Karl Marx once said that history always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. America has always liked to think of itself as one country, united by unassailable truths, but in fact it has always been two countries, split almost down the middle by a rural and an urban way of looking at the world, values versus change, science versus blind faith.

If you read history, you know that the polarization that has nearly paralyzed the American government is not new at all, but another struggle in the country’s long and very painful efforts to define itself in  peaceful ways. This has sometimes been possible and sometimes not, but the Republic has always survived.

The son of Russian and European Jews, my family always worshipped the idea of education and science and revered a country free of the often murderous  religious dogma that has shed so much blood in the world, and sheds blood still.

Jews know only too  well what the faithful can do when their beliefs are challenged.

Some struggles just never seem to got away, and today we are fighting them more bitterly than ever. It’s as if we lurch back and forth between enlightenment and repression, the eternal tug of war for the soul of the world.

Tonight, Maria is giving me a gift, she is taking me to see the classic movie Inherit The Wind, playing at a theater in Williamstown, Massachusetts, about an hour away. It is a wonderful gift for me, Maria knows what an extraordinary impact this movie had on a troubled but idealist teenage boy adrift in Providence, R.I.

I know this script and the court testimony by heart, and have seen the movie many more times than I can count.  Inherit the Wind came out a lifetime ago, in 1960 when I was thirteen. It is based on an all too real a story,  a trial held in 1925 in a small midwestern trial that transfixed the country, it became the national battleground for the raging conflict that still goes on between people who believe in the scientific idea of evolution and people who follow the Bible in the most literal way.

The ACLU, then as always standing up to the abuse of government power, persuaded a young Dayton, Tennesse school teacher named John Scopes to defy a state law banning the teaching of Charles Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution, a landmark work that changed the way the earth viewed the history of the human species, and horrified Christianity, by far the dominant faith in America.

Scopes taught Darwin in his classroom, was arrested and jailed. The ACLU asked  him to  represent Scopes and H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist and iconoclast – he was outraged by the arrest – made it a national story, one that transfixed the country party through the new medium of radio.

The movie was prescient in its evocation of the continuing struggle between dogma and science that is so evident today in the fights over gay marriage, climate change and transgender rights. The issue is whether every word in the Bible stands as factual history or whether it is just another book written by brilliant theologians.

I can’t to this day explain the impact this movie made on me, I took the bus to Boston, then New York City at least a dozen times by myself to go see it, my parents thought I was made. I read every book written about the trial, especially the colossal intellectual conflict between Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, who volunteered to prosecute Scopes.

I have so many memories of long bus rides, darkened theaters, I always went alone, I always had a small tub of popcorn with some butter. I will do that again tonight.

I could not, then or now, imagine the justification for jailing, demonizing or even killing people who are different. It seems to be a basic and fundamental human instinct. Thank God there are always Darrows around to stand and fight,  to protect science and freedom from ignorance and bigotry. But I think the lesson of Inherit The Wind is that I must accept that the fight will never really be over. Because of Darrow, I am never shocked to see that this is true, not in the past, not now.

The religious faithful flocked to Dayton to see the confrontation between Darrow, a brilliant and eloquent lawyer and Bryan, a national political figure who had once run for President. The evangelists who prosecuted Scopes came to see Darrow, reviled as a heretic and infidel, humiliated.

But the trial went the other way. Darrow (played by Spencer Tracy), perhaps one of the finest and most articulate legal minds in the country’s history, devastated Bryan (Frederick March) in his cross-examination, which Bryan foolishly submitted to. The cross-examination was so piercing and humiliating that Bryan’s heart gave out and he died two days later.

It was brutally hot in Dayton, and the struggle between these two giants, each at polar ends of the cultural and political spectrum had to be held outside of the courtroom it was so hot. I never imagined that this trial would be as relevant in 2017 as it was in 1925, or even 1960.

I have been a rabid follower of Clarence Darrow all of my life, he was an uncompromising defender of the downtrodden and persecuted, of the hated and despised. He defended murders, radical activists, bombers and African-Americans caught up in the brutality of the Deep South. He was a fearless intellectual who lived right off the grounds of the University of Chicago. He was often called a “lion” in court, but a lamb outside of it. He loved to read books and spend time with his patient wife Ruby.

Why did this movie have such an impact on me? I know now, but didn’t then, that I felt oppressed and mistreated myself. I wanted to be Darrow, to stand up to the forces that had abused and persecuted me, my head was full of eloquent arguments that were never heard or listened to.

I have always identified with the John Scopes of the world, punished, jailed, even killed for their beliefs, even in a country that claimed it was free. Today, Darrow would be in a courtroom challenging the hateful assaults on Muslims and immigrants. He would draw hundreds of  reporters to the courtroom, as Darrow did, and touch the hearts and soul of the country with his eloquence and passion.

He was always on the side of the underdog, he always argued for mercy and compassion, for learning and human progress. In Dayton, Tennessee, he won a great courtroom victory over hatred and ignorance. But it didn’t last for very long. Beliefs that seem ancient seem to have eternal life, they are never put aside to make room for learning or the evolution of knowledge. I don’t think a movie made today would dare to challenge religious fundamentalism as directly as Inherit The Wind does.

I am eager to see if it touches and inspires me as deeply as it die when I was 13. It’s a lovely gift from Maria to me. Either way, I’ll let you know. It seems particularly relevant to me today.

Roger Ebert wrote of Inherit The WInd  that some ideas will always be rejected by those who judge a statement not by its content but by its source. That is precisely the argument between Darwinism and creationism. Inherit the Wind is ultimately a battle between those who believe, as Spencer Tracy said the movie, that “an idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.”

I warned Maria that I would cry during the movie, and more than once. I will probably also speak along with the courtroom dialogue, I can recite it verbatim. I suppose if you are wondering why I am so deeply affected by the assaults on refugees and immigrants, I would have to say  you can blame Clarence Darrow.