U.S. at war with itself

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/02/2018 (2811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We are reporting today from the battle lines of a nation at war, besieged by attackers on multiple fronts, yet tragically unable to even identify its prime enemy.

So we must begin not by analyzing another round of fresh battle plans from our frayed commanders. Instead, we need to consult our nation’s most sage philosopher, in the hopes that he can once again set us straight. I refer, of course, to Pogo, the possum who functioned as the philosopher king of newspaper comic strip Walt Kelly’s satirical swamp.

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” Pogo famously told us in the 1950s. And lo, Pogo is spot on, yet again, in the America of 2018.

America today is a nation at war with itself. In one week:

● Fourteen Parkland, Fla., teens and three teachers were slaughtered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A mentally troubled, expelled student is accused of spraying his former classmates with a military-styled AR-15 assault weapon he’d purchased legally. Cops went to his house 39 times; he’d had mental counselling; teachers feared him. The FBI was twice warned he wanted to be a school shooter, but it shockingly failed to act. Background checks failed because federal, state and local computers didn’t tell each other what they knew about the accused gunman, Nikolas Cruz, 19. Just days later, Florida’s Republican state legislature refused to debate the gun controversy, yet found time to drone on about the perils of pornography. So teenage survivors of the Parkland massacre went to Tallahassee to courageously confront legislators for their un-American failures to act.

● Thirteen Russians with ties to the Kremlin were indicted by the Justice Department’s independent counsel for launching an attack on the United States democracy, seeking to spread lies and dissent during the 2016 presidential election via cyberwarfare and also on the ground. The independent counsel is investigating evidence of ties between the campaign of the ultimate winner, U.S. President Donald Trump, and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his Pogo Papers anthology, Walt Kelly explained that he came up with Pogo’s core philosophy while thinking through the Cold War crisis that led to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist Cold War abuses and excesses in reaction to the Soviet efforts to infiltrate spies into the U.S. government.

“In the time of Joseph McCarthyism… I attempted to explain each individual is wholly involved in the democratic process,” Kelly wrote. “The results of the process fall on the head of the public, and he who is recalcitrant or procrastinates in raising his voice can blame no one but himself.”

McCarthy’s abuses were ultimately curtailed because America’s Republicans and Democrats used to say that politics stops at the water’s edge. In today’s multiple battles, we need to pay homage to, and heed, the patriotic instincts of the father of the modern conservative movement, Sen. Barry Goldwater. The Arizona Republican was a patriotic leader in both of the arenas that marked this past week’s major news.

Goldwater famously posed with his rifle (the one he made!) for the National Rifle Association’s recruitment ads, proclaiming: “I am the NRA.” Yet, as the iconic “Conscience of the Conservatives” spoke out strongly in defence of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, he also believed that no hunter should be able to buy military-style assault weapons. “I’ve never used an automatic or semi-automatic for hunting,” Goldwater once said. “There’s no need to… If any SOB can’t hit a deer with one shot, he should quit shooting.”

Now, the NRA calls such talk blasphemy, while cutting off funding if pols dare speak such common sense and running primary opponents against them. This makes gun-toting Republicans cower in fear and run up their laundry bills, never mind that Ronald Reagan agreed with Goldwater.

Gun enthusiasts need to re-channel the Goldwater/Reagan greatness they once admired, defend the common-sense strength of the Second Amendment — and really make America great again.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

— Tribune News Service