I’m not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) 

Maybe he should’ve done a paragraph break before continuing:

It’s just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. 

Westerners = Europeans (Americans aren’t even included in “The West” anymore).  It is interesting … “Bad Americans!  Look what they did!” 

I get tired of that finger-pointing, too, but mostly because I had them aimed at me for history I wasn’t even a part of.  Sitting in an Irish Pub in Auckland, I remember some dumbass White South African saying, “Damn Kaffir [nigger] doesn’t belong in here!”  When I protested his idiocy, he says, “Don’t start on me, boet [brother] — you killed the Indians and locked up the Nips [Japanese] during World War II!”

Mind you, this was a guy who’d run like Hell from South Africa because he was afraid he’d get some recompence for the crap he’d done in his lifetime.  And somehow, even though he was a racist, separatist prick who assisted in “ruling” the non-white majority, the fact that killing Native Americans in the 1800’s and locking up Japanese in the 1940’s — well before I was born, mind you — trumped the fact that he was screaming about non-whites in the bar that very night.

I’m also absolutely certain that if an American made a historically inaccurate play about how the Scottish politicians screwed the clans over in order to earn fortune and power in an English-ruled Highland, the Scots would be totally up-in-arms, too.

“The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It’s just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?”

He’s trying to say that our complaints about a society that won’t show Elvis’ hips is ridiculous when Communists are killing people in Russia.

I say, it is perfectly okay to pick at smaller issues in America, even though there may be huge issues elsewhere.

His argument is meaningless. You can always say “X” is far worse than “Y”, but that does not mean we are somehow stupid to care about and even get POed about “Y”.