By Tom Lantz
Mark Twain, who early in his career was a journalist in Virginia City, Nev., and returned to that honorable profession for the San Francisco “Morning Call” after fleeing Virginia City to avoid fighting a duel with an angry reader, once said, “I’m not an editor of a newspaper, and shall always try to do right and be good, so that God does not make me one.”
One of newspaper editors’ jobs as guardians of our First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” is “e-printing” in their “e-ditions,” with the often-insulting “e-comments” by “Internet wingnutz” about some of the articles printed in their respectable papers. Some of those comments might’ve prophesied the recent flood of acts of political vandalism and threats of violence, which are distracting the American people from having a serious discussion about the underlying, urgent issues facing our nation.
This nation hasn’t yet regressed to the point where, two centuries ago, our young republic’s former Vice President Aaron Burr and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (he’s on our $10 bill) pistol-dueled to the death (which Twain wisely declined to do). Political name-calling HAS reached the point, though, where some people reflexively accuse public servants who disagree with them of being simultaneously “Marxists” AND “Nazis” – a puzzling oil-and-water blend.
We were at a copy shop downtown recently, Xeroxing an article we’d written, in this newspaper, that criticized those in the “extreme media” who profited by inciting otherwise-decent citizens to riotously disrupt our congresspersons’ health care “town hall meetings,” forcing our already-“stretched” police department to line the walls at those meetings. A “tough customer” at the shop saw our congressman’s name in this newspaper’s headline. He started shouting threateningly about that amazingly hard-working public servant, and yelling that President Obama was (BOTH) a devout Muslim AND a godless Marxist.
It’s quite a feat for the president to manage to be a “Muslim Marxist” since it was the “devout Muslims” – our allies at the time – who drove the “godless Soviet Marxists” out of Afghanistan in 1989. That sped the fall of the Berlin Wall, which let the Soviet leader Gorbachev and his wife to gratefully retire to “godless” San Francisco, to endure Twain’s famed “coldest winter(s) I ever spent.” The Gorbachevs evidently preferred those wintry “summer(s) in San Francisco” to Moscow’s, so they “voted with their feet” like the Russian Jews who fled to America during the iconic Czar’s un-Christian “pogroms.”
After the red-faced arm-waver left the copy shop, a middle-aged woman customer sympathetically advised that we delist our address and phone number if we intended to keep writing newspaper articles “in THIS town.” The store manager graciously volunteered an “Alexander Hamilton ($10) discount” off our Xerox bill.
On a grander scale, political strategist Karl Rove, notorious for running fiercely-negative campaigns, was on T.V. again on Sunday, plugging his just-out book, which unsurprisingly absolved him of any such sins. An older female called in to the nationwide T.V. show to politely dispute his claim that he hadn’t run mud-slinging campaigns. He instinctively shot back in his Texas twang, “Lady, you drunk so much swamp-water you done caught the fever!” Case in point, Mr. Rove …
It may be partly due to such a plague of rudeness that some “hatriots” have launched a nationwide Internet campaign to literally “break the windows” of all the office-holders they don’t like. It’s troubling that “the boy has cried Wolf! /Nazi! /Marxist!” so often lately that we’re numbed to people accurately pointing out the frightening resemblance of the hatriots’ window-smashing campaign to November, 1938’s “Kristallnacht.”
Literally “Crystal Night,” “Kristallnacht” was named for the smashed windows throughout Germany of the millions of Jewish citizens, who suffered a host of more shocking horrors that night as well, in reprisal for the shooting of just one Nazi diplomat in pre-invasion Paris. It’s no coincidence that the word “vandal” comes from the barbaric “Vandals”, who in 455 A.D. threatened the very existence of by-then-relatively-civilized Rome.
A certain presidential campaign’s signs in this county were widely vandalized in 2008. It’s been said that “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.”
On a final, selfish note, whoever “liberated” our eyeglasses and a huge, old four-language dictionary out of our car while we worked in that 2008 election campaign, please at least return the book, if you’re through using it (no doubt) as a doorstop. It belonged to a U.S. Navy officer who fought “fascism” in World War II and “totalitarian socialism” in the Korean War, so his kids would have the First Amendment right to Xerox copies, without fear of reprisal, of an article they dared to write (and this newspaper dared to print) – at a copy shop, as the NICE shop-customer put it, “in THIS town.”
Tom Lantz is a Hollister resident.
