That’s an interesting comment coming from one of America’s best actors.

Morgan is a craftsman’s craftsman. I believe he represents the best of classic American acting since Henry Fonda. With similar aesthetics and discipline, both he and Henry Fonda have shown young American actors how to do “more with less” but do it with sharpshooting accuracy.

 I can honestly say that I’ve never seen him give a bad performance. Either on stage or in film.

I, along with the hundreds of others less disciplined, certainly wish we could say that for ourselves.

Morgan seems to be congenitally incapable of substandard work. Plus he carries what Fonda carried and what the great English director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie said was the rarest gift among actors: “nobility”.

Morgan and I once discussed, briefly I must add, getting “pissed off”. It was in relation to why Morgan hasn’t performed Othello in a big venue. He generally indicated that the rage within Othello was out of his reach.

Hmmm …

Now, I know he doesn’t want Barack Obama to be tearing the Presidential seal to tatters as Laurence Olivier might be prone to, but Morgan does want the President “pissed off”.

Much of America, as I am sure Morgan Freeman is aware, is very “pissed off” with Obama.

Morgan, please ask Representative Allen West of Florida and Presidential Candidate Herman Cain if we, who are “pissed off” with our President, are unjustified in being “pissed off”.

I’ll try to maintain my own calm as I write this.

President Obama promised Americans a “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.”

We are learning, however, that to “transform America,” the President must first help to transform the Middle East.

“The Arab Spring” – which President Obama, through his own private sources, obviously knows more about than his CIA advisers – is nitroglycerin in the trumpets of a mariachi band.

The ultimate, long term leadership of Egypt is still in question.

Now with Muammar Gaddafi in hiding, Libya’s future has massively dire possibilities, alternatives that could prove quite catastrophic to not only America but the entire Free World.

Isn’t it clear, though, that the “fundamental transformation of the Free World’s Freest Nation” would necessitate an equal and earth-shattering transformation of Freedom itself?

Obama’s idea of a Presidency, however, and government involvement in almost every walk of life, defies the very meaning of individual freedom and responsibility.

Why?

The President’s economic policies are not merely Keynesian, they’re Marxist.

His idea of State-controlled Capitalism benefits the government’s most cooperative businesses which are, as he describes them, “too large to fail”. He shuts out his political competitors, the individually free small businesses which are always a challenge to the large, fat and generally lazy “Bigs”.

Obama is a Marxist ideologue and the intensity of his commitment to ending a totally free market is disturbingly fierce.

And you want him to get “pissed off”?!

You who have been the “coolest” of professionals on any set in the world. The calmest. The most assured, and on the set of Along Came A Spider, the most helpful to other actors.

Is the “Arab Spring” filled with similar “intensity” as that of President Obama? What percentage of the “Arab Spring” is Marxist as well as radically Islamic? What message would a “pissed off” Marxist President be sending to the Marxist troublemakers involved with the “Arab Spring”?

The following comments and conclusions in the Walid Phares interview indicate that President Obama’s cool and his distance from the action, his delays at entering the political nightmares still growing in Egypt, and virtually on fire in both Libya and Syria, are exactly what invites terrorists and radical Islamists to take power in all three places.

Is that what you want, Morgan?

Walid Phares says that the chance of Jihadist presence in Libya is “50/50”.

He says, “Libya could become another Iran.”

He also made perfectly clear that Obama’s hesitation to act is allowing the terrorist element within Libya (as well as Egypt and Syria) is helping the Jihadists to flourish. Because America has failed to act, the “Islamist radicals” have a foothold. It is fairly clear why President Obama is not getting “pissed off” with the Middle East. He seems to love and approve what is happening there.

However, Morgan, it’s not the Middle East you want Obama “pissed off” about. It’s the Republican opposition which is filled with increasingly “pissed off” Americans.

The consistently “coolest” thing to be, or to have ever been since the 1960’s, is to be a Marxist. And you were one of the coolest actors I’d ever met.

That is what you were when we met for the first time at the Charles Street Playhouse in 1970, performing in the very Marxist creation, Jungle of Cities, by that most Marxist of playwrights, Bertolt Brecht. I was a dizzily ambitious young actor who didn’t really give a damn about the political philosophy being sold. The Boston Globe critic gave me a positive review largely because he must have mistook me for a young Marxist. That same critic later murdered my Richard III because of my very un-Marxist idea within it: link Shakespeare’s vision of bottomless and over-the-top evil to Napoleon Bonaparte and that first glimpse of Marxist/Communist Revolt: the French Revolution.

Who knows? I was not an intellectual when we first met and have learned since then that I’m not one now. I’m rolling through ideologies and ideologues looking for the savage poetry in all of it. Having found it, I’m a very “pissed off” American exile watching the United States from Canada.  I cringe in dread as the United States drowns itself with the Marxist/Maoist philosophy running throughout most of the Obama Nation.

Performing in Jungle of Cities is one stage of Marxism. However, hanging Mao Zedong on the White House Christmas tree is much more eloquently “Red” than even singing Kurt Weill’s music … which I happened to do in a college production of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera.

We are obviously over the McCarthy days and Joseph’s Irish name, in addition to my own moniker, goes down into the bowels of a recent Marxist’s fantasy, Karl’s atheistic prayers for a Tea Party Inferno.

Elia Kazan was thrown with McCarthy under the same Marxist bus when he testified before the House On Un-American Activities Committee. All the Marxists in America were really “pissed off” then, weren’t they?

Now with New York, Chicago, Washington and Hollywood virtually owned by mini-Marxists and hypnotized by Maoist daydreams, you, sir, want President Obama “pissed off”?

With Obama, Marxists, full-blown Communists and the Arab Spring have reached goals none of them could have imagined. And why did they reach them? Because of Barack Obama’s eloquent cool that won him the Presidency.

And you want him pissed off?

You must know yourself, Morgan, that you reached success by being one of the coolest actors in the history of Hollywood. Staying cool is how you stay a star in both Hollywood and Washington, D.C.

Getting “pissed off” would get both you and Obama fired.

So keep those cards, letters and headlines coming in!

Hmmm … the course of Marxist genius never runs smoothly.

If you don’t believe me, read the life of Bertolt Brecht.

However, Peter Sellars’ Marxism, as Wikipedia prefers to translate it, is to be a “progressively radical” artist of some sort.

With President Obama in the White House, it can now be known as “radically Progressive”: the Progressive Clinton as versus the radically Progressive Obama.

Radicalism, a la Van Jones, even as seen through the eyes of the Huffington Post, is the inevitability of the “Progressive” New World Order, whether you like it or not.

There is, however, one impressively dialectical twist in this drama: women such as Alice Goodman, the librettist.

Her Marxist heresy, because of the ministerial collar, is what is sometimes referred to by the KGB  hardliners as the Western Sentimentality of “useful idiots” and the decadent schmaltz seems to have escaped even the intriguingly odd but hawk-eyed Peter Sellars.

Reverend Goodman is still a “Progressive” of the Progressively Baptist Bill Clinton sort. She is actually an ordained Anglican priest; and is now a chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge.

The initial Wizard of Nixon In China happened to be the director, Peter Sellars.

The real Wizard, however, is Alice Goodman.

Peter Sellars’ instincts about Alice Goodman were Brechtian genius itself.

However, Alice Goodman’s love of God’s mysteries seemed to have escaped even the hawk-eyed and progressively radical Peter Sellars.

Either that or he simply endured the “mysteries” within Ms. Goodman’s poetry as allowably Buddhist.

Communism is ultimately no sin to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama actually admits to being a Marxist.

Besides, the John Adams’ musical portrait of Chou En-Lai contains the requisite, albeit poetic, sentimentality required to sell Chou En-Lai to America as the real hero of Nixon In China.

Score ten for the Progressive New World Order!

The music, in fact “minimalism” in general, just seems a lazy way to whip out hours of agitation for a profoundly complex encounter between two massively powerful cultures.

Laying that aside, what kept me glued to the You Tube video of the Houston Opera Company’s Production was Alice Goodman’s libretto.

Quite annoyingly, that libretto is not available on the internet. Scores of the entire opera cost $120 Canadian dollars … including delivery of course.

All I wished to see was the libretto but then how will John Adams get his share of the profits from a poetess he and Peter Sellars singlehandedly made?! Who taught them Marxist economics?

Michael Moore?

Sean Penn?

Is this Marxism? Or just good ole American, villainous Capitalism?

Rev. Goodman, however, and her firmly feminist point of view dominates Nixon In China. How else could she earn post-modern credentials with these Marxist men in her life?

She does indeed spare no amount of operatic melodrama in examining both the heroine and villainess of Nixon In China.

Ms. Goodman’s own romantic yearnings, God bless her, rise up not only in the huge question Chou En-Lai leaves us hanging on at the end, but also in the Cultural Revolution Ballet. This play-within-an-opera ballet and its hero and heroine, its Romeo and Juliet, caught amidst the Machiavellian nightmares within the Nixon In China opera itself?

Would she had Rachmaninoff’s lyricism and Stravinsky’s muscle to canonize the brilliant contrasts that sit and eagerly wait for a great composer. Then again, those two composers were decidedly not Marxists. Stravinsky was Russian Orthodox and exiled himself to, of all places, hamburger-eating, pre-Nixon America.

The ideological contrasts of Nixon In China alone make the encounter with Ms. Goodman herself fascinating.

Here she is!

Reverend Goodman, mind you!

A Marxist Christian?

She’s certainly a big fan of Chou En-Lai.

He’s the hero of Nixon In China.

You were right, Mr. Adams!

The idea of Nixon In China was a “risky” one … but possibly helpful enough to pave Elitism’s Way for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to both become Presidents of the United States.

Hmmm … now there’s the major question of not only this editorial, and this hour but this coming decade … and possibly this century … or human infinity.

Can there be such a thing as a Marxist Christian?

The Dalai Lama himself is a Marxist and Chosen One of Buddha!

Why not?

There was Liberation Catholicism running all around South America, wasn’t there?

God and Karl Marx.

The Almighty and The Grandest of Atheists!

Who can’t see them married?!

The alternate lifestyle of a Marxist … no, the Community Organizing Fundamental of a Progressive New World Order!

“Let’s wear down those ugly Americans such as Sarah Palin!!”

“If she becomes President America will have the West’s version of Mao’s Chiang Ching!!!”

“Maggie Thatcher in jack boots!!!!”

“Ronald Reagan in drag!!!!!”

“A virtual animal! Mamma Grizzly as POTUS!!!!!!”

“The solution is to surround these ‘stupid people’ with not only their cultural superiors like Bill Maher The Atheist but their religious superiors such as Alice Goodman as well.”

“They’ll never be able to understand the divine subtleties within the Marriage of God and Karl Marx!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Such an achievement is far beyond the vulgarities of Catholic idiocies such as Figaro or Mozart’s Don Giovanni!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Match-making God and Karl is the only possible hope for peace, you know.”

“If not, Judeo-Christians, you are toast!! Toast!!! Toast!!!!!”

This last bit of libretto within my comic opera is sung in falsetto, a la Alban Berg.

Having spent two whole days with Nixon In China, I sympathize sincerely with Chou En-Lai’s exhaustion in the final scene.

As for Henry Kissinger, the double for a villainous landowner in the Cultural Revolution Ballet?

Here he isas The 20^th Century’s Greatest Courtier.

Why am I so sure that both Goodman and Adams are Marxists?

Anticipating the increasingly obvious and desperately inevitable marriage of Marx and Islam, they both, along with Sellars as well, prophetically mind you, gave voice to the Palestinian version of Israel’s “unacceptability” in their next opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer”.

From Wikipedia:

Following “Nixon,” the three collaborated on a second opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” about the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking by Palestinians in which an elderly American Jew was killed. It premiered in 1991 but was promptly assailed by charges that it was anti-Semitic and glorified Palestinian terrorists. Several planned productions were canceled and the work has rarely been performed since, although the Opera Theater of St. Louis is presenting it next June.

Adams, Goodman and Sellars repeatedly claimed that they were trying to give equal voice to both Israelis and Palestinians with respect to the political background.

But the period of composition was a momentous one for Goodman personally. Raised a Reform Jew in St. Paul, Minn., she had married English poet Geoffrey Hill, and while writing “Klinghoffer” she converted to Christianity. She was later ordained as an Anglican priest and is currently winding up a stint as chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge.

This Christian Marxist felt obliged to give two sides of the story in this second opera and here’s a larger version of “The Death of Klinghoffer”.

Communist Islam rising!!!

Can you hear the orchestra in full fortissimo??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last night I glimpsed the British version of Alice Goodman. It was Vanessa Redgrave sitting in the audience of the Tony Awards.

Both Goodman and Redgrave?

Oh, not both at The Tony Awards but brilliantly “useful talents” for the Communist Revolution.

The fact that God gave the two of them their talents seems a lie to Vanessa and a reason for Alice to make God a Marxist.

Now that’s not a bad idea for an opera: Marx’s conversion of God to Communism!

Obviously Alice Goodman is the only poet qualified to write the libretto since she obviously feels that is exactly what must have happened.

Alice Goodman, the Brechtian poet of Heaven.

Where’s Kurt Weill when you need him?

And who could possibly sing the role of God?

If it’s a movie?

The ghost of Frank Sinatra.

Italian Communism is, of course, as complex a thing as Alice Goodman might possibly want to confuse us with.

Unfortunately I doubt if Mr. Sinatra will want to even show up for rehearsal.

Why?

Karl Marx would be a tenor!

The tenor always steals the show from the baritone in an opera.

God is not Wozzeck.

The Almighty is never quite that stupid.

This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left.

Primetime Propaganda is not a content analysis of the last 60 years of TV. Instead, Shapiro wore his Harvard Law baseball cap and interviewed some of Hollywood’s most influential television creators. Assuming from his alma mater and last name that he was one of them, the Hollywood insiders were too honest for their own good. Time and again Shapiro found them confessing that A) Yes, the Left dominates Hollywood, B) Yes, conservatives are blacklisted, C) Yes, they did try and use television to push their politics, and D) No, they did not see anything wrong with any of this in the slightest.

(For the evidence on tape see Big Hollywood’s thorough archive of the many damning admissions from the creators of history’s most influential TV shows.)

The revelations Shapiro unearths are only the beginning. This is also a masterful history book that will transform readers’ understanding of television. Shapiro leaps back to the 1950s and in the first 220 pages of the book interweaves his blockbuster interviews with the story of how a small clique of executives, producers, and writers created most of the TV shows that have shaped four generations of Americans. The heart of the book is the second and third chapter, focusing on the history of TV comedies and dramas. Shapiro goes down the line from The Honeymooners to All in the Family to Cheers and Friends. He documents the subversion of the cop and legal dramas from the early days of righteous cops and prosecutors to the nihilism of Hill Street Blues and Picket Fences.

The picture that emerges from Shapiro is of Hollywood leftists distinct from Washington, DC Democratic Party leftists, ACORN community organizing leftists, and the academic Ivory Tower leftists. The defining characteristic of the Hollywood leftist is an embarrassing abundance of anti-intellectualism. Most of the producers and writers Shapiro profiles have barely thought through their politics. If that’s the case then what drives Hollywood to embed leftist ideas in their programs and exclude conservatives? Superficial notions about what feels right. The Hollywood Left fantasizes that they are the champions of the “have-nots,” the outsiders, the oppressed.

This anti-intellectualism is why in Hollywood the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT politics are the social issues. (As evidence that Hollywood leftists care about these subjects above all others, observe how they will tolerate hawkish, fiscally conservative Republicans as long as they’re pro-gay and pro-choice. Shapiro’s example: “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry.)

Hollywood is not a town of deep thinkers. It’s a bubble filled with deep feelers. Next time a Hollywood leftist is on TV spouting their clichés note how often they “feel” instead of “think.” That’s a Freudian slip confessing a disagreement not with what conservatives think but in how conservatives think. The rejection is not just the Western tradition of individual liberty, but in the Enlightenment process of rational thought.

What are the unique implications for apostates of this church of the Left?

In parts two, three, and four of this series I’ll explore Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. Each author’s book is an important component in the revolt against the Hollywood Left’s mental gulag. They each bring the best of what their generation has to offer in the fight to retake our culture and our country. Read all three along with Shapiro’s book and a comprehensive picture of the Hollywood Left – and the means for defeating it – emerges.

This is our sixth month of Obama Nation strips. Huzzah!

Perhaps it’s genetic and, because I’m Irish-American, I’m sounding like Joseph McCarthy when he railed against Communism with his Un-American Activities Committee. Plus, with a name like Moriarty, given that’s the “handle” for the major villain in the World of Sherlock Holmes, I’m doubly cursed.

My sometimes awkward efforts to trace the growth of communism in the American performing arts does not have the substantive weight of an historical scholar, but it does have my over-forty years of personal experience behind it.

In an almost childlike way but with plenty of time to ponder my past in film and theater, I offer up a truth that, for me, has only been glimpsed in depth by Glenn Beck.

If, for instance, I have been inaccurate about where Laszlo and Ilsa might have ended up, whether in South America or the United States, the message this hero of the Czechoslovakian Resistance brings will be the same in either continent: continue the work of the International Communist Party.

The hopefully final fruit of such labors is now the radically Left, Obama Presidency.

Given the proven endurance of Communist tenacity for over one hundred years, this American, hybrid version of Marxism called Progressivism, with its added commitment to the eugenics of abortion and the absolute omnipotence of pseudo-Science, yes, this blend of Communism and Nazism, not to mention the hovering lunacy of Islamic terrorism being labeled a “man-made disaster” by the Obama administration, all of this explosive evil in high office demands an explanation.

For those not interested in the war between good and evil but obsessed with where Laszlo and Ilsa finally ended up – in South America or the United States – such a question will, of course, be the solid grounds upon which they can try to discredit the messenger with charges of poor scholarship in the message.

My claims and supporting evidence for the communist infiltration of the performing arts in America can, indeed, be traced even beyond the 100-year-old beginnings of Progressivism in America.

The French Revolution and, as Voltaire described them, its “enlightened despots” or, in this case, the Obama Nation’s Elitists, began, with its communes, the Communist Revolution and its desire to literally tear the French Monarchy to pieces, starting with their royal heads first.

We now have the Obama Czars trampling all over the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, transforming the words “all men are created equal” into “all men are gestated as possible candidates for abortion”.

As a former Liberal myself, I’ll leave it to a supportive voice among the responses to my editorial, Deconstructing “Casablanca,” to state my case for me:

“George Orwell joined the International Brigades as a Communist, but he left Spain as a fervent anti-Communist. He even made a now infamous – infamous for the left, that is – list of people he suspected of being pro-Communist, just like McCarthy did. He saw commies under every bed, too. Later he wrote Animal Farm and 1984.

“As for the movie – during the early 40s only very few people, like Orwell, saw the reality behind the romantic illusions that Stalin’s genius for propaganda had created for the West. Hemingway didn’t see it. Most Hollywood writers didn’t see it. They created a romantic hero with a Communist background (the International Brigades) while Stalin was sending hundreds of thousands of his people to the GULAG and killing a few million Ukranians during the Holodomor.

“In the 1950s Simone Signoret and Yves Montand met Kruschev during a much publicized tour through Russia. This was shortly before or after the invasion of Hungary and a big victory for Communist propaganda. Decades later, both of them apologized publicly. They hadn’t realized that their romantic leftism had been used by the Communists. How about that – honesty and self-reflection, instead of attacking anybody who threatens your illusions.”

I much prefer this comparison of myself to George Orwell than to Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy had never been a Liberal, as I had, let alone a Communist as Orwell had been.

As for Sherlock Holmes?

I have no doubt the famous detective would now be an ostensibly law-biding Progressive friend of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and President Barack H. Obama and one of the invited guests at the White House.

Onward to High Noon at the Red River… 

In regard to criticisms of the subtitle for one of my editorials for Big Hollywood, Riding the Rhone, I’m sticking – for the sake of a questionable posterity – with my original spelling of Rhone instead of roan because with closer analysis there are profounder inferences for an increasingly Marxist America within the Rhone River than the name of a horse which may or may not be red.

Arriving on earth out of the record-breaking neutrality of Switzerland, the Rhone enters France, where – as I’ve pointed out in my series, America’s French Revolution, the idyllic dreams of communes and Communism began. With a similarly and seemingly harmless idealism within the Obama campaign, our President arose to transform the White House into a Marxist and Maoist Czardom, a totalitarian oxymoron … Communist Czars?! … that actually marries a trinity of Isms, one of which veiled the horrors of eugenics. The other two, Communism and Fascism … well, please read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

Reading a relatively long series of replies to one comment on my editorial, The Christmas of ‘09, I smelled a propaganda rat. The thoughts contained were gruesome and violent … and I said to myself … hmmmm …. sounds like a kind of sabotaging propaganda move, an effort to make conservatives sound bloodthirsty and … well … exactly like the infamous Madame Lafarge of French Revolutionary History.

Hmmm, indeed.

This might be out of the very book that George Soros contributed to: What George Orwell Didn’t Know. The Obama/Soros’ yearly half-a-billion-dollar contribution created very little that Orwell could not anticipate. I love the presumptuous title, though, the Marxist one-ups-man-ship of What George Orwell Didn’t Know … “about us Marxists”.

Regardless of the Sorosian backwash, Riding the Rhone is not only equestrian in its inference but aquatic as well … Riding the Red River … with all of the John Wayne implications and his battles with a new generation of Left-Leaning Americans that title might imply.

This inevitably brings me to the famous Hollywood political differences between John Wayne and Gary Cooper.

There are two films that involved these two great Hollywood stars that clearly defined not only their self-image but their politics as well, Red River and High Noon. 

Gary Cooper turned down the role of Thomas Dunson in Red River because he thought the role too ruthless for his own screen image. John Wayne took the role with apparently little hesitation.

As for High Noon and the conflicting stories about a growing feud over it between Wayne and Cooper, the facts are fairly clear. The screenwriter, Carl Foreman, had always thought of himself as living the very showdown which Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) faced. High Noon was intended as an allegory in Hollywood for the failure of Hollywood people to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red-baiting era of Senator McCarthy.

Wayne, in his typically combative fashion, helped produce and starred in Rio Bravo as a direct answer to what he saw as High Noon’s indictment of America in general.

The battles of John Wayne with an increasingly Leftist Hollywood are, without a doubt, on a counter-revolutionary level. He never, however, let his political feelings interfere with what is essentially the very Capitalist adventure that Hollywood has always been. Had he done so, he would never have agreed to appear and accept the Academy Award for High Noon.

Needless to say, the mounting successes of the Hollywood Left have reached their zenith (at this point) with President Barack Obama.

However, none of this could have happened without the Far Left subtext of the Clintons with their fiercely pro-abortion stance and William Clinton’s admitted love for Carl Foreman’s High Noon and his equal admiration for Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station. Wilson’s rather ill-considered and romantic view of Vladimir Ilytch Lenin is, I’m grateful to say, pointed out in Professor Louis Menand’s introduction to the most recent edition of To The Finland Station.

Vladimir Nabokov, with whom Wilson eventually feuded, described Lenin as “a pail of the milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom.”

Ahhh, the American Left!

They’re all so brilliant and … Ivy League … and replete with Pulitzers and Rhodes Scholarships and Harvard/Yale degrees and … yes, Nobel Prizes!

They write mesmerizing films and inspire politically active stars … and they never realize how deeply Joseph Stalin is laughing in his grave, knowing full well what I have shared with many of my readers.

Now we have America hanging precipitously on the lip of a bottomless and deceptively tyrannical well called the Progressive New World Order.

The Soros/Obama/MSM/Hollywood/Chicago/New York/Far Left coalition would prefer that the Tea Partiers and 9/12ers and Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s Counter-Revolutionary Empire sit silently by while the virtually Marxist New World Order is built!

Hmmmm, again!!

The Blue Dogs, however, those Democrats whose knees shake increasingly before they vote Obama Care into a fait accompli?

Blue Dogs have predecessors in Hollywood such as Gary Cooper, legendary stars who had discovered some of the political nightmares they were caught in … increasingly dark.

The first and most publicly challenged of the Hollywood Blue Dogs was Humphrey Bogart.

These Blue Dog Legends, seemingly poised in a kind of Swiss neutrality, were indeed carried by the Rhone River and frequently against their will, into the communes of legendary French Communism … now better known as the Objectives of the American Progressive New World Order.

–

NewsBusters:

Cameron claims “Great wealth makes me uncomfortable,” and he has a track record of producing “quasi-Marxist epic[s],” as Newsweek described Titanic. Cameron himself said that Titanic was “holding just short of Marxist dogma.”

Critic James Kendrick pointed out Titanic, Aliens and The Abyss as three Cameron films that include Marxist overtones.

Certainly Avatar can be added to that list. Along with the global warming message—Popular Science calls it “every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true”—it has also been described as “blatant anti-military” and “anti-American.” The idea of the corporate partnership itself (or a $300 million movie) is a very capitalist idea in and of itself—made more so because McDonalds is so often targeted by radical critics for not being “socially responsible.”

Read the full article here.

See the one point that liberals miss when they read the story of Robin Hood was that the man never stole from “the rich.” Leftists like to vilify the wealthy, but the tale of Robin Hood vilifies a corrupt government. Robin Hood was stealing from an oppressive monarchy/administration and giving the wealth back to its rightful owners. He was essentially re-distributing wealth by removing it from the initial re-distributors. Confused? Let’s break down the story of Robin Hood for a second:

• Members of the monarchy are born into positions of power without having been elected.
• Peasants are born into a life of poverty; all of their acquisitions are taken from them by aforementioned monarchy.
• Robin Hood sees the injustice in hard-workers living in squalor while corrupt government officials “be livin’ likes pimps” (this is a quote from the original text, of course).
• Robin Hood says “enough” and takes on the government.
• Government loses control in an elaborate sword-fight (Errol Flynn wears tights).
• The people take back what they’d rightfully earned in the first place.

Hmmm… I’m still not seeing this as any sort of socialist crusade. Where in the story does Mr. Hood steal from small business owners or entrepreneurs? If there’s a sub-plot where Robin Hood professes the necessity of “equal outcomes,” I haven’t read it. Perhaps it’s my mere fourth-grade reading equivalency getting the best of me, but nowhere in the book do I see the Prince of Thieves even SUGGEST any sort of higher or additional taxes.

So again, I’d have to ask: Why do liberals so often use Robin Hood as a Marxist parable? Have they not read the story, or have they only watched the Disney version?

Come to think of it, I thought it was weird when Sean Penn started quoting “Robin Hood the Fox.”

The plan has many critics, and rightly so.  For one thing, as Zinn openly admits, his is an activist history meant not only to inform the student, but to inspire them to take up his cause.   This puts the teaching of Zinn in public schools on precarious legal grounds at best.  Others draw attention to Zinn’s radical views themselves.  Zinn says of America, with her representative government and guaranteed freedoms, that,  “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” parceling out just enough wealth and comfort to its citizens to keep them from revolting.  But to truly understand Zinn, and why his work has no place in public education, all a person needs to know is this –  Howard Zinn is not an historian at all; Howard Zinn is a religious zealot.

Now, this is not to say that Zinn or his followers believe in God.   Theirs is a secular religion, but religion none-the-less.  It is a faith in what Rousseau called the natural morality of man, an innate goodness that has only been corrupted by the oppressing evil of power, wealth and property.  It is a belief that when man is truly free, free from ‘wage slavery,’ from bankers and bosses, from states and from God, he will at last be purged of all sin.  Laziness and violence, covetousness and anger, all of these will disappear when the liberation arrives.  The religion is Marxism, Zinn’s denomination, Democratic Socialism (or possibly Anarcho-Syndicalism), but all of it, in the end, is simply Communism.

Of course, Christians actually hold similar beliefs.  Man is fundamentally flawed by something he cannot ultimately control: Sin.  This sin is dealt with by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through whose Spirit a man’s nature, and ultimately behavior, might be changed.  And when Christ appears again in His glory, the world will be made right and all evil will be dispelled.

Another similarity is that faith is required for both, since neither religion can be proven scientifically.  The Spirit of Jesus cannot be measured out in beakers and applied in dosage, or the results of faith in Him tracked against a control-set, since His presence in the life of a man cannot be truly ascertained. Examples of evil done in his name are not true metrics since many wield His name for gain or tribal loyalty, but do not place their faith in Him.

For Zinn and his followers, the same holds true.  True Communism cannot be judged by failed Communist experiments because true Communism must be global, democratic, and de-centralized, none of which has yet occurred.  Point to the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution, and you will hear that all power corrupts.  The failure of the Soviet Experiment?  Stalin’s misguided belief that single country communism could survive in a world of capitalist forces.

And neither religion can prove that their future Utopia will ever exist, but unlike the Christian who renders unto Caesar what is his and is not called to transform the world into his own image but to trust in God’s will and timing, Zinn ultimately believes that the glorious Communist future will, to borrow from John Hiatt, come through your hands.  This is the fundamental danger of Zinn’s world-view.  It is far beyond evangelistic.  It is a crusade.

“We’re dreamers,” writes Zinn.  “We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.”

For the dreamer-crusader, the standard is perfection, and all have sinned and fall short.  Zinn points out that radical historians often make the mistake of judging the past by the standards of the present.  Thomas Jefferson was not deliberately excluding women from civic life when he penned that, “all men are created equal,” says Zinn.  Rather, in his time, the civil rights of women were not even a consideration.  However, this does not prevent Zinn from passing judgment.  While the past may not be judged by the present, Zinn seems fully content to hold both past and present to the standard of the coming Communist Utopia.  Jefferson’s failing was not that he was less sympathetic to select minority interests than we are.  His failing and ours is that we both support and uphold a system of power and oppression of the poor.  For Zinn, as for Marx and Engels, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

For this reason, man cannot look backwards to determine what forms of government are most desirable, or what evils to avoid.  There is no past wisdom to preserve.  There is only the truth that every effort so far has failed.  We must look to the future, gaining from history only those rare glimpses it affords of what might be accomplished when the oppressed stand united against their oppressors.  Moments of inspiration that evidence what could be.  “Not overwhelming evidence,” Zinn writes on his educational website, “just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.”

Less academic and more religious words were never spoken.

To Zinn, all of America’s wars are evil.  It is not that he supports Hitler, or King George, or slavery, or Mullah Mohammad.  It is that he views war as merely another excuse for the rich to expand their wealth while controlling the people with words like valor and justice.  Rich colonists grow richer in the name of national liberty, rich northerners in the name of ending slavery, rich businessmen in the name of defeating fascism, and on, and on.

If Zinn is occasionally more sympathetic to one oppressor than another (Mao for the as-many-as forty-million people killed in just three years in The Great Leap Forward, over, say, Columbus, who Zinn blames for the ultimate loss of a similar number of Native Americans over three-centuries) he can be excused his mild hypocrisies.  In the end, he would consistently denounce both as proof of his master thesis – That power and wealth corrupt.  Thus Zinn holds no allegiance to any man, party, or nation.  He has written that he may, from time to time, vote for one candidate over another based on the fleeting circumstances of the moment, but his support exists, “only for the minute [he is] in the voting booth.”  Beyond that, the perpetual revolution must continue.  Those in power, even those put there by Zinn’s religion, must then be opposed until all who are oppressed, children by parents, minorities by majorities (except for the minority which is the bourgeois), workers by employers, are liberated and the millennial kingdom of Communism is ushered in.

The question is whether or not this religious revolution belongs in public schools.

Of course, this answer is really at the very heart of the current debate over global climate change (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), because whatever the polar bears might think about their own species’ global population, it is obviously far more than most every human environmentalists seem to care about theirs.

“Their is an anti-human element to many environmentalists.”  That was what Phelim told me the day I first met him and his lovely wife Ann McElhinney early last year.  The two had just spoken, quite passionately I might add (everything the two of them do is quite passionate), at a private gathering of conservatives in Sherman Oaks, California. 

Like so many documentary film-makers, they needed a ride.  (Unlike so many documentary film-makers, the ride was to a fairly nice hotel in Santa Monica…)  In exchange, they offered to screen an early cut of their film, “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” for me and a few friends.  It was a bargain I was happy to take.  “Only an environmentalist could look at thirty million dead from malaria and think that the biggest threat to the world is the pesticide that would stop it,” Ann told me on the ride over the hill.  “You really should watch our movie.”

In a world where so much of the debate (if you could argue that there is any real debate…) over climate change is focused on the science, it is the human story that most interests and appalls Phelim and Ann.  More aptly, it is an anti-human story, and they have seen it first hand.

In 2005, the couple traveled to Romania with a mission.  It was being reported in the European press that a greedy western mining corporation was invading the quaint, idyllic Romanian village of Rosia Montana to extract the regions’ gold deposits and exploit its people.  For Phelim and Ann, both experienced documentarians, this seemed like a story worth telling.  The problem, as they soon learned, was that the story was a lie.  Far from quaint and idyllic, Rosia Montana was a badly impoverished village that modernity had largely passed by. “These people weren’t making a lifestyle choice.  They were in deep, deep poverty.  They couldn’t wait for the mine to open and inject fresh money and jobs into the local economy. But stopping that were activists from Switzerland and Belgium. These rich western environmentalists didn’t care.  They were content to watch people live in misery and view it as a “culture” that needed to be preserved, but if you talked to the local people they viewed poverty as a curse that was killing their children early and needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.”

What Phelim and Ann discovered was a far bigger story – one that would give their film, and their lives, a whole new shape.  It was the largely untold tale of western activists advancing Marxist ideology under the guise of environmental protection. “This romantic notion that starving people are ‘poor but happy’ has to stop.  Someone needs to tell these environmentalists that humans are actually part of the environment.”

In 2006, Phelim and Ann did just that, releasing their film, “Mine Your Own Business,” as a stern rebuke of what they see as a criminally disingenuous movement to destroy the west and the progress that modernity has brought.  The film is a brutally honest look at how much damage is done to actual humans by those claiming to save the world.  “Rosia Montana never got their mine, but the Romanian villagers facing another winter of extreme poverty can shiver to sleep secure in the knowledge that the greedy capitalists were defeated.”  Environmentalists called the movie “Nazi propaganda…”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” picks up on the same theme, and carries it much farther.  If free-markets, trade, and employment are the only tools ever used to effectively end poverty, then what would it mean to take those tools off of the table, as the modern environmental movement seems bent on doing?  Who will suffer and who will gain?  According to Phelim and Ann, who will suffer is everyone, especially the poor.  Who will gain is Al Gore and the rest of the multi-billion dollar Big Environmental Businesses.  And of course, America loses the most.  Says Ann, “China produces more genuine pollution than any other nation on Earth, but none of the international regulations on the table do anything to curb them.China’s cities are badly polluted with dirty fumes. If Greenpeace wanted to stop global pollution they should move all their offices to China. And I’m talking about genuine pollution – not CO2 which is essential for life and one of the elements that keep our crops growing and our children healthy. But Greenpeace is not in China because there is a strong anti-business, anti-capitalist and above all anti-American element to the environmental movement.  If the world is really ending, why wouldn’t they want to stop everyone polluting and not just single out the American economy for destruction?.”  Or, as Phelim puts it, “They say America should lead by example, but what example is that?  Suicide?”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is the anti-”Inconvenient Truth,” not only because it exposes and rebukes the foundational premises of that film, but because it advocates humanity first, and nothing serves humanity better than morally checked, free-market capitalism.  As it turns out, that’s another topic Phelim and Ann know rather well.

“We’re trying to do something innovative,” Phelim told me on a recent call.  “We figure that lots of really interesting and intelligent ideas have come out of the American home and almost nothing interesting or intelligent comes out of the current American cinema.”  Phelim and Ann’s innovative answer?  They are going to launch their films in the former, not the latter.  The idea is as profound as it is simple.  In a world of flat-screen televisions, high-speed Internet, streaming media, and cell-phone movie rentals, “Not Evil, Just Wrong” is leading the way in direct-to-consumer marketing.

On Sunday, October 18th, the largest, simultaneous film-premiere in history will take place. “Not Evil, Just Wrong” will be screened in well over 4000 private locations in America, and more than a thousand more worldwide.  People from all walks of life are hosting screenings in their homes and churches, they are renting small theaters and community centers and school auditoriums.  It is a grassroots movie premiere.

You can visit their website for a map of screening locations. It is impressive.  Better yet, you can tune in to Big Hollywood and be a part of this historic premiere event yourself tomorrow night at  5PM PST, just like thousands of other venues around the nation and world.  It is a very human model for getting a very human movie out into the culture, and as Phelim and Ann are always quick to remind, humans are what this story is really about.  As Phelim told me recently in Texas, “The vast majority of human history has been spent in darkness and hunger and tyranny.  That’s what these environmentalists, by their actions, seem to want to bring back, only not for themselves, of course.  They just want everyone else living in huts and starving to death but with a “quaint” centrally approved lifestyle while the environmental elite run the show.  America’s existence and success is the only thing stopping them, and it’s the proof that they’re wrong, which is why they have to destroy it.”

Or, put more simply, “These people don’t give a damn about polar bears.”

Moviefone:

Crude posters of Lenin and Trotsky adorn the threadbare walls of an office in a desolate part of town, and a group of outcast revolutionaries hatch a scheme to overthrow the ruling powers and bring equality and a classless society to mankind. The beginning of an Eisenstein film? Bunuel? Renoir?

Try ‘Astro Boy,’ the upcoming animated film featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage and Kristen Bell about a boy robot (Freddie Highmore) that leaves his scientist father after finding out he isn’t human. Ostensibly a film for children — with a fringe following of fanboys, thanks to its comic book series — the movie features very adult ideas of ownership and class structure that will most likely be future fodder for college philosophy classes around the country.

While it’s no secret that Hollywood films tend to skew left in general, ‘Astro Boy’ may be the first animated blockbuster to discuss, if not necessarily endorse, explicit Marxist ideologies (albeit in cute robot form, of course.) In the movie, the aforementioned outcasts, led by Robotsky, form the Robot Revolutionary Front, stenciling their logo on city walls and chanting “Viva La Robotolution” at anyone within earshot. On the whole, it’s played for laughs, but makes us ponder the question:

Have animated films gotten more leftist in recent years?

You can read the full article here.