Let me finish tonight with what we saw last night – millions of us.
You know when we were young, dad would take to the Lincoln Drive-In in Bucks County. We’d bring a six-pack of Pepsi to save money. The refreshment stand was for rich people.
Anyway, sometimes it was a dollar a carload, a pretty good deal when you’ve got five brothers packed into a station-wagon. Some nights we’d get dad to turn it around backwards so we could open up the back and look out right at the big movie screen.
I remember those nights – a double-feature and an hour of cartoons, sometimes “two” hours of cartoons. Dad was a very good dad.
I was thinking of all this after watching last night: State of the Union night.
Think about it: there was a big double-feature – the President gave a big majestic speech about the future; the Republican Paul Ryan gave a respectable speech on cutting the size of government.
And then there was the big cartoon show: Michele Bachmann.
I speak in all objectivity here. Anyone who calls on the American news media to investigate the Congress for anti-Americanism has no knowledge of the Joe McCarthy period – no notion of what “McCarthyism” means. Anyone who says, as Bachmann did this week, that slavery in this country, our original sin, ended with the Founding Fathers, is beyond hope. We fought a civil war to decide and end slavery. Six hundred thousand men on both sides were killed to end this evil. The founding fathers didn’t end it. Slavery is written right there “in” in the Constitution – the part the treats slaves as three-fifths of a person. People know this. You and I know this. Most Americans know that it took the Civil War to end slavery – and it hurts in our national memory. Slavery hurts. It’s hard to imagine people accepting it, justifying it, but they did and it took almost of a century of our history to end it, and another century to end Jim Crow. I don’t doubt there are some good, decent and knowledgeable people who’ve gone to Tea Party events. What I don’t get it why they sit there are allow their movement to be represented on national television by a Looney Tune.
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