Albert the Alligator and the British Ambassador

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
30 July '10

Once upon a time in an intellectual galaxy now seemingly far away, liberals and conservatives shared a common view. There were the forces of democracy and the forces of totalitarianism (or, if you prefer, authoritarianism) that threatened the world, took away freedom, and held back both economic and social development. The goal of Western foreign policy was to help those favoring liberty against the tyrants and would-be tyrants.

Naturally, there were different views about how to do this, for example should some dictatorships be backed against those deemed worse, but the basic template was the same.

Then came a turning point which can be symbolized by a line in Walt Kelly’s comic-strip “Pogo.” A dialogue balloon destined to shake the world: “We have met the enemy,” said either Pogo the possum or Albert the alligator, “and he is us.” Kelly later wrote that he originated this line in 1953 in an essay opposing McCarthyism but it really took off in a 1972 cartoon, perfectly timed for the "1960s," the era whose ideas rule us today in much of the West.

The sentence was a parody of Oliver Hazard Perry’s message—“We have met the enemy and they are ours”—describing his naval victory during the War of 1812. So what had once been a triumphant shout of American victory was transmuted in a post-Pogo world to symbolize a vitriolic yell of self-induced anti-Americanism.

And so if there are evil forces in the world, they are said either not to be evil at all (mislabeled as so by false Western propaganda) or were only made to behave that way by our (Western, American, democratic, capitalist, etc) sins. In other words, the guilty party is the democratic victim whose bad behavior created the monsters. In this spirit, a supposedly great American intellectual claimed America was the cancer of the world. Formerly, it had been known as the last, best hope of humanity.

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