(Copyright ©2003 by Kristofer Dale, all rights reserved.)

Ask not for whom the bell tolls...

Among many unfortunate casualties of "coalition" aggression, this report recently caught my attention:

"Michael Kelly, first US journalist killed in Iraq war - Arizona Republic - Apr 5, 2003"

( from http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0406obitkelly06.html )

Author of "Martyrs' Day", an account of his reporting experiences in the first "Gulf War", he became one himself, of sorts, the first "embedded" American reporter to die in the conflict. I find it very interesting that he met with this fate, given the mindset he displayed in articles like his editorial in Atlantic Monthly at the close of 2001, online here:

( from http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/kelly.htm )

I quote from this article by way of example,

"One well-expressed wrong idea that has had a great run these past fifty years is the cartoonist Walt Kelly's lament "We have met the enemy and he is us." Like all the catchiest wrong ideas, this draws its strength not only from pithiness but also from a limited measure of truth. Kelly, writing in the age of Senator Joseph McCarthy, had an obvious point: the undermining of America's values and America's liberties by America's guardians against the communist threat seemed to many at least as great a danger as the threat itself. Kelly's idea also benefited from another quality necessary for longevity in the idea racket. It appealed to an inherent human desire--in this case the desire to be perverse. In the USSR the United States had an enemy that anyone could see posed a danger of the direst sort (global war, nuclear holocaust). How appealing to pretend that this giant of a menace from Them was a sort of joke (in some circles "Red Menace" made the transformation from earnest to ironic in about five minutes), and that the real enemy was Us.

But "Us" meant something actually quite different from "us." It meant, actually, "Them"--not an external Them but an internal one. When Kelly wrote of the enemy, he did not mean Americans who thought as he and his friends thought; he meant Americans who did not think this way--he meant people who believed that McCarthy was right and the menace was real. And actually, he did not even mean those people; he meant a caricature of those people."

"This tendency to see the nation as populated by two peoples--one's own crowd and this other, hostile, foreign, and indeed almost unknowable tribe--has hardened over the years into something close to a permanent piece of conventional wisdom. And this view of the country, it seemed, came to enjoy received status not only in liberal America's view of conservative America but also in conservative America's view of liberal America. When Susan Sontag and Ralph Reed looked out the window, they saw essentially the same country: a society and a culture divided between right-thinking Us and scary Us as Them, with Us as a perpetually threatened perpetual minority."


For those who know me well, obviously I begged to differ! In fact, I took him to task vigorously when the article was published, but he never responded. Apart from pretending to know what Walt Kelly really meant in sharing his stellar wit and wisdom, borne of his uncommon humanity, with us, Michael Kelly has little to go on in support of his theory that Walt was presenting an US vs Them scenario. For anyone familiar with the "Pogo" legacy, it is perfectly obvious Walt Kelly knew, intrinsically, thatwe, as Americans are our own worst enemies. Walt bore witness to human nature under pressure, both home and abroad, and depicted the basic conflict of individual versus society with great wit and artistry. Know then, Michael Kelly failed to inform us that the famous quote he reviled so hotly graced an anti-pollution cartoon that can be viewed here:

( from http://www.electro-comicsonline.com/art_store/gifs/kelly085.gif )

I need not go into the social and ecological devastation America contributes to in other parts of the world, it is perfectly obvious that we are destroying ourselves and our country with great alacrity, at an ever expanding rate compared even with Walt Kelly's circa 1970 vantage. I wonder what Walt would have to say to brother Michael should they happen to meet up in the afterlife. I am inclined to think that Walt would be far more forgiving and understanding than Michael was in his shameful article. War maims us all, whether we are for or against it, as Michael has demonstrated so fatefully.

When great American originals are so avidly and acidly painted as "wrong" in their thinking by mere minions of mediocrity, the very essence of our identity as a people is threatened, and the fascist bastards who demand our hearts and minds be bent to their corrupt will become ever more powerful and ever more corrupt. Michael Kelly's death is symbolic of the uniformly destructive result of harboring a secret government, tolerating insider trading, accepting political oppression and corporate welfare, and allowing our lives to be tainted by a diseased love of money that lies at the root of this profound malaise we have allowed our "leaders" to unleash upon the world. Around the same time Walt warned us of our impending self-inflicted doom, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. was working on his book, "The Imperial Presidency" in an attempt to restore accountability to our political process. Despite such early warnings, dating back even past Mark Twain's incisive commentary, we have still slipped from orbit and are accelerating toward a burning re-entry as the inexorable pull of reality draws us near to the grounding we have so devoutly avoided in our collective drunken plutocracy.

Pretenders like Michael Kelly would have us believe that black is white and up is down, and the insights and sacrifices of our ancestors are at most insignificant. Given the crass commercialism of modern life here in the "first world", this may be true, but outside the "bubble" of our media-driven self-deception, there is a bitter world waiting for its turn to speak of the horrors it has endured and resented at our blithe insistence. If we are to suppose that democratic state and national government is a necessity, even a good thing, then one must also allow for the possibility that democratic world government is desirable as well. The unilateral actions of powerful nations cause great harm in the world and to the planet, and this is not lost on others. By casting ourselves in this rogue-elephant role, through the actions of a "president" that is clearly acting from narrow self-interest, we as Americans are sending a clear message to the rest of the planet that we say one thing and do quite another. Since we are no longer to be trusted, we must be appeased or destroyed, lest the carnage continue. How this comedy of horrors plays out is anyone's guess, but the casualties, both actual and symbolic, will likely mount...