Why Johnny Shudders

After a revolution, the first thing the new regime does is kill all the know-it-alls. Right? I imagine lawyers are on The List: the artists, the playwrights, the surrealists, the mimes (who are on everyone's list, anyway), the musicians, the professors and the newspaper editors. And so on. What place in line for the firing squad then goes to the writers and artists of children's literature?

I got to wondering this upon reading this delightful verse from Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly, a reflection on the (not-so-)gentle world Lewis Carroll built for children. It should be no surprise to anyone who knows my work that I count both of these cats as big influences. Kip senses applications to our present circumstances. The sense of forboding warrants the analogy, which is only heightened when considering the paranoia of Kelly's own times.

Would it help if I told you that at any point in history you will find reason for despair? That we can look back through the records and find plenty of evidence of human depravity, mob violence, fear-driven hatred and the scapegoating of the weak? No? I guess not. But then, there has always been reason for hope. It's no accident artists like Carroll or Kelly directed their works toward a particular audience (and, of course, their parents.) What did they see when they looked at the playground? Did they forget that their antagonists were once children too? Carroll, I doubt it; he and J.M. Barrie are from a very different era, a time when one could fetishize childhood without fetishizing the child (eeuugh.) Kelly knew. Which is why Pogo doesn't work very well as children's literature; more like parables for adults who want to relive childhood without forgetting that they grew up into a world full of dangerous, paranoid assholes.

Anyway, Kip, I am trying my best. It doesn't seem to be working. The one source of hope I can maintain is that fifty years from now, if I am still around to be a conscious, doting grandpa, perhaps I could reflect on these times and feel relief that they weren't as bad as I had thought. Provided that such sensations are not artificially induced by the control chip the State sewed into my cerebellum after the Wars of Repentence.