Party Time

 “Ooh ooh it’s party time

It’s time to get you off my mind

. . . .

It’s time to laugh and pass the wine”

"Party Time," T.G. Sheppard

“Party Time” was the title of Saturday Evening Club speaker Jim Wise’s talk, so I joked beforehand that maybe it was about the 1981 song of that name by T.G. Sheppard or the 1957 rockabilly hit “Party Doll” by Texan Buddy Holly. The Emeritus Professor at VU had planned to discuss whether the decline of political parties was good or bad. Instead, after listing momentous events that happened in early January, such as Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and JFK’s 1961 Inaugural address, he focused on the Trump-inspired deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol led by white extremists duped by the Big Lie of a fraudulent election. None of the 18 attendees defended the president. Wise cited Newt Gingrich’s becoming House Speaker in the 1990s as a turning point when Republican ideologues began treating opponents as enemies, not merely adversaries. Wise mentioned working on the 1972 McGovern campaign, as did Toni and I, and brought up past demagogues such as Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and George Lincoln Rockwell, whom I heard speak while at Bucknell, a pathetic American Nazi with a tiny following compared to current white nationalist groups. My only quibble: he praised Maine Republican Susan Collins' tepid condemnation of Trump; I pointed out that she defended her vote not to impeach by professing the belief that he had learned his lesson. Her naivety was recently matched by Sen. Roy Blount, who claimed that Trump “had touched the hot stove and is unlikely to do it again.” More clear-headed, Mitt Romney after being under siege in the Capitol labeled what happened an insurrection and added: “We gather today due to a selfish man’s injured pride.”

Dean Bottorff commented: The events of the past week – and, indeed, what is expected to take place tomorrow and in the ensuing weeks – raise an interesting question for my friend the historian. How much time must pass before this history can be written? The old cliché that journalists write the first draft of history may be true but what is the role of the historian who actually lives through major historical times? None of us will know how the final hand of Trumpism will play out. Is Trumpism the last gasp of the racial politics that have dominated American history since the Founding Fathers embarked on this experiment? Will the days of "alternative facts" ever end? You and I will never know. A somewhat sad thought, really.