Walt Kelly: The Right Freedom For The Right People…Place…Time
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“Certain rights and privileges, we say, are only for certain people. This is but half true. Privileges are always for certain people. Rights are for everybody, otherwise they, too, become privileges and nobody has any rights.” Walt Kelly, The Right Freedom for The Right People, in the Right Place, at the Right Time
Steven Heller recalls Walt Kelly‘s essay for the Fall 1955 issue of Chicago Review and, sadly, notes that not much has changed in the 70 years between the McCarthyism of yesteryear and the Trumpism of the present.
Pogo, an anthropomorphic opossum residing in the Okefenokee Swamp with his friends Albert Alligator, Porky Pine, Howland Owl and Churchy LaFemme, was much more than a comic character. Before Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blurred the lines between the funny pages and the editorial pages, Kelly’s mix of satiric dialogue, crude slapstick and frequent betes noir cameos—including the red-baiting Junior Senator Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev and the cross-dressing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—drove the censors and critics mad. Kelly’s commentary was not gratuitous but it was subversive.
But Kelly was a wordsmith, in both comics balloons and long-form essays. His most influential piece was for Chicago Review‘s “Special Issue: Changing American Culture” (1955), which transformed the otherwise academic journal into a newly confident platform for post-McCarthy revival of liberal values. The times have not changed much if one were to read Kelly’s text today.
Author’s [Heller’s] note: Find a copy of Kelly’s text in your library (it is not online yet).
While the Fall 1955 issue of Chicago Review is not online Walt Kelly’s essay was reproduced in The Okefenokee Star and that in turn was reprinted in The Best of Pogo paperback which is online.
Read “The Right Freedom For the Right People, In the Right Place, At the Right Time” by Walt Kelly from The Best of Pogo via The Internet Archive, along with more Kelly essays and a trove of Pogo comic strips.
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