All this cultural kerfuffle engendered by the radical right-wing of accusing others of being intolerant of its intolerance the last few years that is now being picked up and repackaged by others as the anti-liberalism of the left - with the help, yes, of the rabidly self-righteous and humorless ranting at times of a portion of the left itself - is just a latest iteration of the battles that have been going on in the trenches of leftwing politics for years and years and years. And in the age of hashtags and Facebook and blogs and meta-talk show hosts and rhetorically marauding bloggers and Twitter, et al., it is all small beer compared to the Stalinist left and the anti-Stalinist left debates of the past. But we can only live in the times we live in. And attempt to put it all in context as best we can. I have to admit though I do miss sitting on the sidelines to watch Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman go at it back in the day. Who recalls when McCarthy went after Hellman on Dick Cavetts show - a kind of meta meta-talk show host who never met a literary figure he didnt want on his stage to engage in what was then the cultural discourse and always put it into a larger historical or literary context. After watching the playwright, who had achieved fame decades earlier for such Broadway hits as The Little Foxes, attract legions of new admirers with three volumes of memoirs glossing over her years as a defender of Stalin and playing up her refusal to name names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, McCarthy finally erupted. On the Cavett show she said, Every word she [Hellman] writes is a lie, including `and and `the. Ive also always loved what this McCarthy had to say about communism: For my part .. I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing. Cavett also had this famous clash on his show between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer as Janet Flanner tried to referee the two. This was when such feuding between left-wingers was so much more fun to watch and even had a literary bent to it because of umbrage taken at words published in the New York Review of Books. That was where the gauntlet once was thrown down. Gauntlets now are everywhere.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 16:33:10 +0000