This from Frank Dwyer:
In "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" (1941), a play that ought to be revived tomorrow in every American city, Bertolt Brecht chronicled the easy stages by which a nondescript, graceless, charmless, talentless, ill-bred, dimwitted mob boss takes over the Chicago vegetable market. Why were the American people so ready to facilitate and accept the ascendancy of such a leader? So ready to be manipulated, pampered, deceived, and diminished? Greed? Were we bought by the silly fake tax cut? Fear? Did 9/11 do this, make us such cowards? Why do we allow ourselves to be spied on, and bullied by, and all the while condescended to, by a rogue’s gallery of disgraced hypocrites? Why did we allow our hard-won, precious Constitution, with its dear little system of checks and balances, to be discarded with a smirk and a sneer and a signing ceremony, or a new program of secret surveillance, or a loud bullying charge of treason leveled against us, barked out ad nauseam by men and women who are surely manifest traitors themselves to everything we believe in, every value we thought we shared? How has this happened to us? Why?
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Brecht made it clear that in the modern world a leader like Arturo Ui can only come to power with the lazy, selfish collusion of his citizen-accomplices at every step of the way. Archibald MacLeish had already warned us about the same thing (fascism) in his thrilling 1937 radio play, "The Fall of the City." The "masterless men" of the city willingly "take a master" but are surprised when the Conqueror removes his helmet and there’s no one there. It was Casey Stengel, however, who most succinctly articulated the essential nature of our shared responsibility. It was after his team won the 1958 World Series. "I couldn’t have done it," he said, "without my players."
Happy Fourth, everyone.
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