Opinion: Is Hollywood un-American?

What the fall season tells us is that Hollywood is a lot faster on the uptake with this war than it was with Vietnam. Back then the first blip of the cinematic radar came in 1967 with Roger Corman’s ‘The Trip,’ when a stoned Peter Fonda broke into a neighbor’s home where the TV was playing actual news footage. Just a reference, but it really counted for something. The following year John Wayne’s 21-gun salute, ‘The Green Berets,’ premiered and was a big hit. After that audio-visual silence reigned until 1978, long after Vienam had ended. The pro-war ‘The Deer Hunter’ won an Oscar for best picture, while the antiwar ‘Coming Home’ won ‘Hanoi Jane’ (as the right loves to call her) her second statuette. The country was indeed ‘split’ about Vietnam, and so was Hollywood (about 60% against and 40% for). But if the latest polling figures are to be believed (and I for one have every reason to give them credence), the Iraq war is about as popular as AIDS. Looking at the slate of current and upcoming releases, Hollywood is staying true to cautious form, with ‘criticism’ of the war couched in familiar genre terms. ‘In the Valley of Elah’ is a melodrama about a war vet gone missing after returning stateside, and how it affects his family. ‘Grace is Gone’ concerns a road trip taken by a man (John Cusack) whose wife has been killed in Iraq. In light of the right’s brass-knuckles treatment of antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, I expect no end of jokes will be made at the expense of this film by the ever-sensitive Ann Coulter and her ultra-scrupulous confederates.

To the Hollywood defeat set the Iraq War is painted as Abu Ghraib and a soldier raping an Iraqi 14-year-old girl and killing her family. Anomalous hideous behavior for which the perpetrators are rightfully prosecuted is used to slander the majority in the pursuit of political propaganda intended to demoralize a nation in the pursuit of ending the war. Brian De Palma admitted as much. Shameful. Predictable . . . For those who see the world through art, my side -- which strongly sees radical Islam as a growing anti-democratic, anti-liberal global threat -- is not represented because our dissent is deemed ‘hate speech.’ (War was so much easier when the Nazis were white.) Hollywood acquiesces when CAIR and other pro-Islamist interest groups demand that Muslim extremists not appear in film portrayed as terrorists. If only the Pentagon had the same sway! Sure, my side has talk radio, best-selling books, top-rated cable news shows, blogs, Op-Ed columns and even the presidency to make our points. But we do not have even a minority position to tell the most important stories of our time because of the politically correct architecture of the creative process in Hollywood.