Can America drain the Ramaswampy?
By Alfred P. Doblin
A few weeks ago, I picked up American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark. The book is an easier read than the title. It chronicles Roy Cohn’s rise and fall, and with it, the rise and fall of American democratic values.
Well, sorta.
By now, at least if you are of my age and gay, you know a version of the Roy Cohn story – evil, self-loathing gay man, who enabled Sen. Joe McCarthy, mentored the young Donald Trump, and died of AIDS.
All of that is true enough, although I might trade out evil for despicable; I save evil for Hitler. But the rise and fall of Cohn is a red herring if you want to understand what is happening in America today, or in the years following World War II.
It’s said that nothing survives in a vacuum. I disagree. Dirt lives in a vacuum. If you don’t believe me, check your Hoover, pun intended. We have a lot of dirt in America.
Our republic has always been a two-sided coin: the promise of equality and a reality that was never quite there. In its best moments, the undertow of pettiness, vulgarity, brutality, greed, and narcissism has been kept in check by laws, convention, and morality.
In its worst moments, America accepted slavery, Jim Crow, and Joe McCarthy.
Today, there are forces pushing back against Trumpism and MAGA, but the difference between the age of McCarthy and now is that the power of the government is almost completely in the hands of the petty, vulgar, brutal, greedy, and narcissistic.
Can we push back against the tide? Yes. But we would be foolish to think that it will not return with equal force or even greater power in the future. That inability to see the obvious is proof not of the American Dream, but of the American Folly.
We draw lines in the sand when we are in a righteous mode ignoring that the tide will wash out and erase those lines with time. McCarthyism did not go away forever. It mutated like the flu or Covid. It comes back in variants and sometimes we have the vaccine that prevents us from becoming deathly ill and sometimes, well… sometimes it’s the spring of 2020 all over again.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s deplorable campaign ad targeting his opponent in the Ohio governor’s race, Amy Acton, signals the arrival of March 2020 in the waning days of October 2026. Ramaswamy put up an ad with Acton’s aged, estranged mother. She calls her daughter a liar. Absent from the commercial is the fact that Amy Acton and her brother were removed by the court from their mother’s care when she was 12 because of allegations of sexual abuse by her stepfather.
He was indicted and then fled the state never to return. Amy’s mother stood by her man. It is indefensible – a mother willingly choosing her indicted sex offender husband over her children. But in Ramaswampy Land it is fair game.
Our Catholic vice president chastises Republicans for whining about the ad. Our president thinks it’s politics as usual and that the ad has nothing to do with child abuse. The famous question asked by Joseph Welch, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” was directly aimed at McCarthy, but unless we see the McCarthys around us, and might I add at times, within us, we have learned nothing.
There are Republicans speaking out forcefully against the ad. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had said the ad should come down. But where is the indignation from other prominent Republicans, or really, from every individual with a soapbox? This is America’s Joe Welch moment.
There’s a line in the musical, The Fantasticks, which is stuck in my head: “You wonder how these things begin.” It’s a preface to a beautiful love song. I hear it out of context not as a prologue to simplicity and love, but to complicity and hate.
No one needs to agree with Amy Acton’s political platform, or the political platform of any candidate on the left or right, but can’t we draw a line, not in the sand, but in our collective souls, that some things are horrible because they are? They are horrible because they cry out to God, the Creator, or whatever you believe in that is good, that this thing, this lie, this belief that destroying the very fabric of decency is somehow acceptable in the quest for power.
I don’t know what will happen on Election Day. I am old enough to know that when the fish stinks more refrigeration doesn’t reverse the decay. Whatever lies ahead is not pretty; we have come too far from the shining city on a hill. We are in the metaphorical Ramaswamp, surrounded by veniality, greed, arrogance, and a fair amount of stupidity.
We did not get here because of a single person, charismatic or not. That is not how it works. We got here because we did not say no when it was easier to say no. Perhaps we were dismissive of the risks, or believed the system would right itself by itself. But that defies logic and history.
Have we no decency, at long last, have we no decency? I want the answer to be a resounding yes, but if it is, the hard work is ahead. You cannot drain a swamp you choose to live in.
Until next time, I’m Alfred with a P.
Alfred P. Doblin is the author of “Tales of the Lavender Twilight” and “Sailing Beyond the Sunset,” published by Rattling Good Yarns Press.