July 26, 2008: The Salem Paradox
I've been pondering the paradox that the Salem tourist industry fails to reconcile, namely that they sell themselves as the Witch City--full of New Age stores and magic wands--but none of the people executed as witches in 1692 actually were witches. They were just inconveniently weird old people and/or enemies of the Putnam family.
The Salem Witch Museum has two halves to its exhibit: the cool dramatic retelling of the accusations and trials, and the bland glass cases afterward showing how negative witch stereotypes have poisoned us against folk magic.
That's pretty typical of most exhibits we saw: "Hanging witches is bad. Not because hanging people on trumped up charges is bad, but because it is intolerant."
It wasn't systematic intolerance that killed those twenty innocent people. At best, it was a failure of critical thinking and a subservience to a group mindset. At worst, it was individual malice, opportunism, ambition, and vindictiveness.
What are we supposed to carry away from Salem? That we should be tolerant of those kooky Wiccans, none of whom were around in Salem to be executed? Or that we shouldn't make up crazy shit about our enemies as a pretext to hang them?
The latter seems a bit more poignant and useful these days.
