Penn’s Friends

The auditorium exploded in appreciative applause, as Penn knew it would; but the applause was not entirely for Penn alone. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were also pleased by what Sean Penn represented: a shiny new Oscar that was, in effect, a rebuke to all those people in flyover country for whom Harvey Milk is only a name, or might not have found the real Harvey Milk to their taste.

That was certainly the implication of Penn’s further remarks, which have attracted considerable attention: He rebuked his home state of California for voting (overwhelmingly) to affirm male/female marriage just as it voted (overwhelmingly) to elect our “elegant president,” Barack Obama. Penn’s famous anger was palpable as he invoked the “shame” of those who voted in support of Proposition 8, a shame that will haunt them, so he warned, through their grandchildrens’ lives.

Maybe it will. I was more interested, however, in Penn’s opening line, and the waves of self-congratulatory applause that washed over him as he said it. Nobody in the audience was a communist, of course–that is to say, not a member of the party–but Penn’s sarcasm was aimed not in their direction but at that vague, undifferentiated mass of Americans for whom terms such as “commie” are not necessarily humorous.

Unfortunately, Sean Penn is something of a historic illiterate–in fact, based on a letter of his in my possession, something of an illiterate in general–and could not have been aware that a “homo-loving .  .  . commie” would be an oxymoron. Communists were always hostile to the homosexuals in their ranks, expelling them routinely; and in those dictatorial regimes Penn likes to visit and extol (Cuba, in particular), gay lives are furtive, officially circumscribed, subject to severe punishment.

Which brings me to Penn’s invocation of “commie.” One of the minor victories of the left in the culture wars, and a victory achieved decades ago, is the reduction of “communist,” as a descriptive term, to the status of joke. No doubt, this is one sin that may, once again, be laid at Joseph McCarthy’s doorstep: All the revisionism in the world cannot undo the damage his indiscriminate name-calling did to anti-communism, or the anti-communist left.

For by corralling all the socialists, parlor pinks, fellow travelers, Ivy League radicals, and debate club Trotskyites of 1930s America into the same ring with actual members of the Communist party, McCarthy gave birth to a generation of martyrs, and diluted the meaning, and genuine implications, of being a communist. Thereafter, the badge was worn with pride–see the Hollywood Ten, The Crucible, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, etc.–and the truth behind the term was essentially lost.

Few would argue today that the Soviet Union was an adornment to mankind, but the conventional wisdom insists that communism never amounted to much in American politics–which is true–and that communists were harmless, even well-intentioned, idealists–which is not true. The fact that American communists were agents of a hostile foreign power is bad enough; the truth that they were agents, and public apologists, for the most successfully homicidal regime in human history, is extraordinary. Their hostility toward their country, and willingness to labor on behalf of its deadly adversary, suggests a pathology beyond comprehension.

And yet, it was not only possible for Sean Penn to laugh along with his fellow “commies” in the Kodak Theatre, but to laugh at the very idea of “commies.” Commies are the political equivalent of shadows on the wall, or ghosts under the bed, or figments of especially fevered imaginations. A “commie” is not a communist who wants to re-create Stalin’s Russia in America but someone who makes the bourgeoisie squirm, or proudly excoriates Proposition 8. It is, as understood by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, something of a compliment.

In the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the television reporter Jeff Greenfield had a jokey segment on the evening news in which he wondered, now that communism was defunct, where Hollywood would find its supply of movie villains.

I remember thinking to myself at the time: On what planet does Greenfield reside? The American movie and television industry had not regarded communists as malevolent since, perhaps, the early 1950s–and not even then, in most instances. Before the end of the Eisenhower administration, the genuine menace–American conservatism, corporate America, Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, and so on–had been identified in A Face in the Crowd (1957), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or Seven Days in May (1964). And by the time of Dr. Strangelove (1963) and The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) the whole idea of the Soviet Union as nothing but comic relief was well established.

To be sure, this was before a full accounting of the Gulag, or Stalin’s terror, was widely known, and the shame of Proposition 8 was decades in the future.

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.