Saturday Night Radio Drama - Arthur Miller - The Hook

 The Hook 

The world broadcast premiere of Arthur Miller’s unproduced screenplay tells the story of a 1950s Brooklyn longshoreman who is fired for standing up to his corrupt union boss, but decides to fight back by standing for union president.

1951. The Brooklyn Docks. Dawn. Hundreds of longshoreman queue in line to see if they’re going to be given a counter and picked for work in that day’s gang. It’s dangerous work, but with a hierarchy of corrupt union bosses all taking backhanders above them, they have no option but to accept.

The Hook is part of a season of radio adaptions of unproduced screenplays by the major authors of the 20th century - including Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Orson Welles and Ernest Lehman.
Arthur Miller developed the script for The Hook with Elia Kazan and it was on the trip to LA to pitch it to Harry Cohn at Columbia Studios that he met Marilyn Monroe for the first time. Cohn asked Miller to change the script and turn the corrupt union bosses into communists. Miller refused and the screenplay was shelved. He and Kazan then fell out over Kazan's testimony to McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan went on to make On The Waterfront and Miller wrote A View From The Bridge, essentially reworkings of The Hook.

This radio adaptation is directed by Adrian Noble. During his career Adrian has received over 20 Olivier Award nominations both as artistic director of the RSC and as a freelance theatre director.

Cast:
Narrator - David Suchet
Marty - Elliot Cowan
Louis - Nigel Lindsay
Rocky - Michael Feast
Farragut - Tim Pigott-Smith
Piggy - Nathan Wiley
Enzo - Jonathan Guy Lewis
Sleeper - Kerry Shale
Therese - Joanne Pearce
Old Dominic - Vincent Riotta
Mama - Lorelei King
Irene - Hollie Burgess
Pete - Leo Heller

Screenplay written by Arthur Miller
Adapted for radio by Laurence Bowen

Remembering All The Dead In Shadows And Light

THE WANTS OF BUSINESSMEN being what rules in this, our vaunted liberal democracy,  the sacred act of remembering the dead was bound to be reduced to a meaningless Monday holiday, a long weekend, the unofficial start of summer three weeks before summer actually starts.   It would be better if they'd kept it as it was,  a day that could come on any of the days of the week, a fixed holiday despite the inconvenience to the engines of making the rich richer,  those who wanted to spend it drinking in front of screens or anything other than remembering all of the dead.  

Making it into yet one more occasion of nationalism, concentrating only on those who died in wars was less bad but it still diminished the day as I remember it still being, a day when you were to remember all of those who died.   If those who make the decisions such as for Monday holidays instead of real ones can be depended on doing, it's even making the solemn occasion for reflection that should be the only reason to memorialize those who died in wars to cheapen it into a tawdry opportunity for exactly what the dead don't have any use for, nationalism and political posturing and blathering.   

Silence would be better than a parade or concert or speech.  A day of silence, maybe some of it at the sides of graves, graves for those who died in war, many of those civilians, graves for those who never were in wars, those who opposed wars, those who just lived their lives out in their communities or in many communities, in their families.   It should be a day of shadows in light, the shadow of death, the light of the hope of heaven and the way to get there.   

My Memorial Day morning started by a really disturbing elaborate nightmare of hell as being an enormous, up-scale department store I got trapped in while being dragged along to shop for Christmas and couldn't get out of.   Not until I asked for help and remembered that I could force myself to wake up from it.    The longer I think about it the more appropriate I think it was as a warning to me - what I was being warned against, I'm not ready to say.   Several of my dead and about to die relatives were in the dream, what that means I can only guess at and I'm not ready to do that.  I can say that was the shadow for me, today.   I'm going to spend some time at the cemetery but I'll do that tomorrow.  Too many People there today.  Maybe I'll wait till the 30th to do that.  I'm not big on the Monday holiday thing, except for Labor Day.

I Still Won't Be Fair To Fascists, Nice To Nazis or Stand By Stalinists

ANYONE WHO READS the few comments I choose to post and sometimes answer, will know that the guy who most often trolls me pulled out the ol' "you can't judge people in the past by the standards of now" ruse in defense of America's Stalinists such as the Hollywood 10 and others who fell under  the HUAC inquisition and its associated manifestations during the red scare of the late 40s through early 50s.  To which I pointed out that we should have no problem judging their contemporaries in support of foreign mass murdering dictators, such as the German American Bund and others who supported the Nazi regime in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and the Japanese Imperial regime in Japan.  If we can't judge Lester Cole and Lillian Hellman for their support of Stalin, there must be something wrong with our holding Charles Lindbergh or Henry Luce or the executives of IBM who did business with Hitler for condemnation.  I refuse to believe that for a second.

That period of American Communism shouldn't be forgotten because it proved how dangerous Marxism is in practice, instantly changing some of Hitler's, Mussolini's, Franco's biggest enemies into Republican business types who wanted to do business with Hitler on orders from Moscow.  And, yes, the stupidly sainted Dalton Trumbo, who briefly, following orders from the Stalinists during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, let his book Johnny Got His Gun act as a piece of American isolationist propaganda, more dangerous for keeping America out of WWII because he was, in fact, an effective popular style writer.  If he wrote it with that in mind I can't tell but he, in fact, allowed the Communist Party to use it to put out the same pro-Hitler message that Lindbergh was pushing.  Later, Trumbo also, on behalf of the 10, perhaps including those who may not have wanted to be so identified, admitted that all of them had been members of the Communist Party at one time or another. Which would have been during the dictatorship of Stalin as his crimes were being accurately reported, in case anyone was wondering if any of them were unjustly accused of being Stalinists.  If you want a good example of exactly why we should criticize them on the basis of the morality of today, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the majority of Republican-fascists of the Trump era are doing exactly the same thing for Stalin's ideological grandson, Putin.  I have no doubt that his attack on Ukraine was motivated through his knowledge that the Republican-fascists would aid him in his first step of forced reforming of the Soviet Union through conquering the newly democratic Ukraine. 

I have no problem judging the People who embodied America's fascist tradition, white supremacy, from every point in its history, colonial up to right now, I have no more of a problem judging the universal fascism of male supremacy for the entire
history of its existence. Why shouldn't I?  The very same guys who pull the "you can't judge those from the past are hypocrites because they pick and choose those instances when they will do exactly that.  In the case of Simels, he has no problem  judging the American Bund Nazis even as he demands that the Stalinists get a pass because Hollywood, Broadway and pop novelists say they were innocent martyrs to the vulgar anti-democrats who conducted the Red Scare.  That, in itself, makes a much more complex situation into a simplistic cartoon of it because there were plenty of actual democrats and Democrats who were involved with the red scare along with the Republican goons and media scumbags like Walter Winchell and the Hollywood moguls.  I like to taunt him that his great hero Bobby Kennedy worked for the drunken Senator Joseph McCarthy and dearly wanted the job that he gave to Roy Cohn.  I could point out that Harry Truman had more than a slight hand in setting off the red scare, though I think he was mistaken to believe they would ever have any chance of gaining power in the United States.  What was a real danger were exactly those who made common cause with the Republican red baiters and scarers, America's indigenous fascists of white supremacy.  They not only had power in a large number of the states, they had exercised enormous power over the country for its entire period, accounting for the American genocide and land theft that the country was built on and the kidnapping and enslavement, rape, murder and degredation of Black People here.  Though the political reality that Truman faced was dependent on the traditional membership in the Democratic Party of many of those fascists in the South.  Since Truman was responsible for what Thurgood Marshall once said was the most significant step towards racial equality in American history, the integration of the American military, it's clear politics makes the strangest bedfellows.  I said the entire thing was more simplistic than all of the Hollywood movies and Broadway message plays put together could cover.  Make believe as imagined by story tellers is one of the least efficient and generally most inaccurate means of learning about history, which is why the likes of Simps have such a stupid and distorted idea of it.

I remember hearing the slogan about not judging those in the past in relation to the conduct of many of the late medieval and so-called Renaissance Popes and I didn't buy it then, either.  In that case the moral standards for judging them were to be found in the Gospels and Epistles, Acts and the Book of the Apocolypse.  They claimed to be followers of Jesus so it's entirely appropriate to judge them by that  moral yard stick.  I use the same yard stick to judge the Integralist Catholic members of the Republican-fascist coalition of the morally depraved, and they can hardly complain when I do that because they claim to follow Jesus.  Alito does even as about every time he makes a decision on the Supreme Court he does exactly what Jesus would never have done.  Not to mention his frequent lying and corruption.  I have no problem judging the Southern Baptist members of Congress on the same standard, a standard from a far different time than the one we live in now. Nor the Catho-fascist neo-integralists who support Republican-fascism and Trump. 

For any contemporary Marxist to complain about judging those from a different time period by moral standards not of their time, they do so every time they read the Communist Manifesto and feel fire in their blood over the outrages of injustice - it was probably Marx's best writing before he got all sciency and impossible to read.  The morality that Marx tacitly invokes, the feeling of injustice was certainly a borrowed standard of moral judgement since his materialist-atheist-scientism couldn't provide that.  He had no problem judging those who also practiced amoral materialism, capitalism, by a standard not of 1848.  And he was right to do so, his critique of capitalism is the only really good thing about him, that and his support of the North in the American Civil War. His ideological basis provided no means of support for constructing anything but what was bound to turn very bad and very ugly, murderous and enslaving.  No loud-mouthed atheist of the past quarter of a century who makes a moral criticism of anything has to borrow moral standards, most commonly in the West, from the Jewish tradition from Moses and the Prophets to Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  They judge all kinds of people by moral standards not current in current society, otherwise they've got nothing. 

In my response to Simels I pointed out that his stand that I was wrong to judge the Hollywood Stalinists by what can be shorthanded to "the standards of today" that under the Nazis their standard was set up at the exact same time that Stalin and the movie industry Stalinists were active made their crimes and mass murders legal.  If anyone thinks that secular law is an effective replacement for revealed morality, I pointed to the example I've used before, the one Bobby Kennedy's brother Jack chose as a "Profile in Courage," the morally depraved Robert Taft who opposed the Nuremberg trials on that basis, that what the Nazis did was perfectly legal under the civil law so there was no tidy basis for bringing them to a court to face justice.  Going to Harvard Law School was apparently as likely to make you morally obtuse then as it is today, both Taft and JFK are products of that training ground for servants of oligarchy.  

I have no problem with saying the Nazis had it coming to them, though, of course, I'd never have imposed the death penalty on them - though I have to admit, it got rid of a lot of potentially very dangerous People who had proven to be capable of gaining and wielding power.  I've got no idea if any of them, released later, may not have been very dangerous to post-WWII, Europe.   That's one thing that is extremely dangerous, forgetting that any amoral or immoral ideology that has succeeded in gaining and holding power has proven it can do that and to allow it to be propagated is to help ensure that history will repeat itself, which I've pointed out in relation to our current First Amendment induced idiocy of doing just that.

I would have had no problem bringing those who conducted the genocidal arranged starvation of Ukraine, the many thousands of murders to enforce atheism, ethnic mass murders, terror murders to keep the entire Soviet population terrified and in line, etc. to the same kind of justice if that had become possible.  Some of those sentenced by the Nuremberg process never directly killed anyone but were involved in producing Nazi propaganda, propaganda of the kind that Dalton Trumbo, the Almanac Singers and others produced on behalf of keeping America out of the fight against Hitler on orders from Moscow until Hitler did what any sane person would realize he would do and he attacked the Soviet Union.  Why shouldn't I judge those who produced Stalinist propaganda here on the same basis that Alfred Rosenberg, the publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter,  was sentenced on?  Stalin's crimes were exactly of the same kind that Hitler committed.  Why shouldn't I judge his supporters on the same basis that I condemn the German American Bund or  Mussolini's fascism or the KKK or the various other organs of America's indigenous fascism and lynch law?*  Or, for that matter, those who committed rank injustice during the red scare?  There were entirely innocent People who were wrongly accused and who suffered greatly for it, some may have died as a result.   Accusations of that kind were made against The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. virtually every liberal and are being hurled by the Trumpzis today. Are we to cut the white supremacists and segregationists and, yes, red-scare mongers "moral standards of today" slack?  I'm not going to.

Immorality doesn't change its nature over decades and centuries and millennia.  The suffering is the same.  Social acceptance of immorality might change but that doesn't change people being enslaved, raped, harmed, oppressed and murdered. I have no doubt that those who were the objects of all of those had no problem with identifying their oppressors as wrong.  "Official morality" was set by their oppressors in the dominating class, they got to set the official moral guidelines that we might mistake as the universal opinion of what was right and wrong, then. On that basis, things that are entirely innocuous are wrongly classified as taboos, often with serious legal consequences but I'm talking about enslaving, oppressing. . . murdering, not minor taboos misidentified with morals.  I've got no patience with those who want to, sometimes, selectively,  claim that those obvious wrongs are matters of contingent morality set by those dominating in any culture.  If the same were done to those in the dominating class, THEY would be the first to proclaim themselves to be the victims of moral atrocities.  Equality is among the most important and primary requirements for a moral society, any real democracy. I'm in favor of a single standard for that. 

* It shouldn't be forgotten that during the abolitionist struggle and after, many of the abolitionists were, rightly, as outraged at wage-slavery, economic injustice to those who were paid a pittance and who were, therefore, not officially classed as slaves.  During the conventions that adopted both the Aricles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution, the representatives of slave-power brought up those in the North who worked under wage-slave conditions - ignoring that there were plenty of whites in the South who also worked under wage-slave conditions, so that's rightly considered as covered under moral judgment of the kind discussed here.  It's certainly nothing that the white-collar American Communists could ignore because it was the very stuff of how they aspired to get power here, while, of course, ignoring the slave-labor and wage slavery under the "workers paradise" of every Marxist government there ever has been.  Reportedly those enslaved in Stalinist North Korea are sold to the oligarchs of Putin's neo-Stalinism and the Chinese Communist oligarchs, to the profit of the totalitarian military dictators of the Kim dynasty.  Occasionally, here and among white-collar, often university-based Marxists will claim that North Korea is slandered by Western imperialists.  I don't know why they should bother, the Communists seem to be much better at imperial oppression and enslavement than the Western powers are. 

I have absolutely no tolerance for Marxist supporting the terrorist enslavement and murder of Asians or others while they live the good life in the U.S. or Canada,  Britain, Sweden, etc.  I loathe university based Marxists every much as I loathe Ivy League law-school, Arlington VA style stink tank Capitalists and libertarians and for exactly the same reasons.  I don't think the apologists for Korean or Chinese communism are any less racist than those who figure those mass murdered in Europe count for more than those murdered who aren't killed while white.  Or those who don't much care what color or which language group those enslaved and killed are as long as money is being made from it