Word: swamp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
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...
...Chicago they know them as WASPS (for White Appalachian Southern Protestants), in Cincinnati as SAMS (for Southern Appalachian Migrants). St. Louis calls them, among other things, swamp turkeys and hoosiers. In Columbus and Cleveland they are simply called hillbillies (the name they dislike most). By whatever name, more than a million impoverished white Southerners, comprising 20% of the population of the 250 Appalachian Mountain counties in nine Southern states, *moved northward between 1950 and 1960 to eke out a precarious living in the big cities. Packed into secondhand cars loaded down with their meager possessions, swarms still arrive every...