Have you no sense of decency, sir?

My dad was really proud. He thought it was charity to take help from the government, and for a long time he wouldn’t—even when government programs came in, you know, with respect to his farming, where he could have been paid for certain farming practices, there was quite a while that dad wouldn’t do it.

She was remembering the Dust Bowl, her experience as a girl in the middle of the worst of it, somewhere in No Man's Land--the Oklahoma panhandle or southwest Kansas, sand dunes where there'd never been, air so thick with dirt that what crops there were could burn from heft of static electricity. 

There was a time when canned food was available to those who were in the same situation that we were. We were. . .poor, I guess. We didn’t call ourselves poor, but we were. But Dad wouldn’t—he wouldn’t let Mom get [those handouts]. I think Dad would have let us eat pretty poorly before he would have accepted any help. He was—he thought that was his job. He was the breadwinner of the family, and it was a disgrace for him to think that someone else had to come in and take care of his family.*

Disgrace. Does it exist anymore? Shame. Do people still suffer it? Decency. Does anyone care? If his family suffered, he was no hero by not taking government handouts, but the portrait this woman paints of her father holds an emotion in short supply these days. 

I don't believe, culturally, we're moving toward some glorious future, on the road to "the Great Society." But neither do I buy the horrid darkness of  the "American carnage." We're image-bearers of God almighty, all of us; but we're concurrently subject to the pride that affects all of us. We're sinners capable of sainthood, saints daily subject to sin.

But the memories that woman has of her father feature something seemingly absent right now from our lives. "It was a disgrace for him to think that someone else had to come in and take care of his family." Disgrace. Somebody tell me where disgrace plays a role in our lives these days. Or shame? Does it?

I'm no Puritan. I'm afraid I shed my parents' piety long ago. But what passed as humor at the White House Correspondents' banquet last weekend was too raunchy, and too pointed, even though it was what people call "a roast." Our strength as a people is not manifest by our ability to slash each other bloody, even in the name of humor. Michelle Wolf went too far, cut too deep, brought us all down into a sinkhole. 

But no one has done more on that score than the POTUS. To hear him rail on Michelle Wolf is even more abominable. "Filthy," he called it. "Disgusting." He should know.

When, in the Fifties, people finally dared take on Senator McCarthy's red-baiting, his calling people out as communists and enemies of America, the line that echoes more than a half-century was delivered by a man named Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army in the Army/McCarthy Hearings. So appalled he was by McCarthyism, a devil's brew of fear and mindless patriotism, that what Welch said to McCarthy ought to come out of mothballs once again: "You've done enough," Welch told the junior senator from Wisconsin. "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

I don't know if anyone in this country could say what Welch did and bring us all back to our senses. It may take a Depression. Or worse. I just don't know.

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* from Surviving the Dust Bowl, a film from The American Experience, WGBH, Boston.