Books like Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

My dad turned me onto Pogo years and years ago. One evening laying around his front room (which I am told is no longer called a parlor because of the Influenza epidemic of 1919), I spied (with my little eye) the spine of this Pogo book on his shelves. An hour later and my sides hurt from the laughing."Ah Pogo, the beauty of the forest primeval get me in the heart.""It gets me in the feet, Porkypine"(they look out at a forest full of junk and garbage dumped all over)"It *is* hard walkin' on this stuff""Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us."I was brought up a feral, hippy, enviro Nazi, so this appeals to me greatly. When we were kids we used to drive up the 101 to Leggett and camp out in the undeveloped lands of Usal Creek. Now it has been declared part of the Lost Coast and is protected, but in those days it was being encroached upon by Evil Loggers, and the Even More Evil BLM (which when I was 6 years old was difficult to distinguish from BM - short for bowel movement - and therefore ever after all logging companies and government agencies were poppyheads). We would see redwood logs on trucks being shuttled off to the mill and shake our fists at them and shout "Boo!" out the window. My dad has retired up to the northern California coast now and writes regularly to the editor of the local paper about various, cranky environmental concerns he has. Sometimes he writes spoof letters, such as the one about proposing there be a government program to give occupational therapy to skunks, opossums, and raccoons so they would stop crossing the roads in front of cars and getting squished. He says he doesn't think the editor got his sense of humor on that one, and the piece never appeared in the letters to the editor section. He suspects they have started a file on him, which has been added to the one the FBI has from his days in the Peace and Freedom Party with the Black Panthers et al. The salmon disaster of the Klamath River about killed him I think. It's small comfort that Al Gore has now made being an environmentalist all hip and groovy. Things have degraded much from when Rachel Carson first blew the whistle.But things like Pogo lighten my heart and remind me to keep laughing regardless. I learned that early from my dear old dad. You gotta take the bitter with the sweet. Now that he looks like the Travelocity gnome the glint of mercurial mischief in his eyes is even funnier.I go Pogo, you can too!