G Atkinson is touchingly naive when it comes to the influence that well-funded and politically-connected culture vultures can have in Hollywood. This is a whisper industry, and whispers can end careers. I myself have long been damaged by such whispers--but more recently witness the organised campaigns against the Dixie Chicks, against the Robbinses, against Sean Penn, etc... We're living in a time when a whisper from Karl Rove to a few talk radio and television opinion leaders becomes an oceanic roar in the heartland, echoed repeatedly and with few variations from the various mouthpieces and ditto-heads of the extreme right wing.
There's nothing new about this, of course. In post WWII America, the "Wise Men" advising Harry Truman wanted to push the National Security Act of 1947, (which tripled the military budget of wartime America into peacetime, and cemented the power and influence of "the military/industrial complex"). Truman looked at the Act and said "How am I going to sell this to the American people?" The Wise Men told Truman "You're going to have to scare the living daylights out of them." To this end was hired a well-connected advertising man (whose name slips my memory at the moment) to assemble what he called "A Mighty Wurlitzer", an army of newspaper columnists, radio personalities, filmmakers, newsreel producers, etc... to do just that. Some of us may remember "duck and cover", where we were instructed to protect ourselves against a nuclear attack by hiding under our desks at school. That was a product of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Or the thinly-veiled Communists-as-Outer Space Aliens movies of the early Fifties. Also a product of The Mighty Wurlitzer. On the intelligence front, the CIA became painfully politicised, with intelligence analysts ordered to inflate the Soviet threat. Many intelligence analysts lost their careers when they complained, tarred as Comsymps, and unpatriotic. Soon to follow were the witch hunts of Joe McCarthy. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
yrs,
David Baerwald
