What’s especially wild is that a number of the opinions that can get a person dismissed out of consideration, unquotable forever, were completely standard and mainstream liberal views a mere 10-15 years ago.
it is a funny thing to discover that the people you "hated" without knowing anything about them, really have much more common sense views across a wide array of topics then the people "on your side." it's so easy to stop any conversation by accusing someone of being a nazi, a racist, a transphobe, a putin lover, an anti-vaxxer, a trump supporter. these are the arguments of people who have no arguments.
i listen to a lot of people these days who i had reflexively tuned out pre-covid. once i heard them speak for themselves, i realized that they weren't crazed right wing bigoted hitler lovers, that i actually agreed with many of the things they said and even "liked" them a lot more than i could ever "like" a joy reid type.
now tucker carlson is a "traitor" because he did an interview that every journalist worth their salt should have wanted to do. it waters down the meaning of the word "treason" just like the "me too victims" reduced "rape" to meaninglessness
i always thought Rachel Madcow was intelligent and her reporting nuanced. then she fell into russiagate and lectures about the efficacy of covid vaccines. you may not like trump but if russia didn't influence the 2016 election, then repeating a hundred times that it did merely makes you a liar.
it started with hillary tarring everyone who didn't vote for her as "deplorables." here is a completely unlikable woman who assumed her ascendancy was in the bag, was owed her in payment for the humiliation she endured in standing by her philandering husband. she still denies the outcome of the election which in her case is not a crime but in trump's case is. to see how the legal system is being distorted just to get one person, how democracy is being destroyed in the name of "saving our democracy" is the most frightening thing and actually makes me want to vote for him, something i have never before considered.
the most amazing thing to me in your story is that your intelligent and educated friend did not stop for a moment and ask himself "hmmm, i've known james for a long time and he's always been smart and honorable. and yet he quotes this woman who i find despicable. perhaps i need to look deeper, maybe ask him what he saw in her, maybe watch the debate he watched with an open mind, maybe even watch it with him." but no, he writes you off. "well, james went crazy, he's gone over to the dark side."
i've never been a sam harris fan. i find him to be an insufferable ego maniac but he does have a large following. i never listen to his podcasts but sometimes have heard him when he is a guest on other podcasts that i listen to and i'm never impressed with him. the one time i did listen to his podcast was when he had eric topol on. i have admired topol, bought his books. he was a whistle blower on VIOXX and lived through a hellish persecution by drug companies trying to destroy him. enter covid and here he is telling sam harris that bret weinstein is evil for telling people to not take the vaccine (which he never did) and he's "killing people" with his misinformation. does sam harris stick up for his long time friend? does he say "i really don't want you to bad mouth my friend on a public forum. i need to talk to him first and see why he's come to his conclusions. i know him to be a rational ethical man. maybe i can have you both on and you can debate your positions" no! he falls back on the old insanity plea as in "maybe bret has gone crazy."
since then he's justified his unjustifiable treatment of his former friend by piling on the charges- "i always thought bret was ethical but i was wrong." "his dangerous views may turn out to have been right but at the time, given what we knew, they were wrong." HUH? he'll say anything to avoid admitting that he was, not only wrong, but spineless!
this happened to us with a very old friend. my life partner had been his mentor. he always looked up to me with a kind of hero worship. a few months ago, we delivered something where he was working and my boyfriend was wearing an RFKjr hat. "oh, he's crazy" is how he dismissed us. he has no idea that i've followed the man for years, back when he was a hero in NYC for getting the Hudson River cleaned up, that i donate every year to the CHD, that i've read his books, listened to his lectures. at no point did he stop and think "john and carolyn are the smartest people i know. i would go over a cliff if john asked me to. so why would these two people i respect support this guy who i've been told is crazy? should i look into this?"
no, he simply said "wow, you guys have really changed since moving to the south" forgetting, i guess, that florida where he lives is considerably south of SC where we live. he repeated all the classic liberal tropes- "deathsantis," "anti-vaxxer," " if trump wins, it will be the end of democracy."
he didn't stop to wonder why i would give up my job of 40 years rather than take the vaccine, a job he knows meant everything in the world to me. nope, carolyn's gone crazy, that's all.
the hardest lessons are that most of the people you considered your closest friends actually weren't worth the paper they were printed on and that there are lots of people "on the other side" who you have more in common with, that all the people who said they would have sheltered anne frank would have in fact turned her in for a greater share of rations and that a lot of them have turned over their thinking to the state.
Fabulous comments, thank you! THIS is absolutely on the money: "the most amazing thing to me in your story is that your intelligent and educated friend did not stop for a moment and ask himself "hmmm, i've known james for a long time and he's always been smart and honorable. and yet he quotes this woman who i find despicable. perhaps i need to look deeper..." RIGHT. Unfortunately, as Oscar Wilde wrote "we live in an age of surfaces." Many people are intellectually, politically, culturally lazy and at the mercy of the algorithm unless they seek out alternate sources of information and opinion. But most would rather wear a mask, don a MAGA hat, put pronouns in their bios, use the right hashtag or flag or whatever symbol to signal their tribal allegiances instead of THINK FOR THEMSELVES. Carolyn--I appreciate you, thank you!
I'm reminded these days of Aaron Sorkin's speech written for Michael Douglas in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT:
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free". https://youtu.be/-__djIQgBJc?si=lZE4dLvqbN3y8UQw
one of our favorite films. we watch it often and wish people could really talk like that. BTW, my boyfriend was the technical director of some of the biggest (though not the best) shows ever on broadway and i started a costume shop where we made costumes for every broadway show you can name. i know you are a performer.
happily we left NY in 2018. i can't imagine being there while locked into my apartment, unable due to vaccination status to go anywhere or do anything
The only Broadway production I was in was the national tour of SPAMALOT and it was a thrill to be fitted for shoes at T O Day, and have Paul Huntley fit my wigs, and oh!! Having my clothes tailored by Arturo at Barbara Matera. Amazing. Sigh. Glad I experienced it. My Dad was a set designer, and he trained three decades of scenic artists at BU.
we made costumes for spamalot and i went out to chicago for the out of town work. my feeling was that the scenes with the women really slowed it down and many of them were cut by the time it got to NYC. my boyfriend was the technical director for les miz and phantom and when covid ended his NY career, he was head props on Dear Evan Hanson. he recently got back from 2 1/2 months in chicago on BOOP. the mandates are over so his working wasn't an issue. no one asked and they probably all assumed he was vaccinated and boosted because isn't everyone?
i was for 40 years the costume director of the spoleto arts festival in charleston, SC where we live now and why we live here now. although they fired me over the vaccine so i'm not sure why we live here anymore. i opened my shop in NY so that i would be free to do the festival every year which i would not have been if i worked for someone else. in NYC, we did costumes for phantom, spamalot, jersey boys, chicago, mamma mia, tap dance kid, light on the piazza, the met opera and many more, all of which would have stopped me at the door because of my lack of vaccines. after the festival let me go, not a single person called to see how i was faring after such a betrayal; people i had worked with for 20, 30 years just accepted my sudden absence as if i had never existed. my assistant of 30 years said "you made your choice and the festival honored your choice and moved on. there was no discrimination." funny how a 30 year friendship can end in a sentence.
i always believed artists to be rebels and free thinkers. nothing else mattered but your ability to get the job done. no one ever asked about my flu shots or my mammograms (1 and zero respectively). no one ever minded if i worked through a fever. no one walked around spraying hand sanitizer on everything. i cannot imagine ever being more disappointed in a group of people. it was as if they wanted permission to discriminate, to have an out group so that they could feel superior. there are a whole lot of people i'll never speak to again.
It's going to be very awkward in the not too distant future when people are faced with what they've done to their colleagues out of panic, or a greediness to be RIGHT, or cravenly to expel competition for the very few jobs the industry has to offer. It's gonna be very much like the aftermath of the blacklist.
The difference being that the blacklist mostly occurred behind closed doors, in quietly missed opportunities and whispers (my grandfather, writer-actor David Ellis, was blacklisted). This happened right in front of us, recorded on social media.
I don't know about the behind closed doors thing re: the McCarthy Trials. People (like Ronald Reagan and Elia Kazan) testified on film, naming names, and the greater public saw it all play out on newsreels and in the press. Philip Loeb, whom I wrote about in my piece on Richard Bilkszto, was a household name who was very publicly blacklisted and vilified, canceled by any metric we'd use today, lost his show, his livelihood and ultimately committed suicide (also a well publicized tragedy). I hope your grandfather was able to rebound and return, like Dalton Trumbo and a few others, to their work and good name.
Yes, I should have been more clear. There was the public and the private aspect. A lot of the private aspect meant that there was a lot of denial of the blacklist, just people who stopped working after their appearance before HUAC. (Which...I guess parallels this very closely. Guess I was just being a contrarian.) My grandfather was one of those. Our official family story is that he committed suicide BECAUSE of the pressures of a decade under the blacklist, but of course he’d had depression before it began so it’s all about which narrative one wants to highlight.
One of his final radioplays was specifically about the Blacklistings (“watch your mouth - that’s commie-talk, Joe”) as a final “fuck you, you can’t tell me what to say” since he knew he was about to get iced out of the industry.
I was thinking it might be a good idea to do a dramatic reading at some point of documents from the blacklistings alongside documents from the Great Cancellation. Along with some plays and other artifacts from both eras.
What’s especially wild is that a number of the opinions that can get a person dismissed out of consideration, unquotable forever, were completely standard and mainstream liberal views a mere 10-15 years ago.
Exactly. It's like looking at our culture in fun house mirror (minus the fun).
it is a funny thing to discover that the people you "hated" without knowing anything about them, really have much more common sense views across a wide array of topics then the people "on your side." it's so easy to stop any conversation by accusing someone of being a nazi, a racist, a transphobe, a putin lover, an anti-vaxxer, a trump supporter. these are the arguments of people who have no arguments.
i listen to a lot of people these days who i had reflexively tuned out pre-covid. once i heard them speak for themselves, i realized that they weren't crazed right wing bigoted hitler lovers, that i actually agreed with many of the things they said and even "liked" them a lot more than i could ever "like" a joy reid type.
now tucker carlson is a "traitor" because he did an interview that every journalist worth their salt should have wanted to do. it waters down the meaning of the word "treason" just like the "me too victims" reduced "rape" to meaninglessness
i always thought Rachel Madcow was intelligent and her reporting nuanced. then she fell into russiagate and lectures about the efficacy of covid vaccines. you may not like trump but if russia didn't influence the 2016 election, then repeating a hundred times that it did merely makes you a liar.
it started with hillary tarring everyone who didn't vote for her as "deplorables." here is a completely unlikable woman who assumed her ascendancy was in the bag, was owed her in payment for the humiliation she endured in standing by her philandering husband. she still denies the outcome of the election which in her case is not a crime but in trump's case is. to see how the legal system is being distorted just to get one person, how democracy is being destroyed in the name of "saving our democracy" is the most frightening thing and actually makes me want to vote for him, something i have never before considered.
the most amazing thing to me in your story is that your intelligent and educated friend did not stop for a moment and ask himself "hmmm, i've known james for a long time and he's always been smart and honorable. and yet he quotes this woman who i find despicable. perhaps i need to look deeper, maybe ask him what he saw in her, maybe watch the debate he watched with an open mind, maybe even watch it with him." but no, he writes you off. "well, james went crazy, he's gone over to the dark side."
i've never been a sam harris fan. i find him to be an insufferable ego maniac but he does have a large following. i never listen to his podcasts but sometimes have heard him when he is a guest on other podcasts that i listen to and i'm never impressed with him. the one time i did listen to his podcast was when he had eric topol on. i have admired topol, bought his books. he was a whistle blower on VIOXX and lived through a hellish persecution by drug companies trying to destroy him. enter covid and here he is telling sam harris that bret weinstein is evil for telling people to not take the vaccine (which he never did) and he's "killing people" with his misinformation. does sam harris stick up for his long time friend? does he say "i really don't want you to bad mouth my friend on a public forum. i need to talk to him first and see why he's come to his conclusions. i know him to be a rational ethical man. maybe i can have you both on and you can debate your positions" no! he falls back on the old insanity plea as in "maybe bret has gone crazy."
since then he's justified his unjustifiable treatment of his former friend by piling on the charges- "i always thought bret was ethical but i was wrong." "his dangerous views may turn out to have been right but at the time, given what we knew, they were wrong." HUH? he'll say anything to avoid admitting that he was, not only wrong, but spineless!
this happened to us with a very old friend. my life partner had been his mentor. he always looked up to me with a kind of hero worship. a few months ago, we delivered something where he was working and my boyfriend was wearing an RFKjr hat. "oh, he's crazy" is how he dismissed us. he has no idea that i've followed the man for years, back when he was a hero in NYC for getting the Hudson River cleaned up, that i donate every year to the CHD, that i've read his books, listened to his lectures. at no point did he stop and think "john and carolyn are the smartest people i know. i would go over a cliff if john asked me to. so why would these two people i respect support this guy who i've been told is crazy? should i look into this?"
no, he simply said "wow, you guys have really changed since moving to the south" forgetting, i guess, that florida where he lives is considerably south of SC where we live. he repeated all the classic liberal tropes- "deathsantis," "anti-vaxxer," " if trump wins, it will be the end of democracy."
he didn't stop to wonder why i would give up my job of 40 years rather than take the vaccine, a job he knows meant everything in the world to me. nope, carolyn's gone crazy, that's all.
the hardest lessons are that most of the people you considered your closest friends actually weren't worth the paper they were printed on and that there are lots of people "on the other side" who you have more in common with, that all the people who said they would have sheltered anne frank would have in fact turned her in for a greater share of rations and that a lot of them have turned over their thinking to the state.
Fabulous comments, thank you! THIS is absolutely on the money: "the most amazing thing to me in your story is that your intelligent and educated friend did not stop for a moment and ask himself "hmmm, i've known james for a long time and he's always been smart and honorable. and yet he quotes this woman who i find despicable. perhaps i need to look deeper..." RIGHT. Unfortunately, as Oscar Wilde wrote "we live in an age of surfaces." Many people are intellectually, politically, culturally lazy and at the mercy of the algorithm unless they seek out alternate sources of information and opinion. But most would rather wear a mask, don a MAGA hat, put pronouns in their bios, use the right hashtag or flag or whatever symbol to signal their tribal allegiances instead of THINK FOR THEMSELVES. Carolyn--I appreciate you, thank you!
I'm reminded these days of Aaron Sorkin's speech written for Michael Douglas in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT:
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free". https://youtu.be/-__djIQgBJc?si=lZE4dLvqbN3y8UQw
one of our favorite films. we watch it often and wish people could really talk like that. BTW, my boyfriend was the technical director of some of the biggest (though not the best) shows ever on broadway and i started a costume shop where we made costumes for every broadway show you can name. i know you are a performer.
happily we left NY in 2018. i can't imagine being there while locked into my apartment, unable due to vaccination status to go anywhere or do anything
The only Broadway production I was in was the national tour of SPAMALOT and it was a thrill to be fitted for shoes at T O Day, and have Paul Huntley fit my wigs, and oh!! Having my clothes tailored by Arturo at Barbara Matera. Amazing. Sigh. Glad I experienced it. My Dad was a set designer, and he trained three decades of scenic artists at BU.
we made costumes for spamalot and i went out to chicago for the out of town work. my feeling was that the scenes with the women really slowed it down and many of them were cut by the time it got to NYC. my boyfriend was the technical director for les miz and phantom and when covid ended his NY career, he was head props on Dear Evan Hanson. he recently got back from 2 1/2 months in chicago on BOOP. the mandates are over so his working wasn't an issue. no one asked and they probably all assumed he was vaccinated and boosted because isn't everyone?
i was for 40 years the costume director of the spoleto arts festival in charleston, SC where we live now and why we live here now. although they fired me over the vaccine so i'm not sure why we live here anymore. i opened my shop in NY so that i would be free to do the festival every year which i would not have been if i worked for someone else. in NYC, we did costumes for phantom, spamalot, jersey boys, chicago, mamma mia, tap dance kid, light on the piazza, the met opera and many more, all of which would have stopped me at the door because of my lack of vaccines. after the festival let me go, not a single person called to see how i was faring after such a betrayal; people i had worked with for 20, 30 years just accepted my sudden absence as if i had never existed. my assistant of 30 years said "you made your choice and the festival honored your choice and moved on. there was no discrimination." funny how a 30 year friendship can end in a sentence.
i always believed artists to be rebels and free thinkers. nothing else mattered but your ability to get the job done. no one ever asked about my flu shots or my mammograms (1 and zero respectively). no one ever minded if i worked through a fever. no one walked around spraying hand sanitizer on everything. i cannot imagine ever being more disappointed in a group of people. it was as if they wanted permission to discriminate, to have an out group so that they could feel superior. there are a whole lot of people i'll never speak to again.
It's going to be very awkward in the not too distant future when people are faced with what they've done to their colleagues out of panic, or a greediness to be RIGHT, or cravenly to expel competition for the very few jobs the industry has to offer. It's gonna be very much like the aftermath of the blacklist.
The difference being that the blacklist mostly occurred behind closed doors, in quietly missed opportunities and whispers (my grandfather, writer-actor David Ellis, was blacklisted). This happened right in front of us, recorded on social media.
I don't know about the behind closed doors thing re: the McCarthy Trials. People (like Ronald Reagan and Elia Kazan) testified on film, naming names, and the greater public saw it all play out on newsreels and in the press. Philip Loeb, whom I wrote about in my piece on Richard Bilkszto, was a household name who was very publicly blacklisted and vilified, canceled by any metric we'd use today, lost his show, his livelihood and ultimately committed suicide (also a well publicized tragedy). I hope your grandfather was able to rebound and return, like Dalton Trumbo and a few others, to their work and good name.
Yes, I should have been more clear. There was the public and the private aspect. A lot of the private aspect meant that there was a lot of denial of the blacklist, just people who stopped working after their appearance before HUAC. (Which...I guess parallels this very closely. Guess I was just being a contrarian.) My grandfather was one of those. Our official family story is that he committed suicide BECAUSE of the pressures of a decade under the blacklist, but of course he’d had depression before it began so it’s all about which narrative one wants to highlight.
One of his final radioplays was specifically about the Blacklistings (“watch your mouth - that’s commie-talk, Joe”) as a final “fuck you, you can’t tell me what to say” since he knew he was about to get iced out of the industry.
I was thinking it might be a good idea to do a dramatic reading at some point of documents from the blacklistings alongside documents from the Great Cancellation. Along with some plays and other artifacts from both eras.
That's a fantastic idea!