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When I was just a kid and I walked home from school for lunch, my mother always had the TV on. For the most part, the television fare involved a steady diet of soap operas, and, if I recall, Search for Tomorrow was her favorite. Lots of bad things always happened to good people, and there were enough villains for us all to hate and wish bad things upon.
But there was a relatively short period in the spring of 1954 during which the engrossing melodrama I loved gave way to some really boring show where a batch of old men did nothing but ask each other a batch of questions. Occasionally there was some shouting, but you cannot imagine how disappointed this 9 year old was that Mom had somehow forsaken our beloved scripted drama for a batch of bald men having some sort of debate.
When I asked why we had to watch this stupid stuff, my Mom told me that the McCarthy hearings were important to know about and follow. I’m not quite able to separate what I came to know then as a child and what I learned later about those hearings as an adult. But to put it simply, there was a really really bad guy, Joseph McCarthy, who liked to bully innocent people and have his own way regardless of how much it hurt others. He caused a great deal of harm that was never undone, but eventually fairness and justice prevailed and he got his.
I hadn’t thought about this in a great many years, and the recollection brings back all sorts of memories, some very tender. But I asked myself how these thoughts, deeply buried in my psyche for over 60 years, came back so vividly–today. And then the realization became as clear as the nose on my weathered face.
I was eating lunch and been watching CNN. The impeachment hearings were on the TV with a series of witnesses testifying that a really really bad guy had been doing all sorts of things that were “improper,” “morally wrong,” and “distressing.”
Yes, said their Republican inquisitors, but these acts, however “irregular,” weren’t illegal, were they? He released the funds to Ukraine eventually, did he not? And most notably, who are you to question the President’s judgment? What are your motives? I’m not so sure that you are someone who can be trusted? Impeaching the character of witnesses as a defense against impeachment of a despicable leader is not a new phenomenon. It’s a lesson Trumpites learned from a host of demagogues such as McCarthy, and that McCarthy and his ilk learned from a string of despots before them.
The story goes that eventually McCarthy bullied one person too many, one person who was sympathetic in the eyes of all, and the tide turned, quickly and pretty violently, against him. I’m not sure exactly what it will take for this really really bad man to be recognized for what he is, and finally for those legislators who fear him and those voters who blindly stick by him to say, “Enough is enough.”
But on that day I will be a happy man and my mother, from somewhere above, will tell me that it’s okay to turn back to our regular program on the telly.
