William Shakespeare gave us a lot in his plays. In Hamlet, he had an old rambling character give this advice: Brevity is the soul of wit. Of course, he was neither brief nor wise in the speech, giving us one of the first examples of irony in an English play.
I woke up a few days ago and, just as I do every morning, I let the dogs out, fed the cats and then let the dogs back in and fed them, While they ate, I opened the front door and the cats marched out, single file, onto the front porch.
A normal beginning to a normal day. Then, as I was reading the paper, it hit me. Without ever realizing it, my whole life turned around. Intellectually, politically, morally - I still don’t know what is happening.
It started, I think, with a story about how Donald Trump wants to quit the nuclear arms treaty and build more missiles to counter Chinese military expansion in the Pacific. Or it could have been the story about the Russian woman indicted for trying to influence the 2018 political campaign by spreading fake news on Facebook. Or, maybe, the mystery ads that have been running on the web in Britain - ads that suddenly vanished when the rules changed and the real people who were paying for them had to be made public.
But, there it was. All the things I have mocked almost all of my adult life have turned out to be true. Ronald Reagan was right. Moscow really is the beating heart of an Evil Empire.
Like much of life, that one simple thing led to a lot of more complex things. When I made fun of the House Un-American Activities Committee for its ceaseless (and often baseless) attack on liberals and Jews and blacks for being Communist agitators trying to undermine our country, was I mistaken? Do I owe someone an apology?
Communist agitators have been trying to undermine our country for a long, long time. Maybe long before Karl Marx created Communism. At least, the original form, which was unworkable.
And, if the Republican party stood for truth and justice and anti-Communism for all those long decades, just when did that mantle fall to the Democrats? Just where are the Republican anti-Communists now? Oh, some still talk a good game, but actions count. See any? And you can’t go back to Eisenhower.
Which brings up the way other things have been turned on their head. Just when did freedom of religion become freedom to impose your religion on other people. At least for some religions. Are we bringing back the old Blue Laws, that kept you from selling things and doing things on Sundays? Wait, why can’t I buy a beer until after noon or 1 p.m. So we don’t get drunk driving to a football game?
And now that we have a Supreme Court loaded with “original Constitutionalists,” what does that mean. There’s still no Constitutional Amendment to allow the federal government to create and fund an air force, or to give subsidies to farmers or to enforce any environmental regulations at all, except for that old elastic clause - you know, the one that says the government can do anything which is “necessary and proper” to provide for the needs of our nation.
(That is, of course, an overstatement. That’s why we need Supreme Court interpretations. The clause - article one, section eight - allows Congress to pass any law necessary for it to implement the powers it gets from the rest of the Constitution. Now, we need a court to define what necessary means, what those other powers originally mean and what implement means. I’m pretty sure that when it was written - back in the day of slaves, indentured servants and an average life span of about 40 years, it doesn’t cover health care.)
So, I’m holding off on my apology to the long-dead members of Congress who were active in HUAC (again, just look it up, Or, better still, watch The Front, an old Woody Allen movie) until I see how things play out.
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