The Crucible

There is no question we are in the middle of unhinged times ... another mania like the Salem witch trials ... the analogy that playwright Arthur Miller used for the McCarthy HUAC hearings ... which became a run-away tracking down of Communists inside our government. His analog play was called “The Crucible” (a white-hot container in which to melt metals) ... an attempt to show America how “cures” often go to excess and threaten to destroy the patient.

Another parallel to our current woke mania is the post-French Revolution when much of its nobles were beheaded in a popular blood-list. Here is a better recital of those crazy times than I could write ... see: Splendid Isolation post.

So now we have four instances of societies spinning out of control ... McCarthy’s HUAC, Salem witch trials, the French guillotine blood lust and our current “cancel culture” ... led by an amorphous band of millennials and West-coast techies ... and threatening to defund the police and turn over our cities to the anarchists.

Must be a periodic societal trope ... kinda like lemmings leaping into the sea. I’m doing my best to sit this one out ... if  the Committee of Public Safety will let me.

 Afterward: Another analog ... the Chinese Cultural Revolution ... see: Mao Lives Here

Even later: The Spanish Inquisition.