O'er The Bounding Main

I'm sometimes asked if I'm a "political cartoonist." The answer is most emphatically no. The political cartoons you see on the op-ed pages of newspapers are intended first and foremost to drive home a barbed point about current events. If they can get a chuckle out of you so much the better, but the laugh is secondary. My cartoons, on the other hand, are primarily intended to be funny, and if they can make some social comment about our habits, mores, or collective foibles, it's a plus. Which is to say that the above could easily become a political cartoon by putting a simple label on the pirate vessel: the ship of state. When I was in eighth grade we all had to bring a political cartoon to class once a week, and everyone voted on which was the best. Most of the kids traced or copied theirs from the newspapers, but I insisted on creating my own. I never won, which I thought was grossly unfair given that I was the only one bringing in originals. I remember a freighter sinking in a North Atlantic storm that winter, and the attempt to save it was grabbing daily headlines. The ship was called the Flying Enterprise. My cartoon that week showed the foundering ship, with the words "Free Enterprise" painted on the hull. I'm not sure why I thought that entrepreneurship was in peril, but even at 13 I had a political awareness.