Radio Free New Hampshire: As He Was Saying

By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

Jimmy Kimmel made a tasteless joke on his talk show the other night. The head of the FCC got angry and voiced a rash threat. So the ABC television network benched Kimmel for a few days. He and his peers were justifiably shaken. The freedom to make a bad joke is one good measure of a democracy’s health. But there is nothing new under the sun, wrote Ecclesiastes, and to prove that, Kimmel ultimately returned with an opening line borrowed from Jack Paar: “As I was saying, before I was interrupted.”

Paar hosted a talk show in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. He told a gag about plumbing one night, his network found it offensive, and they censored it without telling him. A smart and emotional man, Paar felt disrespected. He therefore walked off his set on live camera, telling his audience “there must be a better way to make a living.” He came back on his own, three weeks later, explaining that he had looked, and he hadn’t found one. It was a great laugh line.

Paar had been political mainly in the sense that he was alive in his own time and he talked about what he saw. Kimmel is more nakedly partisan. But they hold this in common across the decades: their problem was never their president, nor even the FCC. Their problem was their fellow show-business types.

Obvious for Paar, after all, whose presidents were Eisenhower and Kennedy. The 1950’s had seen the long and dreadful rise of the Red Scare, though, and what became known as McCarthyism had ripped the entertainment industry to shreds. Paar was living in its shadows so he had cause to be sensitive to any form of censorship whatsoever.

Reading about the Red Scare today can be like reading fiction. It’s hard to imagine that loyal Americans ever had to live in so much fear. Yet as its name implies, McCarthyism did not come from the top. In fact, while they can be criticized for not having fought it harder, many top officials (including Eisenhower) tried to tamp it down.

That was possible because their political culture was richer than ours today. Liberal Republicans had doubts about McCarthyism (it was the United States Army that finally checked Joe McCarthy himself) while conservative Democrats often joined in (Kennedy himself was conveniently absent when the Senate voted to censure his fellow senator). People on both sides found allies in unlikely places. That made it easier to move forward in the end.

We are not so fortunate today. Our parties are monolithic in either supporting or despising Trump. But the point remains: Kimmel’s (and our) problem is not Trump himself. It’s everyone else, either cheering him on, actively leading him, or simply staying silent. Those are the numbers and there lies the battle.

If only we had a battle. We don’t yet, partly because we’ve been so fixated on Trump himself. It started early with law firms buckling under. They didn’t like the prospect of losing clients for political reasons. Instead they put their wallets first. Then came the universities. Crippled by their own unique spiritual poverty, our academics also proved weak and unfit to resist. Now our national bullies have moved to the entertainment world, where Kimmel caught a cold and everyone shivered.

Some of them probably believe what they spout. Some of them are just ambitious. Some of them are acting out of fear. It doesn’t matter. We can and should criticize our president as much as we want, but just as during the Red Scare, none of this would be happening but for the people piling on. And that’s not Trump, nor is it Trump’s fault.

Another cry from the McCarthy era echoes today. It comes from a possum named Pogo, who lived in a swamp in a comic strip written by Walt Kelley. We have met the enemy, he warned. And he is us.

A side note, in a dark week, filled with dark news: this Kimmel affair, the Comey disaster. Trump took time to visit New York and tell the United Nations to go to hell. We have suffered that organization for far too long. It sacrificed its credibility ages ago. It exists to give jobs to the globe-trotting elite, it leaves grime on every crisis it touches, its sheen of self-righteousness blinds instead of enlightens. I don’t see Trump proposing a substitute for it nor do I see him trying to reform it. But at least he’s honest about its value. It's so easy to call him out on everything he gets wrong. A principled as opposed to a personal opposition accepts that he gets a few things right too.

Michael Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.