Pogo and the Land of MAGA. . .


Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip that ran in daily newspapers from 1948 to 1973, got it absolutely right. The strip was set in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp and was populated by animals talking in a fractured southern dialect. 

My favorite line in the strip has always been "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Today's version of the original Grand Old Party of Republicans is starring at themselves in the mirror and wondering what in the hell happened. They have, indeed, met the enemy - and it is, indeed, them!  They have allowed a charlatan and a ghost of Adolph Hitler  to carry their banner. Upon achieving power, Hitler smashed the nation's democratic institutions and transformed Germany into a war-like state and cast aside millions of victims who he deemed inferior or undesirable - "life unworthy of life" - among them all who did not look like, act like, or think like, himself. 

How was it all possible? Hitler addressed continuous political meetings  (rallies), and called for a replacement of what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This new order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme nation leader. In a new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, democracy would be abolished; and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the fuhrer state!

We must never believe it cannot happen here. The first step will be a charismatic and domineering  scoundrel who will take up the banner. The second step is to sell the idea that a democracy no longer works (for himself). 

According to some, the first two steps have already been carried out here in America.




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