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Pogo knew long before we thought we needed to know
By Charles Peek
I’ll begin March’s blog with a prediction found in an article that came my way:
“After my imagined strongman takes charge . . . he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his inevitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left?”
Richard Rorty 1997 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization
This of course will not be the first time in history that a people have looked on, looked back, and asked, “How did this happen?” We will no doubt encounter the question in Dr. Koepp’s course on the Rise of Nazism for our Senior College.
And it won’t be the first time that what happened was predicted. Nowadays, Rorty has been acclaimed as a prophet and, from his Massey lectures, it certainly seemed that he could look ahead–at least twenty years ahead. And though twenty years old and still way late in the day, his warning is well taken!
But he is not the only prophet I’ve run across, so I want to work my way from how I once saw things to how I am seeing things now, helped along, as we always are if we listen, by the prophets around me.
Beginning in my last years as an undergraduate, I gradually moved leftward from the moderate and compassionate conservatism of my parents. The move was prompted by disappointment over my party’s ugly response to Civil Rights, its increasing rigidity and intolerance of others, of “difference” itself, and my discovery that its vaunted “fiscal conservatism” was only lip service to cover up the increasing pandering to the portion of white, male America entrenched in what Eisenhower warned was nothing less than a “military industrial complex.” (You need only look at who has actually balanced budgets and reduced deficits since that time!)
Ike’s phrase was perhaps more nuanced than Hillary’s “bag of deplorables,” but all the same, and despite his popularity, he was ignored. That cautionary tale argues for clearer talk now, despite how it backfired for Hillary.
Nudged as I had been by all the above, it was finally the outrage of Vietnam that clinched it for me—my only real bitter moments with the father and father-in-law whom I loved were in arguments about Vietnam, painful exchanges with the naval radar technician and “the Colonel.”
It then became convenient to think—and so I increasingly thought—that there have always been two America’s. I just hadn’t been privy to one of them, or to there being two! But I was learning.
One country is the America of financial success and the cults of popularity and prestige that go along with success’s power. Not all successful people are dishonest and greedy, but still this is the America of the plutocracy, the kleptocracy. It is the America of the exploiters and extractors, the Koch brothers, the Hunt Brothers, the Robber Barons, the corporations that thrive on public subsidies while decrying them for the needy.
This is the America that tells us how good Capitalism is and how bad Socialism is. And they are right. We have tried socialism for the rich, and indeed it has never, ever worked!
This is the America of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and if you ain’t got bootstraps, tough luck. It is the America of those who have gotten theirs. Its American Dream is the dollar. Its defense, a warped theory of trickle-down economics that has at best two moments in our history when anything actually trickled down. Its symbols are the multi-car garages, the yacht, the private jet, and your very own rocket. For those of you of my generation, think General Bullmoose—“what’s good for General Bullmoose is good for America!”
Then there is another America. This other America is the America of the Statue of Liberty and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the United Nations. It is the melting pot of customs and dress, languages and cultures. It is the America that came together around the belief in equality and freedom and justice for all. It is the middle class and the working class and the public and parochial schools for their kids, the kids of the parents who couldn’t afford prep schools and would have looked at them with suspicion even if they could have afforded them.
As the largesse of the Louisiana Purchase ran out, this became the America of the graduated income tax and the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bureau of Reclamation and a social safety net.
It met in Elks Clubs and Masonic Lodges and Legion Halls and church basements. It is the America of the reclamation projects, of rural electrification, of pot-luck suppers. It was the America of one-car garages and Friday night football and baseball diamonds in the summer.
Its symbols are public transportation, the National Parks, the public museums and libraries, the Smithsonian, the linked arms on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Think the barber in his shop or cosmetologist in her salon.
I knew which America I wanted, which America I belonged with, and which America I thought Americans would always ultimately choose when they had to choose between them as they vied for our affection, our votes. It was the America my Dad gave me a taste of when he lifted me up to stand on a baggage cart to hear Harry Truman from the rear of a whistle stop train. I was 10 and grew up in a family that wanted nothing to do with either Roosevelt or Truman!
But, even as I was coming to appreciate the two-America political terrain, this convenient binary division even then sometimes seemed too neat by half.
For instance, at the time of elections, when our affections are tested and our votes solicited, I noticed that there were seldom two pitches. There was the pitch of prosperity, of decreased unemployment and increased employment, of better roads and health care, of progress, of the “land of opportunity,” of “making the world safe.” Both America’s used this rhetoric.
But who, delivering the single standard pitch really believed it and who just used it to gain votes, to gain power…for, of course, other ends? That is what it took me time to discern. Maybe I’m just a slow learner.
And along the way I began to ask why the barber shop was his and the salon hers? Why even today, in Osceola—a fairly progressive little Nebraska town of about 1000 folks—are most of the employees at the local hospital women and those at the halls of government men? And what does that have to do with two America’s?
And how is it that people who once sought to protect their precious land from erosion and speculation began to sell land to the highest bidder—whether for corporate farms or a pipeline?
And how in God’s good name did my America ever let itself elect the plutocrat of all plutocrat, the unscrupulous of all the unscrupulous, the champion of turning all the old wrongs into new rights?
And then, in the midst of becoming more fully conscious, I ran again across a passage that, in better times, I’d read and dismissed, a passage from another prophet:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate
Now here is truly a prophet. The anti-Russian Russian has helped me to realize that there really are two Americas but they don’t lie out there, beyond us, seeking our support. They lie within us, strengthening or seducing our souls, depending as in the old legend of the First Peoples on which we feed.
Wealth may not be mine but I have at times badly wished it were—and so I admire the guy who’s got it. I’ve never failed to be around much wealth before I felt it gradually seducing me.
Gratification may not always be forthcoming but I often badly wish it were—and so I admire those who so easily find gratification, no matter at whose expense, or at what expense to themselves. I’ve never been around instant gratification when I didn’t feel it seducing me, and it has succeeded from time to time.
My loved ones and I may not always be treated fairly but how it rankles when we are not—and how we make a multi-million dollar film industry around those who get revenge for the injustices done them. I couldn’t be around the characters portrayed by Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis for long before it would be Katy-bar-the-door.
(Really, Katy—be prepared. Buffalo gals don’t you come out tonight!)
In a word, Mel Brooks was right: it is good to be King! But, then again, maybe good is not the right word here.
The America we’ve listened to and longed for, even when we thought we believed in and stood for another America, has been pretty successful in accomplishing its aims: the bottom one percent of our country do not possess as much wealth collectively as the top three wealthiest Americans. The fabled 1% own 38% of the private wealth. Half of all Americans can’t scratch up $1,000 to meet an emergency while it costs 200 times that to join Mar-a-Lago.
Yet, all around me now I hear those who have felt they haven’t been heard. To be fair, some of them haven’t been, some have a real beef. But mostly not, mostly they lament an only supposedly lost past. They cry, ‘We used to stand for something. We used to stand. We used to. We.’ These are now the cries of outrage for something of which we imagine we’ve been cheated. And, as their narrative goes, no one is listening when we complain about what’s been taken away from us, denied us, kept away from us, when we bemoan what we think we’ve lost.
So, there are those for whom outrage feels like a solution to the aching longing that stems, not so much from loss as from the greed and lust in our own hearts. And so, they lash out in anger by:
Making sure transgendered people can’t use a public restroom.
Deporting a Dad whose citizen child has leukemia.
Building another wall with billions, raiding Social Security and Medicare to do it.
But the walls of the human heart are porous, and good and bad blood pumps in and out on a daily basis. At the wrong moment, we are easily taken in by appeals to our own basest selves. And so we have been again. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. Well, ourselves and maybe the Russians! And maybe lots of disposable dollars.
In truth, St. Pogo, you were the real prophet all along: we have met the enemy and it is us!
Well, that’s how it looks from here…and here, to close, are some quotes of others to give us pause:
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
The greatest danger from a man so unerring in his detection of human weakness, so attuned to the thrill of cruelty, so aware of the manipulative powers of entertainment, so unrelenting in his disregard for truth, so contemptuous of ethics and culture, so attracted to blood and soil, was always that he would use the immense powers of his office to drag Americans down with him into the vortex. Roger Cohen
Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Verrucosus “Warty” (says Plutarch) because he had a wart on his upper lip. The Romans apparently liked giving less-than-complimentary nicknames to prominent men. M. Tullius Cicero (or an ancestor) had a mole or wart shaped like a chickpea (L. cicer) on his nose. Caligula, the infamous Emperor, got his nickname “Bootikin” as a child from the legionaries in his father Germanicus’s army because he had a miniature suit of armor complete with soldier’s sandals (caligae) that he often wore when with his father in the field. (He reigned as C. Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus and apparently didn’t like his nickname, but he’s universally known by the nickname.) Anu Garg
Somehow that last quote reminds me of our contemporary Caesar and his belittling nicknames.
Kearney, Nebraska
March 2018
PS: the usual Eastertide Reflections will appear sometime in the first week of April.
It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver. Edward Abbey, naturalist and author
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