F E B R U A R Y 2 4, 2 0 0 0 Feed Daily by Keith Gessen
NOT EVERYONE liked Tim Robbins' *Cradle Will Rock* when it was released last December -- too big and too hasty, the reconstruction of the dramatic 1937 staging of Marc Blitzstein's leftist musical didn't quite hold together. Still, reviewers from across the political spectrum, while noting the liberties Robbins took with history, acknowledged the film to be a "loving tribute to 30s idealism." So it wasn't until the hatchet job in this month's issue of *Commentary* that someone bothered to check under the bed for Reds. And, as in days of yore, the Commie-hunting journal found one: Blitzstein, it turns out, joined the Party in 1938. That Robbins would suppress this fact (rather disingenuously) is bad enough. But that no one save *Commentary* noticed is sad confirmation that the Left has come one step closer to abandoning its complicated heritage to the gloating of cranks.
Blitzstein's political affiliation may indeed seem like so much leftist trivia -- the pioneer composer wasn't exactly splitting atoms at Los Alamos. And certainly the wits at *Commentary* went overboard in gleefully labeling the movie, in what looks to be a somewhat infelicitous pun, a "'Cradle' of Lies." But Robbins' fairy tale does typify a certain insidious form of post-ideology masquerading as commitment. Adept, here as in his superior *Bob Roberts*, at caricaturing the right, Robbins wreaks real damage when he turns his leftists into the same sort of cardboard cutouts. Though they are invariably idealistic, the content of their idealism is never questioned. Thus, in *Cradle*, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera courageously defies Nelson Rockefeller's orders to remove Lenin from the mural in Rockefeller Center. But surely Robbins knows that for most people on the Left, a defense of Lenin is merely embarrassing, and that 1938, when Blitzstein joined the Party, was, in the wake of Stalin's purges and show trials, more propitious a time for leaving it. The tragedy of those years is not, as Robbins would have it, that the Dies Committee started searching for Communists, but that it found so many. Robbins doesn't care about this; politics, in his hands, is an aesthetic pantomime of belief, an empty vessel that could as well be filled with one thing as another. It is, as James Wood has written of the religious martyr Thomas More, a "drained, contemporary view, which admires not what More believed but how he believed -- his 'certainty,' only... and [which] represents nothing more than the retired religious yearning of a nonreligious age."
It's a yearning that has become commonplace in the television culture's rendering of its political past. We know, for instance, that Woodstock '69 was a celebration of love and peace, but forget that "peace" meant a very political opposition to American aggression in Southeast Asia. We have Rage Against the Machine treating leftism as a fine occasion for kicking some ass -- which it is, of course -- but forgetting that so long as their fans act like Storm Troopers, it hardly matters what lyrics they mouth. Even a lefty as crafty as J. Hoberman, while acknowledging the Rosenbergs' guilt, so admires the force of their belief that he labels them "Stalinist saints."
We have, in short, replaced political convictions with euphoric images of former convictions. Should we, then, feign surprise that idealistic young editors of high school and college newspapers still churn out editorials that bemoan the lack of "something to believe in?" Or that last week's takeover of the university president's office by University of Pennsylvania students received scant coverage -- presumably because, embodying certain political demands, it lacked the old-style romance? And it's no wonder, finally, that liberals are casting their votes for a man who, though he holds positions (pro-guns, pro-life, pro-military) they find abhorrent, manages to do so with a modicum of what most resembles, in the new Hollywood lexicon, a *leftist* idealism.