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Some wag once opined that what this country needed was a good five-cent cigar. That was back when cigars were strangely regarded as a sign of affluence, or at least an acceptable arrogance of affluence.
It seems anachronistic in this age of healthy behavior that smoking a rolled bunch of stinking leaves was a celebratory sign of success.
What this country really needs today is a good witch hunt. When I say “good,” I mean a hunt as dedicated and wellfunded as our government’s current investigation of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” (U.A.P.s, formerly known as U.F.O.s).
Let’s get to the bottom of this “witch hunt phenomenon.”
It’s not that I expect we’ll find any witches. Personally, I don’t believe in them. Oh, I know there are people who call themselves witches and “practice” witchcraft, but that’s the point. There is no one who actually “performs” witchcraft or any powers of the occult.
That is to say, one who has superhuman powers.
By definition, no human has superhuman powers. Such powers certainly exist, just not in humans.
They exist in the jaws of a white shark, the fangs of a pit viper, the heft of an elephant, numerous viruses and bacteria. It’s a long list without any humans on it.
What a really good look into the existence of witches would finally prove is there is no such thing!
Without the key ingredient of a witch, there can be no witch hunt.
The irrational fear of the people in Salem, Mass., in late 1600s was a fool’s undertaking.
Increase Mather, an early president of Harvard, and his son, Cotton Mather, a graduate of Harvard, were prime agitators of the delirium that drove those people to horrific acts, the latter Mather having observed with approval a mass hanging on August 19, 1692.
(I’m reminded of the observation once made that, on introduction, a man who graduated from Harvard will make known that distinction in the first five minutes of conversation. R emind h im of t he Mathers’ connection to his alma mater. The history-scrubbing that often follows unflattering facts might be amusing.)
Oh! I say “man” here because women don’t envy the same plumage as men. The above-mentioned stogie a case in point.)
The acknowledged absence of witches renders the term “witch hunt” moot.
Or so I hope. It will be very difficult to wean the guilty off the red herring defense of crying “Witch hunt!” M ainly b ecause i t i s t heir only defense.
“Red herring” is “the practice of drawing said fish across a trail to confuse hunting dogs.”
I recognize that innocent people have been wrongfully imprisoned and even executed. Our judicial system undergoes an ever-increasing refinement. Investigations are assiduously conducted, evidence is carefully studied, trials are publicly scrutinized, and verdicts are subject to review by higher courts. Executive actions by governors and presidents can negate mistakes.
It was the governor of Massachusetts Bay Province, William Phips, who, in early 1693, finally ended the hysteria and witch trials in Massachusetts by decree.
There hasn’t been a single witch hunt or trial since.
One of the underpinnings of those trials was “spectral” evidence. It was allowed testimony in which “witnesses claimed that the accused appeared to them and did them harm in a dream or vision”!
The irony is these politicians crying “witch hunt” have themselves, through their own damning actions and remarks, implicated themselves and their true character, not their “specters” in some critic’s mind.
There’s the congressman whose résumé lists colleges he never attended, jobs he never held, and a fictious, conflicting family history.
There’s the businessman turnedoffice- holder urging his supporters to punch-out protestors, making the vacuous promise that he’d pay for their lawyer; telling his thugs to throw one dissenter out in the cold, “but keep his coat;” declaring that he could shoot someone in the street and not lose a single supporter; bragging that he could grab women by their [private parts] because he was a celebrity; and inciting a mob to violence.
The latter admonishment being excused by his apologists as “locker room talk”! Even if only a boast, is that the way an adult behaves? Suppose instead of “women” he had said “young girls”?
Abraham Lincoln is credited with observing, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”
It would never have occurred to our first Republican president, steeped as he was in honesty and humility, that, for the grifter, the fraud, and the liar, one needs only to fool some of the people some of the time.
Those of us who aren’t fooled, who hold truth sacrosanct and reject explanations of “alternative facts,” must hold strong across political, ethnic, religious, and racial differences to preserve the foundation of our republic.
A footnote: I didn’t tie the above self-incriminating remarks to any one individual believing that you, thoughtful reader, know their source. I recognize that there are those readers left clueless because they have actually fooled themselves.
No amount of intervention, regardless of its innocent intent, would be successful.
