From Both Barrels: Gregg, Pixar, Pogo, and Olson

by Brad Birzer

Forgive the scattershot tendencies and directions of this post.  Just lots of short items written quickly from my hotel room in downtown Portland, just blocks from Powells (which I’ve yet to visit).

A few book recommendations

I’m currently reading Sam Gregg’s new book, Wilhelm Roepke’s Political Economy.  Written in a more academic but equally engaging style than his last book, The Commercial Society, Gregg’s new book presents Roepke in the light of Christian Humanism and the 19th and 20th century papal encyclicals on economics, society, and social justice.  While Gregg clearly admires Roepke, he also justly criticizes the humane economist for several of his views.  Not surprisingly, Gregg’s book has been a joy, and I’m eager to finish it.  I will be reviewing it fully over at the University Bookman.  I highly recommend it.

A good friend and former colleague, economist Mark Steckbeck, recommended to me recently The Pixar Touch by David Price.  I just finished the book, having found it a thoroughly excellent read.  With this book, Price offers a necessary glimpse into one of the most important business enterprises of our day.  Price, a follower of Joseph Schumpeter, ably details Pixar’s decade long struggle against cultural decadence, poor art, and quick profit seeking, arguing--ultimately successfully, but not without serious struggles--that true storytelling and excellence comes from delicate, nuanced, and (yes, paradoxically) grueling fortitude.  The author also nicely describes the vital role of Apple’s Steve Jobs in the success of Pixar.   

American Aesop

by John Willson

It is said that Aesop, despite making all his characters animals and thus avoiding being Nathan to his contemporary Davids, was finally thrown over a cliff by the neighbors he offended. Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo, suffered an even more humiliating fate: He was captured by liberals.

The Left took Pogo into custody officially on the first “Earth Day,” April 22, 1970, when Kelly did a poster for the event. Surveying the wreckage we have created, Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Despite the sentiment being profoundly conservative, and despite the fact that Kelly had used a version of it as far back as 1953, it painted Pogo forever green.

But read with the eye of a child, as I read Pogo in the early 1950s, Walt Kelly defends everything that is Good, True and Beautiful. He doesn’t like Big, Bad, or Ugly. He is gentle and peaceful and tolerant. All of his stories have a (moral) point. And most of all, he finds almost everything to be worth laughing at. Hardly the stuff of the Left.

If Aesop had lived in the 20th century he probably would have drawn a comic strip. During the second half of my father’s life (b. 1911) and the first fifty years of mine (b. 1940) the “comics” told as many of America’s popular stories as the movies, and only gradually gave way to television. The Internet may broadband them all away, but for a century the newspaper and “motion pictures” were the main sources of mass entertainment and therefore potentially the sources of a significant part of our moral understanding.