Book Review 324: Walt Kelly

WALT KELLY: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo, by Thomas Andrae and Carsten Laqua. 240 pages, illustrated. Hermes

Thomas Andrae and Carsten Laqua consider Walt Kelly the best cartoonist ever. I agree. Too bad this biography hardly rises above the level of a fanzine.

Kelly wasn’t just superior in each of the cartoonist’s tasks, he was unique in some, such as creating an argot found nowhere else (not unlike P.G. Wodehouse, although Kelly differentiated his voices via typography, too).

He was easily the best caricaturist using animals. Nast did it but he just pasted recognizable faces on animal bodies; and McNelly did skillful personality types but not individuals. Kelly’s best was
Joe McCarthy, first as Simple J. Malarkey and later as Wiley Catt.

Though Kelly has a deserved reputation as a McCarthy-killer, and he was satirizing illiberal values from the first (in 1949), he came rather late to McCarthy, 1953. Herblock had caricatured McCarthy (and invented the word McCarthyism) as early as 1950, but Herblock weakened his attack by occasionally depicting McCarthy (and Nixon) as mischievous boys. Kelly never showed McCarthy as anything but the menace he was.

It has been claimed (though not in this book) that Kelly created more characters than any other cartoonist,   more than 150.

He was the finest draughtsman ever to do cartoons, with a line as expressive as Caran d’Ache’s, and, needless to say, without Caran’s noxious antisemitism.

As one of few animators to turn to newspaper strips (though he was considered too independent at Disney), he also created motion in his panels that has never even been attempted by the second-raters who are sometimes compared to him, like Breathed and Trudeau.

Finally, he was funny. To everybody but the morons at the FBI who -- unbelievably except that it fits a pattern already known --  assigned codebreakers to find the hidden messages to the Communist underground in “Pogo.”

“Pogo” has also shown staying power. No one reads “L’il Abner” any more, but “Pogo” remains popular among children and adults. I had a nearly complete set of the 30-odd “Pogo” books, but my children discovered them when they got to be about 9 or 10 years old, and read them over and over till they disintegrated.

So much for who Walt Kelly was, which you will glean from this biography, although not much more. His marriages and alcoholism are barely alluded to. Although a fond remembrance by his stepson mentions numerous “antidotes” that his multitudinous friends would tell about him, we do not hear more than a couple of them.

Kelly, at least, would have appreciated “antidotes” and the numerous other illiteracies in this badly edited volume, and with his habit of making satire out of misunderstandings, would probably have laughed until the tears flowed to read this:

“As a concession to the Republican right-wing he chose Richard Nixon as his running mate, a HUAC lawyer who made his reputation by helping prosecute Albert Hiss, a lawyer suspected of leaking atomic secrets to the Soviets.”

Bad as it is, true Pogophiles will want “Walt Kelly” for (not especially adoitly-chosen) reproductions of many strips and especially photographs and fugitive Kellyana not within reach of any but the well-heeled collector.

Wandering in Babylon

I was asked by someone I know well to watch this address from the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. I did.

I have said before that I got tired, living in Tennessee, of having strangers tell me I was immoral because I didn't believe in their religion. This guy is one of those; according to him, I am living a life of Babylonian sin.

And he -- his name is Robert George, and he is a rich, tenured professor at Princeton who has been appointed to several presidential commissions -- complains how tough it is to believe in his religion because we Babylonians have retarded him in his career, and exiled him socially for his faith.

You know what's really tough about being a Catholic, Professor George? Being an altar boy with a cute butt.

Tax cheats find a friend

Named Eric Holder. Joe Nocera tells why in the New York Times:

“This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law,” said Holder at a news conference.

In fact, it shows nothing of the sort. Yes, Credit Suisse agreed to pay $2.6 billion; that’s real money, but nothing a bank its size can’t handle. And yes, three years ago, seven midlevel Credit Suisse executives were indicted. But in the just-announced settlement, no one in top management was forced to resign. The U.S. wanted the names of the Americans with private Credit Suisse bank accounts; Justice settled without getting them. And, most amazing of all, pleading guilty to a felony will have absolutely no business consequences for Credit Suisse. For instance, a Securities and Exchange Commission rule forbids a firm convicted of a felony from serving as an investment adviser; the rule was temporarily waived for Credit Suisse.

As its chief executive, Brady Dougan, put it in a conference call with media and analysts after the guilty plea, “We have found no instances where clients cannot do business with us.”

What Brady Dougan meant is he doesn't mind doing business with criminals.

Crime scene

Sure would be nice to learn the names of those 22,000 patriots with numbered accounts.

For the Swiss, business as usual. They collaborated with the Nazis to rob Jews, and still are (probably) holding some of that loot. 

You never see a fat mouse, do you?

Coming soon to your kitchen

Dutch researchers put exercise wheels outside to determine whether mice would work out. They would.

 Gene D. Block, chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, was not involved with the paper but knows Dr. Meijer and had seen the wheel set up in her garden. He said the study made it clear that wheel-running is “some type of rewarding behavior” and “probably not driven by stress or anxiety.”

The question had a serious purpose, but who cares about that? Now to talk them into buying tiny, overpriced shoes.

Which reminds me to remind you that we will be having a plague of mice around July or August. The last one was over 12 years ago. I forget the exact year, but Kimo Apana was mayor.

A plague of mice

When it rains, grasses luxuriate on the leeward slopes, the mice eat the seeds and reproduce exponentially, and not just to powers of 2 either. Mouse generations are only about 3 weeks long.

So if we take whatever number of girl mice were making babies on, say, April 1 as Generation 1, then we are already seeing the emergence of the young mice of Gen 3. And with serveral girl mice in each litter, it will not take long to have plagues of mice.

As they eat up the seeds, and the dry summer restricts production of new seeds, they will migrate up to Kula and eat up the farms and down to Kihei and Lahaina and alarm the condo owners.

No doubt the most alarmist will blame global warming, but that is just because people who believe in global warming have short memories (or, for malihini, none at all).

Calling out the gun nuts

RtO's position is that gun nuts are cowards, afraid to go unarmed in places where even little old ladies do. But I did not say it as trenchantly as Flock the NRA.

About the anti-GMO petition

CORRECTION: I let a decimal point get adrift and have thus revised the numbers in the post downward to correct them. The conclusion remains robust. (I failed to make the basic reality check of asking if my numbers were in the ballpark. For US suicides, they weren't. Suicides and auto deaths should be roughly the same.)

RtO was not planning to say anything more about GMOs (see "GMOs love you," Feb. 6), but Tricia asked me to revisit it in light of the petition to get a Luddite proposition on the county ballot in November.

Some background: Tricia probably knows more about genetic engineering than I do and she for sure has more field experience with plant breeding, having worked for a time for the NifTAL Project. (Nitrogen fixation in Tropical Agricultural Legumes, an excellent idea whose money was taken away by Bush I and given to Russian mobsters.) On Friday, while she was being a docent at the Makawao Histoy Museum, she was approached by a woman seeking signatures for the petition

Tricia has far more patience with these ignoramuses than I do and spent some time listening to her spiel. The woman knew nothing about farming or genetics, but what alarmed Tricia the most was the claim that Monsanto caused "hundreds of thousands" of farmers in India to commit suicide.

Statistics are very uncertain, but the number of reported farmer suicides in India is under 20,000 a year, in a population of close to 700,000,000 rural people. This is certainly an undercount, as landless rural laborers are not treated as "farmers."

Still, that is not a huge number compared to the United States. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest 37,000 successful suicides a year here, of which farmers' share would be around 750. 

Since there are about 100 times as many farmers in India as in the United States, for there to be an epidemic of suicides (from any or all causes), there would have to be 75,000 farm suicides a year in India.

Whatever the accurate number is, nobody claims it is that high.

'Nuff said about the gullibility and ignorance of the anti-GMO crowd. But a word about the alleged mechanism provoking these deaths, which is debt incurred by farmers using Monsanto seed leading to despair leading to suicide.

Now, the issue of income and debt in India goes way back before there was ever a Monsanto (and if you are interested, the histories of Mike Davis and Eric Hobsbawm are a good place to begin), but the perfervid campaign against Monsanto led some researchers to ask real farmers about debt:

Ron Herring, a professor of government at Cornell University, interviewed Indian farmers in 2006 after 200,000 suicides in 10 years. He called "the media construction baseless," and told the Cornell Chronicle, "Farmers were insulted and incredulous: If farmers committed suicide every time they fell into debt, they said, there would be no farmers."

(If I were to go into more detail, I would link today's anti-GMO drive to the evil anti-Green Revolution propaganda of the '70s. The illustration makes the link graphic.)

Book Review 323; Infinitesimals

INFINITESIMAL: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, by Amir Alexander. 352 pages, illustrated. Scientific American/Farrar Straus, $27

That there was a dispute at the end of the 17th century between Newton and Liebnitz over priority for calculus is a well-known episode in the history of science, but the strongest word used to describe it is usually “unseemly,” and nothing depended on the outcome.

In “Infinitesimal,” UCLA professor Amir Alexander goes to the beginning of the century when the dispute over the same thing, then called the “method of exhaustion” or “infinitesimals,” was a matter of life and death, both for mathematicians and, so the disputants thought, for the life of their societies. They were not wrong.

As always seems to be the case wherever you look at that wonderful, horrible century at the divide between the Middle Ages and modern times, the characters are all fuller, stranger and more lively than anything we can produce in the 21at century.

Although Alexander cautions several times against applying today’s standards to men whose experience and understanding were so different, Thomas Hobbes had many characteristics that would have qualified him as a villain in any century. And yet, the philosopher was probably the only out-and-out atheist in the cast, which makes him sound modern; and he was a secularist in government at a time when few could even conceive of that.

The dispute over math was in many ways religious, weird as that sounds to us, and it is a measure of the strong feelings involved that Alexander says the Catholic Jesuits wold have burned Hobbes if they could have caught him, while the Anglicans, who had him, called for burning him but were politically unable to.

No wonder Hobbes thought that two of the leading characteristics of life were its brutality and its brevity.

We do not usually think of Hobbes as a mathematician, and his ideas (like squaring the circle) were disdained at the time, but he was at one point considered so highly that he was named math tutor to Charles Stuart, a man who, to say the least of it, grew up to be one of the greatest calculators of his time.

The war on infinitesimals was fought twice, with opposite outcomes.

The first half of “Infinitesimal” recounts the rise and triumph of the Jesuits as they sought to impose doctrinaire, inflexible and -- as we now know -- insanely wrong ideas on Europe. They succeeded in Italy, turning it from the scientific vanguard to a rural backwater. People really did get murdered for math in this war.

Along the way the Jesuits created what Alexander calls the first and still the only worldwide educational system. It is regrettable that most of what they taught was and still is nonsense.

What the Jesuits wanted, after generations of savage religious warfare, was stability, order and religion. If that sounds very modern, it is.

Gunpowder saved northern Europe from the Jesuits. In 1632, the same year Galileo was condemned (and might well have been burned had he not been a celebrity), Gustavus Adolphus defeated the Catholic army at Breitenfeld, and that was that as far as imposing Catholicism by force went, except around the Mediterranean and in Latin America.

The war over infinitesimals began earlier in Italy but the crisis overlapped in the two theaters, coming to its climaxes around 1660. In England, an odd character named John Wallis was the key disputant. His proofs seemed sloppy to, for example, Fermat; but they worked and appeared to ally mathematics with experimentalism and against rigid authoritarianism and Hobbes.
And that proved to be the winning approach, in economic, power political and philosophic arenas.

Alexander spends only a few brief paragraphs in sketching the consequences, which were, of course, dependent on many other things besides an experimental and inquisitive approach to math.

Advanced math is not sufficient to become modern, but it does seem to be a requirement.

Alexander does not speculate on or extend the point, but that does not have to stop his readers. It is a fact, unmentioned by Alexander, that Islam deliberately took itself out of the running for math supremacy in the 13th century and China about a century later. Of the other centers where mathematics was so sophisticated that it is possible to imagine one of them pushing forward into modernity (India, Central America), all were conquered by backward religions and so stultified.