Fascism -- As Potter Stewart said "I know it when I see it"

My friend and banjo player Mark Gunther, who was an undergrad with me at Columbia in the late 60s and early 70s, wrote me Saturday night about Gabrielle Giffords.  He referenced Sarah Palin's crosshairs -- her "spokeswoman" now says they were meant to depict a surveyor's site not a rifle site. Mark wrote: "the Tea Party is all about revolution from the right. There is a common name for such an ideology, often misused lately."


Here's what I think --


Mark,

You and I, who have seen all sorts of weirdness, are like Potter Stewart, when he spoke of pornography.  About fascism, we know it when we see it.  The problem is that the kids who are too young to remember the visuals of the people pushers in Grant Park Chicago in 68, France in 68, Columbia in 68, the faces of J Edgar and Tricky Dick, the truths of Irangate and even the more recent big lies like Colin Powell made to give that speech about yellowcake to the UN that he never would have given if he had been allowed the truth, don't know it when they see it.  When they are bombarded with Glenn Beck in one ear from, say, a parent or the radio, while trying to watch you tube, they don't have time or interest to know what is really going down, and they don't have to worry about being potentially drafted, because their parents have bought them out of liability for military service while supporting decreases in spending for public education. So now we have a fully dumbed down generation of people whose sentences start with "Like" and who don't have the interest or the critical sense to ask what is happening to our once beautiful country.

Like David Byrne, we must ask "How did I get here?" And the answer isn't pretty. The answer is that we have allowed it.  By not standing up to the Glenn Becks, by not insisting that our kids read a minimum of a half hour every day and know about current events -- and that doesn't mean Kim Kardashian, by not insisting that our kids know the history of the protest movements, the civil rights movements, the long thread connecting Lindbergh, Ford, the Ku Klux Klan, I could go on.

As long as we sit by wondering what our kids are doing while they are in their rooms spending hours on FB YT MS etc, we are propelling our country into a terrible dark place from which it will be hard to emerge.  Obama has tried with a real shot at discourse during the campaign and around the Health Care "debate." But he was naive and allowed the town meetings to be hijacked, and didn't have the political foresight to see the loss of the Kennedy seat and what that would mean.  If anyone is poised to courageously take back this situation, it is Obama using the bully pulpit of the Presidency. And at terrible personal risk, but he has taken all those risks already and I applaud him for it.

I would like to see him come out with a major speech on national healing in which he could prescribe a modest proposal -- a history lesson for all of us.  As George Santayana said in The Life of Reason, "Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it." And those of us who do read history (and have an understanding for the ancient Jewish concept of remembrance as a goal unto itself) must use it as a tool for instruction and pass it down with reverence so that never again can an anti-tolerance, anti-intellectual fascist movement (like Pol Pot, or Hitler) subvert a beautiful all embracing society such as what we had once in these United States.  Though it was never perfect, it was and has been the best we've got!

You can quote me on that!