Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Exiting from the Maui Mall Megaplex on Labor Day, I was pleased to see a poster for an upcoming movie treatment of "Alice in Wonderland." This seems an excellent time for America to revisit Lewis Carroll's quirky political fantasy.
Seeing the film's Mad Hatter promo poster brought to mind all the "tea party" nuttiness rampant in the country right now. But while The Mad Hatter's tea party was simply goofy, the current U.S. "tea party" is downright scary.
How scary?
* Side arms and AK-47 machine pistols are angrily brandished at congressional town hall meetings, where any talk of health care reform is furiously shouted down as "socialism!"
* The president is likened to German mass murderer Adolf Hitler, and his likeness is adorned with swastikas and Hitler moustaches.
* A generic presidential call to the nation's students to study hard and stay in school draws comparisons from Tea Partiers to the indoctrination of "Hitler Youth" during the 1930s.
* Prominent conservative broadcasters whose audiences number in the millions repeatedly label the president a "racist," a "fascist" and a "socialist." They repeat such nonsensical fictions as that the president was born in Kenya, hates white people and plans to euthanize America's senior citizens.
My guess is that the growing chorus of hate speech being directed at President Obama and his supporters would have bemused The Mad Hatter. He would have recognized the irony the president's accusers overlook.
The Tea Partiers revile the president for using "dictatorial" methods, but it is they who have noisily shut down public meetings and brandished loaded firearms to intimidate those with whom they disagree. Hitler's Brown Shirts used similar tactics to throttle civic debate in prewar Germany.
Likewise, the Tea Partiers' incessant and systematic drumbeat of lies echoes the propaganda methods used so successfully by the very socialist and fascist regimes they claim to revile. As Hitler's propaganda minister remarked, a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. In socialist Russia, Stalin made lying a national pastime. Many Soviet-era patriots still refuse to believe Stalin ordered millions of his own countrymen put to death.
At the very least, the Tea Partiers need to get their condemnations straight. Accusing the president of being a "socialist" and a "fascist" suggests a gross misreading of history. Millions perished on the Eastern Front in World War II because the Axis fascists and Stalin's socialists fought each other to the death.
Cold War history provides what might prove a more pertinent example, at least for Americans. I'm old enough to remember the "red scare" hysteria that gripped the United States during the 1950s. Grainy black-and-white newsreels of the day chronicled Sen. Joseph McCarthy's relentless campaign to condemn as a "communist" or "communist sympathizer" anyone whose patriotism he found suspect.
Like Hitler's scapegoating of gypsies and European Jews and Stalin's vilification of Ukranian kulaks, McCarthy's campaign against America's "red menace" used public ignorance, fear and paranoia to create a reign of terror. Before CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow finally unmasked McCarthy as a liar and a bully, the junior senator from Wisconsin managed to ruin countless lives, careers and reputations.
In the early 1950s, McCarthy's long shadow even darkened the distant Territory of Hawaii, then vying with Alaska to become the 49th state. Battling the territory's long-dominant Republican establishment, prominent Hawaii labor leaders and Democratic office-seekers found themselves tarred with the "Red" label, often with the complicity of isle media that should have known better.
On the 50th anniversary of its statehood, Hawaii, of all places, should be wary of the sort of thuggish demagoguery Hitler, Stalin and McCarthy employed so successfully decades ago. Now, as then, vitriolic choruses of "racism!" "socialism!" and "fascism!" need to be seen for what they are: attempts to muzzle civic discourse through falsehood and intimidation.
As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the present-day Tea Partiers' tactics might have pleased Adolph and the two Joes. On the other hand, I suspect The Mad Hatter would have told these menacing shouters exactly what he told Alice when she tried to join his tea party: "No room! No room!"
We need to tell today's demagogues the same thing.
* Tom Stevens is a freelance writer whose "Shave Ice" column appears every Wednesday. Send e-mail to him at shaveice@gmail.com.
