The Patriot Post® · The Blacklist Lives On

The fact is that I write so much that there are times even I lose track. One such occasion occurred recently when I opened my copy of Written By, the monthly magazine published by the Writers Guild for the sole purpose of allowing hacks to pretend that the schlock that most of them churn out is great art that will live on through the ages.

Month after month, one will often come across interviews with WGA members responsible for things like “Nightmare on Elm Street XII” or “Rocky: The 15th Round” talking about how they were born to write it, pretending that the job was motivated by something besides paying their mortgage. I swear, if you were able to get Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Dickens, Melville, Poe, Tolstoy and Twain, together for a roundtable discussion, you wouldn’t hear such self-aggrandizing bull hockey.

To make matters worse, the members of the Guild are nearly without exception liberals. One day about six or seven years ago, I had reason to visit the WGA headquarters. As I walked down the hallway, every office that had its door open revealed an Obama poster on its wall. So not only are the members of the WGA certifiable, but those employed by the Guild march to the same tin drum.

As I was saying, I opened the November-December copy of the Guild’s bi-monthly to find that in response to the September-October issue that was devoted to the Hollywood blacklist (inspired by the release of the movie, “Trumbo”), they had received a record number of letters to the editor. That reminded me that I had written such a letter and I wondered if they had run it. I also wondered if others had reacted to the blacklist issue as I had. Silly me.

There were 10 letters in all. Nine of them could have been written by the same person. They were effusive (“Great issue! Congratulations!” “Bravo!” “Superb issue!”); some of them sharing glowing memories of those who had been victimized by the blacklist, including Dalton Trumbo, Sterling Hayden, Ben Barzman and Adrian Scott.

From having been in the Guild since the late 1960s and having served on the Board of Directors from 1987-1991, I knew some of those who had been blacklisted, including George Kirgo, Jean Butler, Ollie Crawford and Paul Jarrico, and had met Trumbo, Edward G. Robinson, Lee J. Cobb and John Howard Lawson, a second-rate screenwriter who had been the head of the Hollywood cell of the Communist Party.

I even liked a few of them, but let them know that I thought their politics indicated a deficiency, either of character or intelligence or both. I acknowledge it’s not always easy being friends with me. But if I can speak that way to people I actually like, you can imagine how I felt about a magazine that attempted to turn their mental and/or moral flaws into virtues of heroic proportions.

But instead of having to imagine it, I will share the letter I wrote.

“How much longer is the Guild going to carry on as if the 1950s Blacklist was the second coming of the Holocaust? The fact of the matter is that John Howard Lawson, a man born to run a gulag, was a devout communist who controlled what a great many Hollywood screenwriters thought, said and wrote. He also had them tithing a tidy portion of their studio salaries to the Soviet Union, even though Stalin was as evil and despotic as Hitler and had an equal amount of blood on his hands.

"The only reason that the Soviet Union was our ally during World War II was that Hitler betrayed Stalin — who had been only too happy to sign a mutual non-aggression pact with the Fuhrer — by invading the Soviet Union. But Stalin had the last laugh. He not only helped destroy Germany but then got to pick up where Hitler had left off, enslaving all of Eastern Europe for half a century.

"I find it equal parts repulsive and embarrassing that six decades after the short-lived Blacklist, Written By continues to honor those who may not have been evil but supported evil and were dangerously gullible. They lived up to the appellation given them years earlier by Vladimir Lenin: useful idiots.

"It is particularly offensive in 2015 when we are in the midst of the Hollywood gray list, which denies older writers a livelihood for the singular crime of aging, and the Guild magazine is still dredging up and revising ancient history.”

Thus far, I haven’t received any “Bravos!” or even a single “Atta boy!” from my 9,000 fellow Guild members.

I’m beginning to think that I am once again a majority of one.

I’m not complaining, you understand. I’m bragging.