The Spread of Invasive Ideas

 

Carmela is thinking of closing down her Facebook account – well that’s what she says at least.  You can’t always believe it when people say things like that can you although you might also think it might be a good idea.  

It had been a long time since the four of us met `in the flesh’ so to speak – Carmela, Judith, Marilyn and me and Zoom is never quite the same.  It’s largely because of Judith that we try to spend at least a proportion of our time discussing topics that are what she terms `meaningful’.   She used to like lengthy debate about private education years ago when she was still sure her children would benefit from it.  In more recent years she has concluded that one of them at least would have fallen through the cracks no matter where he went and she’s more than glad she abandoned the nonsensical idea of home schooling that at one stage she toyed with simply because I was dedicated to it myself at the time.

We were at The Paddington again, largely because a lot of places are not reliably open in January when, Covid or no Covid not to mention most unlikely shark warnings, Aucklanders seem forced to the beach to partake in mediocre takeaways regardless of evening humidity and a distinct lack of facilities for washing greasy fingers.   Judith observed that we could mock if we wanted to but there had been definite warnings of sharks at Muriwai and that caused Marilyn to point out that Muriwai was quite a distance from Judges Bay and even further from Mission Bay which seemed to be the January picnic place of choice when striking out from Parnell. 

The possible closure of Carmela’s Facebook account is mostly because of an unpleasant argument she recently found herself embroiled in with someone who seemed determined to tear her and her ideas, good or bad, apart.   Judith thought that withdrawing from the Facebook platform altogether was rather overdramatic and that there were always going to be those who lurked behind keyboards with nothing better to do than attack others in order to demonstrate their own virtue.   She reminded us of the discussion we had months ago about Witch Finders and said we should bear in mind that had Facebook been available in the seventeenth century it would have made Matthew Hopkins’ work a great deal easier.  In fact, she said, he would have barely needed to move around the country at all, merely wait in his office for Teams of Trusty Trolls to reveal the miscreants to him!  

I ventured, once we’d decided to share pizzas, that we didn’t need to go back in time as far as Matthew Hopkins and that two of the four of us were old enough to half remember the Reds under Beds hysteria of the 1950s though at the time we were unlikely to have had much comprehension of the ensuing alarm that was caused.  The exaggerated obsessive fear of the presence and harmful influence of Communist sympathisers gaining a foothold in society convinced a great many Americans that they would certainly be Better Dead than Red.   The entire terror was largely the brainchild of Senator Joseph McCarthy who seemed to be able to easily persuade his fellow countrymen that the Reds would force the population to watch endless Russian propaganda movies and ensure that restaurants be made to remove hamburgers and steaks from their menus and replace them with black bread, potato soup and stuffed cabbage. 

Rather worse than menu changes were the accusations against government officials and a number of notable authors and actors that they were secret Communist sympathisers which ensured they were humiliated, blacklisted and lost jobs.   Carmela nodded sagely and said if that was even half accurate JK Rowling and Laurence Fox would certainly recognise the syndrome. On the other hand the future of performance Shakespeare had been enhanced by Sam Wanamaker’s decision to abandon the United States and flee to the UK and proved to be a blessing for the British once he immersed himself in the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre.    Marilyn was entirely unaware that Wanamaker had ever been a Communist in the first place and even if he had been, was it really of such major significance she wanted to know?    Had he really been so terribly dangerous?   Was he not simply perhaps caught up in the mania of a 1950s witch hunt?  Carmela told me later that she only knew herself because she watched his daughter Zoe’s journey tracing family history on one of those late night Sky channels via Who Do You Think You Are.

We were about to order a second bottle of House Chardonnay because the pizzas had barely been touched with all the talk of Reds and we therefore set about the important business of eating.    After a few minutes Judith asked how it was we ever got caught up in these ideas in the first place because looking back with a certain degree of logic, it would appear that with the best will in the world the dogma that supported the stance of the day against both witch hunts and  Communism seemed fragile and flimsy from where we stood now.   

Marilyn agreed and pointed out that we are these days far too sensible to see burning witches as anything other than the persecution of women of a certain age who lived alone and were fond of cats though you had to also take into consideration the herbal remedies for everyday ailments they were keen on.   Far more of us would put our faith in modern medicine these days.    However, examining the hysteria in retrospect was in many ways embarrassing and maybe the basis of it all had been that they could not control their vicious tongues and all that was needed was some counselling.   However, at the time she had to agree that it would not have been prudent to be too critical about duckings and burnings and possibly better by far to largely ignore the end results of the syndrome and advise going in for a dog rather than a cat when a household pet was being considered.   It was never terribly wise to express undue public criticism with regard to the manias that spread through society from time to time.

Wanamaker and his like, she felt, should have thought carefully before renewing membership of the Communist Party although on the face of it what were those much dreaded Reds actually guilty of as a group?   Sharing possessions too freely?   Too much enthusiasm for Collective farms?  Being supportive to each other regarding wage rises?  It was hard to see the inherent day to day dangers of throwing your lot in with them.

Even so, Carmela reminded us, it wouldn’t have been entirely straightforward to avoid what my mother always called `being tarred with the same brush’ no matter how diligently you kept your head down and avoided anything to do with spies – she for one certainly wouldn’t have felt it safe naming her only daughter Lara back then.   

All of us agreed that the obsessions that develop every now and again within society grow from strength to strength with a speed that is astonishing to behold.   After all, who would have thought a a decade ago that the mere mention of the Toy that Dare Not Speak its Name would cause such a toxic Facebook attack for Carmela so rapidly, simply because she mentioned her fondness for knitting versions of it for the local Church fete?   And who would have possibly believed back when we were all busy burning our bras that Germaine Greer, then the heroine of the moment for so many of us who had actually bothered to read The Female Eunuch, could possibly fall from grace?   How on earth did that happen?  Regardless of how or why, Carmela is of the opinion that it’s better to be safe than sorry in early 2022 and simply not mention her at all – airbrush her from memory in fact.     Judith wanted to know if that attitude wasn’t quite gutless and we all rather shiftily agreed that it was.  Nevertheless, for peace of mind it was probably better to go in for a modicum of gutlessness rather than fan the flames of incitement for no good reason because it was clear that there were plenty of horrifyingly Woke Warriors for Justice poised ready to cast huge stones. 

The pizzas had been largely demolished when Judith tentatively mentioned the Nazi regime and how the general population of the 1930s seemed to be oblivious as to what might or might not be happening to their Jewish neighbours.  How many of those ordinary citizens were as committed to the activities of Kristallnacht as we are now led to believe?  It’s certainly a stretch of the imagination to accept that they were universally dedicated to acres of broken glass.   Judith felt that it was more likely that the majority of Ordinary People might simply have felt it was easier to pretend not to notice what was happening even though the wholesale aggression towards those on the wrong side of the event was not deserved.  Anyway who in their right mind would have been all that keen on stepping forward to remonstrate with the glass breakers?   After all few of us could be relied upon these days to firmly state our innermost thoughts on incendiary topics such as transgender sportswomen – and we had just airbrushed Germaine from memory with admirable alacrity!