DRAMA QUEEN. The wonderful actor Michael Moriarty is at Big Hollywood, telling us that the liberal/socialist/communist Hollywood/Broadway threat goes back further than you can imagine. No, not to Bang The Drum Slowly, with its collectivist idea that wealth-producers should expend themselves in sympathy for the weak in mind and spirit. To Dead End:

The rich people in Dead End, who, in a miraculous quirk of fate, happen to live on the same block as the poor people, are not very nice. They are cold and distant. They’re the real villains, because … well … they’re rich!

Obviously the real Dead End is Capitalism and capitalist America

Also: modern jazz, the Group Theater, the New School for Social Research, the "very hellish bottom of anti-heroism" of Taxi Driver, etc.

From the early part of the 20th Century, a "pre-Soviet, Communist/Capitalist merger in America evolved into what we now know of as the Progressive Movement, which, in turn, became the Progressive Power Years of the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama White Houses." And the very motor of this rise has been provided by folks who write, act, paint, etc.

World Communism without the French Revolution and American Communism without the Far Left artists of New York and Hollywood are fantasies as incomplete as the Lone Ranger without Tonto … or Stalin without Lenin.

As an artist Moriarty has presumably spent time among other artists, yet he attributes their tendency toward groupthink and sentimental ideas of life to an ideological conspiracy. In my experience artists tend to be a little dreamy and insecure -- as who wouldn't be, given their position in this society -- and will cut people, especially others of their own kind, for imagined slights and social misalliances at least as readily as for their political affiliations, and compensate for the resulting maladjustments with delusory fantasies of their own power and the power of art.

Come to think of it, that seems to be what Moriarty is doing now.