I just was going through boxes that have accumulated over the years and found all my dad’s Pogo stuff. Dad was an unreconstructed Walt Kelly fan, and remained so even after he (Dad) discovered the Democratic Party had left him, and started voting Republican in 1972 because he considered McGovern a fucking communist (which of course, McGovern was and remained to the end of his days).
Specifically I came upon “The Jack Acid Society Black Book”, which Kelly intended as a jab at “right wing societies”, by which of course he meant the John Birch Society and other similar patriotic and anti-Communist, if perhaps perceived as somewhat nutcase, organizations of the day. Kelly, of course, was an unreconstructed jackass Democrat, and he began his introduction to the book thusly:
“All of the right-wing societies which might be confused with the Jack Acid Society are understandably as nervous as a troop of elephants trying to walk on water. They claim to be apprehensive of the far left, the left, and even the middle, but they also keep a sharp eye on each other.”
The book itself is imbued of many jack-boot jackasseries attributed (naturally) to the right wing, but I think it is simply a very early example of the projection we now see on the Left — which must attribute all of its destructive behavior to the right, lest the peepul see through its canards and prevarications and turn on it to destroy it utterly, root and branch.
Thus this book, seemingly quite popular among the American Left in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s who got their cheap yuks out of it, is little more than part of the reaction to what the Left labeled as McCarthyism (and thus, evil) at that time. I’m sure Kelly made a bundle off of it at a buck a copy, back when a dollar was still worth a dollar and the Democrats hadn’t run our country into a mountain of debt.
But I can’t help but think at this far remove, sixty-plus years later, that what Kelly really needed to do was look in the fucking mirror before he wrote. Unfortunately, like so many leftists of his day and ours, he was so smart and self-assured, he went all the way back around the spectrum to “stupid”.
I’d burn the damn books but they’re probably worth something.