If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. –Thomas Pynchon, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’
Good morning, Gentle Reader. This morning I will continue with two more examples of paranoia as a style in political life. As you might recall, the first came from our Congressional Record; Senator Joe McCarthy uttered these words in June, 1951. The second came from the leaders of the Populist Party and is contained within the 1895 ‘Manifesto’ that the leaders signed. The next one appeared in the 15 September, 1855 issues of the ‘Texas State Times.’
From the Texas State Times newspaper, 1855. …It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism… The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic Church throughout the United States… These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and state; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic; and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. [No evidence was ever provided or found to support this conspiracy. Recently our President claimed that many people voted more than once in our recent mid-term elections; they simply went home and changed clothes and returned and voted again. Again, no evidence has been provided AND I was not aware that one could vote again simply by changing one’s clothes!]
A Jedidiah Morse Sermon, 1798 (Massachusetts). Secret and systematic means have been adopted and pursued, with zeal and activity, by wicked and artful men, in foreign countries, to undermine the foundations of this Religion (Christianity), and to overthrow its Altars, and thus to deprive the world of its benign influence on society… These impious conspirators and philosophers have completely effected their purposes in a large portion of Europe, and boast of their means of accomplishing their plans in all parts of Christendom, glory in the certainty of their success, and set opposition at defiance… [Morse was referring to the movement that we have come to call, ‘The Enlightenment’ a ‘movement’ that, among other things stressed the importance that each person learn to think for him and herself. This, alone, was a threat to many religionists.]
These four quotations, taken from intervals of half century, provide us with the tap root of the style of thought. I love history and in the history of the United States one finds the paranoia-style in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in the words of certain abolitionists who believed that the United States was in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in a variety of writers who were fear-full of Mormonism, and in the words of those who were fear-full, prior to our entering into World War I, of the munitions’ makers conspiracy to bring us into the ‘War’ in order to line their pockets with our money. Today this style is a favorite of the ‘Nationalists’ who seek to fill us with fear each day – fear of the ‘other’ and particularly fear of the immigrant and refugee.
These past 60+ years we can hear it in the words of both those who speak for the far-left and the far-right (the far-right has embraced this style more powerfully than the far-left – thus far, at any rate). We have finally elected a President who openly supports and nurtures this style. The question remains whether this style will create more powerful tap roots and become more openly embraced by ‘We the People’.
Next time, Gentle Reader, I will continue with more examples. Remember, those who do not learn from their history will be damned to repeat it. I am concerned that ‘WE THE PEOPLE’ are ‘history-blind’ and ‘history-deaf’ and this concern fuels my desire to provide us an opportunity to learn more about ‘Paranoia as a Style’. This is my rationale for adding more postings focusing on this topic and our history.
Among the internet’s many gains for humanity, decreasing paranoia has not been one of them. –John Niven
Searcher-Seeker 