It was all wrapped around the theme “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World.”  The Moscow Times reports that Spacey and Stone were, err, “cheesy.”  Standing in front of neo-classical columns “decorated with pink curtains,”  the two co-hosts “continuously mangled various Russian names and concepts.”  Stone (who they described as “ditzy”) went through a number of dress changes and Spacey tried to crack a joke about perestroika that was, well, “mangled.”    In between The Scorpions sang their songs “Wind of Change”  and later “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” Spandex anyone?

—–

Ted Turner was given an award.  Then came a Russian pop group named Khor Turetskogo singing the old black spiritual,  ”Go Down Moses.”  Strange choice if you are celebrating the birthday of an atheist,  don’t you think? You can’t make this stuff up.

Famous Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky tried to remind London about who they were celebrating.  He filed a lawsuit to have Gorbachev arrested for his crimes as Soviet leader.  Bukovsky points out that among other things Gorbachev ordered the violent break-up of several demonstrations between 1989-1991 which led to the death of 100 people. But his request was rejected by a London Court on the grounds that Gorbachev was in the UK as part of a “Special Mission” on behalf of the Russian state.  The fact is, of course, that he has absolutely no official position in the Russian government.

At a time when everyone is reporting on the alleged demise of the dictator in the Middle East how strange that they celebrate one from a different region and a previous era.  Gorbachev was not elected,  and he rejected democracy in favor of a “leading role” for the communist party.  Events passed him up.  He didn’t lead Russia to a democratic system.   Just shows you that for the Left the Universal Law of Dictators is simple: dictators on the right bad; dictators on the left,  throw them a party!

Not for the squeamish. Enjoy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Sakhalin Island, USSR; 1984 

They never turned the light off. That was the rule.

There were many rules in prison. The way you had to sleep, for example. Only one position allowed, facing the light. The light, which was always in your eyes. How did they expect a man to sleep with this way? They didn’t. That was part of the punishment. That was part of the treatment. That’s how you made the New Soviet Man: by shining the light in his eyes until he finally saw it.

No matter how you tried, you couldn’t avoid the light. You couldn’t roll over during the few hours they allowed you to sleep. You had to lie on your back, facing the light; if you fell asleep on your side or on your stomach, the guards came in and woke you up, flipped you over, and made you observe the light, ponder it. There was no escaping the light, although it did give you, the prisoner, adequate radiance to illuminate your crime.

After a while, however, you got accustomed to it, used to the position, used to the lack of sleep, used to the light. The light was like the Almighty, drawing you nearer. Into the light, as if you were dead, shooting along the dark tunnel that was this earthly life into the eternal light of the next.

The light. Always on, unblinking, indifferent in its magnificence, secure in its omnipotence. It knew your crime, it penetrated to the farthest recesses of your brain, bore into you, right down to the secret depths of your being. There was no hiding from the light, or hiding anything from it. It could tip your soul and peer within, could pierce and puncture your flabby, feeble defenses, strip you naked of your pretenses and leave only your guilt-ridden essence. There was no use pretending that you were not culpable. You must be at fault. Otherwise you would not be here. Everybody is guilty of something, and all must be punished. By the light. By immersion in the light, which was at once your tormentor and your savior.

For after a while you began to love the light, no matter how brightly it shone, no matter how hot it burned, no matter how deeply it pervaded. When they first put you in here, you thought you were alone, without friend or hope, but eventually you realized that when all else had failed you – and, in here, all else had – you always had the light. It was like God.

It was certainly multifaceted, the way God, the mythical God of the Hebrews, was supposed to be. Omnipresent and infinite in its variety. If you stared at the light long enough, you could fracture and fragment it into a thousand component shafts and strands, each one in a different color, your eye a spectrograph analyzing each degree of the color spectrum, breaking it down from infrared to ultraviolet. The ultraviolent light.  Each one a different face of God, or maybe even a different God, your own private, personal collection of lares and penates.

How long had he been here? There was no way to tell. Better to ask the light, but the light never spoke. It was magisterially silent, as God was. Besides, the calendar was irrelevant when it came to judging his separation from Mother, which seemed infinite. Because she had taken care of him, had promised that she always would, that she would always be at his side, omnipresent, just like God, but better than God, because she was Mother.

The room was small, about ten feet long by six feet wide. There was a slop jar and a rude bed made of packed straw but no other furnishings. There was a window, but it was so high up on the wall, and so small, that he could see nothing out of it, and had long since given up trying. The only other thing in the room was the light, burning bright. Neither prisoner nor jailer, it was simply the light, immutable and immortal, dispassionate and fair.

He seemed to remember that once there was another man in the cell. Mother, however, had warned him about other men; how they were never to be trusted, how they were all traitors, informers, spies; defilers, corrupters, seducers. Men were all alike.

This man had tried to speak with him, to draw him out, to inquire after his crimes, but he had ignored him for as long as he could, concentrating on the light, learning to love its arid luminescence, the light that never gave off warmth no matter how close to you got it, because in the end you could never get close enough, never close enough to be warmed by it, but only to be bathed in its cold, uncaring, relentless brilliance.

One night, when the man was sleeping, he pulled out his tongue. That man was the last human being he had seen. Even the guards no longer came in, no longer peered through the peephole in the door at him; they sent his food in on a tray, and most of the time he had simply put the swill directly into the slop jar, for he was rarely hungry anymore. After a while, they stopped bringing the food and then, because it was no longer necessary, they took away the slop jar too. This they did when he was asleep, like children afraid of the dark. Even though the light was on, as always.

During the day, whenever that was, he was not allowed to recline; at night, just as arbitrary in its diurnal rhythm, he had to lie on his back with his hands outside the covers at all times. This was meant to annoy him, but he had transcended annoyance. The light had given him something to aspire to: grand dispassion, supreme apathy, a godlike indifference to the human condition. By becoming one with the light, he would become like God.

The solitude was designed to break him, to sap his will, to make him beg, or crawl, or plead. But he laughed at it: he had been alone so much of his life, alone except for the times he was with Mother, and now even she had been taken away from him, although he knew she must be near, watching him and watching over him, as she promised.

Other men, he knew fought the light. They were mystified by their sudden isolation, bewildered, confused. They fought, they made demands and shouted questions: on whose authority do you hold me? On whose commission have you arrested me? They screamed that they were victims and protested their innocence, as if that mattered. But here, there were no innocents. Here, there were no victims.

After a while, even the most resolute protest subsided. The punishment was too severe, the hopelessness too overwhelming. Nothing a man said availed him anything, for no one was listening, including God. No man had the strength to protest all his life; acceptance of what you could not change was part of growing up and thus even the most dedicated resisters either died or conformed. In the end all men were collaborators, either with the enemy or with Death. Every man might be a hero to his dog, but no man is a hero to his jailer. No man, caught in the pitiless glare of the light, could harbor heroism in his breast. He could only scrabble for his soul.

And so they gave up, surrendering to the inevitable. They became resigned, contemplative, peaceful and peaceable. They stopped protesting, stopped expecting, stopped awaiting, and they let themselves go, ignoring their surroundings, where once they took such a passionate interest in them; ignoring their fellows; ignoring their captors; ignoring the ever more infrequent swellings of hope that were gradually abandoning them. They ate, rudely shoveling in the foodstuffs, not caring whether they got everything in their mouths because they could no longer taste. They took an inordinate interest in the products of their bowels; the food and the slop jar had become two aspects of the same reality. Neither disgusted them any longer. The two inanimate vessels were all that was left to remind them of their distance from the animals and after a time even that distinction disappeared.
Normally it took four to six weeks to reduce a man to the condition of a beast. He, however was nearly the same man he was when he came in; nearly the same, but better. His mind harbored some of the same thoughts and desires that it always had, but these feelings had become more intense, more refined, more sophisticated. With nothing to do but contemplate the light, he had studied it and learned from it. It had become his beacon, his compass, a lamp unto his feet; it was his leader and teacher; it had become his friend. It even spoke to him.

“Tovarish,” it said. Comrade. “Of course you know why you are here?”

The voice had come out of the light, and at first he had a hard time locating it. He had been staring at the light forever, appraising its majesty, and so the voice had sounded like an angel’s, disembodied, hortatory, Gabrielian.

But he was no longer in his cell. He was in an office. The man sitting across from him, on the other side of a gunmetal gray desk, was thickset and muscular, bald on the top with a monk’s ring of hair hovering above his ears. He was wearing a dark brown business suit and a pair of cheap black Soviet shoes, the kind made out of cowhide and plastic, the kind that lasted a couple of months if you were lucky and took very good care of them, which mostly involved not wearing them. He could see the tips of the man’s shoes peeking out from underneath the desk.

“Tovarish,” the man said. “The State is kind. the State is just. The State is merciful.”

There were, he noticed, guards on either side of the man, wearing big boots, their weapons trained on him. But he was no danger to anyone right now. He felt no anger, no enmity. This is where he belonged. This was where his long journey had been leading all along.

Paris had come and gone in an instant, and then there was the trip across Germany and Denmark, to Sweden and the Finland station, until finally there was the Rodina, just as Mother had promised, a journey from imprisonment to freedom, from strangers to friends, from foreign lands to home, from hate to love. In Russian, the word Rodina means Motherland.

Moscow was golden. Gold-painted were the walls; though they may be crumbling, they yet retained their honeyed gleam, as if to negate the tawdriness that surrounded them, a passive protest against what Marx and Lenin had wrought, yet fruitless because behind and beyond these walls was dirt and mud and filth and decay. But if you closed your eyes, squinted, the way you looked at the light, and saw the city through a haze of moisture and eyelids and lashes, you could forget the grime and see only the gold.

Mother and he shared the flat with two other families, a crude thing in a district that the authorities ignored as surely as the residents ignored the vermin. In memory it was golden, warm in the winter as all Moscow flats were warm in the long hard winter, fresh and cool in the short hot summer. “Ya podvig sily besprimernoi gotov skryvatsya vam v ugodu,” was what he always told Mother before leaving the flat: “A feat of unexampled strength I am now ready to perform for you.” A quick thrust of the knife and the drunk in the gutter, the man on the sidewalk, the woman in her kitchen, even the miliman directing traffic on the lonely street, had given up their fortunes. He knew the Moscow Metro better than its architects; knew how to disappear down the rabbit hole of its many entrances; knew how to make himself invisible in the motley Soviet crowd. During the attenuated summer days and endless winter nights he would ride the Metro to the end of each line until he could name each of the stations by sound and by smell.

Then they took Mother away from him and the gold disappeared. The next day, they came for him too. There had been one last journey, a very long train ride until he had reached the Island.

“Tovarish,” said the man with the plastic shoes. “You will take off your trousers and lie down on the floor. On your back, pazhah’lsta.”

He had seen this before. The prisoner was held down while the man with the boots stepped on his testicles, gently at first and then ever harder, until either the man confessed or his manhood was crushed to powder.

They forced him down, his legs wide apart. The man placed the toe of his plastic shoe on his scrotum and pressed down. “Are you ready to confess your crimes?”

“I am ready,” he said. But he showed no pain, he did not cry or cry out, and after a few minutes even the stupidest man in plastic shoes could tell something was not right.

Then they looked at him more carefully, examined him lying there, spread-eagled on the ground, poking and prodding him and summoning the doctor, who squeezed his empty sack and investigated his rectum with thick, probing fingers, and after that they allowed him to dress. He could hear them talking animatedly in the next room.

“The results of your medical examination are most interesting,” the man said.

“I hope I am well,” he said. “I hope there is nothing wrong with me.”

“Nothing wrong, no, comrade,” said the man. “You are, however, an unusual man. A man, and yet not a man. Man, and yet not man. Man, and yet more than man. It is a mystery, which perhaps your mother can answer.”

“My mother,” he said, and tensed. He always tensed when someone spoke of his Mother. “When will I see her?”

The man put down the piece of paper and looked away from him. This man is going to tell me a lie, he thought, and it will be a lie about Mother.

“Soon,” the man said. “Very soon.”

“I am happy to hear this, comrade,” he said. “I am sometimes lonely in my room, without my mother.” In response, the man tossed back his head and laughed.

In a flash he had crossed over the desk and buried his teeth in the man’s neck. The guards were too slow to stop him, as he knew they would be, and before they could react he had torn out the man’s throat and popped out his eyeballs with his thumbs. They beat him then, of course, beat him into unconsciousness, struck him with their rifle butts and kicked him with their heavy boots, but the blows were like drops of rain, painless, and the oblivion was welcome because, through the haze, he could see Mother, surrounded by the light and smiling at him.

He was awakened by something being shoved down his throat.  It was a rubber tube, the narrow end of a kind of baster whose bulbous body was made of rubber. Two of the guards were holding him by the arms while a third was forcing the tube into his mouth. He tried not to swallow the salty liquid, but his stomach filled quickly with warm salt water. Then they put him in the solitary box, a small chamber hacked out of the side of one of the prison’s walls, just barely big enough for a man. It was like being buried alive, and there he stayed for the next twenty-four hours, his stomach burning, his bladder bursting with nowhere to relieve himself but on himself, and when he pissed the salt burned his urethra and almost made him cry out in pain.

Back in the light, it did not occur to him to ask why he was still alive. There was no longer any barrier or border between life and death, no meaningful distinction; he had no love of the former and no fear of the latter. Life brought him closer to Mother, and so he loved his life; death would only take him away from her, and so he loathed it. He would triumph over death, slay the slayer, trample it underfoot. Because death could not kill what had never really lived.

And so he amused himself in his cell, immune to the pangs of loneliness and isolation that corrupted other men. Mother, he knew, was still alive, and as long as she lived he lived too. His life was devoted to her, to the warmth of her body and the radiance of her voice and the gentle stroke of her hand. Were he blind, deaf and dumb, he would yet know Mother. His world had always lay in being close to her, to hearing the soft sounds she made, feeling the warm puff her breath on his face and she bent over him, to touch him, to minister to him, to heal him. For there was no truth but the truth of her flesh; the word was not made flesh; the word was flesh, and he was the word.

Which is why it amused him as well to open his eyes and stare into the light, to see the face of God, which was not so very different, he knew, from the face of Mother. Was God a female? And did it matter? Male and female, He did make them – and some He made both. Which was right, and just. For did not both sexes breathe and defecate and make love? And was not part of every man a woman, and part of every woman a man? Was not the baby in the womb, for a time, a hermaphrodite? Were there not creatures who combined both sexes in one body? And did God not love them equally well? Did God not love him, and Mother? Was he not, as all men were, the son of God?

Still, he knew that women were the supreme beings. And whereas each man was only a man, only one man, each woman was more than a single individual. Each woman was also a part of the great Eternal Feminine, a lone aspect of that sacred Femaleness toward which all men aspired and for which all men longed unto death. There was, in the end, only one Woman, and all women were facets of Her – sacred unto themselves but how much more sanctified by virtue of belonging to the life force that was larger and stronger than any one mortal. Woman was holy, and the font of all holiness. To approach Godhood, one must approach Womanhood. Only God could create; only Woman could give birth. It took a woman to be Mother. Was this not proof that God is Woman?

During his solitary confinement he was no longer permitted any time in the yard, which disappointed him because many amusing things occurred there. Sometimes the men would be mustered to stand, naked and barefoot, in twenty-two-degrees-below-zero-Celsius weather. Floggings with a rubber truncheon were then administered to the most emaciated of prisoners, the weak. The blow would fall across where the buttocks should have been, but that part of the body had long since fallen or rotten away from starvation and pellagra, and so the blow landed on the sciatic nerve, which transmitted the torment directly to the brain. The victims of these beatings would go mad with pain; their fingernails, if they had any left, would snap off at the cuticles as they struggled to clutch the floor, scuttled futilely to escape the blows that were raining down inside of their brains. Then the man would be dragged away, and for the next few days he would shit himself silly, shit himself so hard that the skin of his backside would rip open from the effort, and he would die. After a prisoner was dead they conducted an open-air autopsy, not to discover the cause of death, but to make sure no one was faking. A bayonet through the torso was as effective as a scalpel in determining the presence or absence of life, and if a bayonet was not at hand, then the skull could always be crushed with a hammer or a rock.

It was while he was looking into the light, imagining the life of the world outside, that the door opened and another man appeared. This man’s name, he said, was Herman, and his shoes were no better than the other’s. It must not be a good thing to be an official on the Island; far better to be in the world, even though there the sores of present-day society were especially evident.

“Tovarish,” said Herman. “We have much to discuss. Do you know why you are here?”

“Yes, comrade,” he replied. “Because of my crimes.”

“No,” corrected Herman. “For your crimes we should have killed you and then you would not be here. No, tovarish, you are here because of your father.”

“My father,” he said, “is a very great man. Mother tells me so.”

“A very great man – and a very great criminal,” replied the man called Herman. “A very great criminal who comes from a very great family. A weak man, who found strength; a fatuous man who found wisdom; a commonplace man whose cleverness could not be surpassed. A brilliant blackguard, a holy fool – this is your father.”

“My father,” he repeated.

“Your father betrayed us, and by rights we should have liquidated you to atone for his sins. That we did not speaks well of us.”

“Very well of you, tovarish,” he agreed.

“But your father’s family – now that is a different story,” Herman told him. “It is a very great family. All the greater, then, the shame he has brought on them – and upon your mother.”

“My mother,” he said.

“This is why we did not kill you,” explained the man. “Because of your father. And his family. And because of your mother. A feat of unexampled strength you will now perform for us.”

He took instruction well. Pistols, previously a mystery, became his friends, although no mere pistol could ever take the place of his razor or his knife, because with a pistol, although you were close, you were never close enough to really enjoy your work. They made him shoot, sometimes six hours a day, at targets shaped like humans, popping up here and there, this way and that. He learned quickly, and after a month or so he could put down all the figures with one shot apiece, never more. If you could not put down your man with one shot then you were shooting in the wrong place. Some men went for the body because it was bigger and easier to hit, but that did not guarantee a one-shot kill; even if you hit your man directly in the heart, he sometimes could get off a round in return and that round, the one you did not hear and could not see, might be the one with your name on it. So you shot him in the head, because no one could survive a bullet in the brain, a bullet that blew out the side or back of your head, a bullet whose explosive force was so great that when the shell penetrated the skull the head was thrown violently in the other direction, the result of the jet effect of exploding brain matter; it was almost as though your man was coming back toward you, coming back for more, long after he had had more than enough.

He already knew the American and Russian and French languages, but they drilled still more tongues into his head, which was not very difficult because he apprehended speech the same way he apprehended the light, and God, and Mother. There were long hours of lectures about the Party and the Committee, which were boring because it was clear that the men delivering the homilies did not really believe what they were telling him. But they did believe in weapons, and in languages, in the skills he must learn in order to become more perfect, more Godlike, more worthy of his Mother, and so he did too.

And when he was finished, he was brought before the man named Herman once more.  “Honor thy mother,” commanded Herman. “Because of her, you live.”

“Because of her, I was given life,” he corrected. “Without her, there is no life.”

“Then you shall have life once more,” said the man. “To me has been given the power of life and death over you. I am the creator, and you are my creature. I am, to you, like God.”

“There is no God,” he reproved. “So you have told me.”

“And you believe us?”

“No,” he said. “But for you to say you are like God makes me want to kill you. No one should have God’s power over me, except my mother.”

“Horasho!” exclaimed the man. Both hands came down hard on his desk, and the guards flinched. “You are strong, not weak; brave, not fearful; deft, not dull. How unlike him you are!”

“Ya podvig sily besprimernoi gotov skryvatsya vam v ugodu,” he said.

“You are the executioner of God’s judgments,” said Herman. “The instrument of the State. That is what the tattoo we have given you signifies. By this sign shall you be known: and let all men who see know that this is what you are, and let them fear you. Vengeance, retribution, justice – the revenge of the People against the traitor. Henceforth so shall you be known.”

“‘God hears.’ This shall be my name. For I am the son of God. With every death, I partake of God, I become like God. With this death, I shall become God, one with the Mother.”

“Horasho! This death…” said Herman.

“The death of my father,” he said.

Herman said: “They will try to stop you. Every man’s hand shall be against you, and yours against every man’s. Ishmael: God hears. So shalt thou be.”

“I will find him, and kill him. For the Rodina. For the Motherland. For my Mother.”

“Horasho,” said Herman, for the third time. “There is much anger inside you.”

“And much love.”

“Always remember,” said Herman. “One must never kill in anger, but only in love, as God does.”

“And who better than I,” said Vanya, “knows what love is.”

The original hardback cover

A Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection upon its publication in 1997, and the recipient of a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Exchange Alley (for reasons that will become clear as you read) has become something of a cult novel. In it, I introduced the character of Lt. Francis X. Byrne, the hot-tempered detective who catches a grisly murder case that, literally, changes his entire world. Frankie became so popular with readers that I brought him back last year (and promoted him to Captain) in Early Warning, where he battles against a spectacular terrorist attack on Times Square, and I suspect he’ll turn up again in another novel very soon.

I first got the idea of writing Exchange Alley during my various trips to the Soviet Union, beginning in 1986 (I was in country when Chernobyl blew up) and continuing right up to its dissolution in 1991. At the same time, I was deeply fascinated by the Kennedy Assassination, which I recalled vividly from my boyhood. So, as writers do, I thought: what if?

What if the KGB’s file on Lee Harvey Oswald, which has never been made public, was stolen by a rogue KGB agent operating under deep cover in the U.S. and made available to the highest bidder?

What if the interested parties included the Mafia, the CIA and the FBI?

What if Frankie’s brother, Tom, was an FBI agent and deeply involved with the case?

What if Frankie and Tom hate each other?

What if there’s a family secret that stretches all the way back to World War II and the Holocaust?

And what if the Russian agent — who goes by the name of Egil Ekdahl — is dead in the very first chapter, the victim of what at first appears to be an impossible crime?

Well, you can imagine the hilarity that ensues.

Publishers Weekly said:

The final 100 pages of this book offer a series of explosive surprises, from the identity of Ekdahl’s killer to the truth about Byrne’s own heritage. There isn’t much Walsh doesn’t know about the JFK assassination, and the background research for this virtuoso novel feels thorough. Weaving from the worst of the Russian prison camps to Manhattan’s elite European demimonde, from Brighton Beach’s vicious Russian mobs to Little Italy’s complacently murderous families, Walsh orchestrates a gripping tale of the horrors that were set in motion the day a president was murdered.

And that’s how Exchange Alley came about. I’ve published four more novels since, with another three under contract (continuing the “Devlin” series), but I’ll likely never write a book as technically complex and downright weird as this one.

So be warned: Exchange Alley is not for the squeamish. Violent, sexy and wildly politically incorrect, it probably wouldn’t even get published today. There’s something in it to offend and frighten just about everybody. But I love it the way a dad loves his first born, and I hope you will too.

Attention producers — this is the only one of my novels for which the movie rights are still available!

Excerpts tomorrow. Come prepared. You’ve been warned…

In 103 minutes, this documentary gives Americans, especially young ones like me who know little of Reagan’s presidency, a complete summary of the historic highlights of Reagan’s eight years in office within its national and international context. The film doesn’t shy away from mistakes Reagan may have made. It isn’t overly worshiping. It simply presents Reagan in his own words, honoring a man who changed the world.

The film begins by putting Reagan’s presidency in its historical setting: a nation pulled apart by warring liberals and conservatives; where Vietnam savagely cut America in two, Nixon’s Watergate had tarnished the GOP, and Carter’s foreign policy had left Democrats looking weak. Reagan brought the nation together by giving Americans a mission: to defeat a true opponent – the U.S.S.R.

From touching dedications and eulogies to rousing speeches and calls to action, the documentary features footage of Governor Reagan’s GOP convention and presidential nomination acceptance speeches, his national address following the Challenger tragedy and, of course, his demand that the Soviet Union tear down the Berlin Wall.

As a Cold War fanatic, I would have appreciated more coverage of Reagan’s fight against the U.S.S.R. and communism, but segments on presidential debates and the dedication of the Kennedy Library were nice touches and great supplements to the expected footage.

Reagan had a dream of America as a “shining city on a hill,” a phrase borrowed from John Winthrop, who had adapted it from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. And as Reagan left office, he saw that “[America] still stands strong and true … and her glow has held steady no matter what storm.” This film explores America before and after Reagan, concisely capturing the enduring effect that his administration had upon the nation.

As the film nears its conclusion, it focuses on a Reagan quote inscribed in granite at the Reagan Library: “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.” Reagan lived his life guided by this belief. His defense of the enslaved people in the Soviet Union, of freedom over tyranny every time, are proof.

Reagan said in his address to the 1984 Republican National Convention, “There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams. … In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America’s is.” On the eve of springtime 2011, the light of Reagan’s legacy is shining more brightly than ever, and this film will help Americans see it for generations to come.

Anne Applebaum in today’s Washington Post:

“It’s based on a true story.” Or “It’s truth, but stranger than fiction.” Or even: “You couldn’t make it up.” When Peter Weir gets sent film scripts these days, most of them advertise themselves as “true.” That wasn’t always the case: Weir (who made “Gallipoli,” “Witness,” “Master and Commander”) dates the tilt away from fiction and toward “fact” back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day reality did suddenly seem “exactly like a Hollywood movie.”

—-

Kengor’s strength is research (the book’s introduction alone lists 35 citations), and Dupes authoritatively identifies both dupes and true Communists in Hollywood, documenting them down to their Communist Party USA registration card numbers and how many times they wrote for Communist publications.

Take playwright extraordinaire Arthur Miller, for example. It is widely accepted that “The Crucible” is about McCarthyism. Beyond that, today’s educators have allowed what Senator Joe McCarthy and his “witch hunts” found to blend with the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In reality, they were entirely separate.

Kengor points out that the falsely titled “HUAC,” (a recent New Yorker article, which gives a good review of former Communist Elia Kazan, used the “HUAC” abbreviation too) which suggests the committee was the actual un-American organization, was chaired by Democrats for much of its existence, and it was attacked for its work by Communists regardless of who was in charge.

Finally, among the most famous witnesses called by the House Committee on Un-American Activities were the “Hollywood Ten,” a collection of industry workers suspected of being Communists. Claiming they weren’t Communists, these Communist sympathizers and actual Communists convinced liberal actors and actresses to come and defend them in Washington, D.C. Kengor points out, “It is interesting that while many liberals have been concerned about the reputation of Communists…those same Communists had no qualms about tarnishing the reputations of the liberals they preyed upon – even when the liberals were friends and relatives.”

Humphry Bogart was among those who was duped into testifying, and after the testimonies, he was anything but happy about it. The truth is, the Hollywood Ten were not clean. Kengor said in an e-mail, “From the very first day that the main four members of the Hollywood Ten were called to the stand, in October 1947, we’ve known their actual Communist Party numbers, which were published at the time, in all the newspapers, and which I’ve been forced to re-publish in the book – such is our ignorance. John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Alvah Bessie, Albert Maltz. All were Communists and pro-Soviet patriots, period.”

Few remember the truth of the hearings – only the “horror” that the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted afterward. Perhaps they were blacklisted more for lying to their would-be defenders than they were for being Communists. If someone stabs your back, you generally don’t pat theirs in return.

Director Elia Kazan new the truth. He was once a Communist, but was kicked out of the Party after refusing to follow orders. He testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and was attacked for it. He wrote in his diary, “I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them.” Unfortunately, many in Hollywood held it against him for years.

And Arthur Miller, who portrayed these trials as witch hunts? He applied to join CPUSA, and admitted to helping Communist front groups.

I find it interesting that the left continues to use one of the favorite strategies of Communism – name-calling – on a regular basis. Kengor quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald on this: “The important thing is that you should not argue with [Communists],” Fitzgerald said. “Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.” Liberals use this strategy today when dealing with social conservatives or with Tea Partiers.

“One of the greatest successes of the left…has been its ability to discredit anti-Communism and anti-Communists,” Kengor said. “They stereotype and broad-bush anti-Communists, trying their best to push every new stalwart anti-Communist into their ever-widening category of ‘another Joe McCarthy,’ of which there were far more than Joe McCarthy. Long before Joe McCarthy, the left was smearing liberals like Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer, Wilson himself, and Democrats in Congress like Martin Dies, the first head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, all for the unforgivable sin of strident anti-Communism. Believe me, that’s a short list of the anti-Communists that the left crucified.”

Kengor’s non-partisan approach to looking at Communist influences in America led him to defend many liberals, and also hold conservative-loved dupes accountable. Take Ronald Reagan for instance. He was a duped liberal before he became a staunch anti-Communist and then a conservative.

“Reagan was very candid about this,” Kengor said. “I’ve tried to be honest in this book, highlighting even political heroes of mine – like Reagan – who were once duped. But it was what he learned from that experience that helped convert him into arguably the greatest anti-Communist. He became first a chastened liberal, which was part of a deeper, wider awakening.”

Speaking of Reagan, I asked Kengor about the status of the Reagan film that will be based on his books. “We’re plugging away,” he said. “Ronald Reagan was a great, inspiring historical figure. The man merits a major, serious ‘bio-pic’ that accurately represents what he did and how he helped change the world for the better. This is another area of history that we can’t leave to the extreme left.”

What makes him a natural for this kind of project is Stone’s admiration for Fidel Castro – his documentary  about the Cuban dictator (shelved by HBO – kudos to them) attempted to “portray the human figure” – and Hugo Chavez (whom he “warmly embraced” when on some kind of fact-finding tour of Latin America).

Do they share a wardrobe?

What is it with Hollywoodites and dictators? Michael Medved tries to explain:

“Many people in the entertainment industry feel guilty about their own wealth. They know that they earned it in an arbitrary way, not because they are so much better than someone who’s still working as a waiter in Beverly Hills, but they earned it out of luck. They believe that all capitalism works that way – that people have goodies showered on them not because of their own hard work or creativity, but because of good fortune and luck. That guilt produces this fascination with socialism.”

Feeling guilty, guys? Why not give that excess money to a worthy charity? Or you could decline the big-buck paychecks and ask for something a little more in keeping with what, say, someone working at a convenience store would earn. But I digress.

Stone’s upcoming 10-part miniseries for Showtime, called “Secret History of America”…

…promises to focus on events that ‘at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America’s unique and complex history of the last 60 years.’ Subjects in ‘History’ include President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Of the monsters Stalin and Hitler (and McCarthy!), Stone said,

“Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.

“Stalin has a complete other story,” Stone said. “Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII … I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated.”

Um, I am familiar with the connection between WWI and WWII. Bitter because they lost, bitter because they lost a lot of land, and bitter because they were ordered to pay billions in reparations that took a heavy toll on their economy (they could not afford to pay it all), Germans were ripe for exploitation, and Hitler was the “right man” at the “right time.” Not everyone in America is as in awe of your intellect as you are, Oliver.

I suppose we should have a pity party for Hitler. His dad was abusive, he didn’t do well in school due to his innate laziness, didn’t have lots of friends and he was rejected from art school. He also wasn’t very attractive and had a problem with flatulence, poor guy. Then again, there are plenty of ugly, gassy people whose relationship with their parents wasn’t the greatest who didn’t get into the school of their choice, but not everyone makes up for past failures by coming up with the “Final Solution,” killing six million Jews and other “undesirables,” and inciting a war that involved most of the world’s nations in one way or another and ended with over 70 million dead.

Couldn’t he have just gone on Oprah or Dr. Phil instead?

Some of Hitler’s handiwork

Will Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the “Kennedy Dynasty,” be included in the miniseries as a man who welcomed Hitler because he was a “welcome solution” to the problem of those pesky Jews? Just curious.

We could feel sorry for Stalin too. Imagine being saddled with the birth name Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili! Geez, how do you even say that? But Hollywood stars are in the habit of changing their names too, so maybe that’s one way they can relate. Stalin’s father was a cobbler (shoemaker) and an alcoholic, his mother was a maid, he contracted smallpox and he suffered from the same kind of poverty that most Russian peasants did in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (He earned better grades than Hitler did, though. Snap! Sounds pretty depressing.

But it’s not every pockmarked Russian peasant who can claim to have not only been a part of the group who toppled a royal dynasty, but also engineered a famine in Ukraine that killed some 7 million people because they dared to seek independence from his glorious rule. Gosh, who wouldn’t revel in the government seizure of all privately-owned land and livestock in a predominantly agricultural society?

Victims of Stalin’s famine in Ukraine

And speaking of “context,” had we not dropped the bomb on Japan, the Japanese would have kept on fighting, keeping the war going on for who knows how much longer, until “all Japanese were killed.” And now we’re allies. Who would have predicted that in 1945? The world is a strange and wondrous place.

But fear not, patriotic Americans: Big Hollywood’s Kurt Schlichter has Oliver Stone’s number:

The real “Secret History” that Stone won’t disclose involves the identity of the Americans who actually thought the Nazis had quite a lot to offer with their collectivist, anti-capitalist vision, their refusal to let things like democracy stop their agenda, and their fondness for eugenics.  Here’s a hint:  It starts with a “P” and ends with a “rogressives.”

Hmmm…you mean that Sen. Joe McCarthy was right all along?

I wonder if that’s the kind of context Stone is looking for?

Somehow, I doubt it.

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They learn quite a bit about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

If you’ve read Karl Marx, there’s no reason to read Howard Zinn. In fact, reading the most important line of The Communist Manifesto makes a study of A People’s History of the United States a colossal waste of time. The single-bullet theory of history offered by Marx–“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”–is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history. Economics determines everything. Why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and one finds greed motivating every major event. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both world wars—to name but a few examples—all stem from base motives involving rich men seeking to get richer at the expense of other men.

Zinn’s projection of Marxist theory upon historical reality begins with Columbus. According to Zinn, those following the seafaring Italian to the New World did so for one reason: profit. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property,” maintains the octogenarian scribe.

A materialist interpretation continues with the Founding. “Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”

Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, he portrays the American Founding as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression. If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights are merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution.

Zinn paints antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society subjugating man for profit. Curiously, the war that ultimately results in slavery’s demise is portrayed as a conflict of oppression too. Zinn writes, “it is money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.” Rather than welcoming emancipation, as one might expect, Zinn casts a cynical eye towards it. “Class consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War,” the author laments, placing a decidedly negative spin on the central event in American history. America is in a lose/lose situation. The same thing, according to Zinn, caused both slavery and emancipation: greed. Whether the U.S. tolerates or eradicates slavery, its nefarious motives remain the same. Zinn’s jaundiced eye fails to see the real issues surrounding the Civil War. Instead, he envisions the chief significance of the grisly conflict as how it allegedly served as a distraction from the impending socialist revolution.

By the time the reader reaches World War I, Zinn begins to sound like a broken record. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,” the Boston University emeritus professor of history writes of the Great War, “supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another diversion to delay the revolution!

“A People’s War?” is Zinn’s chapter on the war in which he served his country. Zinn suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun. The fight against fascism was all an illusion. While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have been America’s enemies, Uncle Sam’s real goal was empire. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, Zinn asks:  “[W]as it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.” Reality is inverted. It’s not the Soviet Union that went from being anti-Nazi to pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies upon the United States. While Zinn awkwardly excuses the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he all but proclaims a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact.

The reader learns that the Second World War was really about—surprise!—money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings,” Zinn writes, “American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.” Yet, this didn’t happen. The English Empire expired, but no American Empire took its place. Despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, America rebuilt these countries. They are now America’s chief economic rivals, not its colonies.

The profit motive certainly is central to numerous major events in American history. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort in 1848, for example, undeniably stands as the primary reason—alongside the favorable outcome of the Mexican War—for the subsequent population explosion in California. The Gold Rush is one of several historical occurrences that conform to Zinn’s overall thesis. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. For every major figure or event whose catalyst was economic interests, scores were sparked by some unrelated concern.

To question Zinn’s method of analyses is not to say that economics does not influence events. It is to say that one-size-fits-all explanations of history are bound to be wrong more than they are right. History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, ideologues choose theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit theory, leaving the reader to wonder what “people” he is referring to in the book’s title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. By his last month in office, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn’t be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians—and it’s not hard to figure out why. Reagan’s free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out—Reagan’s policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from late 1982 until mid 1990—historians prefer to rewrite history.

These are but a few of Zinn’s errors, which curiously seem to always bolster the left-of-center position. No error goes against the grain of the author’s general thesis. Every author makes mistakes. Zinn, it seems, would make less of them if he used his mind rather than his ideology to do his thinking.

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn’s classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an “F” for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses.

More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out.

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s “tear down the wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn highlights immigrants that went into professions such as ditch-digging and prostitution, he excludes success stories like Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during 1991’s Gulf War.

How do readers learn about U.S. history with all these omissions? They don’t.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008) and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright © 2004 by Daniel J. Flynn.

When you factor in that Barack Obama is my president, Joe Biden is my vice-president, Nancy Pelosi is next in line, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are my senators, Brad Sherman is my congressman, Antonio Villaraigosa is my mayor and Jerry Brown is lurking in the wings to be my governor, do you really think I’ll be turning my pen into a plowshare anytime soon?    

But at least now you might have a better handle on why I look back so fondly on what I have come to regard as the good old days when an American’s major complaint was that he had taxation without representation. 

On top of everything else, I live in Los Angeles and have spent most of my adult life laboring in Hollywood, a place that some people regard as less an actual location than a state of mind.  I agree it is a state of mind in the same sense that paranoia and schizophrenia are states of mind. 

After working in the field of entertainment for about 40 years, I swear to you that there are a fair number of normal, decent human beings who work in the industry.  But truth compels me to say that the lower you go in the pecking order, the likelier you are to find them.  That’s not to say that every producer, actor, director and writer, is an arrogant, leftwing, coke-snorting, bottom-feeding egomaniac, but that’s certainly the way to bet. 

Sometimes, when I’m daydreaming about what Hell must be like, I envision a place where every day you wake up and have to go work for someone like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, nasty sourpusses who think that their every whim should be immediately pandered to and who regard themselves as God, but with a bigger expense account, a larger staff and a better pension plan. 

In short, Pelosi, Frank and Reid and their congressional cronies, could find true happiness working at a TV network, a movie studio or a theatrical agency.  Perhaps you think I’m making this up, but I’m not.  Liberal politicians are doing their best to shove Obamacare down our throats, pretending it’s manna from Heaven, but you may have noticed that they haven’t the slightest intention of leaving their own medical care up to a lottery system.  And can you really blame them?  Do you think Pelosi wants a bunch of strangers deciding if she can get another dozen face lifts?  You think Robert Byrd wants to leave it up to a death panel to determine if it’s time to put the old Ku Kluxer on an ice floe? 

You could call them hypocrites, but I call them Hollywood hopefuls.  They’d fit right in.  This is the town, after all, where people are still whining over the fact that a handful of mediocre actors and hack writers were blacklisted 60 years ago because they were, for the most part, unrepentant Communists whose allegiance was to the evil Soviet Union.  But these same people think nothing of blacklisting writers and directors who have done nothing worse than made the fatal mistake of turning 50. 

Many years ago, radio wit Fred Allen observed that “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, stick it in the navel of a flea, and still have room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”  I say he was being too kind.  Although I regard myself as basically a loyal person, I’ve had about two dozen agents in my life.  What’s more, in what was a moderately successful TV writing career, by getting my own jobs, I made money for all of them, except the last one.  Which was just as well because she’s the one who went to the slammer for stealing her clients’ money.

 The reason, by the way, I kept leaving agents wasn’t simply because none of them ever earned his or her 10%, but because eventually they all lied to me about what they would do for me or, worse yet, what they had already done. 

In my experience, agents are people who like to have lunch, shmooze with other agents and con young women into having sex with them.  Those are the male agents, of course.  Female agents, on the other hand, like to have lunch, shmooze with other agents and con young women into having sex with them. 

In other words, if a genie somehow managed to switch everyone in Hollywood with everyone in Congress, you would barely notice it.  In fact, aside from the fact that the paparazzi would all have to pack up and move east and that “Henry Waxman: The Musical!” would finally be green-lighted at Universal, life would go on as usual.

Brooks is a superstar pundit.  A featured journalist at The Weekly Standard, in 2000 Brooks was author of “Bobos in Paradise,” a smart look at “bourgeois bohemians,” the educated, “counterculture” crowd that had become America’s new blue state power elite.  Brooks went on to occupy the house conservative Op Ed position at the liberal mainstay New York Times and the equivalent chair on PBS NewsHour’s version of crossfire, with ever-apologetic Brooks pitted against the always garrulous lefty Mark Shields.  These two roles established Brooks as the left’s favorite conservative, a position he solidified as one of the Obamacons, prominent conservatives who supported Obama, believing him to be a moderate centrist, or in Brooks’ case, even a closet Burkean conservative. 

Last week Brooks went with his 15-year-old daughter to see a Springsteen concert in Baltimore and witnessed her joyous astonishment.  Her arrival at utter abandon echoed the exhilaration, the emotional learning, Springsteen had long ago imparted to Brooks, the depiction of a world of “teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law,” tales told with a jolt for “10,000 people in a state of utter abandon.”   

Brooks fondly describes the artistry and stories of Springsteen’s universe, “a distinct map of reality” seen on an epic and anthemic scale, in which “losers” always retain dignity and their choices have immense moral consequences, with emotions like stoicism, seen through veils of exaltation and nostalgia.  

Brooks also contemplates the artist, Springsteen himself, elusive, but for Brooks revealed by the “embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself,” which Brooks reads as a humble de-emphasis of his own individual contributions in favor of the various musical traditions he presents. 

Brooks’ view is both charmingly personal and astonishingly superficial. It should occur to Brooks that the epic, anthemic performance he celebrates, through veils of exaltation and nostalgia, is a brilliantly constructed and much polished reach toward the mythological.  The desperate teenagers, laid-off mill workers, lawbreaking drifters are less the real folks of Springsteen’s life or American history than the figures of 60’s counterculture mythology, all of whom stand in, like Bonnie and Clyde, for alienated middle class adolescents searching for an identity.  

In an affectionate but clear-eyed analysis of the Springsteen show, Slate’s Stephen Metcalf has described this map of reality as “Faux Americana,” “a middle class fantasy of white, working class authenticity,” which Metcalf wisely attributes to Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer, manager, and “full-service Svengali.” Landau, graduate of Brandeis and veteran of the 60’s Boston political scene, ‘discovered’ Springsteen, famously declaring, “I have seen rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” echoing left-wing journalist Lincoln Steffens 1921 remark after visiting the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future, and it works.”  Springsteen’s own politics have been decidedly left-wing: “I was politicized by the 60’s,” he has observed, and has supported John Kerry, anti-nuke, pro-Sandinista, Amnesty International, and MoveOn campaigns.   

The ‘Bruce’ David Brooks celebrates is not just the self-effacing voice of our musical traditions.  After all, in the rock pantheon he is ‘the Boss.’ Rather, the concerts are fully dramatized and choreographed presentations of Springsteen as the everyman oracle of this mythology, bourn on Wagnerian walls of sound.  Metcalf observes, the persona is constructed, “a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang,” a much refined invention, all “po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move.” 

The fanciful working class authenticity is key, the basis of the Boss’ claim on what Brooks sees as immense moral authority.  Brooks quotes Landau, that there is “not a lot of irony” in Bruce’s work, which, if you have any critical distance from the fabricated character, attendant mythology, and anthemic music, is dead wrong, Otherwise, you are Metcalf’s “rock and roll naïf,” and Landau is a circus huckster.  

Springsteen is not alone in constructing a persona, with its own mythology, claiming an imagined authenticity.  Many among the cast of characters of the 60’s counterculture, including rock stars, were in fact middle class kids who remade their own histories and identities, which is okay so long as 40 years after Woodstock and Altamont you mention to your impressionable 15-year old kid, this is show business, these are not the real gods, this is not your real history. 

But this is not likely among the blue-state elites.  Rather, it is likely that Brooks’ daughter will, at an elite university, be taught a map of reality rather close to the Boss’ faux Americana.  This is only too cruel, as it is also likely that today’s 15-year-olds will be asked to be stoical, to pay for all the mischief, all the self-serving boomer schemes, financial and otherwise.