Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.
Given the turmoil of today’s politics and environmental concerns, it’s time to revisit Okefenokee Swamp and attend to the wisdom of Pogo Possum. He sagely advised more than 50 years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote that line for the Pogo comic strip in 1971, as Pogo Possum and one of his cartoon companions, Porky Pine, surveyed the human despoliation of their wetlands home. The swamp covers almost half a million acres straddling the Georgia-Florida border; the cartoon depicted it as awash in discarded furniture, a bath tub, a car half sunk in the swamp and other tons of trash.
The first Earth Day had happened in 1970, and Pogo’s comment has been a catch phrase for Earth Day (April 22) ever since.
Walt Kelly (1913-1973) recognized that in politics as well as in our use of natural resources, Americans were sometimes our own enemies. His comic strip had satirized Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, even in the 1950s.
Here’s a Library of Congress summary of that part of his work:
In 1953, when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigation of communists in government was at its height, Kelly was one of the few editorial voices to speak out against his tactics. He introduced Simple J. Malarkey (a vicious wildcat resembling McCarthy) and the half-blind Mole MacCarony (who probably represented Senator Pat McCarran, a foe of Communism and non-European immigration).
Kelly continued the satire some 20 years later in his 1972 book, Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us. That book featured then Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on the cover and this in Kelly’s introduction:
Man has turned out to be his own worst enemy. If the many faceted eye of the Public had at least one facet inwardly directed which would tell man something of himself, the view might be so clear that we would finally see tomorrow.
We’ve had thousands of tomorrows since Kelly called for such “inwardly directed” perception, and we have little to show for it. While the literal Okefenokee Swamp was protected in 1974 as a U.S. National Natural Landmark, the figurative political swamp remains at our mercy.
Consider two episodes involving U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, which reflect our current predicament. I mentioned how the senator reminded me of a character from Pogo in a Bleeding Heartland post from 2021.
Back then, Grassley relished former President Trump’s endorsement of his bid for re-election to an eighth term in the Senate. When asked about the outlandish lies Trump continued to tell after leaving the White House, Grassley replied, “He’s a private citizen…He can say anything he wants to.”
A former president seeking a return to the Oval Office is not exactly a private citizen free to say or do whatever he wants.
But Grassley again invoked the “private citizen” status recently to defend Donald Trump, Jr.
The president’s son is a co-founder of a new private membership club, The Executive Branch. It is open by invitation only, and those invited must pay a $500,000 entry fee and annual dues of $15,000. Oval Office access seemed implicit by dint of the involvement of Donald Trump Jr. and the club’s name.
So a friend of mine emailed Grassley about the propriety of all this.
The senator’s office responded:
Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding Donald Trump, Jr. As your senator, it is important to me that I hear from you.
I appreciate hearing of your thoughts that Donald Trump, Jr. founded something called the “Executive Branch” club. I am not familiar with this particular undertaking; however, as a private citizen, Mr. Trump, Jr. is able to start businesses.
Grassley appears to think of freedom, or being a private citizen in a democracy, as meaning the right to do or say whatever one wants. That is contrary to a longstanding view that the only truly free person is one who exercises self-restraint.
Those who do or say whatever they want, whenever they want, may find themselves in trouble.
By dodging the question about Don Jr., Grassley revealed his double standard. He did not give Hunter Biden a pass for being a private citizen when amplifying false allegations that Hunter and his father Joe Biden took bribes. On the contrary: he used his office to promote the false claims over an extended period.
Granted, “Politics ain’t bean bag.” But come on: Trump and his MAGA movement are now tossing bowling balls and bombs in their threats to democracy.
Their delight makes such actions even more troubling.
Over his less than five years in office, Trump undoubtedly has tossed more public F-bombs than all the preceding presidents combined. Last month, he complained to a group of reporters that Iran and Israel have “been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing.”
Consider this video from 2011, if you wish for Trump’s coarsest use of the F-bomb. What’s most alarming here is the joyous response of the audience, Pogo’s “us.”