Enemy of the People
A scientist discovers a threat to life and sounds the alarm. Vested interests attempt to gag the messenger. The scientist clings stubbornly to the inconvenient truth and suffers the consequences.
This describes events:
- At EPA
- At FDA
- At CDC
- At NASA’s climate science division
- At any lab with government funding
- In a 1882 drama
- During a 1832 cholera outbreak
- All of the above
When Trump flung the dictatorial charge “the enemy of the American People” at the mainstream press — specifically The New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN — labeling it “FAKE NEWS,” the thinking public shuddered in the chill blast of antecedents: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Goebbels …
I thought of high school English.
We were flogged with Ibsen, play after play. Read and discuss!
In time-honored, irreverent, adolescent style, a clutch of jokers composed and performed an Ibsen send-up, Enemy of the Pimple, about a scientist discovering the town water supply caused acne. It was hysterical. A good parody, the spoof adhered to its target, Enemy of the People, and burned Ibsen’s plot into my memory more indelibly than the drawing room pacing of Victorian original.
The press was first. Can science be far behind?
That was my next thought. Not because the March for Science is planned for April 22. Not because scientists have been muzzled and defunded. But because, while political allergies to truth are nothing new, the Trump administration seems hypersensitive to the point of anaphylaxis.
Science is, after all, as close as we get to objective truth, and truth is dangerous: dangerous to business, dangerous to politics.
Trump reminded me of Enemy of the People.
We like to believe truth triumphs over falsehood and good wins the day over evil. Ibsen closes the book on our fairy tale.
In a town where politicians and the press hold the power to inform or conceal, the hero of Enemy of the People, Thomas Stockmann, is forced to choose survival or truth when public health is pitted against business interests. Like the real-life doctor upon whom his character is based, Stockmann refuses to crumple under political pressure and is pilloried.
Gee, does that sound familiar?
When Arthur Miller adapted Enemy of the People for the American stage in 1950, he had this to say in his preface:
… it’s central theme is, in my opinion, the central theme of our social life today. Simply, it is the question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in times of crisis. … the play is concerned with the inviolability of objective truth … that those who attempt to warp the truth for ulterior purposes must inevitably become warped and corrupted themselves.
Outspoken Miller, a champion of artistic freedom, wrote in a time of crisis, Joseph McCarthy’s Cold War Communist witch hunt. For his efforts, Miller was branded a Communist sympathizer, rather proving his point, and hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Though not a communist, he refused to name names and was convicted of contempt by Congress. (His conviction was overturned on appeal the following year.)
McCarthy’s self-serving penchant for broadcasting trumped-up charges of treason and subversion received push-back from senators unwilling to follow him down a road that — as Margaret Chase Smith put it in her 1950 Declaration of Conscience — “puts political exploitation above national interest,” eventually resulting in his censure.
John McCain is a modern Senator Smith. He didn’t wait to see what others would do. He defended freedom by calling out Trump’s attack on the press for what it was, a false and dangerous charge striking at a pillar of democracy, saying such language was “how dictators get started.” (Meet the Press, NBC)
The question remains, who among his colleagues has the convictions to join him?
We have already seen climate scientists muzzled, despite the fact that the Pentagon — hardly a bunch of snowflakes — acknowledges climate change as a national security threat, and the well is about to be poisoned thanks to expected rollbacks of environmental regulations, a process already begun with the scrapping of the Stream Protection Rule.
When scientists speak out to protect the public rather than business interests, will they also be branded enemies?
Unlike Enemy of the People, the story behind the play had a happy ending. Dr. Eduard Meissner, after being run out of Teplice (Telplitz), Bohemia — the spa town he tried to protect against a cholera outbreak — by a pitchfork-wielding mob, moved his family to Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) where he was well received and established a successful practice.
There’s always Canada. I hear it’s getting warmer.
