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Fall and Get Up: Lessons From Jules Feiffer
Get out there, fall on your butt if necessary, but then get up and soldier on.
Oct 25, 2025
It’s been more than nine months now since my friend, famed cartoonist Jules Feiffer, died, a week before his 96th birthday after continually warning me that the evil spirit that had descended on this country was leaving him frightened and dispirited. He was glad, he told me, that he was old and close to the end in an era he considered more dangerous than the Civil War and more treacherous than the Reconstruction era. He had, he insisted, lost both heart and hope. I found that difficult to take too seriously. After all, hadn’t he survived the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the McCarthy-era Red Scare, the nightmare of Vietnam, and the “Hard Year” of 1968, while being dubbed the greatest political satirist of his time?
And as it happened, he died only a few days after finishing a graphic memoir, “A License to Fail,” which stunned me with its insight and wit. It reminded me of the shock and awe he had evoked 60-odd years earlier with his spindly cartoons in New York’s Village Voice harpooning the hypocrisies of the government of that era, the developing war in Vietnam of that moment, and the self-delusions of his liberal audience, which still prevail.
The difference between Jules’s work then and now, however, was his emotional motivation. Anger had fueled his Vietnam Era cartoons. In the age of Donald Trump, he was, he assured me, “fed up.”
As he told me recently, “Dr. King said the arc of history bends toward the good, but I say the arc is up for grabs and can move in directions we don’t dare think about. Like civil war. Like the American dream becoming the American con job.”
“Maybe my old age and fartism need to be factored in here, but to my mind Republican politicians just aren’t American citizens."
And yet, for all his pessimism, I found Jules at 95 a beacon of hope. Amid the rising negativity and growing passivity of our increasingly endangered world, he never gave up.
To combat his macular degeneration, he taught himself to look around corners as he drew. He could barely walk a block, but somehow, he still managed to do so. His heart, lungs, and kidneys were on speed dial to the ambulance corps and he was all too frequently hospitalized. Yet he just kept coming back.
Jules was anything but modest. He readily agreed with me that he was a national treasure. As I assured him more than once, I considered him my personal reward for getting old and distinctly an inspiration to keep on going. After all, by the time we met and became dear friends, I was almost 80 and he was almost 90. He agreed I was right.
For five years, from 2017 to 2022, Jules and his wife Joan lived in my small Long Island town, Shelter Island. Jules made me breakfast almost every Sunday morning. Always scrambled eggs. He was incredibly precise about it, as much an artist when it came to those eggs as he was when it came to his acclaimed cartoons and book illustrations. He broke our eggs with a quick rap of a knife, whipped them in a bowl, slid them into a pan, and then shoveled my portion onto a plate and cooked his for another 30 seconds. As the apprentice and acolyte, I made the toast. I brought the food to the table. He always insisted on doing the dishes. Then we talked for at least two hours. Actually, Jules did most of the talking and I, most of the listening.
He said things like, “Maybe my old age and fartism need to be factored in here, but to my mind Republican politicians just aren’t American citizens. They don’t care about their constituents or the Constitution. Like the tobacco executives, they feel that killing your kids and grandkids is just the cost of doing business.”
Meeting the Masses
Jules was born in New York City’s the Bronx, a beanpole who said he hated his body and tried to have nothing to do with it. He claimed to have done only two push-ups in his whole life.
“I can’t do anything physical,” he would tell me. “My body’s just along for the ride. It’s there to carry my head and nothing more. Now I find myself in this old man’s body which still has no relation to me. I have no sense of direction. I used to rage at myself. Now, I just start every trip at least a half hour early.”
His proficiency with computers, phones, cars, and the like was virtually nonexistent and he resisted instruction. (“Machines hate me,” he said.) But he still had a remarkable talent for sponging up information and ideas. One Christmas long, long ago, his sister, a Stalinist, gave him a history of cartooning that introduced him to the radical writer Max Eastman’s controversial socialist magazine The Masses.
“It blew a hole in my mind,” Jules told me. “It gave me permission not just to be a boy cartoonist, but to say something. Then the Army radicalized me, focused my rage. I couldn’t hate my family because I thought they had my best interests at heart, but the Army didn’t, not with their lying and ethical abuse. The Army made me an angry satirist.”
He was drafted into the Army in 1951 during the Korean War and ended up doing animation for the Signal Corps. He never went to college and dropped out of art school. Early on, he was filled with pretension and rage and, as he matured, became something of an intellectual bad boy, the only proper response, he came to believe, to an evil, unfair world.
Those hours I spent with Jules sometimes expanded into lunches with a mutual friend, the actor Harris Yulin, who lived in nearby Bridgehampton. A brilliant Shakespearean teacher and director, Harris made his living as a mostly nefarious cop, judge, or government official in blockbuster movies like Scarface and Clear and Present Danger. On stage, he also played President Richard Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Harris was my age, and we both played the straight man for Jules, especially for his remarkable array of Zeligesque, non-fact-checked memories. When Harris, for instance, mentioned acting with Julie Andrews, Jules would promptly recall being at her wedding. When I mentioned reading William Styron, Jules instantly recounted a drunken evening with that well-known novelist on Martha’s Vineyard and then riffed on why novelists, who work alone and inside their heads, tend to be jerks, while playwrights, who work collectively, are mostly fine guys. Of course, Jules was both.
Once, after Harris mentioned a Philip Roth novel he was reading, Jules recalled sitting between Roth and Jackie Onassis at a dinner party. Jackie, he told us, placed a folded paper in Jules’s hand and asked him to pass it to Roth. A few days later, Jules asked Roth what was on the paper.
“Her phone number,” he replied.
“Have you called her yet?” asked Jules.
Roth made a face. “Are you kidding? Who wants photographers outside your house all night?”
When John Belushi’s name came up, Jules recalled meeting him in his building’s elevator as the young comedian was heading to his therapist. Jules introduced himself and invited him to stop by afterward. “Sweet guy, stayed for an hour,” he told us. “He asked me if being famous was a drag for me, too. I told him no, since people knew my name but never recognized the face.”
Frauds and Favorites
He was not shy about his opinions. Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, and Arthur Miller? All of them, he insisted, were overpraised frauds.
Really? Or had they annoyed him one drunken night at that legendary New York hangout Elaine’s, a second home for Jules?
On the other hand, the comedians, Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, whose bold work he felt had empowered him, the ones who had given him permission to dare, couldn’t be praised enough. Nor could humorist Robert Benchley, whose “schmucky WASP characters” led Jules to his own alter ego character, Bernard Mergendeiler, who wasn’t assertive enough either to get his order taken at a restaurant or even get the elevator operator to stop at his floor. Of those who followed Jules, he particularly liked Doonesbury‘s Garry Trudeau and the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart.
He didn’t live long enough to see the vested interests he loathed be beaten. I hope we do.
Jules and I regularly talked about politics. He had, he felt, been disappointed all too often. The only time he actually campaigned for a candidate was when the acclaimed journalist Sy Hersh persuaded him that Eugene McCarthy’s election was critical to the fate of the nation. Jules was at a hotel in Chicago for the Democratic Convention of 1968, drinking with radio personality Studs Terkel, when he saw a group of young workers for the presidential campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy being driven into the hotel’s plate-glass windows by cops who were beating them with their batons. Calls to McCarthy upstairs were fruitless. He refused to come down. Jules quit the campaign.
For all the betrayals he felt he had experienced, he still believed that he had lived a lucky life. Half a century ago, over scotch at the Des Artistes bar in New York City, Irwin Hasen, cocreator of the comic strip Dondi, had characterized it to him this way: “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this!” Jules agreed that it was indeed amazing to get paid for what you had always wanted to do as a kid.
There were, of course, bumps in the road—periods of alcoholism and two unhappy marriages. In the late 1950s, he drew ads for a bank until a reviewer for the New York Times, Herbert Mitgang, gently suggested that he not sell out. He stopped, he told me, and by doing so changed his life. In the end, he would win an Oscar for an animated short film, Munro, about a 4-year-old drafted into the Army, a Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons, and two Obies for his off-Broadway plays, Little Murders and The White House Murder Case. That, of course, didn’t stop him from complaining that he had never won an Emmy or a Tony.
Thinking about Jules
At some point on those Shelter Island Sundays we spent together, he would abruptly tell me to go home. Joan would be waking up soon and would need her coffee. In any case, he needed his nap.
Even now, on Sunday afternoons, I imagine Jules heading upstairs, leaving me feeling both abandoned and happily sated with his insights, one-liners, and energizing BS. I think he was the smartest, most complex person I ever knew, someone who could be both heartwarmingly kind and charmingly nasty, often in quick succession.
More than once, he said to me, “The blessing of Covid-19 is I don’t have to go to those fucking parties where I never hear anything anyway from people who don’t have much to say in the first place.”
But, of course, he went to those parties. That was the giveaway. The gawky kid from the Bronx loved the acclaim of all those people who still told him how his 60s cartoons in the Village Voice had exposed the hypocrisy of all their friends and neighbors; how the movie he scripted, Carnal Knowledge, prepared us for understanding toxic masculinity and the Me Too movement; how his children’s books brought out the imagination in all ages.
And he worked every day. On the Island, he sat cramped at a tiny table by the door. When he and his wife moved to upstate New York, he sprawled in a splendid studio overlooking a meadow and a lake. From both, in recent years, the results included an acclaimed children’s book, Amazing Grapes, and his as-yet-unpublished graphic memoir that stunned me with its insight and wit, A License to Fail.
That license, which he always insisted to students was critical to success, was the key to the bold surprise in his own work. Get out there, fall on your butt if necessary, but then get up and soldier on. I got to watch some of the failing and successful soldiering on of his last two books, the revising and rewriting, the precision of cracking the eggs of thought and cooking them to perfection. A practically blind, deaf, immobile old man in his 90s, he pumped up my own ambition. Once dismissed on those Sunday afternoons, I headed for my own desk.
I would think about what he had said. I might even dip back into the work of the two journalists who, in the last century, gave him permission to push on, I.F. Stone and Murray Kempton—and the one he admired now, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and wonder, as he did, where we lost our Mr. Smith Goes to Washington confidence. Remember when we believed that all you had to do was expose the evil vested interests and they would be defeated?
Time ran out on Jules Feiffer. Sadly enough, he lived deep into but not out of the era of Donald Trump. He didn’t live long enough to see the vested interests he loathed be beaten. I hope we do. Certainly, Jules left us the words and pictures we need to inspire us to beat them. To keep going; fall and get up; fail and, in the end, succeed.
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House of Dynamite Is a Chilling Reminder of the Nuclear Threat
The film will spark myriad questions for viewers, which is sorely needed as humanity accepts the unacceptable, the scourge of these weapons that recklessly put at dire risk everything we claim to hold dear.
Oct 17, 2025
As a peace and disarmament activist for over four decades, I was conflicted about whether to see A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s new fictional film about an all too realistic nuclear crisis. In my free time, I usually seek refuge from concerns over war and peace.
I haven’t read Annie Jacobson’s recent book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which by all accounts is outstanding. I haven’t watched Oppenheimer (I know a lot about the Father of the Bomb, having read books about him and the Manhattan Project, and it’s my job to know more than most people about the history and current status of nuclear weapons, so I don’t need to see it). I was about to stay home, but my son wanted to see A House of Dynamite, so we went together to the theater on Monday, and I am very glad I did. It is currently showing in a limited movie house release, and will be available on Netflix October 24.
I will refrain from any spoilers here, but in my view the film deserves the widest possible audience. (Well maybe one semi-spoiler, it’s closer to The Day After than to Dr. Strangelove.) My sense is A House of Dynamite will spark myriad questions for viewers, which is sorely needed as humanity accepts the unacceptable, the scourge of these weapons that recklessly put at dire risk everything we claim to hold dear, up to and including the very existence of life on Earth.
Knowing a fair amount about nuclear weapons and “missile defense” technology, policy, and strategy, A House of Dynamite paints an accurate picture of the extreme challenges we face. (In one specific example, the secretary of defense shouts in response to the attempt to shoot down the incoming missile, “So it’s a f******* coin toss? That’s what $50 billion buys us?” In real life the secretary of war and all in power know this, or they should.)
Imagine our current president, the self-anointed “Very Stable Genius,” having 20 minutes to decide whether to possibly end most if not all life on Earth.
Suffice it to say the events that unfold are damning to our collective overconfidence in technology, bureaucracy, and policy orthodoxy, without necessarily calling those out directly. The seemingly magical word “deterrence” is hardly mentioned, but as the alleged cornerstone or raison d’etre for the existence of thousands of nuclear warheads worldwide, its talismanic quality is punctured by the film. Nuclear deterrence may, or may not, actually work in real life, yet we needlessly bet our collective existence on it every day.
So to me, the film’s main strength is it dramatically pierces various “certainties” about US nuclear weapons policy. Also, many of the characters’ human vulnerabilities ring touchingly true. But the film offers no easy answers. Indeed, some crucial details are unclear, leaving this viewer (and some of the characters) to wonder what actually happened more than once, evoking the fog of war.
The dialogue, editing, soundtrack, and performances are all generally top notch. Particularly affecting is Idris Elba as the clearly overwhelmed (as anyone would be) president. Having less than 20 minutes to absorb the foggy details of the crisis and decide how to respond—to nuke or not nuke, to commit omnicide or not—is, as he notes, “insanity,” and “none of this makes any sense, making all these bombs and all these plans.”
Yet the scenario is very realistic, as that one-third of an hour time frame is indeed what a president would likely face in a real nuclear crisis. Moreover, the policies of all nine nuclear weapons states—the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, which are spending, collectively, trillions of dollars to enhance their capacity to wreak unimaginable devastation—invest a single executive with sole authority to initiate a nuclear attack. All nine states lack any requirement for legislative or even cabinet-level approval to fire nuclear weapons.
So, imagine our current president, the self-anointed “Very Stable Genius,” having 20 minutes to decide whether to possibly end most if not all life on Earth. As Harvard professor Elaine Scarry incisively described in her book Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (which I did read), this situation in which one individual has such power makes a mockery of any notion of democracy.
Why do we put up with this? It’s not just the theoretical danger, but the all too real real costs to human life and health. Millions of people worldwide, in addition to the estimated 200,000 or more who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, have had their lives ruined by the disastrous health effects from the mining, manufacturing, testing, and storage of nuclear weapons. The price tag to our environment is incalculable. Then there is the opportunity cost to more productive uses of scarce public resources for human needs, the economy, and our environment. We are squandering trillions of dollars, instead of addressing the Common Good, while fattening the bottom lines of weapons contractors.
I hope A House of Dynamite is a wake-up call. It should be clear that fallible humans cannot be trusted with the power to extinguish life on Earth, and we have already had too many Broken Arrows, nuclear accidents, or near misses that could have turned into calamity. Our species certainly has a lot of problems getting along, but if we want a future, we have no choice but to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide before they eliminate us.
Of course this problem, at a time when so many struggle to keep up with paying their bills, let alone world events, seems daunting for anyone to address alone, so don’t try. Get educated (most aspects of nuclear weapons policy are public, not hidden), and get organized, with others who share your concerns. Support and join organizations working for peace, disarmament, social justice, and more humane priorities. Demand better of politicians who are supposed to represent us. Ask important questions.
Here is a good place to start—why should anyone, not just Donald J. Trump, be delegated the power to start a nuclear war?
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The Fourth Branch: How Conscience and Civic Vigilance May Save the Republic
Ordinary citizens, lower courts, military officers, advocacy groups, and artists together form a novel “fourth branch,” acting as a moral immune system of the body politic, sustaining its health when power itself has become a vector of disease.
Oct 13, 2025
With the executive overreaching and the judiciary acquiescent, the Republic’s immune system strains under political and institutional dysfunction. The legislative branch, meanwhile, toggles between paralysis and performative outrage, its constitutional authority weakened by partisan spectacle. When the formal organs falter, the Republic depends on the dispersed actors of the “fourth branch”—a novel, emergent moral network—tasked with upholding civic and constitutional integrity.
Ordinary citizens, lower courts, military officers, advocacy groups, and artists together make up this fourth branch of government, sustaining the body politic when power itself becomes a vector of disease. Like any living organism, the Republic survives only if parts of its system remain healthy, responsive, and attuned to threat. Two hundred fifty years after the nation’s founding, that resilience appears to reside outside the glare of public office and the ceremonial pomp of political power.
The organs of government—the executive, legislature, and judiciary—were built to temper ambition with accountability. The executive pursues policy goals and national leadership, yet is held in check by congressional oversight, the threat of impeachment, and the Senate’s advice and consent powers. The legislature advances laws and represents constituents, but its ambitions are restrained by the separation of powers and judicial review. The judiciary interprets laws and shapes precedent, yet its authority is bounded by norms, constitutional limits, and the actions of the elected branches that carry out its rulings. In this delicate interplay, each branch’s drive is held in tension with the others, forming a dynamic system of mutual restraint—a mechanism of civic immunity that preserves the Republic’s health whenever power tempts corruption.
When those formal checks falter or are stretched to their limits, other actors step forward. Among the first responders to constitutional stress and executive and legislative overreach are the lower courts. Their judgments, often meticulous and unnoticed, resist the infection of unchecked power, preserving both legal precedent and the vitality of constitutional norms. Historical examples—from district courts enforcing Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to federal judges upholding limits on executive overreach during Watergate—show that judicial restraint and principled decision-making act as vital lymphocytes in the body politic. In recent years, lower courts have repeatedly pushed back against attempts by both parties to expand executive power, reaffirming the judiciary’s enduring role in protecting constitutional norms and maintaining systemic balance.
The individuals of the fourth branch embody resilience, restoring the Republic not through office or ceremony, but through conscience, vigilance, and mindful, ethical action.
Equally critical is the principle guiding the military. Officers sworn to uphold the Constitution function as nodes of resilience. When orders risk undermining constitutional norms, restraint and adherence to lawful principle operate as systemic immunity, ensuring coercive force is not deployed toward corruption or authoritarian consolidation. From Union officers defending constitutional principles during the Civil War to the US military’s post-World War II commitment to civilian control, such principled restraint has protected the Republic from abuse. It has also reinforced societal stability during periods of extraordinary national stress.
Advocacy groups and civic organizations form a diffuse network of immune cells, detecting threats, mobilizing responses, and maintaining transparency. From the NAACP’s legal challenges during the civil rights movement to investigative journalism exposing abuses of power, as well as contemporary grassroots advocacy and sustained public protest, these actors function as a persistent, often invisible immune surveillance, preserving the health of the body politic. These efforts exemplify the kind of decentralized vigilance and ethical engagement that underpins the emergent “fourth branch,” helping sustain systemic stability even when formal institutions falter.
Similarly, artists and curators participate in this moral immune system, using cultural production to expose injustice and inspire civic engagement. From Picasso’s Guernica, which revealed the horrors of war, to the Mirror Shield Project by Cannupa Hanska Luger—created in 2016 for the Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation—art serves as a tool of ethical witnessing. Luger’s mirrored shields, intended as non-violent instruments of protest and protection, exemplify how creative interventions confront corruption and violence, mobilize empathy, and sustain the body politic’s vitality. Other contemporary examples include Ai Weiwei’s installations highlighting human rights abuses and forced migration, Mel Chin’s environmental advocacy and socially engaged art projects, and Theaster Gates’ community-driven work in Chicago that engages citizens in social and political renewal. These artistic acts, like investigative journalism or civic advocacy, function as moral lymphocytes, detecting societal “infection,” prompting reflection, and inspiring collective action.
Yet the deepest layer of defense resides in ordinary citizens. Democracy isn’t merely a formal arrangement of offices; it is sustained by conscience and participation. Every jury that renders judgment according to law rather than ideology; every community that organizes to defend the vulnerable; every voter in presidential, midterm, state, and local elections; and every citizen who peacefully protests or refuses to normalize corruption and injustice contributes to the body politic’s immune function. Herein lies the lifeblood of the fourth branch: a novel, emergent moral structure whose collective actions preserve health and resilience in the face of institutional illness and degradation.
As Montesquieu famously wrote in The Spirit of Laws (1748), “That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth.” He emphasizes balance and vigilance in those who hold office, a caution echoed by Hannah Arendt’s warning against thoughtless compliance and the banality of evil, and by Immanuel Kant’s assertion that moral law—accessible through reason alone (his Categorical Imperative)—guides action even under pressure. When the organs of governance are compromised, these insights become urgent guides for ethical engagement, illuminating the vigilance demanded of the emergent fourth branch.
The metaphor extends further: Like any organism, the body politic is vulnerable to fatigue and infection. Judges may falter. Officers may waver. Citizens may grow indifferent. Yet recognizing systemic vulnerability can catalyze meaningful action. Just as immune systems strengthen in response to challenge, civic vigilance grows in response to institutional illness. The Republic’s health depends on persistent engagement, not the passive expectation of heroic leadership—a principle perfectly captured by John F. Kennedy in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Citizenship isn’t merely a document; it invites—and requires—active participation in the nation’s health and well-being. This can mean resisting authoritarian forces or preventing private interests from capturing public institutions. Such engagement takes many forms: at town halls, shareholder meetings, voting booths, or even the checkout counter.
History demonstrates that resilience often emerges from unexpected quarters. The quiet rulings of lower courts, the disciplined adherence of officers to constitutional oaths, the tireless work of advocacy groups, and the conscientious refusal of citizens to acquiesce in corruption sustain the body politic. Their work is seldom glamorous, yet it is indispensable. The fourth branch enables the Republic to heal and resist, ensuring that liberty endures even when formal organs of power succumb to illness. Democratic health is measured not by office, rank, or visibility, but by the vitality of this dispersed moral network. These actors collectively form the body politic’s immune response, detecting threats, containing infection, and restoring systemic balance.
Benjamin Franklin’s warning—“A republic, if you can keep it”—has never been more urgent. Its keepers are often neither powerful nor celebrated, but those whose acts are small, disciplined, and principled. Acting as the lymphocytes, macrophages, and antibodies of the body politic, they preserve democratic health when governance structures fail. The individuals of the fourth branch embody resilience, restoring the Republic not through office or ceremony, but through conscience, vigilance, and mindful, ethical action. We may never know all their names, yet we may still sense their impact—and feel gratitude for it.
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