Photo by DonkeyHotey | CC by 2.0
With unsurprising convenience, a growing chant can be heard from a choir of lay scholars who find revisionist console in diluting the aim and reach of what was the very real, dark and damning nativist clutch of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Like its political ancestor, today’s cheap sale does great damage to not just truth but, as important, the survivors and memory of the generational victims of a domestic political purge come to be known as simply McCarthyism.
From social media pundits to accomplished bloggers, trendy journal keepers and political gurus, a partisan echo can be heard that reduces any attempt to investigate institutional accountability to little more than a global witch hunt that targets the vulnerable super rich, the powerful and the despots among us… be they the current resident of the White House, the Kremlin or offshore banks.
Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. Let them eat caviar. Better still, a one way ticket to the Bastille, for them all, will not leave me with an overwhelming sense of lament or loss.
McCarthyism, by its very definition, was the storied practice of manipulating facts through accusations of “disloyalty”… especially through pro-Communist activity… based upon little more than speech, association or artistic voice… as if that matters ,at all, given the intended broad reach of the First Amendment.
Had it just stopped there, veterans of the day would have little more to complain of than,…