Anyone familiar with Arthur Miller's 1953 Salem witch-trial drama The Crucible knows that the main villain of the piece is a 19-year-old girl named Abigail Williams, whose uncle, the town minister, discovers, along with a bunch of other girls, "dancing like heathen in the forest." To get herself out of hot water, Abigail begins accusing other women of being witches, the result being a year-long hysteria with many of the townspeople denouncing other townspeople of being in league with the devil. In the end, 19 residents of Salem Village were executed, 18 by hanging and one by being pressed to death under a pile of stones.
I thought about Abigail this week when the stories began to surface of Bachmann's denouncing long-time Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin for being a subversive voice for the Muslim Brotherhod. Bachmann went so far as to send a letter, co-signed by four of her House colleagues, to the State Department demanding an investigation of Abedin and others. (She's since set her sights on fellow Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress).
The parallels to Abigail are obvious - the groundless accusations, the attempt at smearing another persons' reputation to further one's own position in the world. In fact, Abigail becomes practically a saint in the eyes of many of the townsfolk who believe she is doing "the Lord's work."
But there's another parallel between Bachmann and Abigail that I think, in many ways, is even more instructive. In the play, Abigail and the other girls confine their earliest accusations mainly to the less "respectable" members of the village - beggars, the mad, unmarried women living in sin. The townspeople don't much care for these particular accused and are only too happy to cheer them on as they are marched to the gallows. But as Abigail gets more drunk on the power she's been given to pass death sentences on her fellow citizens, she eventually oversteps her bounds and begins to accuse people with far greater favor in the town. It is at this point that the crowd begins to turn against Abigail and she is forced to flee Salem forever.
Well, that seems to be happening in record-setting fashion in the Bachmann/Abedin case. Bachmann made the mistake of accusing someone whom the powerbrokers in Washington, on both sides of the aisle, actually seem to like and admire. Hence, Republcan lawmakers like John McCain, Marco Rubio, Scott Brown and John Boehner have risen to Abedin's defense and castigated Bachmann in no uncertain terms for her witch-hunt hysteria.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
But why does it take knowing and liking a person to get people to do what's right? If McCain, Rubio, Brown and Boehner didn't know Abedin personally, would they have taken the time to condemn Bachmann and the others? If she were just some anonymous person with no connections, would they have made the effort to defend her? I doubt it. After all, did they rise to Van Jones' defense when he was accused day after day by Glenn Beck of being a subversive communist? Of course not, since they didn't know Jones personally.
The warning Miller sounds in his play is that we have to care when all people - even the least liked and least important among us - fall victim to a powerful and bloodthirsty (either literal or figurative) mob. And who's more powerful than elected members of the legistative branch of the United States government, who therefore carry the burden and responsibilty of acting with even greater retraint and decorum than the rest of us in matters such of these? For it is they who set the tone that the population in general is likely to follow.
Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory to the anti-communist witch-hunt hysteria of his own day. But what makes it a timeless work of art is that it is relevant to any and all eras. It's tragic that it's the Michele Bachmanns of the world who are keeping it relevant today. I'm sure, if he were alive today, Miller would be the first to say that it's time to move on.