Irv Leavitt

If you’re a Twitter user, you may have noticed that many journalists have added “An Enemy of the People” to their bios.

It’s our way of letting you all know how bad we feel about what we’ve done, now that we’ve been found out to be a bunch of traitors.

We’re learning a lot, too. Due to not paying attention in school while busy planning to undermine the nation, most of us were unaware that “An Enemy of the People” is the title of a Henrik Ibsen drama from 1882.

But our President obviously already knew all about that old Norwegian play, which made it hurt all the worse when he stamped us as turncoats. We are ignorant turncoats.

Our shallowness has compelled many of us to catch up on our studies. Now we know that the Ibsen play is about a money-making development that has corrupt underpinnings, which lead to disaster.

Our president is a developer, too, but his projects are always on the up-and-up. What a contrast!

The play’s lead character is a doctor, who lives in a town where almost everybody had been poor until he came up with the idea of building public baths for people to soak in and feel better.  So sick people came from miles away to moisten up. They brought money, so poverty wasn’t so severe anymore.

The doctor, even though he was broke, didn’t get a piece of the bath action. But he did get a pretty good job as the baths’ medical officer. They made a big deal in the first scene about people coming over to his house for dinner and eating actual meat.

The doc had warned everybody up front that the pipes carrying the water had to be built pretty high, or pollution might seep in. But his brother the mayor approved lower pipes, because that would be cheaper for the developers. Within two years, however, some of the visitors started dying off, so the doc quietly ordered the water tested.

The tests came back showing lots of poisons and bacteria.

Thank goodness that nowadays, such a thing would never happen in America!

The test results meant that not only the visiting bathers were susceptible to disease, but that everybody in town was probably drinking bad stuff for who knows how long.

The doc was pretty pleased with himself, and mused to his pals that the town might be so grateful for his diligence that they’d name him Most Valuable Doctor or whatever old Norwegians did in such circumstances.

Not so much, Brother Mayor said.

It’s super expensive to retrofit the higher pipes, he told the doc, and by the time it’s done, all the sick people will have found new places to splash around in, and everybody in town would go back to having empty pockets.

And they’d really get ticked at City Hall, which was a bad thing for Mr. Mayor, who not only got paid for his job, but had the use of a really cool hat that told everybody the mayor was coming. He had a special Mr. Mayor stick, too.

I’m not making this up.

So the mayor took off his mayor hat so he could think, and decided that they’d be better off just tinkering around a little with the pipes, and see how that went.

The doc said that was a good way to stack up big piles of dead tourists. Brother Mayor said, you know, you’ve always been a hothead. You’re turning an occasional case of the trots into World War II, which is still two wars away, anyway.

The doc says, Who’s the bath doc here? And Brother Mayor says, not you, if you don’t shut your pie hole.

The doc sees the writing on the bathhouse wall that the mayor won’t clean up the water supply, so he tries something else. He goes down to the newspaper, where he writes an occasional hothead column, and shows his newspaper pals his poison baths report.

They love it, and promise to run it. They say the mayor and his cronies regularly screw everything up, since they’re kind of crooked, and think they’re such a bunch of smarties.

The guy who controls the newspaper tells the editor and the doctor that he’ll have his big homeowners association back them up. But make sure you don’t rock the boat too much, he tells them.

This gets the doc and the editor a little nervous, because plunging the entire region into poverty would generate considerable boat-rocking.

Later, Mr. Mayor sneaks in, and tells the editor and the other guy that his brother is goofy, and hey, what good is a newspaper in a town where nobody has a nickel?

The newspaper guys say, whoa, maybe we’re not such rebels after all. How about we just run that nice editorial about how the baths are in good shape? You know, the one the mayor wrote?

That’s the doc’s second strike. He decides to call a town meeting so he can tell his story face-to-face.

But when he gets up to talk, he says a lot less about the baths than about how almost everybody in town is just so stupid.

This is kind of understandable, because yes. But he kind of sounds like a Democrat who can’t carry Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

All the townsfolk get super ticked at being called stupid, and decide shutting up the doc is the best way to make Norway great again. They vote the doc to be an enemy of the people, which means he’s pretty much out of luck all over town.

Rocks start coming through his windows, too.

So the doc and his family start packing to go to America, where they hear that everyone is smart and does the right thing.

Something interesting happens the next morning. The doc’s father-in-law, who  owns the biggest local tannery, has built up a pile of dough, which, the doc finds out, his wife and kids will  get when the old man croaks.

But minutes after the doc finds out, the tanner drops by and says he has just taken all that money and bought shares in the baths, which are now dirt cheap because of the poison rumors. The old man says if you recant all the pollution claims today, the stock will start rising, and your family gets the stock when I go to The Great Nevermind. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

But hey, the doc says, your tannery is the worst polluter. You’ve apparently been slowly poisoning the town for long before the baths were even here. So this whole thing is your fault.

You catch on fast, the old man says.

“I mean to live and die a clean man,” he adds.

“And how are you going to set about it?” the doc asks.

“You are going to cleanse me,” the tanner said.

The doc now understands that as long as his father-in-law is around, his brother is not the most evil guy in the family.

He gives the old man the bum’s rush.

As he’s leaving, the two newspaper guys arrive. They say they’re wise to a plot between the doc and the tanner to depress the price of the bath stock, then buy it up, and then give the baths the all-clear. And they admire such cunning.

Well, they admire it if they get a shovelful of cash. If they don’t, the stories they publish would have a completely different flavor.

The doc hits his one-day limit for chicanery, grabs his umbrella, and chases both the journalists out the broken windows.

Before the curtain, he decides to stay in town. He has come to the conclusion that the most worthy man in any difficult endeavor is the one who stands alone against the crowd.

He’s that guy standing alone, as long as he doesn’t count his wife and kids, who will soon be standing alongside him, starving.

So the big moral of the story is that while everybody can be crooked, the media is especially corrupt, always waiting in the shadows for their chance to run to do evil.

But wait! There’s a back story.

Ibsen, as Trump surely knew, wrote the whole thing as a protest to the angry reaction to his earlier play, “Ghosts.” In that play, he described how a man’s illicit affair wound up infecting his family with syphilis. In those days, if you talked about syphilis at all, it was as a punishment for bad behavior. Nobody was allowed to mention that the French Disease could be spread to innocent people.

Along with syphilis, things that were not to be mentioned were incest, “free love,” or that pastors could be corrupt, which all came up in “Ghosts.”

Productions of that play were closed up, and copies of the script were taken off the shelves.

So there’s another big moral.

Don’t write about things that the folks in charge don’t want to hear.

If you do, you’re going to wind up an enemy of the people.

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— Leavitt: I’m an enemy of the people, and I apologize —