THE 30 CONDESCENDING IDIOTS

My first thought on seeing the letter from the Congressional Progressive Caucus was “WTF?” when I saw Jaime Raskin’s name on it. Then, when I saw the video of Pramilla Jayapal leading the collection of 30 clucks, and Jaime standing there with a big smile on his face like he’d just done something really good, I was reminded I had known of his father, “back in the day.”

Marcus Goodman Raskin was a Big Name in the academic intellectual wing of The Movement back in the Sixties as a co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, the leading left think tank of the day. No one said anything, but his background as first generation offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants in the 1930s was assumed to mean he had gotten his leftism in his mother’s milk. Most of the leading “left intellectuals” in the Sixties were what was known as “red diaper babies,” children of the 30s and 40s radicals loosely around the CPUSA, the Socialist Worker’s Party, the CIO, etc. This is not to say he was a communist, far from it. His career after studying under Rexford Guy Tugwell at the University of Chicago and UChi Law was pretty elite in D.C., working in the world of what passed for the liberal left in the Democratic Party of those days as a legislative aide to congressman James Roosevelt. In the Fifties, the children of the old radicals had “learned their lesson” and trimmed their sails accordingly. They quietly tut-tutted “that man” (McCarthy) over cocktails in Georgetown. (There’s a good portrait of the kind of people I am thinking of in the original “The Manchurian Candidate,” even moreso in the novel.)

Not surprisingly, in the heady days of the New Frontier, he managed to find his way to the staff of McGeorge Bundy, one of the authors of our adventure in The Big Muddy down in Southeast Asia. Seeing that head-on did reawaken things for a lot of these guys, Raskin among them; in 1963 he left government service and joined Richard Barnet (who I met a couple times) in founding the IPS to critique government policy from the left.

I got to know of Raskin as an anti-war Vietnam vet in search of knowledge about why I was an anti-war Vietnam vet; he was the co-author with French southeast Asia expert Bernard Fall of “The Vietnam Reader,” the first book that brought forth accurate information about the First Indochina War and US support for that and how we came to be there in 1965. He was busy in 1965, writing “A Citizen's White Paper on American Policy in Vietnam and Southeast Asia,” and “After 20 Years: Alternatives to the Cold War in Europe,” with Barnet. I read them all; the last one was the first book that led me to seriously questioning the Cold War, which has been something you will find in the conclusion of “Tidal Wave,” my Korean War trilogy, and the two Vietnam books.

Eventually, Raskin made it into the Big Time publicly when he received documents from Daniel Ellsberg that became known as the Pentagon Papers, and took steps to put Ellsberg in touch with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. In the fallout from that, there was threat of imprisonment.

Philosophically, Raskin was pretty deep in classical American left thinking along with some classic European sources. Reviews of his 1971 book “Being and Doing: An Inquiry Into the Colonization, Decolonization and Reconstruction of American Society and Its State,” noted the influence of American pragmatist John Dewey, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and the politics of the New Left. Looking up the review today in Library Journal on the net, it said that Raskin “foresees a peaceful process of non-Marxist reconstruction that will replace authoritarianism and the status quo with politics of the people and a redefined social ethic.”

By a few years later, I had come to my senses and figured out that that was classic gobbledegook promoted by people who thought they were smart because they could write sentences using 20 polysyllabic words that you had to read three times to make sense of.

However, that’s not my point.

My point is, this is the stuff son Jaime grew up inhaling from a very early age. The end result is that with the family intellectual tradition, and the desire of a boy to emulate the father who divorced his mother, Jaime became the intellectual and political descendant of his father. This makes him very good at some things, like what he is so well-known for in the Trump Era. He’s the best-possible kind of prosecutor for a scum like Trump.

But the other stuff he imbibed (go back and reread the full title of Being and Doing) is why he was standing there with that idiot grin on his face behind Jayapal and next to AOC yesterday.

I was once talking with Billy Wilder at one of our lunches about my experience of The Left in The Sixties, and he talked about his experience of the same bunch in Berlin and then in Hollywood. (The ones in Berlin were physically different people from the ones in Hollywood, who were physically different people from the ones I knew, but they were all “That Guy.”) He remarked that “The thing that really pissed me off about them was their condescension, especially since you could look at their work and see they had nothing to condescend about.” (In his case, the ones he knew in Berlin were the ones who dismissed the Nazis as “clowns” and called him a “crank” for constantly talking about their threat - the ones of whom he said in his story about escaping the Nazis, “I returned twelve years later to find all my friends who had called me a crank were dead. Killed by the clowns.”)

The writer in Hollywood he mentioned as the most condescending was John Howard Lawson.

After I got into the Writers Guild of America, west, Inc., and had access to the library, I was historically interested in examining the work of the Hollywood Commies. The first script I pulled and read was “Action In The North Atlantic,” which fans of World War II war movies may remember starring Humphrey Bogart as the captain of a cargo ship fighting his way across the Atlantic on the deadly Murmansk Run, the story loosely based on the terrible fate of Convoy PQ-17. (That was so tough it was actually worse than what the movie shows, which is pretty strong stuff.)

The screenplay was by John Howard Lawson, at the time Chief Commissar of the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party USA, which had its main headquarters in the Writer’s Guild - which is why the Hollywood Ten were all writers. He was also the elected leader of the WGA when HUAC came to town in 1947.

The general rule is that many bad movies have been made from good scripts, but no good movies have ever been made from bad scripts. “Action In The North Atlantic” is not a great movie, but it “coulda been a contendah.” If it wasn’t for all the Communist “propaganda” Lawson “sneaked in” to the script - the lines are the kind that stop the scene while the actor turns to face the camera and “breaks the fourth wall,” to Proclaim The Truth for the poor benighted audience in the theater. They’re actually pretty mild stuff - favorable comments about the Seaman’s Union and things like that. But the way it’s done reveals one thing:

John Howard Lawson was a talentless hack.

Anyone with talent could put that stuff in and have the audience cheering it instead of laughing at it.

Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. had no trouble doing it. Being writers of talent and intelligence - rather than hacks - they both “came and went” in the Hollywood Branch of the CPUSA, though their reputations outlasted them and they both got hooked into the Hollywood Ten, as you can learn in the really excellent movie “Trumbo,” which I highly recommend. I’ll always love Lardner for his reply to the congressional inquisitor, “I could give you names, but then I’d have to hate myself for the rest of my life.”

Lawson’s not the only one whose work doesn’t stand up to being looked at in its original form by someone familiar with how to pull the rabbit out the hat publicly without being caught at it. The list of the talentless hacks (who else can believe in the usefulness of Socialist Realism? These are the same wannabees I knew 40 years ago who swore that The Seven Golden Keys of Screenwriting Success - taught by a moron with no produced credits - was going to get them an Oscar.)

If you’re someone with the talent of Billy Wilder - or even me - being condescended to by a talentless moron will not get a positive response.

Hell, if you’re someone with the brains to be able to grab your ass with both hands on consecutive attempts, you don’t like being condescended to by obvious morons, talentless or not.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the continuing problem of the American Left. Think it hasn’t been going on forever? Suffer through the first 40 minutes of the interminable “Reds” and I rest my case.

And these are the people who got up in Congress yesterday and decided to issue a statement that had been drafted and forgotten four months ago, two weeks before the most important election in our history, that allowed them to be placed alongside Marjorie Traitor Green and Dumbest Oklafornian Kevin McQarthy as Putin-appeasing idiots.

And then we got treated to the condescension of Pramilla Jayapal, telling us that of course the 30 morons aren’t really morons, don’t believe your lying eyes and ears. I swear, if I lived in Jayapal’s district, I would vote for her opponent on the grounds I’d like to know I was being represented by an idiot.

And that condescending fool thinks she has the ability to succeed the greatest Speaker of the House of Representatives in history, someone who has forgotten more than Jayapal will know if she lives to be 100.

And all 30 of the condescending morons will tell you it’s just that the American people “don’t understand their own needs” that is why Democrats are in trouble in this election.

So, of course, let’s go tell the president it’s time to run up the white flag! Let’s go condescend to Joe!

George Bernard Shaw once observed that, “a man who is not a communist at 20 has no heart, while a man who is a communist at 30 has no head.”

The far right may say Jayapal et al are “commies” (they call me Tommie the Commie when they step up to get smacked in the face). That’s not true.

They’re just idiots.

Unfortunately, they claim they’re on my side, which is damn embarrassing. Jeezus Freaking Kee-rist.

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