Immersed In Red

by Mike Shotwell

  After Reich made claims that the energy from the Orgone Accumulator could cure cancer, the FDA charged him with fraud and ordered him to cease manufacture and sales of his product. He ignored the order and was subsequently jailed in 1954 where he died three years later. Far from being the end of interest in this unproven phenomenon, you can still find instructions online for building your very own Orgone box.

  It is remarkable that the noted individuals of the Fabian Society and Frankfurt School movements, with their express goals of eroding and ultimately destroying Western society, enjoyed such intellectual adulation and regard.

  “Critical Theory:” The other mainstay that evolved from cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School is well described by Toledano: “The destruction of the West, from which a phoenix-like Marxist Utopia would arise, was to be achieved by the combination of Neo-Marxism, neo-Freudianism, Pavlovian psychology, and mass brainwashing, wrapped up in what is euphemistically known as “Critical Theory.” This theory, spread far and wide through the world’s universities, is an innocuous sounding concept that gives the impression of being an intellectual study that results in plumbing fundamental truth. Though it has taken many forms since the 30s, one fairly succinct definition from Max Horkheimer is that any theory is critical insofar as it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”

  A more precise description is Clare Ellis’s quote from Raymond V. Raehn’s book, The Historical Roots of Political Correctness, which describes Critical Theory as, “essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism.”

  The fruits of the spread of Critical Theory were exemplified by the activities of the afore-mentioned Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and their neo-Marxist adherents, as well as student activists such as Communist Party member, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, the Black Panthers organizers, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and many thousands of others who were part of the sexual/cultural chaos of the era. The fuel for this fire was derived from the ugly undercurrent of cultural Marxism.

  Paradoxically, in 1985, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman traveled together for a series of debates billed as “Yippee vs. Yuppie.” While Hoffman remained an activist who occasionally got arrested for civil disobedience, Rubin had become a Wall Street millionaire, thanks in part to investing in Apple. Rubin’s position was that activism was hard work and that the abuse of drugs, sex, and private property had made the counterculture “a scary society in itself.” He also said, “We activists in the 1960s eventually lost touch with ourselves.” He maintained that “wealth creation is the real American Revolution and what the society needed was an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of the country.” Abie Hoffman, still involved with drugs and liquor, and diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, committed suicide in 1989 with an overdose of phenobarbital tablets.

  The instability of Hoffman’s personal life, like so many others in the same period, found an outlet that propelled him to the forefront of the student protest era, where he was seen by fellow students as pointing the way to a new and healthy world. Sadly, it was revealed to be a deadly, negative, skewed vision of a failed ideology. But pressing on, most of the leftist leaders continued with their idealistic agendas; some, like Ayers, Dohrn, and Davis even became respected, albeit unrepentant, teachers and university professors.

  During the turbulent years of campus unrest in the 60s and 70s, Marxist Herbert Marcuse became the acknowledged “guru” of the free-love lifestyle, and the student movements of Germany, France, and the US. He criticized capitalism, modern technology, historical materialism and entertainment culture, arguing that they represented new forms of social control. He regarded man’s erotic nature as the true liberation of humanity, thus inspiring the utopian dreams of Rubin, Davis, Hoffman and other Marxist student leaders.

  James Glaznov, in his book, The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, stated, “Herbert Marcuse, often termed the ‘father of the New Left,’ outlived the rationale for the leftist hatred of the abundance of freedom in American society. Marcuse coined the term ‘repressive tolerance’ to describe the way capitalism enslaves people by making them happy and free. Because capitalism satisfied its citizens’ material needs, it distracted them from what they should be enraged about: their captivity.”

  It is difficult to imagine another more twisted and arcane logic for a political philosophy, but it resonated with the fired up students of the 60s, along with the hopelessly inoculated Marxist left. Once again, as we heard from Lukacs, there is an inbred loathing of the “destructive influences of happiness.” What they embraced was tyranny and terror, the title of Glasnov’s book … and societal repression, exactly mirroring the dictatorial regimes of Stalin, Mao and the socialist monster, Adolph Hitler.

  One of the rallying cries of the post-Woodstock “free-love” era (1968), the year I returned from my Peace Corps stint in Venezuela, was the song by Stephen Stills whose refrain reverberated with the free-love philosophy of the Freudo-Marxists, “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” The lyrics are thought to have been adapted from a song in the 1947 musical, Finian’s Rainbow, co-written by the socialist/blacklisted writer, E.

  Y. “Yip” Harburg, whom Orville would get together with on West Coast trips, and Fred Saidy. Harburg’s lyrics were “When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.”

  This stands out as an example of the discreet ways that leftist Hollywood writers could interject, but disguise, their leftist political viewpoints. Author Russ Kick in his book, Everything You Know About God is Wrong: the Disinformation Guide to Religion, states, “The wildly successful Finian’s Rainbow was produced in 1947 … as a socialist attack on capitalism and racial inequality.” In the same book, he quotes musical librettist, Peter Stone, “Finian’s Rainbow was … extraordinarily political, (but) the audience had no idea of that … if you ever want to reach people with a political tract, go study Finian’s Rainbow.”

  Ironically, my father’s second wife, dancer-actress, Joan Skinner, was a star of one of the early productions of Finian’s Rainbow, along with the black folksingers, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. I remember being taken to the theater to see the grand production. Whether my father or Joan were aware of the underlying purpose of the play would be little more than conjecture; however, my father often related to me that during a stretch of time in the late 40s, he put up the communist songwriter, Woody Guthrie, in his home. My father’s sympathies were definitely on the left side of the aisle, but likely due to his personal issues I did not experience him as being actively political.

  Another prominent representative of the cultural Marxist movement is Angela Davis. Growing up, she was surrounded by the communist milieu through her mother’s role in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party. Introduced to socialism and communism at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York (the high school level of the communist Little Red Schoolhouse), she joined the youth group, Advance.

  While attending Brandeis University, she fell under the spell of, who else but Herbert Marcuse, whom she met at a protest rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Angela later said about Marcuse, “He taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.”

  She spent time in Europe during her college years, where she became involved with the radical Socialist German Student Union and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Back in the US, she joined the recently formed Black Panthers. Davis was an active member of the Communist Party USA, running for vice-president in 1980 and 1984. In 1972, the Soviet news agency, TASS, reported that Davis had been awarded the Lenin Jubilee Medal, a high Soviet honor.
She also received the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1979 for her contribution to worldwide communism and traveled there in July of that year to accept the honor.

  In 2014, UCLA, the institution that fired Angela Davis in 1970 for her activities related to her membership in the Communist Party, brought her out of retirement to teach a spring-quarter graduate seminar in the gender studies department, titled “Critical Theory and Feminist Dialogues.” The school followed up their adulation of Davis in the fall when they festooned the campus with Angela Davis banners that carried the caption, “We Question.” Despite a lack of evidence of her own questioning in regard to the brutality of the regime she so admired, Davis now appears to be among the ranks of Ayers, Dohrn, and others sporting the title of “esteemed professor.”

  When asked during an interview with the Los Angeles Times whether she thought democracy was a good chassis on which to build a political system, Davis answered, “I believe … democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism.” Although no longer a party member, she still “maintains a relationship (with CPUSA) and believes … that capitalism is the most dangerous kind of future we can imagine.”

  Orville was sympathetic to the cultural Marxist camp, but not actually involved in that realm. He didn’t take up the causes of the counter culture with its drugs and emphasis on sexual liberation. He was distinctly opposed to Freudian psychology, believing it to be castrating, debilitating, and a waste of good proletarian money. So his focus remained on Soviet Russia and the economic side of communism.

  My mother, as described earlier, bought into the psychiatric world of Freud, Erich Fromm, and their associates with abandon. I recall seeing Fromm’s books on our living room coffee table. She also eagerly supported the protests of the SDS, SNCC, and CORE, often participating in rallies. Angela Davis, too, was held in high regard as a significant leader of “progressive causes.” My younger brother, Bjorn, sometimes joined her in these activities, which took place in downtown Los Angeles, the Federal Building in West L.A., and on the campus of UCLA.

  For my part, I vividly remember reading Ernest Jones’s three-volume biography of Freud almost nonstop. I became motivated to write down all of my dreams in order to practice self-analysis. On one occasion when I had a dream, I arose from my bed and carefully wrote it all down. Imagine my surprise the next morning when I found nothing on the pad of paper … so much for my amusing experiment.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  THE DOCTRINAIRE WORLD OF THE ARTS

  For my mother and stepfather, literature, music, the arts, and architecture all resonated with dogma and political rigidity, in the sense of being either “good” or “bad.” For example, only certain books by certain leftist authors were credible. Unless a book or article was in adulation of leftist principles, it was a product of right-wing, bourgeois propaganda. Certain playwrights like Albee and Richard Yates were acceptable because they opposed, satirized, and ridiculed the Eisenhower-era American ideal of family life, with the hardworking American male as the head of the household.

  Author Lincoln Steffens was, with many others, at the fore in the literary category. He met and fell under the spell of Lenin and condoned the atrocities taking place in the Soviet workers’ paradise, believing them necessary to bring about the great changes to come. Writers of the past, such as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, displayed liberal social perspectives and were therefore admired. On the other hand, if a person enjoyed reading mystery novels, or a conservative press, they would be brushed off as an uneducated sap; definitely not part of the “intelligentsia.”

  Modern architecture was the only acceptable form of design. The primary example of this was the Bauhaus school in Germany, which was founded by German architect Walter Gropius in 1919. Initially an art school, and later encompassing architecture, it grew out of the emerging socialist narrative that, in part, disdained anything considered “bourgeois.” In the broad architectural sense, this meant doing away with unnecessary external ornamentation, but in reality anything that deviated from the rigid philosophy would be given the moniker “bourgeois.” Gropius’s cooperative ideal envisioned the architects, artists, and designers all working together, rather than individually, as part of a compound devoted to serving the new workers’ paradise. He even issued his own manifesto that outlined the acceptable forms of artistic expression that reflected the revolutionary era. The woodblock illustration on the cover depicted a cubist cathedral by Lyonel Feininger which was drafted into service as a symbol of the Bauhaus, creating problems when the institution later came to be dubbed “the Cathedral of Socialism.”

  The history of the Bauhaus is many-faceted and complex, navigating politics, personalities, ideologies and more. But the most apparent legacy was its architectural style, the forerunner of what became known as the “International Style,” followed by “post modernism” and other antiseptic variants. A learned and succinct commentary on this subject is the 1982 book by Tom Wolf entitled From Bauhaus to Our House. Also worth reading is an article by Hilton Kramer for The New Criterion, June 2016, entitled “At the Bauhaus: the fate of art in “The Cathedral of Socialism.”

  Due to the changing political landscape with the rise of Nazism, the Bauhaus was closed down in 1933. Gropius immigrated to the United States and was invited to head the Architecture Department at Harvard University. His architectural métier was embraced with relish, ushering in not only the austere and sterile International Style to this country but also the compound mentality of conformity in design, the powerful echoes of which have endured to the present in the majority of architectural programs offered today.

  Both my father and mother enthusiastically responded to this school of design having been steeped in its study through Pratt Institute. The architectural publication “Pencil Points” turned its attention to Bauhaus designers, and consequentially changed its name to “Progressive Architecture” to align itself with the progressive movement. In the 40s and 50s, my mother decorated her homes in that style with bare hardwood floors and austere naugahyde-covered foam furniture.

  The anti-bourgeois focus as manifested in uniform worker housing never translated to the US. Ironically, however, the Bauhaus-inspired style became quite desirable with the one segment of society that could afford to hire architects … the derided bourgeoisie.

  Photography as a modern art form was acceptable, as was the multi-faceted work of Picasso and other modern contemporary artists. These “forward thinkers” made the realistic painters of the past obsolete and absurd. You wouldn’t waste your time, for instance, going to the Huntington Library and seeing works of John Constable or Gainsborough, or Van Dyck. They were passé, and their works were definitely not equal to the social message of Picasso, who extolled the virtues and bravery of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Furthermore, the talents of classical artists were wasted painting the corrupt gentry and royalty of Europe, the evil barons of the past whose vestiges would be erased in the new order.

  The music in our home was a diet of politically left folksingers like Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, the Almanac Singers, The Weavers, and Woody Guthrie. Paul Robeson’s, “Ballad for Americans” and his songs from Showboat were often listened to. Russian composers and the Red Army Chorus also filled the living room with their heavy Russian accents offering renditions of the “Volga Boatmen” and “Oh no, John.” Much of the artists’ music was fun and enjoyable, including charming songs my children adored and loved to hear over and over; and for the general public it was simply entertainment, with no political associations. In my home, however, they were presented and experienced through the lens of politics, as was everything else.

  “Drill ye Terriers, Drill” was one of the popular, left-galvanizing, labor folk songs recorded by Pete Seeger. Of particular enjoyment was the line that, after the explosion in the mine, the drillers were “docked for the time they were up in the sky” by the ruthless capitalist bosses and their overseers.
All laborers were elevated in status and characterized as suffering, indentured slaves held under the boots of cigar-chomping, bigoted, criminal industrialists. The characterization was strictly black and white: laborers were noble, oppressed victims; the business owner, or “boss,” was greedy, heartless, and labeled the oppressor.

  Television, then in its infancy, came with its own grading system, good or bad, depending on the politics associated with the program or the actors. Few programs were deemed acceptable, particularly those with actors who had testified about the existence of communist activity in Hollywood during the HCUAA and later the Senate McCarthy hearings. Comedians like Jerry Lewis or Red Skelton were not well received; they didn’t deliver an appropriate political message. Skelton in particular was considered a dimwitted moron who wrapped himself in the American flag and prostituted himself before the House Committee. Shows like Ozzie and Harriet that showed happy families, nicely dressed people, well-groomed children and orderly life, all of this was nothing more than pap, manufactured by big business interests to distract from the underlying lie that was American life. The irony was that, having played with the Nelson kids on the beach, we could see for ourselves that they were just regular kids like us, and yes, they did seem happy.

  Other disliked TV and movie personalities included such names as Gary Cooper and Walt Disney, who testified and offered names of suspected communists. As a result, we never were taken to Disneyland. Actors such as Adolph Menjou, John Wayne, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, and Charlton Heston were seen as reprehensible scum. Their anti-communist positions made them nothing more than sell-outs and corrupt scabs, and filled Orville and my mother with disgust.

  Hollywood movies and comedians had to have some form of leftist political overtone to be considered good, and anything else was just frivolous drivel that pandered to the ignorant masses. Watching a movie comedy or stand-up act for the sake of diversion and a few laughs was a ridiculous waste of time, but great pains were taken to take us to see old Charlie Chaplin films such as Modern Times, where he made fun of the monotonous work in industrial factories, or old Marx Brothers movies such as Duck Soup and Horse Feathers. Neither Marx nor Chaplin were ever directly associated with the Communist Party; nevertheless, they were tireless leftists with FBI files who danced on the periphery, supporting numerous leftist causes.