Too Many Doobies

A Ear Like a Tone-Deaf Toad

Kelly REALLY got mileage out of his iconic carol that year.

You Gets Butter and Butter

Extra art only for the book. Again, sort of an odd bridge for the story. Kelly's points are elusive to me, other than having a tiny laugh with Emile Coue´.

And hey! We get another great unicorn drawing.

Guns an' Butter Both

May 10, 1966 - The broadcast in English made by the New China News agency said: "At 1600 hours [4 pm Peking time] on May 9, 1966, China successfully conducted over its western areas a nuclear explosion which contained thermonuclear material." China's first device was ex- ...

Oct 30, 1966 - The communique from Hsinhua, the Chinese Communist press agency, began with a simple statement of fact: "On Oct. 27, 1966 China successfully conducted over its own territory a guided missile nuclear weapon test. The guided missile flew normally and the nuclear warhead accurately hit the ...

‘Guns or Butter’ is historically linked to President Lyndon Johnson, with stepped-up involvement in Vietnam and reformative domestic social programs competing for national resources. But now China, at this critical time of 1966, entered into an official backing of North Vietnam and entered into the Nuclear Arms Club, while simultaneously entering into a great cultural revolution. 

Kelly saw that Guns or Butter was an international question.

Quoting from Soap Box Amy:

"An economist somewhere in history said that a nation's economy comes down to guns or butter. In other words, a nation places value on either "guns", the military, war, etc. or it places value on "butter", that is, healthy food, clean air and water, children, education, quality of life, etc.  For example, humans have historically placed value on gold as a metal with little value other than its beauty and failure to tarnish, although it does have a few industrial and dental applications. But no matter how much gold a person owns, gold cannot be eaten!

. . .

But now, we have a chance to start fresh, to change our thinking and focus on "basics" and what's truly important! And if we don't, we're most likely doomed. As many a sage and philosopher has said over the centuries, this planet has focused too long and too hard on the Male Principle or "Guns", and that if we don't focus on the Female Principle or "Butter" and the things that are truly important, we doom ourselves and the planet."

He Eats Firecrackers

I'm in over my head trying to understand recent Chinese history, but I'm just trying to find correlations with Kelly's point of view. Graphically Mao is portrayed as a sort of Happy Buddha with a military cap. Below, known as a Mao cap, it is an obvious icon associated with the man:

 
Running around wearing a towel could partly be connected with a Happy Buddha image, but I wonder if it might be associated with Mao's famous swim of the Yangtze River in July of 1966, when Mao was 73:

The swim was part of the launch of the Cultural Revolution, and an effort to convince the world that he was indeed still alive, and was a force to be reckoned with, as he was reported to swim 9 miles in 65 minutes, accompanying 5000 young swimmers in the annual race across the river.

Seeing the chairman in the almost altogether * maybe * sparked Kelly's notion of a costume for the caricature? Maybe not, but it was in the news around the time Kelly would have been drawing these strips.

Back in the Ol' Saddle

From all accounts, Kelly's use of Chinese script characters was accurate, and made for interesting graphics. One might wonder, why the effort? Because it was Kelly, that's why. His satirical setups and situations seem a bit obscure as to their exact correlation to historical events, but then I'm no historian. 

100 Flowers

SO, Kelly now was directly referring to China's political landscape. In 1956 Mao Zedong attempted to relax restrictions that his people had been suffering by letting them vent their anger and frustrations. Using the old saying "let a hundred flowers bloom", he was inviting criticism from his people. The saying comes from a traditional Chinese saying, "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend".

I am paraphrasing information from Wikipedia here: Some thought this was a political trap, to encourage dissidents to step forward only to be ensnared. But it seems that Mao actually thought people would respond with positive critiques to iron out wrinkles in the system, perhaps complaints of petty corruption or local ineptitude. After an initial luke warm response, he basically then said, 'no really, what do you really think? But you know, be healthy about it.' Well then the response was overwhelming in damnation of the system, the party, the major elements of communist rule.

It's still not clear whether it was all a trap or if Mao truly was trying to know the opinion of the people, but he shut it down in 1957. The end result was the persecution of intellectuals, officials, students and dissidents, with over 550,000 people humiliated, imprisoned, demoted or fired from their positions, sent to labor camps, tortured, or killed.

This, then, is what Kelly was referring to in 1966, as China launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in August of that year.