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For the Fourth: He’s a Yankee Doodle Dandy — 18 Comments

  1. “once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system… Those functionless creatures, the hippies … just didn’t appear out of a vacuum.”

    Truer words were never spoken.

    I was several years ahead of the hippie movement, age-wise. I supported the Vietnam War as a just cause. I believed in civility and manners. My younger siblings all protested and were generally less civil to those with whom they disagreed, were OK with seizing control of college administration offices and buildings. Remember Mark Rudd? Why were and are so many Jews Leftist, even violently so?

    The birth of the 1960s radicals out of the calm, order and prosperity of the Eisenhower era deserves much study and contemplation, since we are still awash in the hippie/rock ‘n roll/make love not war tsunami a half-century later. The true believers hold many high offices, to our great and continuing danger on this July 4th.

    One of my young and highly popular (because he ‘spoke truth to power’) college profs admitted just a few years ago that he’d participated in the break-in and vandalizing of the Philadelphia FBI office in the late ’60s. A felony, for which he is praised by the school and its students even today, admitting so only decades after the statute of limitations had expired. How noble, how gracious.

  2. Students for a Democratic Society has been reborn, or perhaps never died. A nidus waiting to explode with the growth of radicalism, probably to claim it is anti-fascist.

  3. Cicero:

    Most Jews are not leftists, violent or otherwise. Most Jews are liberals, however, although more religious Jews tend to be conservatives.

    You might just as well ask why are so many Jews scientists? Noble Prize winners? Doctors? Lawyers? Musicians? Actors? Movie moguls? Etc. Etc. In fact, Jews are quite prominent in so many fields, good and less commonly bad.

    And by the way, leftist/radical Jews are almost always ethnic/secular Jews; they are ordinarily not religious. Leftism is their substitute. Believe me, I am well-acquainted with this group.

    If you want to get up to speed on the degree of involvement of Jews among Russian Communists, see this (hint: not nearly as large as anti-Semites would have you think).

    But yes, Jews were and are indeed leftists somewhat out of proportion with their numbers in the population. The answer to the question “why” is not obscure. They had been tremendously persecuted in Russia, and believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that Communists would usher in a much less discriminatory era towards them and towards everyone. They were for the most part idealists—the ones I knew in my youth certainly were (and were completely secular, usually atheists). And as is often the case, they raised their children in the same “religion” of leftism. That’s what the term “red diaper baby” means—someone who was brought up by leftists. Some continue to be leftists; some do not.

    David Horowitz has written at great length about this in his autobiography Radical Son. Highly recommended.

  4. I have always loved this movie. I knew Rosemary DeCamp (who plays Cagney’s mother in the film, even though she was about 11 years Cagney’s junior in real life).

    Rosemary and her husband, John, were good friends of my wife’s family. John was a judge; he married Nina and I on May 27, 1973, a few days before we graduated from medical school.

    Forty-five years ago!

    Tempus fugit.

  5. Do young people ever see these movies? They are so cut off from our culture. When there were only 3 networks,young people watched classic films on the same TV as their parents. Today, they go to their rooms and consume entirely different stuff.

    Not only that , but they are age separated and don’t deal with older and younger cousins and neighbors like we used to. It’s sad that most don’t know anything about Yankee Doodle Dandy or Over There. Movies used to provide some kind of base that kids could build on as they acquired more knowledge. We have to find a way to integrate them into our culture and history.

  6. “Where’s my Oscar?” Right behind the bottle of tequila I culturally appropriated from the Aztecs, my frieind.

  7. “leftist/radical Jews are almost always ethnic/secular Jews; they are ordinarily not religious.”

    I think it is the substitute. I always thought that there was a religious factor, “Day of Atonement” sort of thing.

    Cagney’s brother was a dentist in Culver City CA.

    He was also a very savvy investor having owned most of Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach at one time.

  8. Pingback:[VIDEOS] When a patriotic Hollywood sang about freedom

  9. I think it is the substitute. I always thought that there was a religious factor, “Day of Atonement” sort of thing.

    You nailed it. There’s a well-known maxim, whose provenance escapes me just now, that human beings are fundamentally religious creatures, and in the absence of an organized religion, they will attach religious significance to any other thing of their choosing, and worship it with the same religious fervor that they mock in what they view as “religious” people.

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