Where Have You Gone Joe McCarthy?
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I started building and listening to radios in the late 1950’s when the ‘short waves’ were dominated by Radio Free Europe and Radio Moscow. Powerful transmitters and directional antennae on multiple frequencies. You could always pull them in. Radio Moscow offered all kinds of programming, from Russian language lessons, to music by Russian composers and artists and information about the various Soviet nations. It used to be fun to send reception reports to radio stations and you often got brochures and magazines in return, but even an eleven year old kid was savvy enough in those days not to risk a knock on the door by one of Hoover’s boys in a dark suit and one’s name on a folder in Washington. It happened. The TV featured programs where valiant secret agents battled Soviet forces trying to insert subversive propaganda in textbooks and false news of all sorts. Joe McCarthy and HUAC were on the tube accusing everyone everywhere of being Commies and ‘Pinkos’ and offering lists of such people in Washington and Hollywood. Indeed they’re still trying to sell the “subversive Hollywood Liberal” meme today.
Things may seem to have changed now that Pravda is as available as (and looks like) the National Enquirer, and now that we have the uncensored internet, but I’m not sure they really have. The broadcast media is increasingly owned by a handful of propagandists on the Right despite the rhetoric promoting the opposite.
The FCC, once the agency concerned with promoting the public interest in broadcasting, assuring the multiplicity of opinion by limiting the ownership of too many outlets by too few entities, now allows Russian government owned Sputnik Radio to broadcast in the DC area on 105.5 MHz FM in order to counteract, as they say, the “media bias” against Russia: still trying to gobble up the world while calling us “Imperialists.” A huge segment of the radio spectrum is controlled by far-right corporations pushing Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and fringe-right propaganda trying to diminish the importance of Russian hacking and election meddling. It doesn’t seem so long ago that this was the bogeyman of the Right. Now it is the right.
I don’t know whether it’s apocryphal, but I’ve heard Tailgunner Joe or perhaps his slimy familiar Roy Cohn say “show me someone who talks about the bill of rights and I’ll show you a Commie.” What would they say today? The infamous blank piece of paper claimed to have the names of Russian agents in the State Department is no longer blank with real registered Russian agents populating the Executive. It’s an era when the Declaration of Independence is mistaken for and loudly protested as a left wing media attack on Donald Trump. It’s an era when the “pinko” media owned by US oligarchs and Russia itself is downplaying the danger of Trump’s Russian influences and dealings and Business debts and obligations. What would McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Commission say if they were still around? The famous question still remains: the question asked by Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the United States Army while it was under investigation for Communist activities by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Irony like that is hard to ignore, but in our cowardly new world, irony seems willfully invisible. It’s hard to ignore Army generals who are foreign agents for Russia and others while advising presidents, but we do it. It’s hard to ignore direct involvement in election campaigns, theft of information for the purposes of electing Pro Russia candidates and candidates reluctant to oppose Russian Imperialistic ambitions.
But we do, and much or our media does and many of our people follow like lemmings while attacking those who do not. All my life McCarthy has been held up as an example of dishonesty and tyranny. Perhaps he was just ahead of his time.
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I have many of the radios I built as a kid and being a Ham, I still build equipment. I fell a kind of amazement in talking to people thousands of miles away directly with nothing inbetween that youn people seem to disregard.
McCarthy as a war hero – a meme that still makes my skin crawl when I listen to the ever increasing worship of soldiers or as they call them now “Warriors”
It’s part of idolizing war as the foundation of our “freedom” which doesn’t include the freedom to dissent or criticize or question and, if they get their way, the freedom to vote.
Every time we attack some country we tell ourselves that freedom isn’t free, as though the attack was something that protected our rights or that the only way to protect them were wars or bombing raids or “regime change” And yes, I think the goddamn Republican
s have advanced the art of promoting submission and tyranny to a whole new level.
I remember my father talking about Tailgunner Joe, and, what he said was the truth because he was a real war hero. I was too young to give a fuck. I give a fuck now though.
I started building radios in the early 60’s. I still have fond memories of putting them together, and then, waiting breathlessly after plugging them in, for that first sign of static. Rewarding. As to dishonesty and tyranny, I think McCarthy was a piker concerned to the gang today.