Circular Cruises/Al Capp Liberalism and Vermont
From Eccentric Flower
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Al Capp, Liberalism, and Vermont 2 August 1998 After a fair amount of casual searching - not actively looking, mind you, but keeping my eyes peeled for it whenever the opportunity arose - I found a copy of The Best Of L'il Abner by Al Capp. This is one of the two comic-strip retrospectives I checked out from my local library umpteen times as a kid, books which were just as interesting for the author's notes as for the strips. The other one [which I was eventually given by a friend - thanks, Chris!] is called Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo, by Walt Kelly. I never got to read either strip in the papers. (The Doyle/Sternecky revival of Pogo a few years back had its moments, but really couldn't hold a candle to Walt.) Kelly's politics were never a secret - they showed up in everything he wrote, and a lot of us freedom-of-speech types love him for it. I was scared of censorship even as a child, growing up a too-intelligent kid in Louisiana, and I knew about Joe McCarthy by the time I was sixteen. I understood where Kelly was coming from even then, and I liked it. Plus, the humor in the strip - alternating gentle and silly - appealed to me. L'il Abner was a harder sell for me because it was always silly, and rather absurdist. I didn't like absurdists (I resented being made to read Ionesco and Pinter in high school); still don't, but L'il Abner's an exception in so many ways. I used to resent the "hick" stereotypes in the strip too, until I realized that Capp wasn't making fun of them. Although the city people may seem a lot more savvy, in Capp's strips they always lose in the end. Capp's politics were pretty obvious to people who knew him, according to Mort Walker in Backstage At the Strips (an excellent book, by the by). They were somewhat less obvious in his comics - certainly less obvious than Kelly's. But everyone, including Capp, agrees that he became more conservative in his later years, and the strips seem to confirm that. The first sequence in the book is Abner's marriage, in 1952; the final sequence is from 1970. Another book I bought at the same time, The World of L'il Abner, is a retrospective which ends with the wedding; it adds another seven years or so to the front of that timespan. Capp says Abner first appeared in 1935. Political issues and recognizable caricatures don't start creeping into the strips until the early sixties. By that time Abner's lifespan was half over. It's important to note that Capp doesn't actually say he became more conservative. This is what he says: I had grown up in the days when anybody who ate regularly (the upper class) felt no responsibility for the poor souls who didn't, and helped them only out of human kindness. As I grew into the upper class, I became a liberal. We demanded that the unfortunate be given welfare, that their rent be paid, that they be given food benefits. We fought for all that, and slowly, painfully, we won. It was marvelous being a liberal in those days, because you were on the side of humanity. What began to bother me, privately, was that, as things grew better, the empire of the needy seemed to grow larger. Somehow they became entitled to government gifts other people couldn't get, such as people who worked. Yet I remained a loyal liberal. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of liberalism. I spoke at liberal banquets in New York, Los Angeles, Washington. One day a lady photographer came to my studio and showed me a collection of Boston photographs. A publisher would publish them if only I would rattle off the captions. She had brought a tape recorder. Well, one doesn't turn down a lady liberal. The pictures were funny. My captions tried to be. And then we came to the last one. This one, she said, will break your heart. She showed me a picture of a city street. It was mid-afternoon, the sun was shining. Garbage cans were tipped on the sidewalk. Bottles lined the gutters. On a porch sprawled a half dozen teenagers, drinking and smoking. The caption, I said, should be "Get up off your asses and clean up your street!" The lady stormed out. I guess that was when I began leaving what liberalism had become. I have no idea what a liberal is, but I know that for a liberal, I'm a pretty conservative one. I am at my most liberal when it comes to civil-liberties issues - I don't believe in censoring or suppressing anything that comes to mind immediately. I don't trust the government to be competent and I don't trust big business to be honest. I believe in the invisible hand of the market, with reservations: Obviously there are a few flaws there which need a watchdog (such as the fact that it's more attractive to big companies to merge than to compete). My conservative streak comes from my ability to see the other side. I knew even as a small child that people are liberal until they have money. Then they become conservative. I didn't realize this wasn't obvious to everyone until a few years ago. It makes perfect sense, if you have a dim view of human nature like I do. When you're poor, you want the rich people to share the wealth. When you're rich, you want to hang on to it. But more importantly, I hate receiving any kind of charity. I recognize that charity can be a good thing, but I don't like getting it myself. I firmly believe in paying my own way. This may be why I like the citizens of Dogpatch. They're dirt-poor, but they're too stinking proud to take charity. They'll do some wild things in order to get their food supply, but they can be relied upon to not enter the relief rolls anytime soon. I'm not saying there aren't genuine charity cases in the world, but often my personal outlook on this tears me in two - I want to help the needy, but I also wonder why they're not doing more to help themselves. It also gives me mental fidgets on some issues involving the less-needy, such as the NEA and the Vermont schools, which we'll come back to in a minute. I have something else in common with Capp. As torn as I am on the subject of genuinely needy people, I reserve my real venom for people who I perceive as not needy but who are whining anyway. Some of Capp's meanest cartoons involve student protesting in the sixties. In the "Snapple" strips (this was long before the fruit drinks - a Snapple is a fruit that turns you into a teenager again if you eat it) he shows some student protesters carrying signs which say "The USA Belongs To Youth - But Grownups Can Live In It As Long As They Support Us!" Later in the same sequence, two parents are talking about eating Snapples, saying to their children, "Won't it be wonderful when mummy and daddy are hippies, too?" The children: "It'd be a drag! Who'd feed us, bail us out, and clean up the flowers we toss around?" Get your hackles down: The fifties were a horrid, closeted decade. There were many things being protested in the sixties which were worth protesting about, and there were many advances in thinking - less sexual repression, et al - which came about because of those protests. But a lot of those protests were just protests for the sake of it - a sign of rebellion by a group of kids who went to school on their parents' money, hadn't a clue about the real world, and were looking for ways to show their independence from The System that they were just as much a part of as everyone else. It was a sham, and Capp knew it. A sequence I find particularly amusing: Lonesome Polecat, the Indian (native American, that is), is on the lam from some mobsters - he has a valuable pearl they want back, lodged in his ear. He gets recruited by a desperate Harvard dean, who must acquire an Indian student or lose a valuable grant. He goes to Harvard and gets caught up in the latest student protest by SWINE (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything) who have decided that America be given back to its rightful owners. They decide to begin by giving Harvard back to the Indians - namely, Lonesome Polecat. Interjection: I actually don't think giving America back to the Indians is such a bad idea sometimes. They can't possibly do any worse with it than we have. The point is not the impetus for the protest, but its methodology, as Capp makes clear. The university administration lets the students run roughshod over them, prompting the following exchange: Dean [getting hit on the head with sign]: Good morning, students. So Lonesome owns Harvard. He's sitting in the president's office when the mobsters come in. They're going to break his head open to get the pearl. Lonesome's kinda attached to his head, so he offers to trade the pearl for the deed to Harvard, even swap. They accept the offer. The next time the students try to protest something or another, the mobsters respond in mobster fashion, with brass knuckles. The final strip of the sequence is a series of newspaper pages, ending with "New Harvard administration asked to take over at Yale, Princeton, and Columbia!" Obviously this is a reductio ad absurdum - Capp wouldn't seriously have advocated violence against violence - but you see the point. There are times when I seriously want to be a liberal, but my own personal sense of hey, something is deeply wrong here betrays me. And then there are times I honestly don't know which way to jump, as I mentioned before. The NEA is a perpetual one. I partially believe that artists should not need support - if they do, that part of my brain cries, then they're either poor artists or poor salesmen. Unfortunately, another part of my brain knows better. If art is only what sells, then in America art is rather bland stuff. Since I have weird tastes, most of the artists I like would probably go bankrupt. The other half of my brain replies, yeah, but still, how can funding the arts possibly be part of a government's function? You'd get really irritated if the government were funding religion. It's a no-win argument. Another no-winner is taking place in Vermont. The problem with funding schools by property taxes is that the neighborhoods where the rich people live have better schools. The poorer schools end up neglected. Obviously, in a public school system, this is rather unfair, and the thing to do is share the wealth. Unfortunately, the people paying the taxes have a point too: They expect to get what they pay for. They poured that money into those schools so that their kids could have a better education, and they feel entitled to that. They don't feel like they should be paying for someone else at their own kids' expense. Who do you back in a situation like that? I have no idea, but the situation in Vermont is very tense. There's been a lot of shouting, name-calling, threats of legal action, and whatever happens, someone is going to get unhappy. It's at times like that you wonder if you really know where your loyalties are. In this case, again, I'd be split: If I were poor, I'd be one of the parents screaming to the school board "Fix this damned school up!" If I were rich, I'd be screaming about not wanting to pay to educate some other county. I want to have it both ways. Unfortunately, so does everyone else. Copyright © August 1998. All rights reserved. |
