For those of us who remember Howdy Doody, the red-headed, freckled marionette (one freckle for each of the then 48 states)was part of the childhood golden age that defined Saturday morning programming. The puppet lived in a town, just like we did. He had friends and grown-up acquaintances --again, just like us. Like us, he also had a nemesis, a mean and nasty adult marionette named Phineas T. Bluster, who was described as a “skinflint” which even little kids knew was a bad trait. Phineas was the mayor of Doodyville, the fictitious setting for the Rockefeller Center-based children’s program that ran from 1947 to 1960. It was “must-see TV” for most of us—at least for the “while” that is childhood.
Follow me, here, there is a connection to the present-day events.
The show featured a town filled with a menagerie of interesting and colorful non-human “stars”---remember Clarabel (the clown) and Princess Summerfall Winterspring, Captain Windy Scuttlebut? They performed in front of a “base” of sorts known as “the peanut gallery” who responded enthusiastically to Buffalo Bob’s weekly call out--
Buffalo Bob: Hey, kids, what time is it?
Peanut Gallery: It’s Howdy Doody time!!!
Cowabunga!! If you are too young to have been in the peanut gallery, use your Google machine and catch up here.
Over the weekend, a modern-day Phineas Bluster, William “Phineas T” Barr reflected on the Black Lives Matter movement as,
“... a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism,” Barr said of Black Lives Matter.”
echoing attacks on the movement by the apt named “Flub-the-Dub”* J. Trump, who called a leader of the movement a traitor and declaring the mural with BLM painted outside Trump Towers “a symbol of hate.”
Let us dissect these thoughts outside of Doodyville and put them in some sort of perspective. First, Barr has also been blubbering about Democrats and “the left” as the “Rousseauian Revolutionary” Party that believes in tearing down the system---somehow contravening Flub-a--dub‘s promise to destroy the deep-state and follow the lead of his, then, chief advisor, Steve Bannon who struck a very revolutionary pose in describing the Trump team:
“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy,” said Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman and one of its guiding editorial spirits. He adds, “We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class.
Further mixing philosophies, Barr was quoted the other day asserting that the “Rousseauian Revolutionary Party” was tearing the nation apart, then adding that ”They’re really Bolsheviks!”
“The left wants power because that is essentially their state of grace in their secular religion,” he said. “They want to run peoples’ lives so they can design utopia for all of us and that’s what turns them on. And it’s the lust for power and they weren’t expecting Trump’s victory and it outrages them.”
The irony dripping from Barr’s latest tirades is likely a feeble response to the neverending infantile game of repulsing the claims of many, including Democrats and Republicans, that this administration is fascistic, racist, and misogynistic--- responses strikingly childish and vapid. The “utopia” he sneers at as a Democratic goal is to most of us simply democracy as promised in our founding documents. Freedom from oppression, from being killed in the streets by those charged with protecting us, and from the enactment of regressive and undemocratic policies may be Barr’’s vision of a utopia, but ours begins with his departure from government and an end to this administration and Trump in jail. The long evolving downward turn in fortunes of Trump and his administration because of their mishandling of the health and financial crises are more or less the painful price we must pay for their “utopia.” There is no joy in their dissolution, only grim resolve. The recent court rulings that have gone against them bring some hope that there will be consequences for their actions. While Trump continues his attack upon the Constitution and his constituents while he issues unconstitutional executive orders that do far more harm and no good, the rest of us are obliged to act. Far from Roussaeuian, this makes us Americans. It was and is the cause of our independence and defines our right as citizens to throw off a government that does not act with the consent of the governed---of us.
As Bill Barr pretends to profess his indignation of us, what remains clear is that the protests, the rebellion in the streets, the anger, and the violence are the response the administration has elicited for their capitulation to autocracy and its denial of human rights. As the Republican ruled Senate remains steadfast in silence, “Clarabel” McConnell mimes his assent to the cognitive dissonance his party now practices, at once being displeased with while allowing the destruction of norms that constitute rational governance. They conveniently tend to forget, that George Floyd was at the time of his fateful arrest and murder, an innocent man. His death sparked a rekindling of the renunciation of the horrid record of the Trump Administration that began with the Muslim ban, atrocities committed against immigrants, ungodly separations of families which echoed the depraved inhumanity accorded the captive Africans who were enslaved and separated upon landing on our shores. Belligerence to the acceptance of a white supremacist like Steven Miller advising the president on immigration policy should be an expectation in a democracy. A president unable to denounce the alt-right fascists who attacked the peaceful demonstrators in Charlottesville is unacceptable. One who equates protected protest to thuggery, who gassing legal protestors from the public space across from the People’s House for a photo op is unworthy of the office. After careful deliberation, Donald Trump chose to rekindle the nationalist neo-nazi movement, going as far as noting that their actions were equally “good”, equally protected as those they attacked.
Those of us who sit in the Peanut Gallery waiting for the show to end are becoming restless. And so if opposing this behavior fits Bill Barr’s definition of Bolshevism, then, count me in! If the Democrats are leading some sort of “Rousseauian Revolt”, then, once again count me in, because,
...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government...
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
---Declaration of Independence
With little respect for Barr’s supposed erudition and historical views, what is happening in our streets is far more Jeffersonian than Rousseauian. More American than Trumpian.
Enough, let’s vote.
*flub the dub, To loaf or evade duty; also, to bungle or botch. This term dates from the first half of the 1900s and became widely current during World War II. Early on it also was slang for male masturbation, but that sense has not survived. John Hersey used it in G.I. Laughs (1943), “Wanders from barracks to barracks . . . generally flubbing his dub.”