Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 122

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Popular Culture Review
Kelly’s original distaste for radicalized youth and anti-war protests
could be seen as that of a moderate 1950s liberal who instinctively shied away
from violent or disruptive tactics. In 1965 he was getting his first view of this
burgeoning youth culture and he did not particularly like what he saw:
If success consists of reaching your goals, there are a lot of
successful young people rampant in these days. It should be
pointed out, of course, that they have a low success threshold.
If your goals are low, you can reach up and touch them from a
slouch position on a lounge. These people have, then, 50 or 60
years ahead of them of accumulated rubber-stamp folksongs,
touch-me-not dancing and odds and ends of rubbish flying
about, obscuring their vision, as trash in a no-gravity space
capsule. It is hard to figure out a generation that believes in
contact lenses and non-contact frug.4
Kelly attempted to conclude this uncharacteristically bitter critique with a leaven
of humor. Instead, he made it even worse: “It makes a lot of us yearn for the
good old days of crooked politics, dirty jokes, war and segregation, all of which
are now, naturally, in the past.”5 It all sounded like the valedictory of a 1950s
liberal facing a yawning generation gap. Kelly’s liberalism, such as it was, had
become sorely tested.
Some of his mood began to find its way into the Pogo strip. In 1965, a
number of the swamp characters (critters) discussed the nature of reform. They
eventually concluded that most people did not know what the term meant. The
solution they arrived at was to establish a string of “reform” schools in order to
educate these people. One could surmise that sixties youth might be candidates
for such schools.6
The Vietnam War itself was rarely mentioned directly in Pogo. When it
did appear, however, it was described over time in increasingly negative terms.
Some of this disenchantment surfaced in a 1966 introduction to a Pogo book
(made up of a collection of recent newspaper strips) when Kelly aired his
uneasiness about the war: “Our own nation at this writing is engaged in the grim
business of dropping bombs on a country with which we are not at war.
Certainly no laughs here.”7 In a 1967 Pogo sequence, one of the swamp critters,
Howland Owl, discussed his own role in an upcoming presidential election in a
Shermanesque manner. “If I were nominated, I would not run.” When asked
what he would do if he was elected anyway, Owl responded that, “if elected I
would not serve.” Then, twisting the old saying a little, he was asked how he
would react to “an honest draft.” The answer was: “Draft? If drafted I wouldn’t
go to Vietnam!”8 Kelly’s own disgust with the policies of the Johnson
administration was summed up in an introduction: “. . . S.E. Asia, Poverty,