From "You Are There" To We are Here

First on radio and then on T.V. the program You Are There ran from 1947 to 1957. It depicted moments in history as if they were happening in our day with Walter Cronkite reporting. The reenactment by John Cassavetes as Plato at the death of Socrates was high drama as was Rod Steiger at the first performance of Romeo and Juliet.

Today, I feel as if I am living in 1930’s Germany. The rise of Hitler is being repeated, American style. Alternately deranged, criminal and clownish the would-be dictator is likely to occupy the Oval after first leading a barely unsuccessful armed coup d’etat three years ago. I no longer wonder what allowed the Fuhrer to seize power in a country with such a cultural heritage.

What Walter Cronkite would say, I think I know. We have allowed a dumbing-down for decades and now we are an Idiocracy with no sense of history or civics and a dearth of critical thinking. We are a congregation of the lost.

Ignorance has become a virtue. Not only ignorance as in a confederacy of dunces but also ignorance as in ignoring. Hitler’s socio-pathology finds its equivalence in Donald’s narcissistic megalomania. Yet we dismiss his stated aims as President, his dismantling of our democracy, and alliance with a mob of thugs. Pay no attention, his supporters tell us when he calls his enemies vermin and he vows revenge by jailing or even executing them. (according to his former Attorney General. Barr)

Even on the left, young people’s passions and moral outrage have been aroused about injustice on the Israeli side (and rightly so) while throwing a blind eye at homophobic Hamas which debases women and feeds on a squandering of human life, on the other. Our youth is chewing on a bone thrown by a burglar as he ransacks this house, this American democracy. Fascism is at our door and they are denouncing the party whose precepts allow them to protest. Let history note their animus toward Biden only serves to help elect Trump.

Fraud, deceit, misogyny, no problem, say his followers. In Nazi Germany, as here and now, certain forces thought they could use him to further their agenda, from Bible-thumpers to the corporate elite. Let him rant with his third-grade vocabulary, be it a toothbrush mustache or orange hair. By 1940 it was clear who was using whom. When America wakes up we won’t be America.

There was another radio program called The Shadow. He knew what evil lurks in the hearts of men. That beast has now been uncaged. The would-be dictator has legitimized the racism, antisemitism and criminal behavior that once only lurked.

Get me Cronkite on line one.