We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.
— Edward R. Murrow, in a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) convention in Chicago (15 October 1958).
Nicole and I watched Good Night and Good Luck on Friday night, and I highly recommend the film! (This isn’t a review, though; there are plenty of those around already.) It’s incredible how many parallels can be drawn to current events… I don’t think the release could have been any more timely.
Have you heard yet? We’re living in a time where the United States has a President who thinks he’s an emperor: this nation was founded on the Rule of Law (“Lex Rex”), but George W. Bush claims the “Divine Right of Kings” every time he refuses to comply with the laws enacted by Congress—as he has been doing for at least the past four years. To top it all off, anyone who opposes him (no matter the reason) is labeled a “lover of terrorists’ rights.”
May I ask you, do you “love this land”? Do you want to consider yourself patriotic? Then prove it: read the Constitution; read the Federalist Papers; read Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. (Then repeat at least five times.) If you remain ignorant of what America was intended to be, then all your flag-waving and cheerleading amounts to nothing but hatred and contempt for what our Founding Fathers fought for.
It’s amazing just how much Pres. Bush’s administration resembles McCarthyism. Yesterday’s “Communists” have been replaced by today’s “Al Qaeda,” and the nation in general is just as complacent as it was in the 1950s. And just as with yesterday, we need men like Edward R. Murrow who are willing to stand up to this usurper.
Earlier, the Senator asked, “Upon what meat does this, our Caesar, feed?” Had he looked three lines earlier in Shakespeare’s Caesar, he would have found this line, which is not altogether inappropriate: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
[...] His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Good night, and good luck.
— Edward R. Murrow, from the March 9, 1954 “See It Now” television broadcast on Senator Joe McCarthy.
If this man is not stopped; if this nation is not restored to the Constitutional Republic it began as; I see no reason to believe we will leave the next generation with anything but a Dictatorship… or perhaps an ash heap.
