Pogo was Right!

Ahh…for the days of my innocent youth.

About 4 o’clock each weeknight, the Milwaukee Journal would arrive on our back porch and I’d start rummaging through what was known as the "Green Sheet," the section where they printed the daily comic strips.

I’d rip right through the riff-raff on my way to "Pogo," an irreverent bi-pedal animal (Porcupine, I think) who had a knack for crystallizing the day’s events and distilling them into a few chosen words of brilliant, bulletproof, backwoods logic.

One of the most memorable observations ever made by Pogo’s unseen human hand, Walt Kelly, was a simple twist on John Paul Jones’ famous battlefield report. According to Kelly, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Pogo was right.

Perhaps my strong Puritanical ethic is showing. Call me naïve. But I’m raising my eight-year-old son to respect and love the truth.

Positions like those recently taken by the White House and Pentagon are making that effort much more difficult.

In our rush to brand North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil," (which presumably they actually are), we warned the world that what makes this trinity of despotic regimes so repulsive is their plan to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against us.

While I would love to reside indefinitely in a state of mindless, post 9-11 jingoism, a few haunting memories are tugging at me.

As I recall, the United States first developed the atomic bomb.

The United States, also, first used the atomic bomb.

In fact, to this point, we are the only nation to have used the atomic bomb during hostilities.

By our own definition of evil, that could put us on shaky moral ground.

In order to whip up war frenzy against Iraq, the mainstream media is also being fed recycled tidbits linking Iraqis to the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. This would be stunning news if it hadn’t already been reported by the alternative media and swept under the rug immediately after the building collapsed.

No mention of Middle East participation in the event was allowed in the trials of the deceased Timothy McVeigh or the indefinitely incarcerated Terry Nichols. At that time, it served the interests of our government to turn up the heat on domestic dissidents. But when you’re trying to build a consensus for a new war, you revisit some of the lesser attended exhibits in the museum of public opinion, dust them off and place them in prominent view.

It’s all about propaganda.

Any doubts to the contrary have now been clearly dispelled with the revelation of a new Pentagon plan to purposely circulate lies overseas to influence friend and foe alike and raise support for the U.S. war on terrorism.

This is all a dog and pony show.

The real question is not whether the U.S. government will start lying. The intention is to keep us from questioning whether what we have already been told is true.

Does anyone seriously believe we could conduct the kind of intensive military operation we have in Afghanistan with only one soldier and one CIA agent killed in action?

Does anyone in this country know or care that we lost close to 40 military aircraft during our Kosovo bombing campaign? An English language Serb website showed multiple crash sites with twisted metallic wreckage bearing U.S. military markings and serial numbers. Funny how the mainstream media stuck with the lowball Pentagon statistics and never seriously investigated the significant evidence to the contrary.

Were you aware a dis-information campaign in Kosovo was operated to keep a lid on American casualties during that campaign, as well? I personally spoke with an Army officer who later admitted his job had been to lie to the media about American deaths there.

The bottom line is…truth does not play out well on TV. Honest casualty reports created a surge in public opinion against the Vietnam War that led to our defeat. This is not a mistake the Pentagon will ever allow again.

I do not suggest the military should tell us everything it knows. That would be stupidity bordering on treason. I only want the information shared with us to be truthful.

In the book, "1984" the Ministries of Peace and Information were busily promoting only war and lies.

How can we teach our children to love and respect a land whose government thrives on deception?

I am a patriotic American but a very sad one, at this writing.

Christian conscience leads me to agree with my little porcupine friend…

"We have met the enemy…and he is us."

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