Today — as with pretty much any other day — I heard our president call American journalists “the enemy of the people.”
He says it so often you would think he invented the phrase: “Enemy of the people.” He says it every time he refers to the press, that most American of institutions that our Founding Fathers insisted on protecting when they drafted our First Amendment, the most urgent document of them all, guaranteeing our most important rights that most clearly define what it means to be an American.
But then, this president believes that those Founding Fathers were just clearing their throats before getting around to the really important Amendments, like the Second.
But if you trace the phrase “enemy of the people” back in history, it all makes sense that this president would take ownership of it, because he has chosen to play an almost identical role to the title character in the play that bears the name “Enemy of the People.”
Henrik Ibsen was the Norwegian writer who penned the play “An Enemy of the People” way back in 1882, and it’s considered a literary masterpiece.
It’s not just a coincidence that our Commander in Chief calls the press the “enemy of the people” when he gets teed-off with them, because the play from which he quotes is about a politician (in this case, a mayor) battling against a newspaper editor who wants to warn the public about a health hazard at the public baths. The narcissistic mayor declares the article fake news, intended only as a political attack on his administration.
But it’s not fake news, because when the town’s doctor reveals scientific proof that the baths are indeed a public health hazard, all the facts support the editor who only wants to warn the people of the dangers that threaten their health.
Of course, the mayor knows that shutting down the baths temporarily might hurt the booming economy — and along the way reveal the corruption of his political administration that led to the bad conditions — so the mayor publicly proclaims the civic-minded whistle-blower to be an “enemy of the people.”
The mayor’s political base rises up as a mob. Cowed by fear, the editor kills the story instead of publishing it.
But the civic-minded doctor holds firm, and he pays the price of the Mayor’s lies and narcissistic rage, because with the press muffled into submission, only the politician’s voice echoes in the people’s ears. The mayor’s political base swings into action — the doctor’s landlord evicts him and his family from their home, his office is destroyed, and his daughter is fired from her teaching job.
And thus the town is made “great again,” free to be poisoned at the baths without interference from “enemies of the people” like doctors, editors and teachers.
You can read the play if you like, but it isn’t easy to get through. After all, it was written by a Norwegian, and you know how Norwegians can be. They go swimming in the winter — you can only imagine how chilly their prose must be.
Or you can just watch the movie “Jaws,” which Steven Spielberg admits was inspired by the Ibsen play.
All the elements are there — the corrupt politician (Mayor Vaughn) declaring the overwhelming shark-attack evidence to be fake news and keeping the beaches open even as swimmers vanish morsel by morsel, claiming all along that the greater threat to the people is not the shark but the guy blowing the shark whistle (police chief Brody).
Spielberg used the Ibsen play only as a starting point, though, because in his film the forces of good stand up to the sniveling mayor, who eventually backs down and lets them fix the problem, but you’ll get the idea. Besides, there’s that great scene of a big bloated shark blowing up at the end, and that’s always fun to watch. (Well, it’s more fun than watching CNN, which almost never shows a big bloated shark blowing up. At least not literally. Metaphorically, they show a big bloated orange-haired shark blowing up almost every minute of every broadcast.)
So when our Commander in Chief opens his command-hole and insists that the path to “Make America great again” is to muzzle the press and limit our right to free, fact-based speech, let’s follow his “enemy of the people” quotations directly to their literal source—the Henrik Ibsen play, “An Enemy of the People.”
Let’s remember that those lines of dialog are spoken by a corrupt, scheming, lying politician concerned only with money and reputation, willing to trade the welfare of the people for his own self-aggrandizement, and happy to goad his base to violence to get the job done.
Because if you’re a true patriotic American, you owe it to your Commander-in-Chief to recognize the role he’s chosen to play in this very real drama, don’t you?
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
