This  nonsense in Maine over the Labor Dept. mural cuts pretty close to my last nerve.  Our entire family consists of artists; and we have experienced more than our fair share of censorship attempts.  

That is what we’re talking about in Maine…censorship.  In the liberty-casual U.S.A. we’re more familiar with censorship efforts directed at “offensive” images…mostly having to do with nudity and bodily functions with which Americans have never been entirely comfortable.  Former Governor Douglas’s blushing banishment of the Greek Slave from his statehouse desk springs readily to mind.

We regard political censorship as something foreign and unlikely on these shores.  But here it is, in all its autocratic glory: a genuine act of political censorship; right here in one of our Yankee sister-states!  It has certainly raised comment, but not nearly on the level that one might expect, given all that is at stake.  We’re busy parsing words about misappropriation of funds and the public’s right to access when we should be genuinely alarmed, conjuring memories of Nazi Germany, where the manipulation of public art played a significant role in a certain paper-hanger’s propaganda machine.  Okay; it’s my turn to hyperventilate and invoke the other “N” word.

There is a class-war on in this country.  This time, it is not the creation of a restless underclass; rather, it is a cynical construct generated by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country; people like the Koch Bros., and the Waltons who hit the jackpot with a little discount store called Walmart.   Both have made the effort to defund public education central to their political “philanthropy”; and they champion a regressive social agenda that finds favor with the extreme right.  

They understand that their goal of unbridled corporate dominance of America’s economic resources will depend as much on dumbing-down the “Have-Not” population and redirecting their anger away from the “Haves”, as it will on any direct political funding. So the targets become public education, public television and radio…and those dangerous expressive arts.  They pull funding, revise textbooks, remove images and attempt to re-write science.

I do not invoke Nazi Germany casually.  It has become the shrill invective of last resort; often hurled by an accuser who hasn’t the first clue that the Nazis and their fellow travelers were right-wing extremists, social conservatives and about as far from being socialists as one could get.  I waited a long time before drawing that equation because it runs the risk of simply being lost in the noise.  But here is where I’m coming from:

In the early 1970’s, I spent a couple of years living in Berlin with my sculptor husband who was a guest of the Deutsches Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Our good friends, American sculptor, Ed Kienholz and his wife Nancy had already been living there for several years and had become immersed in the history of the Third Reich, which figures significantly in their work from those Berlin years.

Naturally, we were drawn into the conversation, and I began to read everything about the period that I could lay my hands upon.  What most concerned us all was the manner in which the good people we saw all around us had been alternately seduced and entangled in the monstrous social experiment that was Nazi Germany.  

I say “good people” without  a trace of irony because they were good people, just as the vast majority of Tea Party followers are good people.  As individuals, most of them would have given you the shirt off their backs. Even my father-in-law, who survived the camps but lost all but two of his family members…even he always insisted that

“there are no bad people…there are only bad leaders.”

That is what is so very dangerous about the slippery slope from simple pliant ignorance to complicit barbarism; it is a path that might be travelled by even the best among us if we succumb to the argument that intellectual thought and science and the arts may be subverted to serve an overarching political agenda of neo-patriotism and religious intolerance.

The left is always poorly equipped to meet this brazen enemy of thought because we sit in stunned disbelief far too long.  It is in the vacuum of that stunned silence (or as we frame our carefully measured response) that  folks like Rand Paul and Governor Walker are emboldened to reach still further.   We count too much on common sense prevailing, and we discount the powerful nectar of blissful ignorance.

I can’t help imagining American militia groups (our home-grown Brown Shirts) assembling behind the Tea Party luminaries; and I see parallels between the economic chaos of the Weimer Republic, which gave rise to those Brown Shirts in Germany, and the economic dysfunction we have been experiencing here since the collapse of the Wall Street ponzi schemes.  They too were emerging from a costly, humiliating, and winless war.

Both have led to a less civilized society, ripe to be misled into attacking scapegoats and indulging right-wing extremism.  It is here that I begin replaying the first chapters of “Inside the Third Reich” in my head again.

We have teetered on the brink more than once in the past,  recovering our sense of proportion in time to save our liberties and hold up the standard of human decency once again.  But so had Germany maintained a relatively tolerant, intellectually free society right up until it plunged clean over that cliff…practically over-night.  

It would serve us well to bear in mind that Hitler did not march on Berlin to seize power in a coup de tat.  His reign of terror began quietly enough with insidious Brown Shirt successes achieved within a democratic election process.

It’s time to set aside that pocket Constitution for a moment and pick-up a history book…but not a Texan textbook.

The writing is on the wall.