To hate someone or something takes a great deal of energy and
resolve. Most of our national afflictions, such as television, Tom
Daschle, and the Washington Post aren’t really worth the
effort. A weary but resigned disregard for them seems enough. I
used to place Hollywood in that category. I was wrong.
To generate a really healthy hate, it is not enough to hear the
likes of director Robert Altman sermonizing that displays of
patriotism make him ill, and that he would gladly live elsewhere.
When the likes of liberal weenie Alec Baldwin promises to leave the
country if Dubya were elected, and then breaks his promise, we can
laugh while we mourn his truly unimportant decision to not leave.
It’s not even enough to bestir a real hatred that most of the
“entertainment” that Hollywood exports, in television and movies,
is a sneering attack on most of what is good about our country. I
tried to like “The West Wing.” It took only a couple of episodes of
this ode to what the Clinton White House would have been without
Monica to bore me half to death.
Years ago, a criticism of academia was published under the
title, Harvard Hates America. The point was that much of
the education at Ivy League schools was predicated on negative
judgments about American values and history. But Harvard just isn’t
in the same league as Hollywood. What drove me over the edge was a
long conversation I had recently with a very successful Hollywood
screenplay writer.
The gent was someone I knew I wouldn’t like when he came up and
shook my hand. Over sixty, with his golf shirt open low enough to
display too much chest and too many gold chains, his hair was
probably just a thinner version of how it looked the first time he
tried to grow a “do” like Jack Kennedy’s pompadour. He looked like
a retirement-aged Ken without Barbie. We started talking about his
success as a screenwriter for more than twenty years. He was
pleasant, and kind of amusing. Then I mentioned that I wrote
columns for TAP and the Washington Times.
Over the next twenty minutes, I tried to do three things. First,
I tried to get away without making a scene, but there was little
room to maneuver from behind the table at which I was signing my
novel. Next, I was forced to demonstrate that liberals’ favorite
tactic — trying to save a failing argument by repeating it more
and more loudly — wouldn’t work on me. This is true because my
Dad, the mud marine, managed to pass on a fine set of pipes that
can work at sufficient volume to reach a battalion. Finally, I
simply tried to listen and learn how the man reasoned his beliefs.
He didn’t. All he did was chant “Noam Chomsky.”
He said Chomsky — outré liberal icon and author
— had declared America to be the source of most of the terrorism
in the world, and that was proof enough for him. From this man’s
self-proclaimed success in Hollywood, I have to conclude that he —
and other adherents of Chomsky — are the norm there. But what
Chomsky said is so contemptible, it should be the basis for any
thinking person — not just conservatives — to despise these
people and their products.
Chomsky’s speech, on October 15, came just five weeks after
Nine-Eleven, and ten days after we began the Afghanistan campaign.
In it, he posed five questions and gave the answers. First, in
answer to the question “what’s happening right now?” Chomsky said
America was committing a “silent genocide” against the Afghan
population by conducting bombing that interfered with U.N. food
distribution. Second, he asked why Nine-Eleven was even an historic
event. In his opinion, it really wasn’t that important that our
nation was attacked because, “Since World War Two, [America] has
extended its reach around the world…But it was always
killing.”
To the third question he posed, “What is the war against
terrorism?” Chomsky answered by stating that terror was not a
weapon of the weak, but of the strong. Chomsky gave an example of
“legitimate” measures taken against terror by citing the Nazi
atrocities against the French resistance: “They weren’t carrying
out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local
population from the terrorisms [sic] of the partisans.” (I guess
we’d better cancel that WW2 Memorial, and call back all those
copies of Patton.)
The fourth question asked for the origins of Nine-Eleven.
Chomsky, of course, blames the CIA for supporting bin Laden in the
days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the “harsh and
brutal” Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. His fifth
question and answer you can guess by now. “What are the policy
options?” Naturally, if we want to reduce the amount of terror in
the world, we should “stop participating in it. That would
automatically reduce the amount of terror enormously.”
The man I listened to is pitiable. He’s so deep in a liberal
trench, he can’t see over the top. But he — and all the other
Chomskyites who infest Hollywood — are deserving of worse than
pity. What they believe echoes Vichy France, Fidel Castro, and,
yes, Hitler. They should be ridiculed publicly as often as we can
manage. I wish Chomsky had been with our troops on the ground, who
— at the same moment he was accusing us of genocide by starvation
— had to wait for ammo and other supplies because airdrops were
delivering millions of food packets to Afghan civilians.
Chomsky represents all that is wrong with liberalism. This is
not merely moral relativism. It’s a sickening denial of history, an
intentionally confused and intellectually corrupt view of the
world. Who would you trust with the future of America, Noam Chomsky
or the rawest Marine private just out of boot camp? I’ll take the
jarhead any day. After the D.I. was finished with him, he’d be much
better suited to distinguish between good and evil, between freedom
and slavery.
