... well, he's Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, the true point of which, he says, has been missed: Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted.
There were a couple of items in this that I would have brought to the reporter's attention had I edited the story. One is the assertion that in 1953 most Americans "watched 7-inch screens in black and white." Well, the black and white is right, but the screens were already much bigger (we had a 12-inch TV), as this ad indicates.
Then, there's the reference to "Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands." I hold no brief for McCarthy, who was a bounder, but his investigations, such as they were, were of the state department and the army. In other words, it was intragovernmental squabbling of a particularly high decibel level. Our reporter is probably thinking of the House Un-American Activities Committee that in the late '40s investigated the movie industry (it was that industry that set up the black list, by the way, not the government). Whether thousands had their creativity stifled is doubtful.
I'm afraid I've only the sketchiest of knowledge so at the risk of being off the mark but wasn't Charlie Chaplin effectively hounded out of America during the McCarthy years? If someone as seemingly benevolent in his artistic pretensions as Chaplin was pushed out then presumably such an atmosphere of repression did indeed extend into the larger artistic population.
ReplyDeleteJust a quick recourse to Wikipedia and a quote by Chaplin here:
ReplyDelete". . . Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America's yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States."
Chaplin was called to testify before HUAC in 1947, but the invitation was postponed again and again. His running off with Oona O'Neill when she was about 18 got him a lot of bad press in the gossip columns. Anti-communist (I hesitate to call them conservative) columnists got on his case and the like. But McCarthy had nothing to do with it - that's my point. Nor am I in any way condoning that sort of thing. Charlie appears to have remained blind to the excesses of Stalin and hypersensitive to criticism in a more or less open society. He was rich. He hardly suffered - and his creativity by then was mostly a thing of the past.
ReplyDeleteI agree about avoiding McCarthy being made a villain of the piece- politics, media, big business interests all exist in alliance with each other, not elegantly existing in hermetically sealed off realms. That Chaplin's creative years were behind him and how much he suffered would seem perhaps besides the point...he could as he did go abroad and live comfortably abroad. Presumably others in the US did not have such possibilities open and the atmosphere more genuinely stifling when more at stake.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the 50s. I have grown so weary of hearing - mostly from people who weren't born yet - that it was unbearably repressive and conformist, some American counterpart to Stalinist Russia. Yeah, and it gave us the Beats, rock 'n' roll, some the best movies ever, the last great period of American theater, some excellent - if now largely ignored - classical music, and some fine jazz. I could go on. What did the wondrous '60s give us? What's the great hippie novel or poem or play?
ReplyDeleteI am not suggesting it was paradise or that some people didn't have some political problems. I am saying that in the US it was pretty good time to be alive.
But Chaplin left in the late 40s, not the 50s. It's not a case of all or nothing, Frank. I wasn't there nor am I pretending 50s US was anything like Stalinist Russia, but then again that's not in itself much of a boast. As someone more of this generation whatever that is, 60s music means infinitely more to me and to most like me than 50s music, though perhaps Beat literature meant(as oposed to means) more than any 60s equivalent. The 60s also brought a very obvious political assassination of the US President from within the establishment, unless we pretend to be morons and believe the official bullshit. That's a pretty repressive act. In western "democracies" one tends not to see the police state within until that state feels threatened, though when the brain-washed masses are hypnotised by vacuities there tends to be less need for 1984 tactics as opposed to the Brave New Worldian.
ReplyDeleteDon't want to harp on this and it's all gone a bit tangential anyway, but a thought that just struck me regarding what point I'm not sure but if we argued that good or great art is a sign of lack of repression of the state, then we'd be left in the awkward position of having to deal with Andrei Tarkovsky, a far greater filmmaker than anyone from the US, or anywhere else for that matter, and I would consider very possibly the greatest artist of the last century. This in an art-form where an awful lot of financial backing is necessary and an artist who was essentially religious in his vision or understanding of life. Does this signify Tarkovsky lived in a less repressive society, ie USSR of the 60s and 70s? Which of course he didn't but we have to be slow to make claims for a state based on the artists who emerge within it. Just as another tangent, Tarkovsky certainly faced severe obstacles from within the Soviet system in getting his films made and he eventually exiled himself from there, but he considered it very unlikely that had he lived in the West, he would have got the kind of financial backing necessary to make a film like Andrei Rublev in the way he wished it made. In fact it seems utterly inconceivable that he would have done so.
ReplyDeleteWell, Andrew, I think Vincent Bugliosi's new book (and Richard Posner's older one) both pretty conclusively demonstrate that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy. I subscribe to none of the conspiracy theories and it doesn't look as if any rational person could after the work Bugliosi has done. Of course, I also think John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln, Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley and Charles Guiteau did in Garfield.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't suggesting that the US in the '50s was only marginally better than Stalinist Russia. I was suggesting that it was infintely better. And if that be thought boasting, well I stand by it. As for the '60s, there's plenty of music from then and later that I love (see earlier post today about Nilsson, a close friend of the sainted John Lennon). But I think that, apart from pop music, the '60s contribution to the arts was not much to boast of. Which brings us to the point of your followup post. I don't know if repression is necessary to produce great art - I hope not. But it does seem that luxury is unlikely to produce it. I was not suggesting, by the way, that '50s America produced better art because it was not repressive. The bit about art was ancillary to my overall point, which is that the view of the '50s espoused by many who did not live then is false. It was not some dark age - and in addition to that, it was aesthetically vital in ways the country has yet to be again.
I better let JFK go as ...no...I'll let it go. Though you didn't see a pattern with the assassinations of the popular figures of JFK, Martin Luther King, RObert Kennedy...that was quite a roll of lone gun nuts conveniently ridding potential or actual thorns in the establishment as represented by figures like LBJ & Nixon. I didn't quite let it go. I'd have no argument with anything else really. But you don't think pop art was wonderful whenever that emerged...people like Roy Liechtenstein. No, me neither.
ReplyDeleteAs regards Tarkovsky, I'd guess repression can help focus the mind whereas it's possibly harder to react against a culture of docile satiation.
Just seen the opening line of Bryan's Einstein review:
ReplyDeleteBy the time of Albert Einstein’s death in 1955, the FBI had a 1,427-page dossier on him.
!
Hi Andrew,
ReplyDeleteNassim Nicholas Taleb is the fellow you want to look at to see how much randomness plays a part in events, including assassinations. I know about the FBI and Einstein ... and Oppenheimer, and Elvis, too, I think. Gathering information on people is not in itself wrong. Nothing was done to Einstein and Oppenheimer's case was complicated (having less to do with the deplorable J. Edgar than with a vendetta against Oppenheimer on the part of Robert Strauss). You seem to think that because information was gathered, the FBI functioned like the KGB. It didn't - note that this has been known about the FBI for decades. I'm afraid rumors of spolice state in the USA have been greatly exaggerated.
No, Frank, you seem to think I think that because information was gathered, the FBI functioned like the KGB. You have leapt to that conclusion on your own through a radical interpretation of my lines. Though in things like its brain-washing programs like MK ULTRA which the authorities later admitted to, it could, without qualms, behave exactly in the manner of a totalitarian system, such as its funding of the disgusting Dr Mengele type experimentation of Dr Ewan Cameron. I'd also say that the kind of invasion of privacy that gathering information involves almost certainly is wrong, and the kind of things such surveillance may reap is likely to result in things like blacmail, and will also offshoot into other directions. This typically justified by authoritarianism with the reasoning, "If you have nothing to hide, then why worry about our monitoring of all you do." Who monitors these people, I wonder? Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
ReplyDeleteAlso, artists do tend to be sensitive beings and knowing you are being effectively spied on isn't exactly condusive to the natural outflowing of your art which was the original poin of all this.
As for proving JFK was killed by Oswald and nothing but the Oswald, it's also been conclusively proven that it was a far wider operation.
Well, if it's been conclusively proven that JFK's death involved a wider operation it's news to me. As for gathering information about people, maybe it doesn't bother me as much because I'm the son of a cop. What exactly do you expect an agency like the FBI to do if something like espionage is a crime? Who monitors them? Well, the courts have a say, and so does Congress. Cameron, by the way, worked with the CIA, not the FBI (and the CIA is an agency I think we could well do without, simply by virtue of its almost unbroken record of incompetence).Is the system here fail-safe against abuse? Of course not. You do seem to have a peculiar view of the US. And you're not the only one abroad who seems to. I may have more to say about that in a later post.
ReplyDelete