Immediately following the storming
of the Bastille in July of 1789 there spread throughout vast areas of rural
France a mass delusion known to historians as “the Great Fear”. Its acute phase lasted about three
weeks. Rumors were rife that brigands were
marauding through the countryside plundering villages, burning crops in the
fields, and killing peasants. The
grapevine typically claimed that the violence had already reached such-and-such
a nearby village and was now headed “this way”.
You can perhaps imagine the actual social consequences of such
widespread panic—or perhaps you cannot. Suffice it to say they were considerably more
revolutionary than the attack on the Bastille itself.
I am not particularly good at
correctly predicting results of such things as athletic contests and political
elections, but I do have a nose for codswallop and hogwash that many of my
peers seem to lack. I well remember when
just about Thanksgiving of 1987 I saw a report in the Times of the supposed kidnapping and sexual torture of a young
woman named Tawana Brawley in Wappinger Falls, NY. I knew immediately that the story had to be a
hoax—an obvious conclusion arrived at only much later and most reluctantly by
the mainstream press, and only after having contributed generously to the
creation of a horrible episode of racial tension and having promoted the Rev.
Al Sharpton to his tenured position as race-hustling political guru among the
American punditocracy.
Toward the end of last week several
urgent messages from various centers of social gravitas in our upscale community
of Princeton, NJ—the Y, the public library, the mayor’s office, the
University’s “Tiger Alert” service—appeared in my email and, I supposed, in the
boxes of many others.. They informed me
that on the proximate Saturday, maybe even the next day, white supremacists
were planning a hateful march through the center of our little town. Not to worry, however. The police were prepared to protect us. Plans for emergency street clearings and
special parking restrictions had already been put in place. I had never before heard of the fascist
entity sponsoring the march--the New Jersey European Heritage Association—but
an instant’s Internet research confirmed the existence of such a sadsack
sodality, or at least the existence of a website featuring a photograph of a
pregnant blonde and a lament for the comparatively anemic Caucasian birth-rate
in America. White Supremacy, while no
laughing matter, is nonetheless ludicrous.
Conspicuously absent, however, was the announcement of a March on
Princeton, or indeed on anywhere else.
I already was beginning to have vague
intimations of that Tawana Brawley feeling as I set out to discover the
evidence triggering our very own local Great Fear. Of course a sizable political demonstration
in the center of a bustling town, whether by white supremacists or the PTA, but
especially one requiring police supervision at least as vigilant as that for
the 10K “Turkey Trot” at Thanksgiving, would normally require prior
planning. According to the mayor’s
communication, no application had been made by the NJEHA or anybody else for a
permit to march or demonstrate on this particular Saturday; but (and here the
plot took a sinister turn toward the passive voice) fliers announcing a
proposed march had appeared in the
town. Anonymous, but appeared. How to assess the threat? Hume’s argument against miracles is an
argument from probability. Is it more
probable that a man walked on water or that the report of his having done so
was mistaken or actually fraudulent? To
my mind, the proposition that White Supremacists were going to have a political
rally in Princeton, NJ, was a priori less
probable than—well, than most ways you could finish the sentence. But Xeroxed fliers pushed me over the edge, as they might have done to others
who have spent forty years on a college campus observing the potential for
mischief inherent in anonymous fliers.
In 1708, wicked Jonathan Swift published a flier predicting the imminent
death of an annoying astrologer named Partridge. Nothing Partridge did thereafter could convince
the public that he was not in fact dead.
They wanted him to be dead,
and they had seen his death predicted in a flier.
No pasarán! Palmer Square, Princeton, N. J., 12 January 2019
The White Supremacists were no
shows, but there was still a pretty impressive counter-demonstration, presuming
that one needs no actual demonstration to counter one. I was not there, but I got the following
report from Tiger Alert: “More than 500 people chanting and holding signs
marched around the square for more than an hour this afternoon. They went ahead with their demonstration even
though the white supremacist group did not show up.” The racists were presumably back lurking
under the bridges with the rest of the trolls, waiting for the Billy Goats
Gruff. There may not have been such a
flap in these parts since October 30, 1938.
On that evening CBS transmitted a drama, a version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds adapted for radio by
the genius of Orson Welles, that convinced its listeners that hostile Martians
had landed at Grover’s Mill, practically in spitting distance of the Princeton
campus, and that they were headed “this way”.
Old Mrs. Skillman, my landlady in graduate student days and an eye
witness, told us all about it. No
counter-attack, but lots of people apparently took refuge in the Catholic
church two blocks east on Nassau Street for a hastily initiated prophylactic
novena.
