Sans Witches, This May Have Been A Witch-Hunt

No, this isn’t about #45, for a change, but here are a few definitions of “witch-hunt” to get us started:

“A situation [in which] accusations are made freely.” — yourdictionary.com

“A politically-motivated, often vindictive investigation that feeds on public fears.” — politicaldictionary.com

“A search for persons labelled ‘witches’ or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic or mass hysteria.” — Wikipedia

America certainly is all in a blaze these days, and quite a confounding one. That often happens when accusations are flying as fast and high as they were a few months ago. While the pace has lessened, the damage to worthy careers like Sen. Al Franken’s is forever, and nothing would indicate that we’ve learned anything from what now would appear to have been a destructive fad.

Sexual accusations, in particular, have a destructive power so alarming that they should dictate greater care in determining the truth. Instead, we saw one massive rush to judgment after another, replete with comments like “I believe the women,” as in all the women, as in not even one could possibly be lying, exaggerating or mistaken. Others may be, as former Sen. Franken has suggested, simply “remembering events differently.”

Were some of the women pointing fingers at political candidates, high office-holders, television anchors, low office-holders, chefs, you name it, telling the truth? Were some of them exaggerating? Were some of them lying? A reasonable, measured response — based on, if nothing else, odds — would be in the affirmative times three.

How do we tell the difference between them in an age when so many people have gotten so terribly good at lying and so many people have so many axes to grind with so many others and such an appalling, consuming need to be right?

As thoroughly politically, idealogically and socially repugnant as Roy Moore is to many people including yours truly, the timing of the accusations against him and the length of time since those affronts allegedly occurred were troublesome. While his accusers did seem eminently credible, his denials seemed credible — except for maybe telltale hints like railing against the people who want to change “a way of life,” presumably one that includes sex with minors. But true are not, Moore’s denials certainly were consistent.

And why a sudden flood of such latent accusations, immediately followed by fresh floods of accusations against so many others? I’m hearing that phrase again from one of the definitions of the actual hunt for witches: “moral panic or mass hysteria.”

In Sen. Franken’s case, he admitted past transgressions and apologized for them. They were before he entered public service, from his life in the routinely bawdy world of comedy, and they were light-years short of sexual battery, although some media labeled them “sexual assault.”

No question, sexual battery and sexual assault are never acceptable, but are we really going to loose either damning term on a long-ago persistent pursuit of an unwanted kiss? Don’t avid pursuers of anything sometimes go a little too far? Does every little instance have to be blown up into some massive, horrible crime? Finally, does every American institution’s official response have to be immediate termination, no questions asked, shoot first and ask questions later?

NBC fired Matt Lauer, then said it would investigate.  That makes almost as much sense as presuming that every person with a tale to tell is being honest, or forgetting a lot of common-sense common knowledge. Here’s an obvious one: People act funny when they smell money.

It’s good that fingers pointed with apparent disregard for direction (as in left, right or center), but does that have to come with disregard for every possible truth? And shouldn’t every diligently conscious American resist anything that begins to resemble a real witch-hunt, i.e. anything that completely subverts essential American ideals like due process, fairness and punishment befitting the crime?

Here’s the bottom line:

Whole livelihoods and careers were plopped in front of a public gallows set at full slaughter based on nothing but accusations. Accusations that certainly were being made freely. Some of them appeared to be politically motivated, and some were openly “feeding on public fears.”

But worst of all, the dizzying rapid fire of accusations reached a frenzy that felt like something awfully close to “moral panic or mass hysteria,” things that got a lot of innocent people all too literally burned once upon a horrible time in our history. Why were we and our fire-happy culture so intent on finding a way of even figuratively repeating it?