James Lileks returns to form today and comes out swinging at leftist hypocrites of Boomer vintage who seem to misremember the 1950s. Their continuing childishness in socalled Western intellectual precincts, continually noted here in HazZzMat, surfaces once again in a "cutting edge" Scottish play trashing—what else—the McCarthy Witch Hunts and Walt Disney and his Mouse's part in them.
I’m not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis!...It's just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?
Because a herd of frozen zeks dying in the snows of Wherdifugistan doesn’t really connect, you know? Whereas six guys sitting around the Carnegie Deli bitching about cowardly sponsors, that strikes a chord.
Lileks comes to a preliminary conclusion about this latest leftist gilding of the lily, all too common in smug, "artistic" precincts where "shocking the middle class" is seen as progress, even though these idiots have been doing this for 60+ years now and the middle class has mostly moved on:
There’s a clinical psychological term for all this, and it’s “Pissed at Daddy.”
Indeed. Lileks is just getting warmed up now:
It made me think of the perpetual adolescent strain in post-WW2 culture. Before the 50s, when there were actual problems like an interminable Depression and Nazis, adolescents were mostly unseen in the culture. You had kids, and you had grown-ups. Adolescents were young grownups, expected to adhere to the same general rules of behavior. It was an adult culture, and adolescents were the interns. The culture would tolerate some things like Bobby Soxers, but with wry eye-rolling amusement. After the war, though, the adolescent was not only the focus of the culture’s attention, he was taken seriously.
Lileks drives relentlessly and savagely toward his conclusion:
Among the wise and brave in the west, the Red Scare and the Eisenhower Golfocracy will remain the go-to era for the modern Dark Ages, a time when talented, witty people couldn’t glibly support a collectivist blood-soaked totalitarian system without fear their boss might get the wrong idea. You can see why the “Mouse is Dead” premise, however historically flawed, was catnip for the playwrights. Disney = Mickey, and everyone loved Mickey Mouse. He was cheerful, brave, industrious, ingenious, faithful, fair, scrappy and true. He was everything the grownups said we should be.
God how we hate him.
Read the whole thing. The absolute best rant ever about the arrested leftie adolescents who continue to be taken seriously as "artists."
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