September
29, 2023
If
you grew up in the 1950s, as I did in a lefty American family, the name Joseph
McCarthy elicited as much loathing as that of John Wilkes Booth and Benito
Mussolini. The zeitgeist of the late 1940s and early 1950s—fueled by the Cold
War—were, as troubadour Peter Seeger sang, while he strummed the banjo, “a
terrible time,” though it was also, he added, “a wonderful time.” A Tale of Two
Cities, Charles Dickens’s novel of the French Revolution, begins on a similar
note: “It was the best of times, it was
the worst of times.”
