Wednesday, April 16, 2003
BEYOND CRITICISM
By Dr. Ted Baehr, Publisher of MOVIEGUIDE®
HOLLYWOOD, CA (ANS) -- Once upon a time, not too long ago, actors were considered the lesser element of society. My father went into acting in the 1930s, when that was still the case (so his father was furious!). Of course, before that, if they didn’t perform well, actors were forced into penury, or reduced to traveling from town to town while dragging their carts behind them. And, long before that, they were thrown to the lions.
In those far away, long ago days, the king could not be criticized, and the king was the law. The Christian Reformation, however (which included the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776), eventually removed the king from this divine position in Western Civilization and said that even the king was under the law of God. When he violated that law, the king deserved criticism and perhaps even removal from office.
Today, a lot of actors and actresses are speaking out against President Bush. The Reformation established their right to do just that. Some of their criticism may have merit. Much of it probably comes from their own limited perspectives. After all, many of them do not have the education or the access to information to make cogent criticisms about the President’s actions; rather, they are operating out of emotion.
However, the Screen Actor’s Guild in Hollywood has complained publicly about a slew of mail and email that has criticized the actors. The Guild issued a strong rebuke of anyone who would criticize these celebrities on March 10, 2003, when the Guild said that people who criticized Celebrities are reviving McCarthyism and the infamous Hollywood Blacklist. Immediately, newspapers and television networks, which are intimately related to these celebrities, yelled at the people who were criticizing these actors, accusing the citizen critics of being McCarthyites.
This is absurd because people have the right to say whatever they want. It is not “hate speech” to criticize Sean Penn for his vituperative criticism of the president (by the way, we have commended Penn for many of his movie roles), nor is it McCarthyism.
The SAG warning is deceitful. The Federal investigation of Communists in the entertainment industry had nothing to do with Senator McCarthy! The Hollywood Ten hearings were conducted in 1948, which was years before McCarthy came on the scene and instituted his Senate Hearings at a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954!
Moreover, the 1948 hearings had the support of the heads of the major movie studios. The reason that Jack Warner and the other studio heads were concerned about communism was that Joseph Stalin was killing, maiming, and mutilating tens of millions of people and gobbling up countries around the world to put them under the iron fist of the Soviet system. His goal was world conquest, and those who sympathized with him and his murderous reign were confused, misled, or evil in their own right.
Furthermore, my father, actor Robert Allen, was on the board of the East Coast division of SAG and noted that it was the conservatives who were really blacklisted. In fact, after the Federal hearings on Communism in Hollywood in 1948, some conservatives could hardly get a job!
That said, for any person in the United States to speak up against Susan Sarandon has nothing to do with the studio heads designating a very small group of Communists (10) as people who should not be working in the entertainment industry because they advocated the VIOLENT overthrow of the United States of America.
The dictionary definition of censorship is “prior restraint by the government.” You or I or the farm workers can complain, boycott, and revile, but we cannot censor. Censorship is when someone yells “Bomb” in an airport and the TSA hauls them away.
There are certain things in society, such as child pornography, that should be censored by the government. Everything else belongs to free speech, and SAG is using the worst form of intimidation when it tells the American public that “they must not blacklist people who speak out.”
Whether SAG likes it or not, the American public has every right to speak out, just as these celebrities do! Some day people have to stop being intimidated by the politics of guilt manipulation spewed forth from the celebrities who have almost complete control over the soapbox in our country. Their voices are so loud on this issue and so deceitful that the average person cowers, and the fellow travelers in the mass media scream, “blacklist.”
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This county was founded on the premise that everybody has a right to a soapbox. Some day, perhaps, the Internet and other communications will remove the control of the megaphone from a few. Until that day comes, don’t be intimidated! Believe what the Founding Fathers said when they called upon the average citizen to speak up.© baehr, 2002
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NOTE from Dr. Ted Baehr: For more information from a Christian perspective, order the latest MOVIEGUIDE® magazine by calling 1-800-899-6684(MOVI) or visit our website at www.movieguide.org. MOVIEGUIDE® is dedicated to redeeming the values of Hollywood by informing parents about today's movies and entertainment and by showing media executives and artists that family-friendly and even Christian-friendly movies do best at the box office year in and year out. MOVIEGUIDE® now offers an online subscription to its magazine version, at www.movieguide.org. The magazine, which comes out 25 times a year, contains many informative articles and reviews that help parents train their children to be media-wise consumers. MOVIEGUIDE® also regularly broadcasts several international TV and radio programs hosted by Dr. Baehr. Also, if you want to train your family to be media-wise, call 1-800-899-6684 in North America to order the book, video or audio version of THE MEDIA-WISE! FAMILY, Dr. Ted Baehr's latest book. © baehr, 2001--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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