The Communists Are Here!

photo © 2009 Andrew Aliferis | more info (via: Wylio)
by Guest Contributor Brian Robinson

I don’t know if you noticed, but ‘The Russkies’ are back! Not the ones who have been trying their hands at a capitalistic society for the past twenty years, but those old fashioned hammer and sickle Communists! Didn’t you know that they have finally done what Lenin and Marx tasked them to do…take over the American government?! EEEKK!! They have wormed their way into every facet of our government and are here to eat your children. At least that’s what the loudest mouths on TV and radio are telling me. Isn’t it true that the louder they are the more right they are? Or at least, more ‘truthy‘?

Though I am not old enough to have lived through the McCarthy Era and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)/ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations debacle, I doubt many reading this blog have no idea what I am talking about, but just for clarity’s sake: HUAC was an investigative committee of the US House of Representatives tasked with finding corrupting and/or dangerous social movements or influences in the US. McCarthy was a U.S. Senator who used a related arm of the government called the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to look, specifically, for Communists within our borders. (Technically, both panels still exist, by the way, they just changed the names/departments.)

While in theory neither committee is inherently bad, McCarthy found a way to make it a public bludgeon against people who, as it turned out, were not threats to the US government. They were people, by and large, who had different ideas about how government best serves its citizens. In the US, its OK to have different ideas about what does or doesn’t work, and to join like-minded people in a social or political group. As long as people are not calling for a violent overthrow of the standing government, talking, thinking or organizing are not crimes and they never have been. But in McCarthy’s world view, they were sub-human monsters bent on bringing down all the good people of the United States. Any of this sound like an echo these days?

There is an element in our society that has never liked President Obama or any Democrats, for that matter. Well, OK, maybe they like dead Democrats, but you know what I mean. This small, but vocal and voracious group has ‘warned’ us since months before the last Presidential election that Obama represented a very scary and dangerous philosophy. They just couldn’t nail it down, but somehow it had something to do with Fascism or Socialism or Communism…hell, let’s even throw in Nazism just to make a set of four! No matter that all of these political philosophies are not the same and actually contradict one another in fundamental ways, but when grasping at straws you may as well grab a handful (By the way, Nazism really doesn’t exist as its own philosophy, it’s just a bastardized offshoot of Fascism.) Somehow, here we are eight months into Obama’s administration and we now have ‘proof’ that he’s a communist, socialist, or whatever term will scare you the most! The ‘proof’ is in the form of opinion.

There are those on opinion TV and radio – it’s too hard to really call them ‘news’ organizations – who trade on America’s fear. They have taken President Roosevelt’s famous admonition to avoid fear and have made it a commodity to trade in everyday on their airwaves. The ranting and raving of people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs are fairly reminiscent to one degree or another of what McCarthy was doing in the fifties; find a target, wrap yourself in jingoistic rhetoric and let the half-truths, distortions and flat out lies fly at maximum volume! The biggest difference here is that instead of attacking random citizens like McCarthy did, Beck and his ilk turn all their hatred up the ladder towards the President and his associates. While it’s perfectly legal and covered under the First Amendment to say (almost) anything about the President, it doesn’t make it alright to flat out be lying when you do. Ironically, Beck has taken some hits for his speech (when he called Obama a ‘racist’ without an ounce of proof or fact to back that up) by having advertisers flee his show – I think the count is up in the fifties by now – and somehow sees that as an affront to his freedom of speech. Like Ms California (Carrie Prejean) before him, Beck has simply learned (which must really sting when that happens to him) that the right to free speech doesn’t guarantee the right to do it on national television. As it’s always been, our right to free speech doesn’t guarantee there will be no negative response to what we say.

Beck has heard the comparison of he and Senator McCarthy and says that it’s not apples to apples because Beck doesn’t have a position of power like McCarty had. Again, small thinking is what this guy trades in every day and it shows. National TV figures have as much power to influence political thought everyday as our politicians do. No, they don’t have the power of subpoena, but they can control the national conversation to either enlighten or terrify the population of a nation like ours. Unfortunately, as PBS and Fox have shown, enlightenment doesn’t pay as well as pandering fear does.

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Recently, I was watching two films that happened to involve two figures from the McCarthy era: screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and director Elia Kazan. Both were working in Hollywood during the McCarthy witch hunt and each took a very different path when it came to being questioned by the panel: Kazan named names and continued to work, Trumbo resisted and was blacklisted for his stance. Now, I am not going to spend time enumerating why one was wrong or right because each man made his decision based on his background and life experience and its hard to really sit here and accurately judge them fifty years later. But, there is the work they left behind that gives one pause when thinking about the tenor of the times they lived in.

‘Trumbo’ is a 2007 documentary, with some dramatic readings of his letters, that reviews the suffering that he and other blacklisted screenwriters in Hollywood suffered for not informing McCarthy’s committee who they knew to have communist affiliations, if any. Whether you believe the man guilty or innocent for having a political ideology (not for taking up arms against the US, but for having another thought about government!) what he went through to continue making art is astounding. One of the scripts he wrote, ‘Spartacus’, has one of the most heartbreaking scenes ever on film wherein a hillside of slaves claim to be Spartacus, and risk mass murder just to save an individual. Knowing Trumbo’s experiences with the hearings, it carries a tremendous amount of weight. Whether you agree with him or not, the man lived his convictions.

Kazan made a movie that more directly comments on the power and danger of political polemicists on TV. In ‘A Face in the Crowd’ Andy Griffith plays a conniving, venal and narcissistic drifter who just happens to be golden in front of a microphone or television camera. He is able to parlay his cult of personality into becoming a powerbroker for politicians who want to reach ‘his’ people. He has the eyes and ears of ‘common folk’ and makes himself the conduit to get to the minions any politician would love to have. Well, you can imagine there is a fall just waiting to happen to happen to a person like this, but you have to also know that Americans love a comeback, right? At the end of the film, Walter Matthau (in only his fourth movie at this point) delivers a speech that could have been written TODAY. It’s an astounding bit of screenwriting by Bud Schulberg that is eerily prescient and is fully informed about how we have always viewed celebrity in our culture, political or otherwise. One of the hardest things these days is remembering the difference between celebrity and news.