RACISM REARS ITS UGLY HEAD: I am a racist. Yes, I am. I know this particularly unsavory fact about myself because Janeane Garofalo says so. Ms. Garofalo comes to us from the morally and psychically elevated plane of Hollywood, whose denizens can spot the lurking shadow of racism in a linen closet full of white sheets. So, I am a racist, as are the tens of thousands of people who either went to last week’s tea parties or supported the demonstrators’ aims. This, I think, is always a good thing to know about yourself, even if the sight of an affluent white woman playing the race card seems a bit cognitively dissonant at first; I will have to get over this. It seems that I am a racist because I object to the former senator from Illinois’ plan to spend the nation into bankruptcy. You wouldn’t think that fiscal policy could support a charge of racism; spending money you don’t have seems fairly color blind to me; but you’d be wrong there. Ms. Garofalo knows better and we must all defer to her superior wisdom. In fact, non-supporters of the distinguished gentleman from Illinois should simply stop spewing our racist hate altogether and be still while our betters decide what’s best for us. I was a bit nonplussed at this; I was under the impression that petitioning the government for a redress of grievances was in the Constitution somewhere and that dissent was the highest form of patriotism, but I guess I was wrong about that.

AND NOW THE STAR OF OUR SHOW, NANOOK OF THE NORTH: Nanook of the North starved to death. He didn’t mean to, of course; no one except fakirs and anorexics are actually trying to starve themselves, but things just worked out that way. Nanook enjoyed his fifteen minutes of cinematic fame, but he wearied of waiting for the right part to come along—parts for nomadic hunter gatherers, whether they are from a polar region or from a somewhat more temperate clime, being few and far between both then and now, and tiring of development hell, he left Hollywood and went home to his spacious Spanish colonial igloo on the frozen tundra, a phrase I’ve never really understood since all tundra is frozen; otherwise tundra would just be cold wet dirt trying to make up its mind about whether it wants to be mud or listen to its parents and go to medical school instead. In any case, two years after he was the hit of the documentary film world, Nanook starved to death while waiting for his piece of the profits to come rolling in. I’m not sure why Nanook abandoned Hollywood for the Arctic. I understand that for many people a big tasty chunk of raw seal blubber beats a Chicago style deep pan pizza any day of the week, especially in those regions north of the Brooks Range, but the pizza is much easier to get a hold of, what with seals being fairly elusive critters not at all willing to be the main course at a Super Bowl party, and pizza has the added benefit of not annoying various and sundry environmentalist types who think that seals are cute as the dickens, which is another phrase I’ve never understood. Have you ever seen a photograph of Dickens? There’s a lot of things you could call Charlie, and a lot of people called him a lot of things, mostly unflattering, back in the day, but let’s face it, folks, cute ain’t one of them.

Now, you may not realize this; ordinarily I wouldn’t bring it up at all, but it seems germane at the moment; but I am writing this sentence about a week after I finished writing the last sentence in the previous paragraph. For most of the past week, I have been ill with a viral infection that manifested itself in a variety of ways too disgusting for me to mention here. Suffice it to say, however, that at this juncture I have absolutely no idea what this essay is supposed to be about now. Yes, whatever it was about poor old Nanook starving to death that I thought was funny enough to start one of these screeds is now one with Nineveh and Tyre. I’ve been trying to tell myself that the reason I can’t go on with this a lighthearted poke at a starving Eskimo is that, in my own small way, we are both brothers sharing the common bond of suffering. It took my family all of a minute to shoot this theory down—they would have shot it down sooner, but they were too busy laughing at me. The general consensus of opinion amongst those nearest and dearest to me is that I am a selfish, self-pitying bastard who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the sufferings of poor old Nanook. Clearly, I will have to do something about the family, but I need to make sure no suspects me afterwards. This, I think, might be a little hard to do.

Well then, having gotten this far without a subject and little or no idea what the point of it all is, I shall have to think of something and think of it in short order, won’t I? I hardly think you are going to sit there while I wrack my brain for available subject matter and I fear that the Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton trick of describing all the furniture in the room down to what kind of cheese is in the mousetrap while I try to think of something to say is not going to work in this case. I have a movable desk, a chair, a desk light, and a mesh can full of pencils. My electric pencil sharpener is on the windowsill and my dress shirts are hanging from a rod to my left. There’s not much of interest here, even if I did start describing it all.

I am, however, fond of my electric pencil sharpener. For most of my life, the lack of attention paid to the inventor of the electric pencil sharpener has struck me as inherently unfair. The electric pencil sharpener may not have pizzazz of Blackberries or cell phones or many modern communications devices, but the electric pencil sharpener has, in its own homely way, been one of the great steps forward in the history of communications. That the inventor of the electric pencil sharpener never received the adulation of Alexander Graham Bell or Samuel F. B. Morse only shows, I think, the depth to which the blind and unreasoning prejudice against pencils reaches here in this our Great Republic.

The American prejudice against pencils is never an easy subject to speak about, even today in our much more open and Oprahfied society. Like prostitutes, pencils exist to service a societal need, and when society deems that need met, society ignores or, worse, discards the used and damaged pencils entirely. The cost of this ongoing callousness is high; every year, work and school-related accidents damage, sometimes permanently, millions of fresh young pencils, and for these victims, there is little hope for a return to complete health. There is only the certainty that a hypocritical society will throw them away and replace them with a new, untouched pencil or, in extreme cases, with a ballpoint pen, perhaps even, and it pains me to say this in mixed company, a magic marker.

You may argue, and you may have a point here, that the social status of pencils is hardly a fitting subject for an essay like this, what with the children watching and all, but how would we serve the children any better by going on about poor old Nanook starving to death, that’s what I want to know. Obviously, this whole essay would have taken a much different turn if I hadn’t gotten sick in the middle of it and forgotten why I thought Nanook’s starving was so funny in the first place. It made perfect sense at the time, I remember, but then, so did phrenology, mesmerism, and Marxism-Leninism, so I guess that’s not much of an excuse.

AND A FINAL WORD ON THE OSCARS: I like George Clooney. I am not saying that to be ironic or patronizing or to denigrate him; I’ve always liked him, ever since his days on E.R., and if the Academy voted him an Oscar I am sure he deserved it. I know that amongst a good many people on the right there has been some sniping about his acceptance speech, with some people saying that it was self-serving and that he was giving himself a big pat on the back. I did not get that impression; I found it the speech of a man proud of his profession and honored to receive the award that profession bestowed on him. Who would not feel honored in that situation? We all crave the approval of our peers and, God willing, we are all properly grateful to them and to the profession we share when we receive it. So it wasn’t George Clooney and his speech that brought on this little screed.

No, what is giving me a major case of agita was the montage Samuel L. Jackson introduced. That bit of film was one of the most meretricious pieces of malarkey I have ever seen. Hollywood, which doesn’t mind rewriting other people's history in the most egregious manner in order to make a better story, clearly tried to rewrite its own history in that montage and hoping that we wouldn’t notice. Mr. Clooney’s remarks were off the cuff; this montage was not—this is how Hollywood really sees itself, and like so many things in Hollywood, what we see on the screen has very little to do with reality.

Both Mr. Clooney and the montage brought up Hattie McDaniel and how the Academy honored her in 1939 with the first Oscar ever awarded to an African American. Ms. McDaniel won the Oscar that year for best supporting actress for her portrayal of Mammy, the black slave maid to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. In fact, although she was a talented performer—one can read about just how talented she was in Jill Watts’ new biography of her, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood—the only work she could get in Hollywood was portraying a maid. She didn’t like it, but as she once put it, she’d rather make a thousand dollars a week playing a maid than ten dollars a week being one. Hollywood did little or nothing to end Jim Crow in America; it simply catered to the prejudices of its audiences, limiting black performers to minor roles as domestics, to the occasional all black feature, or to easily removable musical numbers so that the film would not lose money in the South. And nowhere in that montage did I see any clips from The Birth of a Nation, which actually did bring about tremendous social change in this country, but not in a way that Hollywood now finds it congenial to admit.

Today, with the release of such films as Brokeback Mountain, Hollywood proclaims itself on the forefront of the struggle for equal rights for homosexuals. Indeed, the montage pointed out that in Philadelphia Hollywood proclaimed the truth about AIDS when no one else wanted to bring the matter up. This, frankly, is a rewrite of recent history. Philadelphia was the first major Hollywood feature film dealing with the AIDS epidemic—it was the film that won Tom Hanks the first of his two Oscars for best actor—and Tri-Star Pictures released the film in 1993. By 1993, the AIDS epidemic had been raging for twelve years. In that time, the disease had killed tens of thousands of gay men, including hundreds in Hollywood, the most prominent victim being Rock Hudson, and yet Hollywood only got around to making a movie about the disease and its effects on the gay community some twelve years after the doctors realized that there was a new and untreatable disease abroad in the land. This is not being ahead of the curve; this is following the pack, and following the pack is something Hollywood is very good at. But such cowardice is not new in Hollywood; it is the norm, not the exception.

During the movies’ Golden Age, stars and studios routinely toadied to the likes of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, knowing full well that either woman could effectively end a star’s career with allegations of sexual impropriety. Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn were just two of the many whose careers took major hits when Parsons and Hopper blared their sexual peccadilloes to the public through their newspaper columns. And when, in the 1950’s, Maureen O’Hara sued Confidential magazine for slandering her, the movie industry first rallied behind her and then headed for the hills, leaving her to fight the charges alone. It does not take a genius to figure out that the editors at Confidential had the goods on many of O’Hara’s original supporters and that the editors did not hesitate to let her backers know that Confidential could break their careers in a heartbeat if they didn't back off. In Hollywood, as in most areas of human life, career preservation and covering one’s ass trumped doing the right thing, a life lesson Ms. O’Hara learned the hard way and writes about in her memoir, ‘Tis Herself.

And when it comes to the 1950’s, there are few periods in recent history that Hollywood is more tendentious about. In 1999, when Elia Kazan received an honorary Oscar for his lifetime of work in the movies, many in the audience pointedly refused to applaud the old man, and when he died in 2003, whoever compiled the memorial montage placed Mr. Kazan’s clip after the clip for Leni Riefenstahl, a juxtaposition that could hardly be accidental. There is only one problem with that linkage: Riefenstahl was wrong and Kazan was right.

The reason why Hollywood loathed Kazan for so long was not that he named people he knew to be Communists in his testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); other people did the same thing that Kazan did and did not have to bear the collective loathing of the industry that Kazan endured. From the time of his testimony until his death, many former friends routinely called Kazan a rat who’d sold out people he knew were harmless in order to save his career, but on closer examination these charges don’t really hold water. Kazan could have refused to testify and gone back to Broadway, where he’d established a reputation as one of the most brilliant directors of his generation, and where there was no blacklist to keep him from working. He might not have made the money he made in Hollywood, but he’d still be living quite well. As for Kazan’s being a rat, one must suspect a certain partisanship here; if he’d informed on the Nazis, he’d be a hero today, but he didn’t. He informed on the Communists, a party he’d been a member of in the 1930’s, as were many other people in the arts, and he’d left the Party because he could not longer toe the Party line on artistic matters.

Unlike many others, Kazan knew the Party very well and liked the Party very little. And it is important to remember that the American Communist Party was not some independent happy go lucky band of Marxist progressives wanting to improve the lot of the proletariat and free blacks from the oppression of Jim Crow; the Party, we now know, was a front run by and for the benefit of the Soviet Union. So why did Hollywood loathe Kazan for so long? The answer is simple: a bad conscience. Kazan took a principled stand against the Communists and spent the rest of his life paying for it; men like Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner, Jr. took a principled stand for the Party and went to prison for it, but what did the rest of Hollywood do? Nothing. Like the Vichy French, Hollywood looked the enemy straight in the eye and then promptly collapsed. The truth of the matter is this: Hollywood collaborated. Hollywood went along with the blacklist, went along with making schlock movies like I Married A Communist, and bent over backwards catering to the whims of politicians out to score political points by putting celebrities on the witness stand. That it was not illegal for anyone to be a Communist in the 1930’s didn’t matter; no one’s inconvenient political background was going to get in the way of maximizing studio profits or enhancing one’s career, which were then, are now, and always shall be the twin lodestars of Hollywood.

So Hollywood caved in, and when the era finally ended in the 1960’s the industry tried to ease its collective conscience; Lardner got an Oscar for MASH (he deserved it; that’s still one of my favorite movies) and Kazan became the scapegoat for all of Hollywood’s sins, bearing their resentment for their own lack of moral backbone for the rest of his life. And what caused this lack? I think it derives from the nature of film as an art form. Film is a collaborative art. For all the intellectual theorizing in film studies classes about the movie director as auteur, the simple reality is that no film director can be the author of his work in the same way that a writer or a painter can be. The vision of the latter is their own; the vision of the film director rests on the approval of producers, the infusion of a tremendous amount of cash, and the coordinated work of hundreds of people. One can argue rightly that the theater is also a collaborative art, but in the theater the technical demands of any given production are simply a matter of degree. As Thornton Wilder showed in Our Town, all the theater really needs is a bare stage, willing actors, and the text; everything else is more or less optional. Movies are the product of art, money, and technology, and the technology has always been expensive. A commercial venture the size of a standard feature film does not promote the prolonged examination of social issues unless a consensus about those issues already exists; there is simply too much money at stake. Hollywood will not take a financial chance on such a film unless they know they can make their money back, which is why the first major studio film about the AIDS epidemic came out twelve years after the doctors diagnosed the disease in gay men, and why the studios relegated blacks, Latinos, Asians, and American Indians to stereotypical roles well into the latter half of the twentieth century. In 2002, all of Hollywood fell over itself congratulating Halle Berry for being the first African American woman to win an Oscar in the leading actress category, and yet no one wanted to ask why only seven African American women had ever been nominated in this category and why it took until 2002 for one of them to win. For all the moral preening one gets from the movie industry about the race issue in the United States, I suspect that their record in this area is considerably worse than almost any other American industry you could pick out of a hat, including used cars, pharmaceuticals, and accordion manufacturing.

The fact is that literature can lead the way into a new and different way of looking at the world in ways that the movies cannot; one need only look at the effects of such works as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle or The Gulag Archipelago to know that a writer can get way out ahead of the curve and help bend that curve in another direction. As much as movie people want to do that, they can’t—there’s simply too much money and too much personal ambition and too many people involved. For this reason, the movies will always be the camp followers of culture, busily trying to keep up with literature and the other arts, and always willing to put aside personal qualms and scruples for a chance to make a larger profit or to make oneself look good. There’s nothing wrong with improving one’s bottom line; it’s the engine that drives the country, but I think the rest of us would prefer that Hollywood stop pretending that somehow or other it is the moral conscience of the nation and that all those anonymous people sitting out there in the dark who make Hollywood possible are a bunch of ignorant yahoos who need the preachments of a self-involved clique in order to live their lives properly .