perhaps it is time for me to tone-down the rhetoric against the far-right and take a more positive stance, knowing that history is on my side:
"Those who don't know
history are destined to
repeat it..."
Edmund Burke
ON THE 25TH DAY OF NOVEMBER IN 1947 ...
THE WITCHUNT IN HOLLYWOOD BEGAN AS ten writers and directors were cited for Contempt of Congress for refusal to assist delving into the activities of the American Communist Party. A Blacklist began that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working on movies or television - and it became known as the McCarthy Era, named after a somewhat insane and alcoholic Junior Senator from the State of Wisconsin, who led the chase to the point where we also began to lose scientists, schoolteachers and scholars on ideological grounds. We had a free press, but the vast majority of our newspapers couldn't challenge the intelligence of a cocker spaniel, living in fear that they too would be blacklisted by the Wisconsin Senator and his group of toadies. Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom read, saw, or heard from American communists or socialists, who were dismissed as being disloyal to American freedom. They simply were not allowed a voice of defense.
Books were banned from bookstore and Dalton Trumbo, who wrote Exodus, was no longer allowed to write; Edward Dymytryk, a fine film directer was no longer allowed to produce or direct. They were replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and McCarthy hacks like Walt Disney and Gary Cooper and Ronald Regan, who was then the President of the Screen Actors Guild. They eagerly denounced former friends as being 'either friendly to the Communist Party or actual members of the party itself' by naming names to the members of the House of Un-American Activities. Individuals were raped of their reputations and could no longer find gainful employment, some of whom would eventually commit suicide. This was voiced with great clarity by the actor Humphrey Bogart when he spotted another actor named Danny Kaye at a Hollywood party in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel and said to Kaye in a loud voice: You fuckers sold me out!
Our National amnesia had begun.
On December 2nd of 1954, Joe McCarthy was censured by the United States Senate and he eventually died on the 2nd day of May 1n 1957 bent full of booze, fallen from grace, and more-or-less mourned by none. Which proved to we Americans that we still had a choice to never forget our democratic past and our social contract. That it was a rather simple matter: Allow the two party system work on the big decisions and let the individual make the small decisions on how to live out their own lives with both dignity and grace.
The lesson learned was to never give up memory of past mistakes or the use of critical intelligence, and always recall the evil demand for national amnesia, when Americans were once urged to forget Gettysburg and World War One and World War Two, and when America itself edged toward a totalitarian state, one which began with whispers of Communists and Socialists not being truly American; or can just as easily begin in the present tense with equally small mutters and mumbles about our President not being truly American or that Latinos coming across our borders are merely carriers of drugs like marijuana and cocaine and are, thereby, a personal menace to all true American patriots...
Good Old Draconian Measures have begun to rear-their-heads once again to bring order to what they assume is our disorder, and if that means clearing our streets of Latinos and Blacks and real-or-imagined addicts of any sort, then so-be-it; because their only agenda is to clean-house from all enemies either foreign or domestic with whom they disagree.
The problem with that is this: You cannot fight the simpleminded with rational argument, because rational argument is something that conservatives seem not to understand. Nothing makes their blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it's history or verifiable truth, most of the yawn and turn away, if it resembles a movie, they snap to attention and are ready for war. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill once said: Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
There are lessons to be learned here for all of us. The American Right will never change. There will always be a new enemy, real or imagined. Therefore, we must never forget that our lonely fight to establish a Nation began over 2 centuries ago by men who were willing enough and believed enough in their cause to place their bodies before the might of the British nation. At first, they had no guns. And in the end they won. They won for themselves and their families and their friends, for their country, for memory and history. Others came after them, men and women fought for their own freedoms only 50 years ago, led by a man named Martin Luther King and aided by a woman named Rosa Louise Parks. King once said: Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
He did not rant nor rail nor rave at the enemy and she simply sat down on a bus, they stood their ground for what they believed to be right, not for what the others told them that they ought to believe, and that understanding also won for those lonely men and women and children who had once stood under the heavy-hand of bigotry and stupidity. One of the enduring mysteries of mankind is that there have always been men like Martin Luther King and women like Rosa Louise Parks and that there always will be more...
...And that is the happiest ending of all.
"Those who don't know
history are destined to
repeat it..."
Edmund Burke
ON THE 25TH DAY OF NOVEMBER IN 1947 ...
THE WITCHUNT IN HOLLYWOOD BEGAN AS ten writers and directors were cited for Contempt of Congress for refusal to assist delving into the activities of the American Communist Party. A Blacklist began that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working on movies or television - and it became known as the McCarthy Era, named after a somewhat insane and alcoholic Junior Senator from the State of Wisconsin, who led the chase to the point where we also began to lose scientists, schoolteachers and scholars on ideological grounds. We had a free press, but the vast majority of our newspapers couldn't challenge the intelligence of a cocker spaniel, living in fear that they too would be blacklisted by the Wisconsin Senator and his group of toadies. Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom read, saw, or heard from American communists or socialists, who were dismissed as being disloyal to American freedom. They simply were not allowed a voice of defense.
Books were banned from bookstore and Dalton Trumbo, who wrote Exodus, was no longer allowed to write; Edward Dymytryk, a fine film directer was no longer allowed to produce or direct. They were replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and McCarthy hacks like Walt Disney and Gary Cooper and Ronald Regan, who was then the President of the Screen Actors Guild. They eagerly denounced former friends as being 'either friendly to the Communist Party or actual members of the party itself' by naming names to the members of the House of Un-American Activities. Individuals were raped of their reputations and could no longer find gainful employment, some of whom would eventually commit suicide. This was voiced with great clarity by the actor Humphrey Bogart when he spotted another actor named Danny Kaye at a Hollywood party in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel and said to Kaye in a loud voice: You fuckers sold me out!
Our National amnesia had begun.
On December 2nd of 1954, Joe McCarthy was censured by the United States Senate and he eventually died on the 2nd day of May 1n 1957 bent full of booze, fallen from grace, and more-or-less mourned by none. Which proved to we Americans that we still had a choice to never forget our democratic past and our social contract. That it was a rather simple matter: Allow the two party system work on the big decisions and let the individual make the small decisions on how to live out their own lives with both dignity and grace.
The lesson learned was to never give up memory of past mistakes or the use of critical intelligence, and always recall the evil demand for national amnesia, when Americans were once urged to forget Gettysburg and World War One and World War Two, and when America itself edged toward a totalitarian state, one which began with whispers of Communists and Socialists not being truly American; or can just as easily begin in the present tense with equally small mutters and mumbles about our President not being truly American or that Latinos coming across our borders are merely carriers of drugs like marijuana and cocaine and are, thereby, a personal menace to all true American patriots...
Good Old Draconian Measures have begun to rear-their-heads once again to bring order to what they assume is our disorder, and if that means clearing our streets of Latinos and Blacks and real-or-imagined addicts of any sort, then so-be-it; because their only agenda is to clean-house from all enemies either foreign or domestic with whom they disagree.
The problem with that is this: You cannot fight the simpleminded with rational argument, because rational argument is something that conservatives seem not to understand. Nothing makes their blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it's history or verifiable truth, most of the yawn and turn away, if it resembles a movie, they snap to attention and are ready for war. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill once said: Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
There are lessons to be learned here for all of us. The American Right will never change. There will always be a new enemy, real or imagined. Therefore, we must never forget that our lonely fight to establish a Nation began over 2 centuries ago by men who were willing enough and believed enough in their cause to place their bodies before the might of the British nation. At first, they had no guns. And in the end they won. They won for themselves and their families and their friends, for their country, for memory and history. Others came after them, men and women fought for their own freedoms only 50 years ago, led by a man named Martin Luther King and aided by a woman named Rosa Louise Parks. King once said: Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
He did not rant nor rail nor rave at the enemy and she simply sat down on a bus, they stood their ground for what they believed to be right, not for what the others told them that they ought to believe, and that understanding also won for those lonely men and women and children who had once stood under the heavy-hand of bigotry and stupidity. One of the enduring mysteries of mankind is that there have always been men like Martin Luther King and women like Rosa Louise Parks and that there always will be more...
...And that is the happiest ending of all.
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