Ah yes, the good ol' days when a comic strip could be among the first to stand up to Joe McCarthy.
Walt Kelly first used the quote "We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us" on a poster for Earth Day in 1970. In 1971, he did a two panel version with Pogo and Porky in a trash filled swamp. This is the only example I know of with a balloon, indicating Pogo responding to Porky with "YEP, SON, WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US." In 1972, it was the title of a book, Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.
Pogo has been a lasting memory all through my life. My faithful friend, a black Pomeranian with a Pogo face now bears the name. Actually what this diary is really about is quite serious. I want to tell you about an essay by Wendell Berry entitled "Word and Flesh". It is about the stuff we are all here concerned about. This essay, Word and Flesh appeared in 2005 in the Vermont Commons and has everything to say about what we are blogging about today. Please look below the break and I will explain.
Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place. First, let me tell you about where I met Wendell. Back in October we attended this conference in Montana. Back to reality? A conference in Montana and the coming election. It was my first time with the group, but Wendell is a regular. They talk about the issues that confront us, the unifying theme might be "sustainability". Here's Berry's approach to this all encompassing topic:
Toward the end of As You Like It, Orlando says: "I can live no longer by thinking." He is ready to marry Rosalind. It is time for incarnation. Having thought too much, he is at one of the limits of human experience, or of human sanity. If his love does put on flesh, we know he must sooner or later arrive at the opposite limit, at which he will say, "I can live no longer without thinking." Thought—even consciousness—seems to live between these limits: the abstract and the particular, the word and the flesh.
All public movements of thought quickly produce a language that works as a code, useless to the extent that it is abstract. It is readily evident, for example, that you can't conduct a relationship with another person in terms of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement or the women's movement—as useful as those rhetorics may initially have been to personal relationships.
The same is true of the environmental movement. The favorite adjective of this movement now seems to be "planetary." This word is used, properly enough, to refer to the interdependence of places, and to the recognition, which is desirable and growing, that no place on the earth can be completely healthy until all places are.
But the word "planetary" also refers to an abstract anxiety or an abstract passion that is desperate and useless exactly to the extent that it is abstract. How, after all, can anybody—any particular body—do anything to heal a planet? The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white horses to save the planet—and they keep falling off in front of the grandstand.
What we need, obviously, is a more intelligent—which is to say, a more accurate—description of the problem. The description of a problem as planetary arouses a motivation for which, of necessity, there is no employment. The adjective "planetary" describes a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved. In fact, though we now have serous problems nearly everywhere on the planet, we have no problem that can accurately be described as planetary. And, short of the total annihilation of the human race, there is no planetary solution.
There are also no national, state, or county problems, and no national, state, or county solutions. That will-o'-the-wisp, the large-scale solution to a large-scale problem, which is so dear to governments, universities, and corporations, serves mostly to distract people from the small, private problems that they may, in fact, have the power to solve.
There you have it in a nutshell. Obama and friends may help us a bit, but it is really up to us. I have been here long enough to know that this is definitely not what you want to hear! You want to see the problems solved. You do not want to admit that until you do what you have to do, the "solvers" are helpless. Let us see how Berry explains it:
The problems, if we describe them accurately, are all private and small. Or they are so initially.
The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.
The economies of our communities and households are wrong. The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.
The planetary versions—the heroic versions—of our problems have attracted great intelligence. But these problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households, and our communities, have attracted very little intelligence.
Oh my! "Culture and Character? Who me? You mean that my self righteous writings about Gaza, Obama, republicans, etc. etc. really can be related to the way I live my life? Come off it. I'm OK. It's all these other people.
And it will go on this way as long as we continue to look "out there" for someone to save us. It is beyond human reason to expect the people who are the central cause for things to suddenly wake up and see their role. The illusion is total. Berry brings it closer to home for us:
In his essay on Kipling, George Orwell wrote: "All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue."
This is strong medicine. It is hard to take. As the embryonic Obama administration begins to reach its birth, we are being given a day by day reality check.
Would it not be ironic if the neocons, in their ugly "take no prisoners" assault on the social programs that might have been, actually set the groundwork for some forced austerity among us? We shall see.
This statement of Orwell's is clearly applicable to our situation now; all we need to do is change a few nouns. The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.
We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.
The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do.
How dependent, in fact, are we? How dependent are our neighborhoods and communities? How might our dependencies be reduced? To answer these questions will require better thoughts and better deeds than we have been capable of so far.
We must have the sense and the courage, for example, to see that the ability to transport food for hundreds or thousands of miles does not necessarily mean that we are well off. It means that the food supply is more vulnerable and more costly than a local food supply would be. It means that consumers do not control or influence the healthfulness of their food supply and that they are at the mercy of people who have the control and influence. It means that, in eating, people are using large quantities of petroleum that other people in another time are almost certain to need.
Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources. We persist in land-use methods that reduce the potentially infinite power of soil fertility to a finite quantity, which we then proceed to waste as if it were an infinite quantity. We have an economy that depends not on the quality and quantity of necessary goods and services, but on the moods of a few stockbrokers. We believe that democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the history of democracy and indifferent to the responsibilities of freedom.
Our leaders have been for many years as oblivious to the realities and dangers of their time as were George III and Lord North. They believe that the difference between war and peace is still the overriding political difference—when, in fact, the difference has diminished to the point of insignificance. How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry—between, say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off."
Messages like this get ignored rather easily. Maybe that's why pogo was so on the mark? let me leave you with this. If not you and I, who?