Thursday, August 03, 2006
What would the real Annie think of Osama's Pope?
Since I've become fascinated with Harold Gray, I picked up a big compilation of his original Annie strips from '35 to '45. Great reading! Lots of suspense and action, and absolutely zero moral equivalence. Gray understood and appreciated diversity in the true sense of the word. He portrayed a wide variety of people with differing temperaments and experiences, and allowed for those differences with one basic proviso: You must be constructive. You're probably not a leader; you may not be able to succeed in the world's terms; but if you are building things and minding your own business, you're doing right. If you are destroying things or people, or (especially!) if you are minding other people's business, you're doing wrong. Gray had a special hate for uplifters, reformers, and do-gooders; he would have seen through John McCain in a millisecond.
Here's what he thought of Christian pacifism. We can surmise that it must have been rearing its ugly head in those days just as it does now....
Incidentally, when I read this I thought -- Wait a minute, isn't this backwards? I had to look up the original! Sure enough, the commonly quoted version of this passage is intentionally perverted and inverted. The Leftist parody (beat your swords into plowshares) has become so rigidly established in common currency that the original sounds wrong!
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This reminded me of another bellicose saying that has been replaced by its leftist parody. Admiral Perry's quote "We have met the enemy and he is ours" served for many years as a succinct definition of how and when to stop fighting. Not when the UN passes a resolution, not when you start to kill civilians, not when the New York Times disapproves, but when you own the enemy. Around 1970, Walt Kelly (who was the exact leftist competitor to Harold Gray, in fact) put the leftist parody into the mouth of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." This version has taken over entirely in the common vocabulary, so that the bellicose original now looks like a misprint. Pogo's version, of course, recommends not only surrender but self-destruction. No wonder it has gained such wide appeal.
¶ 10:30 AM
Here's what he thought of Christian pacifism. We can surmise that it must have been rearing its ugly head in those days just as it does now....
Incidentally, when I read this I thought -- Wait a minute, isn't this backwards? I had to look up the original! Sure enough, the commonly quoted version of this passage is intentionally perverted and inverted. The Leftist parody (beat your swords into plowshares) has become so rigidly established in common currency that the original sounds wrong!
-----
This reminded me of another bellicose saying that has been replaced by its leftist parody. Admiral Perry's quote "We have met the enemy and he is ours" served for many years as a succinct definition of how and when to stop fighting. Not when the UN passes a resolution, not when you start to kill civilians, not when the New York Times disapproves, but when you own the enemy. Around 1970, Walt Kelly (who was the exact leftist competitor to Harold Gray, in fact) put the leftist parody into the mouth of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." This version has taken over entirely in the common vocabulary, so that the bellicose original now looks like a misprint. Pogo's version, of course, recommends not only surrender but self-destruction. No wonder it has gained such wide appeal.
¶ 10:30 AM
