The characters live, for the most part, in hollow trees amidst lushly rendered backdrops of North American wetlands, bayous, lagoons and backwoods. The memorial dump was destroyed in an inferno caused by Owl's disastrous attempt to launch a rocket ship, in the strips from April 27, to May 18, , and was under reconstruction when the strip terminated. The landscape is fluid and vividly detailed, with a dense variety of often caricatured flora and fauna.
The richly textured trees and marshlands frequently change from panel to panel within the same strip. Like the Coconino County depicted in Krazy Kat and the Dogpatch of Li'l Abner , the distinctive cartoon landscape of Kelly's Okefenokee Swamp became as strongly identified with the strip as any of its characters. There are occasional forays into exotic locations as well, including at least two visits to Australia during the Melbourne Olympics in , and again in The Aussie natives include a bandicoot , a lady wallaby , and a mustachioed, aviator kangaroo named "Basher".
Kelly also frequently parodied Mother Goose stories featuring the characters in period costume: These offbeat sequences, usually presented as a staged play or a story within a story related by one of the characters, seem to take place in the fairy tale dreamscapes of children's literature, with European storybook-style cottages and forests, etc. The strip was notable for its distinctive and whimsical use of language.
Kelly, a native northeasterner , had a sharply perceptive ear for language and used it to great humorous effect.
The predominant vernacular in Pogo , sometimes referred to as "swamp-speak", is essentially a rural southern U. Pogo has been engaged in his favorite pastime, fishing in the swamp from a flat-bottomed boat, and has hooked a small catfish. Kelly was an accomplished poet, and frequently added pages of original comic verse to his Pogo reprint books, complete with cartoon illustrations. The odd song parody or nonsense poem also occasionally appeared in the newspaper strip. In , Kelly published Songs of the Pogo , an illustrated collection of his original songs, with lyrics by Kelly and music by Kelly and Norman Monath.
The tunes were also issued on a vinyl LP , with Kelly himself contributing to the vocals. Nora's freezin' on the trolley; Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo". They are enthusiastically performed by the swamp's rotating "Okefenokee Glee and Perloo Union" Choir perloo is a pilaf -based Cajun stew, similar to jambalaya , although in their childish innocence the chorus typically mangles the lyrics.
Churchy once sang a version of Good King Wenceslas that went: Kelly used Pogo to comment on the human condition, and from time to time, this drifted into politics. Pogo was a reluctant "candidate" for President although he never campaigned in and Eisenhower 's iconic campaign slogan "I Like Ike", appeared on giveaway promotional lapel pins featuring Pogo, and was also used by Kelly as a book title. A campaign rally at Harvard degenerated into chaos sufficient to be officially termed a riot, and police responded. The egg kept saying: Kelly, who claimed to be against "the extreme Right, the extreme Left, and the extreme Middle", used these fake campaigns as excuses to hit the stump himself for voter registration campaigns, with the slogan "Pogo says: If you can't vote my way, vote anyway, but VOTE!
Perhaps the most famous example of the strip's satirical edge came into being on May 1, , when Kelly introduced a friend of Mole's: Malarkey", an obvious caricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy. This showed significant courage on Kelly's part, considering the influence the politician wielded at the time and the possibility of scaring away subscribing newspapers. When The Providence Bulletin issued an ultimatum in , threatening to drop the strip if Malarkey's face appeared in the strip again, Kelly had Malarkey throw a bag over his head as Miss "Sis" Boombah a Rhode Island Red hen approached, explaining "no one from Providence should see me!
Malarkey appeared in the strip only once after that sequence ended, during Kelly's tenure, on October 15, Again his face was covered, this time by his speech balloons as he stood on a soapbox shouting to general uninterest. Kelly had planned to defy the threats made by the Bulletin and show Malarkey's face, but decided it was more fun to see how many people recognized the character and the man he lampooned by speech patterns alone.
When Kelly got letters of complaint about kicking the senator when he was down McCarthy had been censured by that time, and had lost most of his influence , Kelly responded, "They identified him, I didn't. Malarkey reappeared on April 1, when the strip had been resurrected by Larry Doyle and Neal Sternecky. It was hinted that he was a ghost. In the early s, Kelly took on the ultra- conservative John Birch Society with a series of strips dedicated to Mole and Deacon's efforts to weed out Anti-Americanism as they saw it in the swamp, which led them to form "The Jack Acid Society.
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Everyone the Jack Acids suspected of not being a true American was put on their blacklist, until eventually everyone but Mole himself was blacklisted. As the s loomed, even foreign "gummint" figures found themselves caricatured in the pages of Pogo , including communist leaders Fidel Castro , who appeared as an agitator goat named Fido , and Nikita Khrushchev , who emerged as both an unnamed Russian bear and a pig. Other Soviet characters include a pair of cosmonaut seals who arrive at the swamp in via Sputnik , initiating a topical spoof of the Space Race.
An obtuse feline reporter from Newslife magazine named Typo , who resembled both Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller , arrived on the scene in He was often accompanied by a chicken photographer named Hypo , wearing a jaunty fedora with a Press tag in the hat band, and carrying a box camera with an extremely droopy accordion bellows. By the time the presidential campaign rolled around, it seemed the entire swamp was populated by P. Kennedy and George Wallace as wind-up toys. Wallace also appeared as The Prince of Pompadoodle , a puffed-up, diminutive rooster chick.
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Eugene McCarthy was a white knight tied backwards on his horse, spouting poetry. Retiring President Lyndon B. Johnson was portrayed as a befuddled, long-horned steer wearing cowboy boots. Earlier, in the offbeat "Pandemonia" sequence, LBJ had been cast as a prairie centaur named The Loan Arranger , whose low-hung Stetson covered his eyes like a mask.
In the early s, Kelly used a collection of characters he called "the Bulldogs" to mock the secrecy and perceived paranoia of the Nixon administration. The Bulldogs included caricatures of J. Edgar Hoover dressed in an overcoat and fedora, and directing a covert bureau of identical frog operatives , Spiro Agnew portrayed as an unnamed hyena festooned in ornate military regalia , and John Mitchell portrayed as a pipe-smoking eaglet wearing high-top sneakers.
The hyena character would sometimes change into Nixon for a while, then back into Agnew; at the end of the character's run, Churchy wondered, 'How many of him was there? The hyena was dressed in the ornate uniform when President Nixon introduced a fancy new dress uniform for the White House guards. Its appearance in the strip was marked by comments such as 'You look like a wet refugee from a third-rate road company.
You're the head cheese in a non-existent blintz republic, right?
In real life, public ridicule led to the abandonment of the uniform a short time later. Edgar Hoover apparently read more into the strip than was there. According to documents obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the Freedom of Information Act , Hoover had suspected Kelly of sending some form of coded messages via the nonsense poetry and Southern accents he peppered the strip with. He reportedly went so far as to have government cryptographers attempt to "decipher" the strip.
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Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a snake, and then Vice-President Dan Quayle was depicted as an egg, which eventually hatched into a roadrunner -type chick that made the sound "Veep! Kelly's use of satire and politics often drew fire from those he was criticizing and their supporters.
When he started a controversial storyline, Kelly usually created alternate, deliberately innocuous daily strips that papers could opt to run instead of the political ones for a given week. They are sometimes labeled "Special", or with a letter after the date, to denote that they were alternate offerings. Nevertheless, many of the bunny strips are subtle reworkings of the theme of the replaced strip. As if to drive home Kelly's point, some papers published both versions. Kelly told fans that if all they saw in Pogo were fluffy little bunnies, then their newspaper didn't believe they were capable of thinking for themselves, or didn't want them to.
The bunny strips were usually not reproduced when Pogo strips were collected into book form. The quote "We have met the enemy and he is us" is a parody of a message sent in from U. Since the strips reprinted in Papers included the first appearances of Mole and Simple J. Malarkey, beginning Kelly's attacks on McCarthyism , Kelly used the foreword to defend his actions:.
Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle. There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand.
This Day in Quotes: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us. The finalized version of the quotation appeared in a anti-pollution poster for Earth Day and was repeated a year later in the daily strip. The slogan also served as the title for the last Pogo collection released before Kelly's death in , and of an environmentally themed animated short on which Kelly had started work, but did not finish due to ill health.
Perhaps the second best-known Walt Kelly quotation is one of Porky Pine's philosophical observations: It ain't nohow permanent. Walt Kelly frequently had his characters poling around the swamp in a flat-bottomed skiff.
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Invariably, it had a name on the side that was a personal reference of Kelly's: The name changed from one day to the next, and even from panel to panel in the same strip, but it was usually a tribute to a real-life person Kelly wished to salute in print. Long before I could grasp the satirical significance of his stuff, I was enchanted by Kelly's magnificent artwork I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher. If you can learn to stop expecting impossible perfection, in yourself and others, you may find the happiness that has always eluded you.
Martin, A Clash of Kings.
We have met the enemy
An Oral History of the Zombie War. The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. If you claim to be fake then be an enemy instead. It is not so much a feeling of slander as it is that of a massive lie, a misdeed not only to the slandered but also to those manipulated in the process. He has made them all, every one, his enemies, thereupon he is so overwhelmed with guilt that he will deny it until his grave. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction.
There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power.
Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us? Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness. We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them.
If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering.