Category
Jan 15, 2025
In the 1950s, Lillian Hellman, one of our most famous playwrights and writers, was summoned to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to answer questions about her relationship with the Communist Party. She refused to cooperate with the committee, refused to disclose if she were a member or not, and as a result was put on the blacklist, which was an economic death sentence for artists, Hollywood writers and directors, and academics. Her memoir of life during the Red Scare, Scoundrel Time, was published in 1976.
We are living in our own scoundrel time. This time it is not HUAC, which disbanded in the 1980s, that is writing the script for this scoundrel time. The Trump administration, the MAGA movement, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and a host of other organizations that helped write Project 2025 are now writing the scoundrel script. They are now not only repealing the 20th century in America, but also the whole international legal and treaty infrastructure that’s developed since 1945.
As we have seen in the butchery of Gaza, in the Ukraine, and in countries across the globe, a new regime of impunity has replaced the old regime of international law, treaties, and cooperative agencies that deal with health, famines, and natural disasters. This new regime says to the people of the world that you are on your own. No one is going to help you survive disasters. The mighty can do anything they want. The United Nations is useless, the world courts are impotent, and you are on your own. Even the institution of the nation state has collapsed before the armed chaos of gangs, militias, and modern-day warlords. We now live in a Mad Max world of all versus all.
In the United States, all the demons of our past have been rehabilitated and put back into power. The advances that made the United States into a more fair, democratic, and compassionate society have been repudiated. The advances of the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements are in retreat. The loot and pillage land ethic of the 19th century is back. The American landscape is now at the mercy of polluters and those who suffer and are sickened from the pollution are on their own. The climate? Let it burn. Once again, as has been true throughout our history, your status as a citizen is determined by the color of your skin, your language, your gender, and your faith. Immigrants that have been essential to our economy, society, and culture now live in fear of being snatched from the streets and deported by the paramilitary thugs of ICE. As in Lillian Helman’s time, Americans are once again afraid of being punished for what they say, write, or believe.
Writers such as me are challenged to use our language to adequately describe the sheer squalor of this time, its cruelty, its arrogance, its lack of empathy and its meanness. We will emerge from this time, and hopefully we will be able to rebuild a world where decency, mercy, and justice are not held up to ridicule and where those who planned, built and profited from this wretched era will live out their lives in disgrace, shame and hopefully a jail cell.
Now that I have played the role of a modern Dante and given you a tour of hell, I will turn to much happier news. Zohran Mamdani not only won the New York City Democratic Primary; he gave us something we have not seen in a while ― hope. Now let us see if the idiots of the Democratic National Committee realize that. From my lips to God’s ears. The next rant is relevant to Mamdani’s politics. It is called Bring Back Sewer Socialism. It will come out on July 6th.
— Randy Cunningham.
