Word: swamps
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...Texas' Sam Rayburn in a Washington hotel, invited just about everybody in the phone book. Winston Churchill cabled his regrets, but 900 others came to sample a score of cases of Scotch and bourbon, along with Quebec salmon, Alabama venison, Montana elk, bear meat from the Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia turkey, and antelope from Chugwater, Wyo. Boykin's all-for-love motto was bantered about the banquet hall. Everybody had a great time, and jolly Frank was delighted to fork over...
Volume rises another 50% to 5,450,000 shares, and so many sell orders swamp the ticker that it lags behind for two hours and 28 minutes. A total of 460 stocks sink to new lows for the year. The Dow-Jones index loses another 9.82 points, to 626.52, its lowest in 16 months...
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...
This is Walt Kelly's weakness as a satirist; he is always shading off into whimsy and gentleness. With humorous exceptions like Mole and Deacon, or Wiley Catt and Sarcophagus MaCabre, the swamp creatures want only to live quietly and be kind, to play, and to indulge in their uniaersal passion for telling each other the oldest hoariest American chestnuts. (Even the Deacon succumbs to the weakness: Mole sombrely admonishes him, "Remember forewarned is forearmed," and Deacon sniggers "I suppose an Octopus is twice as well off?" As they walk away, Mole snorts with disgust and Deacon is tee-heeing...