Stupid Hate Mail

You know, Stupy, I went back and looked at the novel, though I had to scan fast I think it confirms my memory that the party of the evil mother and her husband isn't specified.   Refresh my memory with an actual passage from the novel or I'm going to conclude you never read the thing.   

The plot is pretty silly, based on some of the bogus psychology of the 50s that, like just so much in psychology, is eventually shown to be complete crap.   Though it works as sci-fi and will do as a movie. 

I hadn't known about the plagiarism scandal over the book that was uncovered in the 90s, but, then, I don't think I've really thought about it much.   I hadn't known they'd done a remake of the movie of it. From what I read, in the second movie, the evil mother and her husband are Democrats, why that would be, I don't know.   I do sort of like to think Condon was comparing the corruption of American politics with the early imperial period of Rome, though it was hardly an original idea. 

Update:  Stupy, get the novel, type out where it specifies the party.  You're even stupider than I think you are if you think I'm just going to take your word for anything.   And I mean the novel, not the movies they made of it, which are probably the only things you've seen of it. 

Update 2:  "Condon was a genius" translated from Simelsese that means "I watched a movie based on one of his books" or, "Kewl people talk about the movie".   He was an adequate pulp writer, the plot of The Manchurian Candidate is entertaining, the writing sags in places, the plot is absolutely absurd. 

You do know, don't you, Stupy, that the guy who is brainwashed by the commies wasn't the one who was a candidate of an unnamed party, he was the guy who was programmed to assassinate the candidate.  Thus the comparison of the movie to the Kennedy assassination, assuming Oswald did it.  Condon wrote a rather oddly rambling article about it*. Actually, I'm not even sure you know that much about it.  

*  I was reading about how Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky absolved the American people from any guilt in the assassination of the President when a reporter from a South African press association telephoned from London to ask if I felt responsible for the President's killing, inasmuch as I had written a novel, The Manchurian Candidate, on which had been based a film that had just been frozen in the United States because it was felt that the assassin might have seen it and been influenced by it. I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel.

     The differences between Senator Morton's views on this and my own are vast. The man who shot John Kennedy, Senator Morton said, was a stranger to the American heritage and his mind had been warped by an alien violence, not by a native condition.

     Brainwashing to violence and assassination is the line taken in my novel. On its melodramatic surface, the book is a study of the consequences of a mind warped by alien violence, but I had also hoped to suggest that for some time all of us in the United States had been brainwashed to violence, and to indicate that the reader might consider that the tempo of this all-American brainwashing was being speeded up.

     I meant to call attention, through example, to the proved brainwashing to violence shown by the increased sale of cigarettes after they had been conclusively demonstrated to be suicide weapons. I meant to show that when the attention of a nation is focused upon violence when it appears on the front page of all newspapers, throughout television programming, in the hundreds of millions of monthly comic books, in most motion pictures, in the rhythms of popular music and the dance, and in popular $5 novels which soon become 50c paperbacks; when a most violent example is set by city, state and federal governments, when organized crime merges with organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed we must not be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down a President of our republic. We can feign surprise, as we did with the murder of President Kennedy, but none of us seemed either surprised or moved by the murder of Medgar Evers, who was also a man who had a young wife and children, and whose assassin most certainly matched the basic, American psychological pattern of the killer of our President...

I don't think David McCullough's contention that the evil mommy was supposed to stand in for Roy Cohn and her husband to represent Joe McCarthy helps much.  Even more so if that was the case.

At any rate, I don't think it has much of an effect on my contention that no one would have predicted that it would be the Republican Party that ran a KGB asset for president, doing so rather openly.

Now, you're going to have to excuse me.  I feel old realizing I remember an article I read almost fifty three years ago.   I think I'll go put my feet up.

Update 3:  Oh, yeah, this part of the Condon defense was, actually, kind of interesting and topical.

When the fanatic is a ruler, rather than the assassin of a ruler, the people who permitted him to take power must be blamed whether they be the Germans of 1933-35 for Adolf Hitler, or the people of Chicago, Illinois, for their local government. But when the fanatic is the assassin, he emerges from the very fabric of the people. In answer to Senator Morton: if the American people are encouraging a mass educational system the over communications industry [I assume he means TV and the radio] which instructs for the production of the highest crime rate and the most widely shared violence dependencies of any country in the world, is it not time to say, most particularly by our government, that each American is responsible for that state of affairs because he does nothing to change it? We are not, as some well-meaning European newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such toughness was required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized, thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.

      It is a hell of a spot for a country to be in. Who, the least brainwashed among us, will cast the first redemptive thought?

You have to wonder what he'd make of today's media and the popular culture that is many scores of times more violent and brutal and the fascist demagogue who has a chance of winning the presidency of the United States with the support of the KGB thug from Russia and overt neo-Nazis and other fascists and white supremacists.   You know what I think, that it's an entirely predictable result of media deregulation and the permission that liberals on the Supreme Court handed the media to lie with impunity a few months after he wrote that.