October 13, 2006
On Red and Reds Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:10 PM EST I’ve been mulling over Fred Schwarz’s post “The Age of McCarthy,” and one thing that occurs to me—the least serious thing, as it happens—is how much our political symbols and idioms have changed. A couple of years ago, a colleague somewhat smugly asserted that senior colleagues didn’t like her because she was “a red.” The idiom had a decidedly dated sound, but I certainly knew what she meant. Because her tone was also mildly ironical, I decided that she might have deliberately employed dated slang to imply the paleolithic character of her adversaries and their clueless marginality. But her remark was faintly irritating, because she somehow simultaneously implied that her politics put her job at risk, a risk to which she was courageously indifferent. In the modern academic world, the implication that being on the Marxian left always requires reckless courage is not wholly persuasive. I remembered this incident last weekend, when a friend came to town. He had recently taken a job teaching history at the University of Georgia, and a couple of weeks ago he was baffled when some of his students patronized the southeastern counties of that state. “They’re really red down there,” one of his students observed, in a very heavy Georgia accent and a clearly derisive tone of voice. My friend’s first thought was that the contention that the area between Athens and Savannah was crawling with Bolsheviks seemed improbable. He then decided that “red” had clearly changed meaning, and tentatively concluded that “red” might now mean “red state,” but neither of us knew if southeast Georgia votes more heavily Republican than any other quadrant of the state. I suggested that it might mean “redneck,” which he thought was more likely, but we agreed that we really had no idea. Red once pretty reliably meant something else, of course. An anti-Communist socialist, dead and buried many years ago, once advised me to wear a red necktie whenever I debated, so that the meanest intelligence in the room would know which side I was on, and for a while I took that advice. The advice is clearly out of date: I was at an auction at Sotheby’s last night, purely for the sake of seeing a friend in town from the U.K.; it was a charity affair for Great Britain’s Countryside Alliance, which is generally if somewhat inaccurately thought to be a decidedly High Tory cause. A longish time ago, Tories wore blue ties, at least around election time, and a couple of decades ago I formed the impression that investment bankers wore yellow ties. I am not a Tory, but I did not want to look too out of place, so, still stuck in the ’80s, I wore a yellow tie and a charcoal suit, thinking I’d blend in. I had a certain intuition about what sort of person would be doing the heavy bidding. In the event, almost every man there was wearing a red tie, which may well be what you wear nowadays to suggest that you’ve had a McNab, which I discovered means the experience of catching a salmon and shooting a stag and a brace of grouse all in the same day. A red tie has come to be, at best, a floating signifier. In The Sorrow and the Pity, the great Ophuls documentary about Vichy France, a very, very brave peasant who had been in the Resistance offered his interlocutor some wine he had made himself, observing that it was “red—like me!” I wonder what they’d make of that in Athens, Georgia. When I was a boy, a logo for a once-famous paint company showed brilliant red paint spilling over a globe and was allegedly attacked as covert Communist propaganda. That seems goofy, but not quite incomprehensible, in an age when some my countrymen have detected the ominous numbers 666 in a modern corporate logo. Still, I do not think this is a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose. In the age of McCarthy, the inquisitorial use of state power and industrywide boycotts punished political heresy on a significant scale. One oddity of the current scene is the conviction, at least in some quarters, that comparable political heresy nowadays puts comparable numbers of Americans at comparable risk from the same quarters. For as far as I can tell, that is very simply not true.
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