When you are a spiteful little nothing of a person whose shortlist of shitty accomplishments include hawking bilious right-wing propaganda tracts to tea-party idiots who read at a fifth grade level, I can understand that Hollywood's making of a movie, Trumbo, about a true American Literary and Popular Arts lion, Dalton Trumbo, might cause a a bilestorm of rage and jealously, knowing that short of committing mass murder or sticking your empty head in an oven, one's own unremarkable career will never be writ on any larger page than that of the small-screen of fellow-traveling dipshtick Sean Hannity's lie-fest joke of a television show.
But so goes Coultergeist's life.
Hat-tip to Larry Ceplair over at Salon for alerting me to her garbage.
For those of you who might not be of an age to know, Dalton Trumbo was the writer of the brilliant Anti-war Novel "Johnny Got His Gun" which was written in 1938 and published days after Hitler invaded Poland precipitating WWII, in 1939. The idea for the book came from an article Trumbo had read about The Prince of Wales visiting a Canadian Veteran of WWI who had lost all of his limbs. In "Johnny" Trumbo's protagonist, Joe Bonham, has lost not only his arms and legs but also his facial features, rendering him unable to communicate the horror of his existence and his hatred for the nationalistic jingoism and martial buffoonery that landed him in it, by any method other than tapping out Morse code with his head upon his hospital bed pillow. Anxiety and tension grow in the novel as Joe wonders if his method of speaking out will ever be even recognized for what it is. Denouement comes about when Joe realizes to his further horror that, yes, his message was understood but will be willfully ignored by those who have a stake in his nation's next grand adventure into war. "Johnny", along with "Slaughterhouse Five", by WWII veteran Kurt Vonnegut, remain two of the most poignant and affecting Anti-War Novels written in the English Language. I read them both as a mid-teenager (during the height of the Vietnam War) and they still inform my heart and mind when idiots like Coulter and her vacuous neocon glitterati cronies beat their tired drums for yet another profitable war in the Mideast.
More over the fold...
In her scat smelling column BRYAN CRANSTON: FROM METH COOK TO HITLER APOLOGIST our girl Annie insults first, in the title, the artist chosen to portray Trumbo, Billy Cranston, of "Breaking Bad" fame, conflating the actor with the roles he plays. It's as if some equally idiotic assclown, if such exists, wrote a piece titled Al Pacino Murderer and Gun-thug. or Omar Sharif Scourge of Eurasia. But ever eager to top her small-minded stupidities, Coulter plunges on...
In her opening paragraph she fluffs "Hollywood Traitors" a book written about the House Un-American Activities Committee by the son of Morrie Ryskind a man who somehow devolved from a humorous screenplay writer (he wrote most of the screenplays for the Marx Brother's comedies) and avid socialist to right-wing John Bircher, McCarthyite snitch and "friendly witness" to HUAC, who rightly thereafter couldn't sell a bag of peanuts, let alone a screenplay, for, or to any respectable Studio in America. Not one to wear his bitterness at his thusly greatly reduced inheritance on his sleeve, son Allan Ryskind brands as traitors not only Trumbo but the great Paul Robeson, future M.A.S.H screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., the irascible (but one of my favorites) Lillian Hellman - who said "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion" - along with luminaries like Leonard Bernstein, Bertolt Brecht, Lee J. Cobb, Aaron Copland, José Ferrer, Will Geer, Tom Glazer, Arthur Miller, Artie Shaw and scores of others too numerous to mention.
The rest of Coulter's piece is such a bizarre mash-up of distorted and disjointed accusations against Trumbo that you'll just have pinch your nose and read the piece to believe it. But for those ascetically opposed to clicking on anything Coulter I will attempt to summarize. Sticking a rare perfect double Godwin on a pommel horse resting somewhere in AnnWorld, Coultergeist accuses Trumbo, a communist (which is not now or ever was illegal in this country, Annie) of writing "Johnny" not to alert a world and a generation of young men to the horrors of the war they would soon be called upon to fight, but rather as a simultaneous and, I assume Cced, love letter to both Joe Stalin and Adolph Hitler.
Coulter then sets out to Palinsplain an historic sweep of inaccuracies to we mere mortal historians:
To place this in context for Hollywood half-brights, in 1938 Hitler invaded Austria and seized the Sudetenland -- sweeping through the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year. On Sept. 1, 1939, the Fuhrer invaded Poland, finally forcing France and England to go to war with Germany.
fine...so far... in setting the release of the novel in it's time. But, like sister Sarah, she goes further down a whacky road...
All that, in addition to Hitler's sweep through Western Europe, was well known. But the very month that Hitler marched into Poland, Trumbo published "Johnny Got His Gun," a pure propaganda piece designed to squelch American ardor for helping Hitler's victims.
Whoa a minute, horseface! Hitler's "sweep through Western Europe" did not happened until the spring mud of 1940 had dried up, an event that was still inconveniently in the future as Hitler "Marched into Poland" and Trumbo published. But what are the fracturing a few facts between wingnuts, hey Annie?
The truth is Ann, that Stalin, recognizing Hitler exactly for what he was, tried desperately to align the Soviet Union with France and England in the decisive two years during which Hitler invaded Austria and Poland. And Communists in England and America, like, yes, Trumbo, editorialized for the alliance, which, had it been obtained, might have squelched Hitler and saved tens of millions of lives. But align with Commies? Nebber!!! That would be like asking Iran to retake Tikrit.
Or, as Ceplair, at salon puts it...
Coulter does not seem to know that her heroic, anti-Hitler countries, England and France, were desperately trying to stay out of a war with Germany. Prior to the nonaggression treaty, they refused to sign an alliance with the Soviet Union, and, when they did declare war on Germany, in September 1939, they did nothing, engaging in what the French called “la drôle de guerre” (the joke of a war). Only in the spring of 1940, when German armed forces launched an attack against the countries of western Europe, did they respond militarily. They were, that is, anti-Hitler by force of circumstances, not by ideals. In such a world of realpolitik, Trumbo wanted more clarity about who was fighting whom and why.
Annie also criticizes Trumbo's foray into Heavy International Diplomacy/Light Romantic Hollywood Comedy "
"The Remarkable Andrew" which most of the known world recognized as an entertaining farce about an accountant who runs afoul of politicians and lands in Jail for keeping a city's books honestly, but in AnnWorld represents Trumbo's continued wrascally effort (at the late date of 1942) to keep the U.S. from attacking his BFF Hitler/Stalin. She bases this fetid construct on one line of dialogue in the film which depicts Old Hickory opining, in reference to England, "There's no point, in cooking up an alliance with a country that's already licked."
That dastardly Trumbo! Why would Jackson dislike valiant England and see them as "Licked"?????
Christ.
In October 1947 Trumbo was convicted ofcontempt of Congress for refusing to testify against others and was blacklisted from working in Hollywood by the heads of the major studios. In 1950, Trumbo served 11 months in prison as punishment for the contempt conviction, in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky.
Later, after his star had again ascended and he'd written screenplays for "Spartacus", Leon Uris' "Exodus", his own "Johnny Got His Gun" and "Executive Action" he had this to say about those times and, typically, did not let himself completely off the hook.
There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.
Preach it, brother.
I think I've gone far enough into the weeds on this one folks...and the extra-strenth patchouli oil I smeared into my 'satsh to get me through it is wearin' out so I'll give Ceplair his last word and then wrap up...
As Jesus said of Satan in ”Paradise Regained”:
That hath been thy craft,
By mixing somewhat true to vent more lies.
But what have been thy answers, what but dark,
Ambiguous and with double sense deluding. (I, 432-35).
In other words Annie, next time you set out to smear one of your betters, try to get
all of your facts straight, or better yet, just shut yer freaking pie-hole. If Trumbo had nerver written anything better than the Screenplay for "Spartacus", and I'll go a bit futher, had Trumbo never written anything better than the "I AM Spartus!" scene in which he answers you and Joe McCarthy and Allan Ryskind and all of his other dumbass detractors - who will collectively stand in relation to history to Trumbo as a pimple on his right buttcheek - with those three words alone he would still personify a greatness beyond your feral little cerebrum's capacity to grok.
Donald Sutherland tells a story about he and Jane Fonda speaking to Trumbo about revolution in the heady 1960's...but, here, I'll let him tell it...
The three of us, Jane Fonda, Dalton, and I, had walked out of the living room and were standing on his back porch, sort of hearing the garden noises, once in a while glancing at the stars that were tiny pinpoints of light in the warm black night. Jane and I were expounding passionately about the revolution to come when Dalton stopped us, and in our silence he very carefully said: 'Don’t forget to be happy.' His voice has echoed in my mind for forty plus years. How many memories, how much disappointment, how much rejection and loss, how many regrets were held hostage in that phrase. I loved him truly in that moment and I so love him still.
You might try a little of Dalton's advice yourself, Coulter, a little happiness might wipe that painful to look at grimace off yer face.