The Night Culture Fought Back. Good Night and Good Luck

Christine Merser, June 8, 2025

Something extraordinary happened last night.

There is a playbook for democracy’s fall. For a dictator to take over. For the oligarchs to have total control.

Part of the playbook is the dumbing down of the citizens of the country being taken over. Depleting education, especially the accuracy of history, and replacing it with something that props up the regime. That’s already begun.

Another critical aspect is the breaking down of culture. That includes the arts. I think it’s one of the reasons that someone like a Springsteen or Taylor Swift is so frightening to a Donald Trump, who is dependent on ignorant Americans to carry him through the rest of the country. Which, let’s face it, has worked for him so far. But when Springsteen goes around the globe to cheering crowds of tens of thousands and mocks him and calls him out for the fool and the lowlife that he actually is, and social media magnifies it, it threatens the progress he’s made in the dumbing down of America. Look out if Taylor Swift decides she wants to actually come out of the quiet closet she’s living in presently.

One of the regrets I have is that I didn’t realize how many Americans have enjoyed so few of the things that have been part of my day-to-day life that I never really thought much about. Living and traveling all over the world. Museums. Theater. Broadway openings. Best-selling books without noticing whether they were $11 or $30.

Providing an education for our daughter that included the very best schools that she was able to earn admission to, and being able to afford to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world that had the early educational opportunities that helped educate her in a way that gave her access to the secondary schools she needed to have the education she earned.

I didn’t think much about the fact that the world came so easily to me but did not come so easily to most of America. And in fact, it has come to less and less of America over the past decades, as the middle class was decimated by the emergence of oligarchs and things like Walmart taking away thriving businesses across the land.

So what happened last night was extraordinary. And the fact that it was brought about by George Clooney, who Donald Trump can’t stand for the very reason I mentioned above, makes it all the more rich. And I use the word rich because that’s exactly what it was.

It brought all the riches that were afforded me to all of America and actually across the world.

Clooney was one of the producers and starred in the role of the Broadway hit Good Night, and Good Luck, which brings to the stage the confrontation between Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Rachel Maddow just finished a book, which you should read if you can get your hands on it, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, that shows the parallels between that time and this one. Although this one is going to be much harder to overcome.

As best I can ascertain this early after it aired last night, millions watched it. And it was great theater. And one of the surprises was a very popular comedian, Ilana Glzer, had a role that no one realized was in it, but she was recognizable to many Americans.

And so, political commentary was presented not as facts about what’s happening today, but as bigger-picture questions for Americans to think about and ponder on their own to come to their own conclusions. It was presented on the stage, on the Broadway stage, which had never been done before live, for the entire country to see. A country where many had never seen a Broadway Show live. So the culture and education and dumbing down of America was thwarted in a very big way last night, just hours after Donald Trump illegally entered California, who told him not to send in special forces to violently intervene in a peaceful, legal demonstration of the citizens of California standing up to horrendous immigration tactics that are against everything our country stands for.

What does it do? Maybe some of you will say not much. But I say a lot.

This regime is not going to be brought down by anything other than a series of hundreds of acts of civil disobedience on local levels, like California is doing yesterday and again today, and like CNN provided to the country last night.

I know that there were people sitting in homes in Iowa and Ohio and Pennsylvania, and maybe even that foreign country of Florida, who watched it on television last night and maybe had a twinge of regret and understanding of what our country is capable of rather than what it’s becoming. Who thought the beauty of theater should be what we want for our future, not what they are providing.

So I thank you, CNN, for having the courage to air it. I thank you, George Clooney, for standing up to this tyrant who’s in office for now. And I beg my fellow citizens to begin the process of local resistance, even though it may take a little courage, to make sure that they do not win.