-in to this sensibility. And then you have a good life.

George Gendron: Steve, this has been spectacular, man.

Steve Brodner: Same here.

George Gendron: Great way to end too—a kind of, what do you want to call it, an invitation, a passionate invitation. And, as you said earlier, about giving permission to yourself. And I think one thing that journalism needs right now is more people giving permission to themselves.

Steve Brodner: I’ll tell you a really quick story and then we’ll go. One of the things I did while I was struggling in the beginning was draw caricatures at parties. And I went to a party on the Upper East Side, and there I recognized one of my heroes: Gordon Parks, one of the greatest photographers who ever lived.

It was very hard to miss Gordon. He was a black man with a huge white mustache and a huge mane of hair combed back—he looked like a lion. And I knew he’d be friendly for some reason. I walked over to him, I said, “Mr. Parks, I’d like to ask you a question.”

He says, “Sure.”

I said, “You are one of the greatest photographers who ever lived. You’re a filmmaker, you’re a painter, you compose music, you’re a poet. How did you do all those things in one lifetime?”

And he says to me, “It’s very simple. I give myself permission.”

Now you’re a year old black boy in the Great Depression in Minneapolis. You have to be a really special person to feel that you can do all these things. Because there’s no role model. There’s no one you can look at. You just pick yourself up and you make things.

And he did kick down the doors at Life magazine. And he did kick down the doors at the WPA. And he became an international celebrity based on his brilliant photography. Nobody told him he should do it. He just did it.

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