Fearing the enemy within

Those were some dark days in America, presided over by a weird martinet of a man who falsified his war record with forgeries, lied about his political opponents, and made a career of stirring up paranoia and hatred, claiming that the government and the army were riddled with “communists and homosexuals,” and that he knew who they were. I was about 10 at the time of his televised hearings, and I had no very clear idea of what was going on; I just knew it was important because my mother was most uncharacteristically glued to our TV set — in the daytime, yet! Only later did I understand that McCarthy was publicly ruining the lives and livelihoods of many fine people without ever proving anything except that he himself was a troubled man. In the end it emerged that, like his friend, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who also persecuted homosexuals, McCarthy was gay, and it was really himself he so stridently disapproved of.

A week after seeing “Julie & Julia,” I happened upon a documentary that looked back at Watergate, another strange and sad interlude in our country’s history, with the president of the United States authorizing the burglary of the opposing party’s campaign headquarters. Ahead in the polls, Nixon also had the advantage of being an incumbent. He was going to win, so why would he do such a thing? Because he had, along with one of the most brilliant political minds of the 20th century, a fatal flaw: a near-total lack of self-confidence. The inner voice whispering “What if I lose?” became a national crisis.

Fast-forward to George W. Bush’s presidency and you find the firing of federal prosecutors, illegal wiretapping of American citizens, prisoners forced to live like the dogs that were used to terrorize them. Why? A number of prominent Republicans point to the paranoid tendencies of a too-powerful and too-fearful vice president.

We’re not all as wise as Pogo, the Georgia swamp-dweller created by cartoonist Walt Kelly who famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us!” But it would be nice to think that our country doesn’t have to keep slipping into the same trap — that we needn’t keep buying into someone else’s paranoia. Fear of “the other” was the foundation on which Hitler built his infamous Third Reich, all because he couldn’t root out the demons in his own head. Last week we saw this phenomenon in the convicted rapist and sex-offender who abducted an 11-year-old girl and kept her in his backyard for 18 years — while he devoted himself increasingly to distributing religious literature! He was out there trying to redeem others, but the problem was inside him, eating away: a parasite capable of devouring lives and even nations, if we let it.

Susan Harper is the former director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce.