In this week's break from the science of Republicanthink we are indulging in maximum snark instead. Certainly we need it when we want to understand the John Birch Society, either in its original form in the 1950s, or in its Koch brothers form today, when it is almost exactly the same thing.
We can laugh at them, but actual observation shows that they have almost no sense of humor. You can tell by looking at the Mallard Fillmore strip in the funny papers, which Republicans claim to find hilarious. Or by the racist jokes they tell about the President. Here is Walt Kelly's take.
Mole: Remember, forewarned is forearmed.
Deacon Mushrat: I suppose an octopus is twice as well off? Hee hee?
Mole: What's that?
Deacon: It's a joke…it's funny…eight-armed is twice as good as fore-armed.
Mole: I don't get it…there's nothing funny about this business.
Deacon: I won't laugh at anything even if you say it.
All of the right-wing societies which might be confused with the Jack Acid Society are understandably as nervous as a troop of elephants trying to walk on water. They claim to be apprehensive of the far left, the left and even the middle, but they also keep a sharp eye on each other.
The only difference today is that there are more of them, enabled by the Internet, each ideologically purer than all of the others.
In the story, the Jack Acid society was cooked up by Okefenokee Swamp denizens Deacon Mushrat, standing for the Religious Right, and the Flounder of the Society, Molester P. Mole, aka Bobby Base.
Mole: Acid and Base in combine make for salty doings.
Pogo: Oh, yeah…like combinin' soda and vinegar…The society is half base and half…
Deacon, in Olde English font: Right!
They could be seen operating on the same lines years before either the John Birchers or the Jack Aciders appeared publicly under those names, as observed in the Book. The Mole made his first appearance in the
Pogo strips in 1952.
It has been claimed by some that the Jack Acid Society is an imitation, in fact a parody, of extreme rightists. Nothing could be further from the truth. The student will find in the documents on display in this Black Book evidence that the main drive and spirit of the personalities involved have altered not one whit in many years.
In our terms, the Deacon is the standard authoritarian follower, and the Mole is the standard authoritarian leader with maximum demand for obedience from others (Robert Altemeyer's Double High category). All of the cognitive and moral defects that we have been looking at are on full display here in a number of episodes.
I'll call the tunes
if you'll not ask
Me to be
responsible
The Wikipedia account of the
founding of the John Birch Society explains:
The society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958, by a group of 12 led by Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. Welch named the new organization after John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and United States military intelligence officer who had been shot by communist forces in China in August 1945, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Welch claimed that Birch was an unknown but dedicated anti-communist, and the first American casualty of the Cold War.
Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, was one of the founding members. Robert Waring Stoddard, President of Wyman-Gordon, a major industrial enterprise, was also among the founders. Another was Revilo P. Oliver, a University of Illinois professor who later severed his relationship with the society and helped found the [White Supremacist] National Alliance. A transcript of Welch's two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new member receiving a copy.
The Black Book is thus a parody of the Blue Book and the later annual JBS White Book compilations. The
full text of the Blue Book is available electronically from the Internet Archive, and can be purchased at Amazon from used book dealers for one penny plus shipping.
The first few working chapters of The John Birch Society were formed in February, 1959, exactly two years ago. They have been a long two years.
During that period the whole world has moved, by what should be the measure of a century, further into an era of darkness, slavery, and terror. Our own country has suffered from as much turpitude and treason as would ordinarily require a generation to put together.
I cannot do justice to Bircher Conspiracy Theories going back to the Bavarian Illuminati, delusions of persecution, and delusions of grandeur here, but for those who can stomach it, JBS put it out on full display in their publications, and still does. The high point was the accusation that President Eisenhower was working for Stalin. It is clear that Walt Kelly read a substantial amount of this nonsense, because his parody of Robert Welch's speaking and writing style is dead on. Compare this, from the lectures that formed the JBS Blue Book:
We are fighting the Communists — nobody else. Being fully aware of the imminence and horror of the danger we face from that source, we have no intention of being distracted by the carping of our friends, or of those who should be our friends and we hope will be our friends in time. For if we do there is entirely too much likelihood — as we have already said elsewhere and many times — that in a few short years we shall all be hanging from the same lamp posts, while Communist terror reigns around us.
with the Mole's Hayfoot-Strawfoot fireside chat:
We are happy to announce that our position, the position of the Jack Acid Society, stands erect and proud before friend and foe. In other words, we are for the right, although this is not to confuse our position with the false posturing of others. There are some who sail under false colors claiming they alone represent patriotism, mother, country, flag, church…well, they all are undoubtedly subversive…out to destroy we who truly believe…
Most of the
Black Book is made up of a narrative sequence of strips that Kelly wrote in 1961 and 1962 lampooning Bircher ideas, methods, and general paranoia, mixed in with general Pogo foolery. There were some bits Kelly composed in 1957 that fit in around that narrative, starting with this bit of general-purpose paranoid idiocy starring Chicken Little.
The Prince of Pompadoodle
Would survive, he did decide,
Five times as long as he had been
Alive before he died.
so that [spoilers; read the book], plus lampoons of the military (Pompety Pomp, with Chicken Little again) and the militia movement (A Mi-Nute Man's Code, presented by Wiley Catt), complete with
GunFail. Some of the leading themes are
- Believing only the news that they wrote themselves
- Treating the Declaration of Independence as a subversive document
- Being so nativist that they decide to be Native Americans
- Unlimited suspicion, whatever the cost to the innocent
- The population explosion
- The neutron bomb
- Mole's nearly complete blindness
which brings us to this.
Porky Pine: Din't you ever hear the story of the blind men and the elephant?…Each one was partly right.
Pogo: Yeah…an' each was mostly wrong…but you gotta remember each was all blind.
The Black List is at the center of the plot [sic]. Mole explains that it is to include everybody suspected of subversion. Pogo and several others volunteer themselves, but the openly Communist cowbirds can't get on it until they deny everything. Mole even suspects the Deacon, but the loyal Deacon refuses to suspect Mole of anything, at which Mole explodes.
Why do you hate me so?
He is disconsolate until Pogo suggests that he suspect himself, at which point [spoilers; Have I mentioned that you need to read the book yourself?] Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
No, I am not going to tell you how all the rest of the gags come out, and besides, you need the pictures to get the full snark, especially the sight gags when Mole gives the Deacon an Indian blanket to wear, or when the frame pulls back to reveal the fire that Mole is chatting beside. Or the raccoon mama and the pickerel, in the section The Trouble with People is People. Read the book.
Albert Alligator: Oh, I'd give them a piece of my mind if I could find it…I means them.
Porky Pine: Y'know, ol' Albert leads a life of noisy desperation.
Yes, there are some with that problem on our side, including here at Daily Kos. As in the entire run of Pogo over decades, you have to admire how calmly he and some of the others take all of the insanity.
Next Week
After this relatively light-hearted (snarky, anyway) romp, we go into the true depths with The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, on the horrific Stanford Prison experiment. This one isn't only about Republicans. Ordinary college students went to the Dark Side, both as pretend prison guards and as pretend prisoners. But the real fault, it turns out, lies with those who run prisons and allow this to go on, like Zimbardo himself as the oblivious experimenter, and with the System. Zimbardo then applies these lessons to Abu Ghraib. We will apply them to Ferguson MO.
The Grokking Republicans Book List Diary includes links to all of the published Diaries in this series, and notes on upcoming Diaries.
Wed Oct 08, 2014 at 11:02 PM PT: A few more resources:
The John Birch Society's Reality http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The Truth in Time http://www.ourrepubliconline.com/...
