Date: 2003-09-28 08:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] psymonetta.livejournal.com
Will it ever stop? I thought people were supposed to hold out until after the holidays. Have we become so cynical and maladjusted that we try to die before the holidays now.

The current page title on a site I frequent has even been changed to "Will Everybody Please Stop Dying?"

Date: 2003-09-29 04:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] shelleybear.livejournal.com
Standing at the gates of Heaven will he be asked:
"Are you now or have you ever been a pubic rat fink for the McCarthy Witch Hunts."

Sympathy for the devil

Date: 2003-09-29 07:59 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I hate Republicans. I think they are the great asshole party of American politics. You'll never find me carrying water for Senator Joe McLiar.

On the other hand, I had dabbled in radical politics in the vapid fog of my youth and I can tell you that communists were quite serious about subverting the government and were in the habit of trying to co-opt legitimate movements for their own purposes. They may have ultimately proven inept but they were quite serious.

What I'm trying to say is that, recognizing McCarthy as the evil he genuinely was then, does not dispose of the moral ambiguity that was also then.

In my own fantasies, I like to think of myself as having stood up to McCarthy (not that hard a trick — like most bullies he preferred easy marks). But, if I considered my former communist compatriots to have been genuinely disloyal and treasonous, I'm not sure whether my rectitude would have crumbled.

Roast me.

Re: Sympathy for the devil

Date: 2003-09-29 08:37 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jmhm.livejournal.com
Roast, no. It's a serious question.

The problem that I have with the HUAC/McCarthy investigations (other than the obvious) is that they were staggeringly ineffective, and they were designed to be staggeringly ineffective. There actually were communist agents in government, and they weren't caught.

It's the same issue I have with the current war. Was going to war to free Iraq a good idea? On balance, I don't think so, but mileage can vary. If you posit that it was, was a poorly-planned war where our leadership ignored screaming hints that it was going to be a disaster a good idea? No. No matter how you color it, no matter which angle you squint at it from, it wasn't a good idea, because the folks running the war used it internally to divide the country and pour spoils out to their friends, spoils we can't spare.

The witch hunters didn't run a serious investigation. They leaned on celebrities and indulged the personal spites of their "investigators." They lied. They destroyed lives not because they had reason to believe that the people living those lives were a threat, but because they wanted to be seen destroying lives (and if you do any reading about Nixon and Cohn, because they had scores to settle).

There actually were communists in high places. An investigation that would have caught them would not have concentrated on who attended banquets with Mrs. Roosevelt in front of the world and who appeared in movies by parlor pinks from Hollywood.

That investigation, though, would not have gotten primetime TV coverage.

As to Kazan, of him I can only say that if his principles were such that he could not in good conscience keep silent, he did a mighty good job until his lily-white ass was on the line.

If he believed that his friends were a danger, he was willing to live with that danger until it hit him in the pocketbook.

Personally, it's hard for me to understand how anyone could have remained a soviet-style communist after the Hitler-Stalin pack, but it's not hard for me to believe that an awful lot of progressives played footsy with them because they mouthed progressive ideals, and it's not hard for me to believe that in a time when Hearst was arranging wars for us and "agitators" for the rights of women and minorities and the poor were reflexively called communist they looked at anti-communist revelations with a jaundiced eye.

Was Kazan so much wiser? If he was, why did he ever jump into bed? Could it perhaps have been fashionable amongst his circle? Politically correct? Popular?

Could his "friendliness" have served him well at a time when Washington was telling Hollywood who to hire?

I don't see anything in his behavior that suggests to me that Kazan was anything other than a solipsistic careerist, and that he did what he did at any point for any reason other than to aggrandize himself.

Remember, at the end of the book on which On the Waterfront is based (Kazan tried very hard to make that movie his personal myth) Terry Malloy, having sacrificed everything he knows to the truth, ends up dead.

In Kazan's version, he was an unlikely conquering hero.

Dramatically, that was the wrong choice from any angle. Kazan was much too smart a director to make that mistake unless he had to, for reasons of his own.

He risked? Nothing. He gained further lucrative employment and a get-out-of-your-past-free card.

Thus "conscience" makes cowards of us all.

Re: Sympathy for the devil

Date: 2003-09-29 08:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jmhm.livejournal.com
Hitler-Stalin pact. pact. pact. pact.

coffee. must drink coffee.

More sympathy

Date: 2003-09-29 01:10 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
PeskyFly here:
I can say nothing nice about Kazan's involvement with HUAC, but he was a brilliant artist. Let's always try to remember, and truly honor him for that---- without ever forgetting the awful thing that he did in a time and situation most of us under the age of 70 can't entirely understand.

Profile

sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
sisyphusshrugged

November 2016

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789 101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 2nd, 2025 02:36 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios