Jihadist thugs are now attacking us in the name of Islam. No doubt there are a lot of Islamic believers who don’t support this. But like the Germans in World War II, they are not speaking up… for good reason of course, as there was a good reason back in the days of the Third Reich. But because they aren’t speaking up to oppose what is being done in their name, the world has a Muslim problem. Everybody knows this. Not many public figures dare to say it out loud. Some public figures don’t want to know it, much less say it out loud.

Bill O’Reilly, who has taken great pains in recent years to position himself as a centrist, has now had the courage to say out loud what everybody knows. The predictable cries of outrage have ensued. Juan Williams, a true blue liberal who has no doubt outraged his bosses at NPR for years by appearing on Fox, even if it was to espouse their cause, is now paying the price for O’Reilly. They couldn’t fire him; he doesn’t work for them. Juan does, so out he went.

I used to watch Bernie Goldberg in his early days on Fox trying to retain what he could of his liberal beliefs. As he came to see the savagery of the left he slowly came around to being more conservative. It will be interesting to see the same thing happen to Williams. Both of them were decent liberals who found that the ground moved out from under them.

NPR has made a serious miscalculation. It should have buttoned its lip and shut up. But leftists are not just hateful, they are stupid.

Fifty four years ago, I was elected first vice president of the New York local of the television actors union which came to be known as AFTRA. My fellow board members and I fought hard to convince members to merge with the Screen Actors Guild.  Double the size of the union, double the bargaining power! But some of the members resisted, afraid that the number of actors competing with them for jobs would multiply. (Virtually all work produced for television was live and did not involve film and therefore SAG. Why let all those west coast people in on a good thing!)

As time went by, things shifted, more and more shows began to be produced on film and SAG became dominant. Now, it was the film actors turn to fear competition. Why let that little TV union in on a good thing. There’s almost no live TV left, these guys are nothing but news-casters and talk show hosts.  Every attempt at merger has failed because a vocal frightened minority in first one union and then the other fought tooth and nail against it on the grounds that there would be more actors competing against them for jobs. These actors are, I think, insecure in their talent so, naturally, scared of competition.

Recently, something unforeseen happened. The technology of video- tape became so improved that it began to compete in quality with that of film. TV sitcoms and dramas could now be shot under the aegis of the smaller union, AFTRA. Because it was smaller and weaker, it had had to settle for less pay and fewer benefits for its members. There was lots of money to be saved by producers. They could hire the same actors under AFTRA for whom they would have had to pay more under SAG. 

Frightened little people, over the years, have scuttled chance after chance to have performers represented by one large, powerful union. Now any chance at merger is probably gone forever. When I was a kid, FDR on the radio said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. We should be afraid of fear, or at least of acting out of it. That always wreaks havoc and now we actors are paying for it.

Who are you and what have you done with Jack Bauer? That’s what I wanted to scream at the pod person who starred on “24” last Monday. When the conservative creators of the show left and liberals took over, I was apprehensive. But by and large, the quality of the program kept up. I snorted, of course, when a bad character was threatened with torture by other bad guys. She was hauled into a medieval chamber filled with pincers, hot pokers and iron maidens. Then she was strapped down, a washcloth was draped over her mouth… and she was water boarded. Oy. Then, a week ago, Jack murdered her in cold blood, not to get information… she’d already been terrified into offering up the info… but just because he felt like it.

What?! 

But this week the writers went too far. Bauer tortures a bad guy horribly… and enjoys it. In the next room a woman can be heard screaming, “No. No. He’s a human being!” Bauer uses pliers and a blow torch. The guy screams horribly but refuses to give up. Bauer steps aside and mutters to himself, “This isn’t working.” Then, realizing that the terrorist (my word, not theirs) has probably swallowed what Bauer needs, he guts him like a fish, plunges his hand into the dying  man’s stomach and retrieves the cell phone pad or whatever the hell it was. 

This season’s writers are dramatizing what they’ve always believed: that what Bauer has been doing for eight seasons was always wrong, and that his behavior this year is the inevitable outcome, that he has, like America under Bush, become completely de-humanized. I’ve watched every episode of “24” ever aired and then bought the season DVDs. I won’t watch the remaining three.

Jack is dead. The show is over. I can forgive the pseudo-intellectual left a lot, but not this. Dicking with the only primetime show I ever watched all the way through! Why not put their own dumb stuff on. But no, they had to ruin mine.

One night at the Vanguard I watched in shocked amazement as he pointed to a customer and said, “Oh look, we’ve got a nigger here tonight.” The crowd froze. “And another darky is with him and a third jigaboo.” The silence was deafening. But Lenny was an advocate of the old show business maxim: if you’ve gone too far… go farther. He’d only just begun “Look over here”, he said, “A kike. And a mocky is at the table with him. And we got two spicks in the back. Hey, there’s a fag at the bar.” Slowly, the laughter began. Lenny said nigger a hundred times. Finally the crowd  was howling. The pure outrageousness of it all had gotten to them and they simply had no choice. 

When Lenny had them where he wanted them he turned serious. “It’s all arbitrary,” he told the crowd. “We agree to be offended by certain words. What if we decided that the word dentist was offensive. You dirty rotten dentist! Then that would become the insult du jour. But what if we simply decide not to be offended. What if we just take the sting out of these words and use them as terms of affection. ‘Hey niggah, how ya doin’? ‘Fine, honky, an’ you?’  What if we all just agreed that words can’t hurt? Then nobody could scream insults at a poor little Black girl in Little Rock.” 

How poor Lenny’s wishes have not come true. Now we can’t even say nigger to condemn its use. We have to call it the “N-word.” How pathetic. And the “F-word” is next as the gay rebellion takes charge. At least you can still go outside to smoke. But certain words are taboo anywhere. 

The left has decided to insult the tea party people by calling them tea baggers. First, they had to explain it was an insult by pointing out that it was an obscure sexual term. I’d never heard of it; not many Americans had. But the tea party folks, on cue, dutifully chose to be insulted. What if they hadn’t. Tea bagger is kind of cute, really. It’s a better nickname than tea party. And you could hold up little Tetley tea bags. Why not co-opt the name. Overnight, they couldn’t insult you anymore. It would annoy them and they’d stop trying and look for some other way to put you down. 

While I’m on the subject of Lenny Bruce, he had a great routine on the subject of nature versus nurture. It went like this: the infant child of a pair of brilliant physicists is lost in the woods. Raised by a pack of wild dogs, he finds his way out again at the age of eighteen and goes on to graduate with honors from M.I.T. But a year after that he’s killed chasing a car.

Beautiful Nola was anxious to read the review of the new Off-Broadway show she’d just opened in. The Times and Trib would be covering it but Nola wanted to see what The Daily Worker had to say. Her face fell when she read it. The play was a socially relevant drama, of course, about the struggles of the Negro. She had chosen a dazzling white suit for her wardrobe. The critic said that this was unconscious racism on her part. She had, in fact, picked the suit because it made her boobs look good. 

Sometimes Nola would drag me to upper Broadway where the Thalia, a dusty old nineteen-thirties movie theater, screened Russian language films from the Soviet Union. These were not the brilliant pictures which had come out in the early days of the Revolution, but kitschy agitprop which followed the party line.  In one of them an enormous white plane majestically glides down out of the heavens and lands in an airport somewhere in the Ukraine. Little girls with bouquets of flowers rush out onto the tarmac. The door of the plane opens, steps are put in place and down them and onto a red carpet strides an actor playing the part of Joseph Stalin. He is gloriously handsome and dressed in a dazzling white suit. I glance over at Nola in the darkness of the theater; she does not return my glance.          

Party members in the arts back then willingly did as they were told. Their indoctrination had been total; they knew in their hearts they were doing what was right. Writers wrote about the downtrodden; actors played workers nobly, capitalists evilly. Musicians composed music of the people. To deviate from the party line was unthinkable. With the advent of the Cold War, this behavior slowly faded away. Now it seems to be back. Artists no longer take their orders from Moscow but, it appears, from Washington. Not to do so results in being shunned (or de-funded). 

I’ve been around long enough to see this kind of thing come and go in our beautiful country. Let’s hope it doesn’t last as long as it did back then. This time we’ve got Big Hollywood on our side.

Here’s what popped into my head on the Miller Show. At the age of five, my mother told me that if my father ever left her she would kill herself, and that if I wanted to prevent that from happening, it was my job to keep him around. This is a heavy responsibility to lay on a kid of five but I accepted it without question. I adored my mother. She was beautiful, smart, sexy and funny. She was also a self-destructive drunk who had room in her heart only for my father. He was a charming sadist with room in his heart for no-one: a hot-shot liberal who helped found the New England branch of the A.C.L.U. but in private often used the word jewbastard.

Their marriage was, to say the least, tumultuous. I had been sent by Central Casting to play the small but important role of the child. After each of their frequent and alcoholic altercations, my father would storm out of the house (actually, the rented, upper half of a house in a working class neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts…Gates-Crowley country) and head off to spend a few days with one of his girlfriends. I’d be sent after him, once actually barefoot in the snow, a sobbing ten year old, to catch up and explain how much I loved and needed him and beg him to come back. “Go home,” he’d tell me. “I’ll be back in a while.”

He would be back after a while and things would settle down for a time until the next upheaval. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, my father left home for good and, true to her word, my mother went to the kitchen, lay down on the linoleum floor, turned on the gas and packed it in. I put our furniture in storage, made living arrangements for myself and went on with my life. After ten years of analysis, two years of Reichian therapy, fire-walking, re-birthing and then a second ten years of analysis, I had forgiven my poor, sweet, alcoholic mother. But my father remained beyond my powers to forgive. The last shrink I attended put it this way. “The no-good bastard isn’t worth forgiving. Live with it.”

Meanwhile, I had become a Christian… my own form of odd-ball Christian (leave out the middleman and deal direct with the Maker for big savings). Each morning and night I get down on my knees and thank God for my life and ask Him to make me grateful all the time instead of just most of the time. One morning, a few weeks ago, I realized that I had forgiven my father. I don’t know how or when, I just knew that it had happened. Not because the son of a bitch was worth forgiving and certainly not because he had asked for it, but just because, if I was ever going to feel grateful all the time, in other words, if I was going to become truly happy, I had to forgive him. It wasn’t for him (although it affects him, wherever he is) it was for me.  The heaviness in my heart which he represented and which I’d always carried around, was just gone. I felt lighter. I loved my wife more now. I loved my kids, my grandkids, my friends, the blue sky above and maybe even guys who cut me off on the freeway. (Well…) I hadn’t tried to forgive my father. It had been, it seems, the inevitable result of my prayers to feel grateful, my determination to be happy.

Back to Professor Gates. He has spent a career immersing himself in all the bad stuff that white people have done to Black people. His head is full of it. It seethes in him like a cauldron and it hurts. He will never feel relief until he forgives us white folks. Not just good ones like Officer Crowley, an Irish cop who has worked harder than probably any white guy alive to understand the Black condition, but ordinary ones like me. Oh yes, and really bad ones like the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Hard, you say? If it was easy, as my dear old grandfather used to remark, everybody would do it. But it’s the only way. You can forgive and be filled with happiness and peace of mind or you can hold on to justifiable anger and be rich, famous, tenured at Harvard and miserable.

My high school pal Parker Swan and I would go to the Translux Theater in Boston which featured non-stop newsreel coverage of the war. When bombings of German cities were shown, we’d cheer. After V-E day, when the battle moved to the Pacific, newsreels featured G.I.s using flame throwers to dig Japanese soldiers out of their caves on Iwo Jima and Wake Island. When the enemy came screaming from his dugout, Parker and I would cheer. I sold newspapers, The Globe and Herald, in Harvard Square by the entrance to the subway station. When the A-bomb, about which we had been told nothing, was dropped on Hiroshima, the headline read New Kind of Bomb Devastates Japanese City. Everyone was elated.

War was a way of life for Americans in the early forties. Heroism was expected. Only one soldier was ever executed for cowardice. The year after the conflict ended, I graduated from high school and turned 18. Immediately, I joined the army and, after a few months of basic training, I took a troop train across the country to San Francisco, where I lost my virginity at “Brown’s Hotel… Where You Can Always Get In” and then shipped out for Yokohama. It was late December and we were crowded into a Victory Boat, a converted cargo ship which featured stacks of hammocks four high. I was in the bottom one so there were three young dog faces above me. We sailed along the coast of the Aleutian Islands. The storms were ferocious. The ship would rise up and then slam down. Almost all of us were seasick. The first couple of days out, I was afraid I would die.  The next few, I was afraid I wouldn’t. The compartment I slept in was next to the mess. The few G.I.s and crew members who weren’t sick lined up alongside my bunk, waiting to get into the mess hall to eat my food as well as theirs. Some of them whistled cheerfully. As I looked up at their faces I was filled with hatred. I wanted to kill them for the crime of not being as sick as I was.

I managed to get up above board as often as possible, so I could breathe the fresh air and get away from the aromas of the mess hall. They showed a movie every night on deck in the freezing cold. It was “The Black Dahlia starring Dan Duryea. Someone had screwed up and loaded only one film aboard for the six or seven day trip.” I watched it every night. Sometime during the night of December 24th, we crossed the international dateline and woke up on the 26th. That’s the kind of trip it was. The Red Cross gave each of us a little box containing two cookies and a tooth brush.

I spent a year of occupation duty in a devastated Japan, then sailed home and was mustered out. I never had to fire my carbine in anger but my experience in the army and my evenings with Parker Swan watching newsreels at the Translux Theater created profound respect in me for those who had done so. My wife, actress Alley Mills, and I have shown up at the USO station at Los Angeles Airport to say hello to the boys who are passing through on their way somewhere. They love to have their pictures taken with her: “Oh wow, the mom from ‘The Wonder Years!’”

On this day of Troop-A-Thon, I am especially grateful to our service people and will be sure to say an extra little prayer for all of them tonight.

Disney had taken miles of extraordinary footage from the long-running English nature series and condensed and shaped it into a story of sorts: mama polar bear and her cubs emerge out of hibernation in the arctic snow, with the adorable babies blinking at their first sight of the summer sun. She begins the task of teaching them to survive. Papa bear, meanwhile, or “dad” as he’s known in the narration, is off on the ice floe, trying to catch a seal for his dinner. But “global warming” is making this difficult to do as the ice is breaking up earlier than usual. Dad falls into the frigid water and begins swimming for his life. He swims and swims till he gets to Antarctica where there is an abundance of seals. But dad is too weak from all that swimming, can’t nab a seal, and lies down and dies. End of family.

Now, polar bears don’t mate; they copulate and split. “Dad” has never seen the cubs he spawned and never will. Neither is he any longer interested in mom nor she in him. It’s not a family. And “dad” is, in all probability, played by a number of polar bears from different episodes in the original series. This sad downer of a story has been cobbled together by the Disney writers to make a point: we Homo sapiens are a mortal danger to families and to our beautiful planet.

After a lucrative opening weekend, moviegoers realized that this picture was not something they wanted to take junior to see, and business fell off sharply. The movie could have made a fortune if an uplifting story had been created. Sure, nature can be treacherous and the world is often a dangerous place to live in. But that’s not the main fact of life. The main fact of life is that a gloriously beautiful and perfectly designed planet (and universe) has been created for us and for all our animal and vegetable co-inhabitants (my brother the carrot). Sunrises and sunsets are thrilling; even rainstorms and hurricanes are breathtaking. The BBC photographers captured all of this and the Disney film does show a lot of it, including the mass migration of thousands and thousands of animals. But of course, they focus in on the one baby elephant that gets separated from the herd and wanders off to starve to death. Hour upon hour of glorious footage, filmed by brilliant and intrepid photographers are turned into an agitprop picture condemning consumerism and capitalism.

“Wall-E,” a brilliant animated picture, is another example of the Disney crowd using its powerful creativity to send a message to the younger set: we are destroying the earth. “We” meaning, of course, America with its incredibly successful production of “stuff”. And like all good propaganda, it has more than a kernel of truth to it. The waste in this country is overwhelming. I don’t object to reasonable preachment in favor of conservation and against waste. What pisses me off is the fact that the cultural left is frightening the children. And they’re doing it on purpose. Polls of little kids have been taken which show that they are scared as hell that the earth will be an uninhabitable place to live in when they grow up.

There’s a video called “The Story of Stuff” being shown in classrooms around the country. It has been put together by a former Greenpeace employee and, to quote The New York Times, it “paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned”. The filmmaker also complains that the federal government “spends too much on the military.”

Children are being frightened. It’s not enough that the cultural left is sexualizing them at an early age, it’s also making a generation of worrywarts out of them: trans-fats and second hand smoke and climate change and toxic this and toxic that. And who is strong enough to save us from all this? Only the government, of course; only Big Brother. Worriers tend to vote Democrat and the left is systematically manufacturing a generation of them. Child molesters belong in jail.

Anyway, I guess Feldstein was just crazy enough to make the magazine a huge success. Now long retired and living in Montana (which seems to be a magnet for marginally crazy people), Feldman, an old lefty, recently forwarded an e-mail to a friend of a friend of mine who forwarded it to me. A million plus people have watched this e-mail by now. It’s a slickly produced film attacking Barack Obama. Any surprise that the President’s base is now turning on him?  It explains that he (Obama), is in the pocket of some amorphous, only hinted-at, world-wide society of manipulators who are behind everything bad in the world: “The Trilateral Commission, founded and conceived by David Rockefeller and his obscenely wealthy (redundancy?) Bilderberg Society cohorts… an amalgam of carefully chosen members of ‘The Elite’… the powerful rich… from the three main areas of the world: The U.S.A…. Europe… and Japan… who would slowly and carefully maneuver the free people of the Earth into a ‘One World’ system of Corporate/Fascism.” This is very old stuff. Conspiracy fodder. Been around for years in one form or another. International bankers turning Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into a single country, etc. And it’s all slickly packaged with music and graphics.

Left-wingers and right-wingers come together when they become extreme enough. The Nazi Party was called National Socialism, very similar to Stalin’s Communism, with the addition of “the Fatherland”. The crazies behind this film say they are non-partisan. They are: they’re equal-opportunity haters. They’ll never be satisfied until they are standing in the smoldering ruins of society… any society. They only feel comfortable in chaos. They whip up people’s fears and then give those fears something to latch onto.

The internet (as we are constantly reminded) is a powerful tool for good or for evil. This stuff is evil. It never goes away, and like all evil, it’s seductively attractive. No conservative can ever be conservative enough nor any liberal liberal enough to satisfy the conspiracy crowd. They are political nymphomaniacs, obsessive but incapable of satisfaction, and the stuff they disseminate is like pornography; once hooked on it you need more and more. Like the title of the late Marilyn Chambers flick, they are “Insatiable.”

In March, Andrew Breitbart was on a TV panel with a left-wing, intellectual African-American civil rights activist who, when asked if the election of Obama was at least a step forward, replied, “Just because one Black man is living in ‘public housing’ in Washington D. C., does not an end to racism make.” Nothing would satisfy him. If every white person in America were killed, he would turn on the remaining African-Americans and say they had been polluted and were Uncle Toms.

I’ve got no ending for this piece. I don’t know what to think. Everything’s a mess. The country is more divided than it has been since the war between the states. I’m not outraged by the left or the right. In my day, I’ve been both. One year I proudly sported on my refrigerator a Christmas card from the Young Republicans and Season’s Greetings from Gus Hall of the American Communist Party. The only people I intensely dislike are the ones who throw shit in the fan just to see everybody scurry out of the way.

I’m not a pessimist. I do believe that in some way we don’t understand, God has a hand in things and it will all work out for America. Our money says In God We Trust. And we are the best country, aren’t we?

Orson Bean’s latest novel, M@il For Mikey, is published by Barricade Books

“Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damaage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.

“But physical pain is a passing thing. The enduring torment is the taunting reminder that darkness encroaches. Already he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually his past, like his future, eludes him.”

In his editorial, Mr. Margulies describes how Abu Zubaydah was water-boarded: “They strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to produce the sensation of suffocation and insipient panic. Eighty three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture”, he writes.  “I am content with the self evident truth that it was wrong.”

The CIA did all this to Zubaydah, Marglies concludes,  “because they believed he was evil”. Because they believed he was evil. Because they believed he was evil. When I had calmed down a bit after reading this, I typed out a letter to The Times which they printed. Here’s what the letter said:

“She looks into his eyes. Hers are filled with terror. The heat is unbearable. Her skin is beginning to blister. He reaches out and takes her hand. His hand has a deep gash in it from the shattered glass of the window he has helped to smash. ‘Hold on tight to me,’ he whispers. ‘Keep your eyes closed. Don’t look down.’ Together, they step through the jagged opening of a high floor of the World Trade Center. On the sidewalk below, people shriek in horror.

I don’t know the young woman’s name, but I do know that, like Abu Zabadah, she can’t picture her mother’s face either.”

Orson Bean’s latest novel, M@il For Mikey, is published by Barricade Books