SCOUNDREL TIME AGAIN
Work took me to Washington briefly this week. The city was dead. With the government shut down and Trump in Asia dancing away America’s reputation.
The place was empty. Devoid of tourists as all the museums and monuments are shut down as well as the government. That wind of urgent self-importance the worker bees break over the town as they rush about Capitol Hill, and along K street where lobbying and law firms have their headquarters was absent.
My purpose for visiting Washington was negated by the shutdown. I was there to interview someone at the Library of Congress about the books Thomas Jefferson sold to the Nation to start a new Library after the British burned down the original when they occupied Washington for a day and a bit in1814. I’m making a program for BBC Radio 4’s big season to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next July 4th. My interviewee has been furloughed and was not able to meet me.
Instead, there was time to meet with friends and colleagues based in DC and detect a theme in their comments: surprise and disappointment that at this point of the unraveling of our America there is no real counterweight to MAGA. You know the litany: Democrats can’t get their act together; The rich kid left chase rainbows and don’t have to worry about when their campaigns fail since they are insulated by money from consequences. They also had a genuine puzzlement that in Washington, where people’s jobs have been under threat since Inauguration Day, there is absolute silence, fear, heads are down hoping the storm will pass.
I asked a British journalist friend if he had read Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman’s memoir of the McCarthy Era. He hadn’t but said a number of people had suggested it to him. I urged him (and urge you) to read it. You can get through it in a weekend.
Scoundrel Time recounts Hellman’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It was the third volume of memoirs she took to writing as her playwriting career declined. From the mid-1930s through the early Sixties Hellman had been one of America’s most successful playwrights. She was also a public intellectual and doyenne of the New York literary scene.
Her experience before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, (for the unitiated: HUAC - its abbreviation - was an investigation by the House of Representatives into alleged Communists in public life, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy conducted his own investigations in the upper chamber into these so-called “subversives”. McCarthy’s blustering, bullying persona — MAGA avant la lettre — meant that his name is attached to the entire era of the Red Scare witch hunts including HUAC).
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” people were asked, and then the follow up: the demand to name names of those who had been with them in the party or sympathetic to it. Failure to do so could lead to loss of employment. Many, too many, named names. To save themselves, they destroyed the careers and in some cases the lives of others,
In the entertainment business, where Hellman worked, as the Depression struck and World War 2 approached many had been drawn to the Communist Party, many more had worked with colleagues who were party members organizing solidarity petitions or financially supporting the Republicans against Francisco Franco’s Fascists during the Spanish Civil War as well as civil rights organizations, and just general anti-Fascist activities. As the Cold War took hold of Washington, these folks were in the cross hairs.
Summoned to testify, Hellman decided she would discuss her own activities at Party events (she was not a joiner of any group) but would say nothing about others. Nevertheless the committee demanded she name names. She plead the Fifth Amendment. After her testimony her lawyer released her statement to the Committee. It contained one of her most quoted lines:
“ … to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,”
The book is less about the mendacity of the Committee and McCarthy and more about the cowardice of her fellow writers and creative artists, who, to use a current term of art, “bent the knee” to save their livelihoods. Hellman wrote:
“I feel betrayed by the nonsense I had believed. I had no right to think that American intellectuals were people who would fight for anything if doing so would injure them.”
Scoundrel Time is a great phrase and one that can be applied to present day Washington and the targets of MAGA: elite universities, law firms, tech firms, Hollywood studios. To save their own skins and extremely comfortable livelihoods the leaders of these institutions kowtow to Trump and are complacent as the Constitution suffers death by a thousand cuts.
You look for someone or a group to say no … no more. But the fear is everywhere. Even before Speaker of the House Mike Johnson put his institution into an induced coma, the fear had shaken the federal bureaucracy to its roots. In the early days of the second Trump administration, when Elon Musk unleashed his 21 year olds on workers no one had marched to the White House to demand an end to DOGE. 100s of 1000s of jobs at risk, from my home in London I asked colleagues in Washington why there was no action? Fear. People hope the storm will blow out and are keeping their heads down.
Fear: I’ll lose my family’s health insurance. Fear: two kids approaching college age, how will I pay for it? Fear: I’ve been doing my job for 20 years, I’ll never find another.
Two weeks ago 7 million people took to the streets with no real demand. “No Kings” is a slogan not a demand. But what do with that anti-MAGA energy?
Last Sunday I went to record a rally for Zohran Mamdani at the old Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens. Big name event: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, were speakers. The crowd was organized by various unions and in the warm-up phase of the night one of the speakers urged people to find someone they don’t know in the crowd and speak to them, exchange contact information. Start to widen networks.
It’s a simple thing, I wonder how many of the 7 million No Kings’ers did that?
Courage. In Scoundrel Time it’s in short supply. You have to look down to see signs of it.
The anxious state of my birth country, plus the press of work, had me so agitated this past week that I completely forgot the yahrzeit, the death anniversary, of my brother from another mother Ahmad Shawkat. Ahmad was my translator during the Iraq War. A political dissident throughout the regime of Saddam Hussein, he took full advantage of the dictator’s overthrow to finally write and speak freely. He was murdered for his trouble. During our month working together he had entrusted his life story to me and when he was killed I wrote the story of that life.
Every year on the anniversary of his murder, October 28th, I put up something in social media as a remembrance: a photo, a written tribute, a message to his many children. This year, immiserated by the state of America, I completely forgot. It was only a Facebook post by his son Raafat that reminded me what day it was
Ahmad and I were the same age. I won’t go into the full details of his story, you can find them by reading my book, orignally published as Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace (it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2005) and republished last year as The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat.
But I mention him now because he had courage. He was arrested by the regime many times and tortured. The only reason he was alive for me to meet him was Saddam’s people loved money as much as they loved to bring death. Ahmad’s wife’s family had some and the regime’s jailers would hold him for ransom and then release him.
His crime was free-thinking. He was an anatomy lecturer at Mosul University’s medical school, but a poet by vocation. He would invite students to poetry readings and, in his words, try “to make them enlightenment points” so that when they returned to their hometowns in other parts of Iraq to practice medicine they would know about freedom and the possibilities of other ways of living.
The risk of this activity was considerable and he suffered for it and ultimately died for writing in favor of democracy and excoriating the jihadis and ba’athists who didn’t want a new Iraq to come out of the ruins of Saddam and the war that overthrew him.
“What I can do else?” he asked me in our last conversation.
Although it has ICE snatch squads, the US under Trump is nothing like the Iraq in which my friend struggled to be free. The US does not have a mukhabarat, dragging anybody they like off the street. It has not created a system of state security by turning the society into a system of informers. And even though people in DC are afraid for their livelihoods the US has not become a Republic of Fear. Yet.
Courage is called for now. Not small steps. There is a deep-seated fear among anti-MAGAs that the regime is trying to provoke an incident so it can declare martial law. People fear what might happen if an ICE agent gets shot while dragging someone off the street, or another MAGA figure gets murdered like Charlie Kirk.
That fear of martial law is enough to paralyze discussion of any serious large scale action.
But I wonder about that fear. How many national guardsmen and other law enforcement branches are there to police a declaration of martial law? How long would it take to re-patriate all those troops garrisoning the American empire’s global outposts. Does the sum total of potential enforcers of martial law equal 7 million?
Fear of martial law is reasonable, the regime’s intentions can be inferred by their actions in this second round of power (and in the 4 years after January 6th when Trump was allowed to conduct a kind of parallel presidency). But do you think it can successfully be implemented? They’ve had to put the House in permanent recess to avoid challenges to their budget. Martial law would be an altogether more difficult thing to accomplish.
Courage, Fear. In Scoundrel Time the latter wins.
After two weeks in the US it’s clear to me that most people are pinning their hopes on throwing the bastards out in the midterm elections. It’s the safe option and the anti-MAGA side should have a good day on Tuesday in the off-year elections. But there is still no guarantee that a year from now we will have free and fair mid-terms or that the results will even be recognized.
I think of my brother Ahmad virtually every day since the last election. He took risks against a much fiercer regime, tried to organize underground networks of resistance. We should emulate his courage, create “enlightenment points” and push back hard.
Now.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst … and leave Scoundrel Time behind.
Another superb FRDH, Michael. One of the strangest aspects for me about the current madness, is the shock of not being able to turn to the feds for help in a time of true threat to the nation because this time the threat is coming from inside the White House and this time the White House is running the FBI, purging it of its most effective antiterrorists and diverting the Bureau from the expanding menace of heavily armed white supremacists, as well as growing Russian, Chinese and Iranian spy threats. Trump now believes his own lies that the greatest threat to America is from liberals inside the country. This really needs fact checking and Trump‘s, “enemy within, “declaration is a fever dream that is nevertheless dangerous to our nation’s stability.
Very much part of my pre-teen years was sensing my dad's nervousness over HUAC; would they learn that he'd attended a meeting or two, thinking Capitalism was dead in the early 30s, looking for alternatives; would they know of his support for anti-Franco forces in the late 30s? Would he lose his family's source of income, by having his security clearance revoked at Lockheed?
And an unrelated 2nd comment: the intimacy of your relationship with Shawkat was lovely, as you looked at his children and hoped, someday, for one of your own; as you admired his courage and intelligence, his writing to encourage resistance against Saddam. And your other book on Napoleon and the opening of the ghettos, which I've recommended to both our SILs, as both have grandfathers that escaped the pogroms of Ukraine. Do keep it up, your counseling us about ways to resist!