Movie Review -- Good Night and Good Luck
by guest-poster Bill Patterson
I went in to see George Clooney’s new film Good Night and Good Luck prepared for a lefty blast of mythmaking about the Horror of our very own Terror, and was pleased to find nothing of the sort. The script was intelligent, the performances understated, the use of archival footage extremely well done, and the ideological pitch neither left nor right, but American. This pleased me more than I can say. My respect for Clooney went up several notches.
So pervasive has become the “red state-blue state” crap that it is probably not obvious what I mean by an “American” ideological pitch. What I mean by it is what used to be called “American liberal” before the lefties destroyed the meaning of the term: Clooney’s target—and he portrays Murrow’s target—is not the Communist Menace, for or against; it is strictly limited to McCarthys sleazy methods, concluding its argument with Murrow watching the McCarthy-Army hearings “Have you no sense of decency?”
It is McCarthy’s conspicuous lack of those fundamental American virtues of fairness and decency and respect, even if only minimal, for even one’s opponents—which is, parenthetically, the only thing that has made the Republic work as a republic for the first 209 of the last 229 years. Murrow and Fred Friendly (the role Clooney played as actor in this production) were spoiling for a fight; whatever the complex of motivations, the ground they chose to make their stand on was in the solid tradition of American liberalism (which is also the foundation of that core part of the Republican and conservative movement that is not rightist or “religious rightist").
The left mythology of the so-called McCarthy Era is that the entire country was terrorized; the right mythology goes something like “true, but so what? They were Commies. Fuck ‘em.” Neither mythology bears any relationship to what actually went on. By not engaging the mythologies, Clooney has found common ground and given us that rarity in modern cinema, a thoughtful, engaging, and truthful work of art.
from Tramp Royale by Robert Heinlein:
“The interest in Senator McCarthy was enormous; the total lack of understanding of what was really going on was even more enormous. Now I am neither a constituent nor an admirer of the Senator, but I found myself repeatedly in the odd position of trying to explain what he was doing, why it was legal in a free country for him to do it, and how it was impossible for a congressional investigation to cause a ‘reign of terorr’ in 160,000,000 people.
My task was made more difficult by the fact that many Americans with other attributes of a horse than horse sense were asserting loudly that McCarthy had indeed created a ‘reign of terror.’ Are you terrified? I am not, yet I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator McCarthy’s position. The worst that Senator McCarthy can do to me is to ask me a lot of questions and demand answers under oath. I may resent some of the questions, but I can answer them without taking refuge in the Fifth Amendment; there is no treason in my record.
To call such investigation a ‘reign of terror’ is to stretch language out of all shape. My notion of a ‘reign of terror’ . . . does not mean questioning people under the safeguards of the most thorough system for the protection of individual rights this world has ever known. It does not mean a few dozen traitors and/or custard heads taking refuge behind the Fifth Amendment on the sole grounds that to tell the truth would be to incriminate themselves.
I am not defending McCarthy’s thumb-fingered approach nor his sweeping public statements. It has been argued that McCarthy’s personality and methods have played into the hands of our enemies and enabled Communism International to make effective propaganda against us. There is some truth in this thesis, but, in my opinion, not much. I think that a Senate investigation of communism in the United States would have been fought by propaganda just as angry, just as vicious, had the investigation been chairmanned by Thomas Jefferson with Daniel Webster as his chief council. The thing that the communists hate is not McCarthy’s unloveable personality but the fact that he is daring to attack communism at all. . . .
The point of this aside while our party drives through beautiful new Lima is that the political institutions of another country are hard to understand. Outside the United States very few people comprehend the nature of a congressional investigation and it is almost impossible to explain it to them. They have it mixed up with the Inquisition, with Senator McCarthy having all the functions and powers of Torquemada. The idea that a private citizen can answer or refuse to answer a series of questions put to him by a senator, such that the record shows clearly that the citizen being questioned is now or has in the past been actively engaged in treason against the United States—and then get up and walk out a free man—is so foreign to most other people that they simply cannot believe it.
Furthermore, if they did believe it, they would be even more contemptuous of us for being so soft than they now are for ‘McCarthyism’ as they comprehend it, i.e., which they conceive to be a policy of take-him-away-and-lock-him-up-I-don’t-like-his-politics. Our extreme leniency, if they understood it, would strike them as preposterous, asinine."
I didn’t know until now that Bill was a gorram Commie… [grin]
Posted by on 11/03/05 at 02:34 PMArr! Bite the parrot!
Posted by on 11/03/05 at 03:02 PM-
Posted by Rodger Schlong on 11/03/05 at 04:13 PM
Ahhhh, but if only Uncle Joe were here with us today… ;)
Posted by MoFiZiX Gr4FiX on 11/03/05 at 07:10 PM
Next entry: Here's a Question
Previous entry: Is this what the Senate will be investigating in its Closed Door Session?
