Pogo's Black Book

The animals in Walt Kelly's Pogo books are more human than most people I know, and this makes even their most sinister remarks about politics seem whimsical and charming. The Jack Acid Society Black Book is, as they say, a document for our troubled times; but when you're through reading it, you may wonder what all the trouble is about.

Not to be confused with other house organs, the Black Book is a case study of a rightist movement among the inhabitants of the Okeefenokee swamp. It presents shocking and no doubt suppressed information about the threats boring the Republic from within, all the clear and present dangers in our midst and on our doorsteps. A series of memorable characters and vignettes warn us that there is little time left; we are on the brink, and there is much loin girding, belt tightening, and upper lip stiffening to be done. Maybe a little flag waving and God snatching, too.

Deacon Mushrat is the first of these memorable figures, a Godsymp if there ever was one. "It should be brought out at this point," he intones at us in his mock Gothic script, nose and pince nex dabbling the air above the rostrum, "that the right handed person is correct, natural, and beloved by Providence." The tone deepens and the face frowns, nose still dabbling at the suspect air. "It has occurred to some of us who keep our eyes open that there are entirely too many left handed people worming their way into positions of power. According to reliable research, nearly one out of two federal tax collectors is left-handed, a percentage of better than fifty percent...."

The man on horseback and of the hour, the great savior, is Molester Mole, a grubby mind with a powerful, if threadbare message. He is the Flounder of the Jack Acid Society, its spirited, selfless leader. He guides the Deacon when that Godsymp's flesh weakens, and it is Mole who prepares the Society's blacklist. The list of all the suspect members of the swamp is quite comprehensive; it even includes Mole's friend, the Deacon.

Politics in the swamp is never as intrusive as politics in real life, though, and the two ludicrous conspirators meet with a baffling kind of sympathy. Pogo-helps them by adding his name to the blacklist, as do the other animals. Soon everybody is on it, except Mole, who begins to feel threatened. Pogo's gesture is typical, the kind of stintly, reasonable thing you would expect him to do.

Pogo has always struck me as the voice of common decency and all the bleeding heart stuff that the Deacon warns us about. He always triumphs in the swamp, because, unlike the world, it is composed of mostly decent people, like Hound, Porcupine, and that indomitable, unquenchable, American boob, Albert the Alligator (who "leads a life of noisy desperation"). For all the politics and satire that appear in Pogo, the swamp is really a wonderfully apolitical sort of place. Politics, the booted and shifted movements, are left to a few moral hoodlums and bullies like Mole.

This is Walt Kelly's weakness as a satirist; he is always shading off into whimsy and gentleness. With humorous exceptions like Mole and Deacon, or Wiley Catt and Sarcophagus MaCabre, the swamp creatures want only to live quietly and be kind, to play, and to indulge in their uniaersal passion for telling each other the oldest hoariest American chestnuts. (Even the Deacon succumbs to the weakness: Mole sombrely admonishes him, "Remember forewarned is forearmed," and Deacon sniggers "I suppose an Octopus is twice as well off?" As they walk away, Mole snorts with disgust and Deacon is tee-heeing to himself.)

Okeefenokee is an idyl, rather than a satirist's world. There is a lovely radiant idleness about all those scenes which show the characters lazily fishing, or sleeping on a raft--"The S.S. Kenneth G." What shapes the boundaries of the idyl is a distrust of all the official frauds and postures that keep the real world together, all the speeches and slogans and generals and college songs and national anthems and figures like the Minute Man and Senators. The termite walking along with Pogo states Okefenokee's view of matters pithily--"It'll be a long time afore they get all the bugs out of the gummint."

Walt Kelly is usually preaching a sermon, and that--aside from his wonderful drawings--is a secret of his charm. The sermon is a kind of good-tempered antinomian tract, expressing a universal and perfectly justified skepticism about mostly everything. And there is entirely too much tolerance for the skepticism to ever become bitter. The most biting sketch in The Black Book is a caricature of a red-neck super-patriot Wildcat--"It's people like me what come from old stock that knows a Real American from a Phony--that's where the government breaks down--they got too many card-carryin' spies feedin' off our tax money." But even this ridiculous, blustering monologue is more in fun than condemnation.

The characters in Pogo--and they are the best developed and most consistent in any comic strip--lobby in The Black Book for an idyl and a humorous view of life; just as the characters in other common strips lobby, with terrible earnestness, for their own interests. You know, Buz Sawyer for the Navy, Steve Canyon for the Air Force, Little Orphan Annie for the Jack Acids and Goldwatery cranks. With the Black Book to hearten it, the Pogo lobby will continue to support its own.