WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US

Time for a Walt Kelly tribute, I believe.
The quote noted above is hopefully familiar to almost everyone. However I doubt that too many young readers have any familiarity with the comic strip "Pogo." Walt Kelly was a staple amongst college students just as much as Calvin and Hobbes was 10 years ago but with much more imaginative use of language especially a type of Southern glossolalia. T.S. Eliot was said to have all the Pogo cartoon books sent to England as soon as they were published. Neologisms abounded and I at times find myself floating into this dialect when I am talking to patients. Not good.

I suppose the things that struck me and many others was Walt Kelly's gentleness in poking fun at politics and religion, and his attempts to be as fair as possible, noting the foibles of both sides of contention. As such, it failed as a political cartoon, and, like its predecessor, Krazy Kat, which was also a favorite of Bill Watterson's,it never gained much more than a small but dedicated audience but it
was certainly popular with most of the contemporary journalists. While he poked fun at religious hypocrites like Deacon Mushrat, one got the sense that Kelly really loved these weak characters who would finally join the group for "mo' pie." He would also go after some famous characters on the left, such as the cowbirds who were supposed to be Communists. The characters he was more serious about tended to be on the side of the Jack Acid Society but the members of this august asylum were really just mean-spirited opportunists who wanted nothing more than to shoot up the place and fill the swamp with doom, gloom and paranoia as purblind Molester Mole seemed to both seek and prophesy. And yet...........

My favorite character was probably Porkypine, whose pessimism went far beyond my own and yet, like most porcupines, he was able to stand firm without resorting to dogmatism--or idealism, either one. On Christmas Eve he and Pogo would gather up presents, go to the members of the Jack Acid Society while they were asleep, yell "Merry Christmas!" And run home like mad. At one point PorkyPine humphs,, ".... a highly embellished gesture. Think it'll do anybody any good?" to which Pogo replies, "oh maybe 'jes only us." (There's that enemy again!)

Certainly turning the other cheek like this is highly atypical,not instinctual, and almost impossible to do without outside help, and I suspect that Kelly had more than he realized, at the very least some long-standing and well known if rarely practiced ideas about charity and loving your enemies. I think however that centering on one's own responsibility without casting aspersions on the rest of the world, and "considering others better than yourself," is something also found in books like Walker Percy's, "Lost in the Cosmos". Percy makes the point that we can easily and instantly size up other people and even other planets but have almost no insight into ourselves. I believe that people are designed to be complementary rather than primarily competitive, at least by the time we grow up. It is certainly obvious that liberals and conservatives need each other almost as much as life itself, if for no other reason than each provides an enemy for the other.I even suspect that neither one could exist without the other. Kelly tried to rise above the fray and I think he would be appalled at the Descent of Man that has accompanied our prosperity and material progress. Wisdom today is far less evident and can be taken far less for granted in our current Red Blue incarnation.(Emphasis on the Carnation part--Instant Judgement)

For the sake of clarity, and in the spirit of the above, and without casting stones at those who readily take sides or even demonize designated enemies/targets, I would like to say a little bit more about what I meant by not using this blog to get mired down in politics/religion. I combine these two words because my observations of the last 40 or so years suggest to me that these two phenomena are "joined at the hip." Religion does not require even a taste of the Divine. Atheism is not anti-religion it is simply one of many religions. In my brother's hometown there is a "Freedom from Religion Foundation". Many individuals have also expressed the desire for a "Freedom from Politics Foundation", which probably would often express itself in the terms: "Throw the rascals out!" (I notice that they never include themselves as rascals, so I would presume that they want them selves thrown, "in.")

It has been my opinion for several decades that politics/religion are fairly good but somewhat feeble tools under the right circumstances and depending on the motives of the individual or group, for ordering society and culture. Sometimes it is more politics and sometimes more religion, but both of these tools are what I would call not only competitively-based but "works-righteous," and necessarily include an elaborate meritocracy and what George Orwell called, "groupthink." I love the sequence in Monty Python's "Life of Brian," in which Brian the captive and very unwilling messiah shouts to the crowd gathered around him, "You've got to think for yourselves! You are all individuals!"
And with delicious irony, the crowd shouts back in unison, "Yes! We are all individuals!" After which a still small voice pipes up, "I'm not."

Lest someone believes I am simply advocating some type of blind or vague spirituality, that really is not the point. The universe is full of Content and does operate by laws, some obvious, some not. Nor am I advocating some type of mythological or hypothetical objectivity, something Walt Kelly certainly would not have claimed for himself. Nor will it do to retreat into Scientism with all of its premature conclusions and virtual absolutes. No, really I am re-attempting a type of agnosticism, which the devotional writer Oswald Chambers said was a kind of a necessity for the brains of people who know far too little--which would include all of us. One most obvious applications is a-Gnosticism, something Dan Brown needs desperately, not to mention a good ghostwriter, no pun intended -- these wordythings just happen!

Religion and politics are certainly based on certain aspects of human need, emotion,rationalizing, and the obvious need of the male intellect in particular to "rise and conquer!" The "testosterone wash" which little boys experience in the first trimester and which differentiates their brain also significantly limits their brains and for the most part men can only listen to one conversation at a time and only use one side of their brain at a time. Women can process up to seven conversations at a time and have a much larger corpus callosum, that is much more white matter, from before birth. In other words, men making rules and regulations is not going to go away. We men esp. spend more time arguing about the rules than actually playing a game of anything. However to ask the ladys' Peggy Lee question, "Is that all there is?" , which probably originated under her Christmas tree as it did in our house 50 or more years ago, simply begs the next set of questions which so far are mostly unanswered and possibly unanswerable. Certainly for science esp. mathematics and physics to be consistent in the face of new-(?)-information, they and we cannot with any assurance at any point say, "That's All Folks!" However that doesn't prevent us from asserting otherwise in order to win the day and defeat the turkeys. Or "cockroaches," according to many of the Hutu persuasion.

Speaking of Rwanda, it is currently one of the few nations in Africa that is actually making economic progress because its president has been insisting on an organized program of, yes, forgiveness both between individuals and groups. The New Yorker ran a piece on this recently but of course doubts that it will work. I love the New Yorker, however it does make a habit of damning by faint praise when it comes to people doing things unfamiliar to their inner circles. As a response to which,I think of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party." A drama which I can recommend to almost any thinking individual.

So when I talk of not getting bogged down on the blog with the usual political/religious go round, I am certainly not talking about disengaging myself from philosophy nor do I want to neglect to address the most basic assumptions we all must make. Presuppositional thinking is either done or neglected but it cannot be removed. Just sitting in your chair requires a large measure of faith; just try to visualize how much empty space there is between even the larger particles! If a proton was the size of a basketball, the nearest electron would be the size of a hardball -- 2 miles away! That would be the densest possible configuration, by the way. Under these circumstances, most of what is lacking in me/us would be the Will--a la Kierkegaard-- to peek under our various rocks that we throw at one another. No vows of perfection on my part and I would certainly invite correction when I get off on what I call, musically speaking, "The Rude Rabbit Rondo, "something that is quite the rage these days and makes quite a bit of money for Wal-Mart as well. On that Note: "So Long until tomorrow! To Infinity--and Beyond!"