D.R. Bahlman: Fear chokes free speech as demagoguery does democracy

WILLIAMSTOWN — One of my earliest fears centered around a dead spider.

For several nights after my elementary school class visited the biology laboratory at Williams College, I was haunted by the notion that the enormous tarantula embalmed in a specimen jar — one of the dozens of exhibits on display in the lab’s vestibule — would somehow come back to life, escape the jar and make its way to the Southworth Street home of a certain second-grader, where it would hide under the overly-inquisitive boy’s bed, preparing to strike at the first opportunity.

I confessed my fear to no one; I was 90 percent sure that it was entirely irrational. After all, why would the tarantula pick me when several other kids lived closer to the lab? Still, I worried.

After a few nights of flashlight- illuminated spot checks under the bed and thorough random pat-downs of the linen and blanket, my fear faded away and I once again slept soundly through the night.

Late childhood, adolescence and young adulthood passed, each delivering generous shares of garden-variety, par-for-the-course fears: bullies, potentially deadly (and richly imagined) medical conditions, failing grades, rejection by the opposite sex, among others.

Apart from a brief period in late 1963 and early 1964, when an associate and I, both age 10, temporarily harbored moderate suspicion of Lyndon B. Johnson of being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, politics and current events found no place on my list of fears.

Then came George W. Bush.

My father was terminally ill when he and I discussed the impending election, which I was sure Bush was going to win.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “He’s a nitwit.”

Thankfully, that turned out not to be true, although “Dubya” set off my alarm bells a few times, flashing that famous smirk after making some erroneous declaration or other. Still, he united the country in the months following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he largely won me over when he displayed his possession not only of a sense of humor but of a Texan’s penchant for nicknames. I’d been at school with a contingent of Texans who eventually bestowed a nickname on me. I accepted this (unprintable) handle for the compliment that it was, and when Bush casually referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as “Pootie Poot,” he scored a lot of points in my book.

The post-Bush years brought politics as usual and horror in the forms of war, famine and terrorism. While the fears that those conditions aroused struck at the heart of humanity, they were neither as numerous nor as close to the heart of democracy as they are now.

In 2016, the presidency was won by a candidate who succeeded brilliantly — and ominously — in uniting millions of supporters under banners manufactured with the cloth of bigotry and outright lies. In addition to undermining the nation’s global influence with his simplistic approach to foreign policy, he divided it so sharply that even the clearest and best evidence of his treasonous conduct and attempted election fraud — the countless yards of video and audiotape and vast piles of documents (some marked top secret) collected from speeches, news conferences and a Florida mansion’s bathrooms and closets — is casually dismissed without proof as fabrications of a “deep state.”

In a letter to the editor published Tuesday in this newspaper, a reader wrote about why she and her husband decided against traveling to a destination in the Southern U.S. in a vehicle bearing a “Democrat” bumper sticker. In what should be applauded as a patriotic invocation of a Constitutional right, the couple decided to fly south and leave the sticker where it is.

Sadly and ironically, given the power of the toxins that a con man has injected into the nation’s public discourse, the mere display of a license plate from Massachusetts, which has been referred to as the cradle of liberty, could suffice to incite violence, perhaps even in a certain country singer’s “little town.”

D.R. “Dusty” Bahlman may be reached at [email protected] or 413-441-4278.