You know, people, I should tell you that I try to keep an open mind about things. I really and truly do. However, I must point out that the Bucks County Courier Times carried a column today written by this carbon-based life form named Alan Caruba titled, “What My Father Didn’t Know: McCarthy Was Right.” Caruba is, of course, referring to the infamous Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
Don’t worry, you’re not imagining things. You read that correctly. And, as is almost always the case, I’d write to the paper about this, but I already have something else in the pipeline.
As you may have guessed, Caruba has written a book. It is called “Warning Signs,” published by Merril Press (I don’t mind giving it a plug, since I sincerely doubt that anyone who may be reading this would want to buy it – actually, I’m mentioning the publisher so you’ll know to avoid any of their other books in the future, since they funded this nut job.)
Anyway, I started to read Caruba’s diatribe, and of course it’s chock full of the typical right wing Repug agit-prop (“liberals this, New Deal that, leftist propaganda machine, etc.” – another “pot, meet kettle” moment as far as I’m concerned), but I thought, “well, maybe it’s somehow possible I could learn something I didn’t know in the midst of this drivel, so I’ll keep reading.”
(Caruba also goes back and slams Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury before a grand jury but not of espionage, and Hiss spent the rest of his life into his 90s trying to clear his name, with his health failing and losing his eyesight in the process. Hiss did achieve a measure of recompense, actually outliving his tormentor Richard Nixon, who built his political career upon the Hiss case.)
Well, the kicker came for me with this paragraph:
“The fact is that Joe McCarthy was right, but by now his name has been turned into a dirty word by the same liberal, leftist propaganda machine (see?) that today is trying to convince Americans that the President ‘lied’ to them about Iraq. They had to wait until the FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, was dead before they dared to slander his reputation.”After I read that paragraph, I threw the newspaper across the room (a juvenile thing to do, I’ll admit, but it properly conveyed my disgust).
This, of course, is a typical Repug tactic. Attack, attack, attack, attack…throw so many charges out there that they can’t all possibly be answered at once with a reasonable argument. As for Bush and Iraq, that has been thoroughly covered. As for J. Edgar Hoover (huh?), he was in the mobster Meyer Lansky’s hip pocket because of all of the gambling debts he ran up, as well as the fact that Lansky had in his possession some – shall we say, uncomplimentary? – photos of Hoover in drag (“The Secret File on J.Edgar Hoover” by Anthony Summers is a good read in this vein). As a result, organized crime had a heyday under Hoover’s watch. Also, Hoover fed McCarthy all kinds of lies and misinformation that McCarthy used to ruin innocent people.
(I should mention – and I talked with my uncle once about this, who is now in his 90s and hanging on – that, at the time a lot of these people either joined the Communist party or knew someone who did, and I’m talking about the era of the Great Depression, this country was flat on its back. Communism was doomed to fail, fortunately, but back then to people who had nothing, it may have held out some misguided promise of success. My point is that hindsight is always 20-20.)
There are two main reasons why the Repugs attack history this way and hope to get away with it 1) People have short attention spans, for legitimate reasons of having extremely full lives or because of sloth or carelessness, or 2) Individuals who were part of the era from, say, post World War II until the Reagan era began in 1981 (which historians will mark as the beginning of the end of this country one day when “the book” is written) are dying off, their stories are fading into memory (including John Henry Faulk, who had to sue and spent every dime that he had to see that the HUAC was abolished), and the media, collectively, is ignoring their stories and, as a result, our history, doing so to our great peril.
This is also the reason why the Repugs go on the warpath at times over college curricula, saying that it is “too liberal,” and some professors are that way also. Yes, that is the case in selected instances, but as usual (see the University of Michigan lawsuit in which Sandra Day O’Connor ruled in favor of the school), the Repugs try to turn the exception into the rule.
Well, I should ignore this lunatic Caruba, but I’m not going to. If you want to inform yourself and get a true sense of what went on during the period in which Joe McCarthy ran roughshod over people’s lives and ruined their careers, creating a climate of fear and paranoia during the Eisenhower “feel good” era (and yes…I know McCarthy got going under Truman), here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
http://www.answers.com/topic/hollywood-ten
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
Also, the films “The Way We Were,” Guilty By Suspicion,” and the public television miniseries “Concealed Enemies” are highly instructive concerning this period.
The Repugs want us to forget our history, our culture, and ultimately, our way of life so they can impose their rule for good and forget where we were and how we got here.
We must NEVER let that happen.
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