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I will take your question as if you asked in good faith, as I see a number of others have. If you don't know this case and the others like it you should -- go and learn. Google up Rabinowitz's essays and storms!

Unfortunately there hasn't yet been a capable playwright to recast the material into the pablumatic pre-digested form young students and dottering socialists need. It is raw and messy.

Remember Albee's play "The Crucible"? Well, that play was a 1960's socialist's retelling of the actual witch trials held in Salem, Massachussetts in 1692. Albee had his target set on the Red Scares, the long series of anti-communist and anti-socialist hysterias that had swept up mnay Americans since the 1880's or so. And in particular what was to become the watershed mark of that long series of mass hysterias, the McCarthy hearings and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Albee hit his target square on and devastated it.

In our own time, in the 1980's and early 1990's, we too had a major mass hysteria. Maybe there wasn't yet enough Prozac to go around, whatever.

The subconscious guilt root of that hysteria, I firmly suspect, was in the big increase in working mothers of very young children, and the fact that by working full-time these fertile young women in the peak of their sexual and maternal instinct bloom had to place the very naturally beloved objects of their conceiving and motherhood into the hands of disinterested unrelated parties, whilst at the same time placing their maternally lovely and sexually-peaking selves into the dog-eat-dog work-a-day world where male co-workers and male bosses at best ignored their maternal and sexual blossoming and more than often enough did note it and all the longings and desires for being cherished, longed for, mothering, wife-ing etc.

So much misplaced young motherhood in bloom. Society had not yet adapted. There was an great and serious counter-reaction thrust out of the social subconscious.

The Day Care Sex Scare. From tales of mutilated rabbits used in some weird cultic sexual rituals with toddlers, evil clowns, secret tunnels, to more prosaic yet highly charged claims of sex games with kiddies. All the evil and dark forces of the imagination unleashed!

Evil persons like the Reno herself were quick to the chase and to the exploit of this poisoned cultural well.

And poor sods and innocent good souls, as usual, where burned at all the many stakes the mass and mad public craze was able to muster.

Arthur Miller, not Albee. I read in the Brit Spectator a couple of weeks ago that the production of The Crucible on in New York (I imagine it's still running) with Liam Neeson is magnificent. Unfortunately, I'm in D.C. I wish I could get up to see it.

Author of THE CRUCIBLE was Arthur Miller, not Edward Albee (he wrote WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?). Otherwise, your analogy to the Salem witch trials in this context is on the money.

Albee had his target set on the Red Scares, the long series of anti-communist and anti-socialist hysterias that had swept up mnay Americans since the 1880's or so. And in particular what was to become the watershed mark of that long series of mass hysterias, the McCarthy hearings and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Well, I suppose you could compare the Amirault trial to the "Red Scares" except that, you know, the Communists were actually guilty.