As a child, I was fascinated by Walt Disney.\u00a0 Not by his cartoons.\u00a0 Not by the Mouseketeers. \u00a0Not by Davy Crocket.\u00a0 But by Disney himself, the creator of the company that produced all those films and TV shows.\u00a0 So I was dismayed two weeks ago when, as you have no doubt heard, actress Meryl Streep accused Disney of being a \u201cgender bigot\u201d and an anti-Semite.<\/p>\n
Ms. Streep leveled the charges in the course of presenting a best actress award to Emma Thompson for her work in\u00a0Saving Mr. Banks<\/i>, which is about Disney, the children\u2019s book author P.L Travers and the making of\u00a0Mary Poppins<\/i>.\u00a0 Commentators have noted that Streep spoke midway through the voting period for the Oscars.\u00a0 In a Hollywood meets Washington move, Streep was, some suggest, attempting to deny Thompson that highest profile Best Actress nod, and if so, she succeeded.\u00a0 Thompson and her film failed to snag a single major slot on this year\u2019s lists.<\/p>\n
Of course, Streep said the other day that she was \u201cshocked\u201d at Thompson being bumped from the Oscar lists, \u201cshocked,\u201d some say, in a Claude Raines\u00a0Casablanca<\/i>\u00a0style.\u00a0 Ms. Streep is among the five nominees.<\/p>\n
But what about the charges?\u00a0 Was Disney misogynous or anti-Semitic?<\/p>\n
Streep quoted from a 1938 letter describing the division of the tasks between male and female artists.\u00a0 Animation, as opposed to coloring and other support tasks, was confined to men. But if that in fact was Disney\u2019s practice in 1938, it was short lived.\u00a0 The lead animator in\u00a0Bambi<\/i>, made four years later, was a woman.\u00a0 And assigning her wasn\u2019t a matter of finding someone could be paid less. Disney\u2019s rule was, as he put it, \u201cIf a woman can do the work as well, she is worth as much as a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Regarding anti-Semitism, Disney had numerous Jewish friends, business associates and employees, supported a number of Jewish charities and in 1955 was named the Beverly Hill\u2019s B\u2019nai B\u2019rith\u2019s Man of the year.<\/p>\n
But here is one reason I am telling this.\u00a0 It happens that some of those friends, business associates and employees were the parents of friends of mine.<\/p>\n
As a child, one of my friends played in Disney\u2019s office.\u00a0 His father was in charge of some critical operations at the Disney studios.\u00a0 His mother was the model for Snow White.\u00a0 When he had days at the office with Dad, he would at times be deposited in the boss\u2019 office, where one wall slid open revealing another room filled with Disney character toys and dolls.\u00a0 Today, on a wall at his home, this friend has on display framed Disney cartoons and animation cells, several made especially for his father and mother.<\/p>\n
As you might imagine, my friend and his wife bristled at Streep\u2019s accusations, noting that she was recycling smears that originated with the communist attempts to take over Hollywood following the Second World War.\u00a0 This was the same period in which Ronald Reagan was fighting the communists in the Screen Actors Guild, first as a member of the union\u2019s board, then as its president.\u00a0 When Reagan said at his first presidential press conference that the Soviets \u201copenly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat,\u201d he was speaking in part from his experience with Hollywood communists.\u00a0 Disney, my friend and his wife attest, was a target of the kind of lying and cheating to which Reagan referred.<\/p>\n
The father of someone else to whom I am close was an investor in Hollywood in the 1950s.\u00a0 He was also among the Americans who provided instrumental support for the foundation of the State of Israel.\u00a0 He had a \u201cradar\u201d for anti-Semitism, I am told, and no use for anyone in whom he detected it.\u00a0 He knew and liked Disney and may have invested in Disney\u2019s movies.<\/p>\n
Here is the other reason I am telling this story.<\/p>\n
It strikes me that, in addition to (if reports are true) grotesque ambition, Ms. Streep reflects a certain warped mindset that is all too prominent in the fashionable circles of our time.\u00a0 I am talking about a predisposition to believe that anything iconically American is corrupt.\u00a0 That anyone who has achieved great things in this country did it through exploiting power differentials derived from gender and ethnicity.\u00a0 That nothing is deserved, except, perhaps, the fashionable circle\u2019s own fashionable achievements.\u00a0 That no other life\u2019s work can be credited, particularly if it comes from, say, a dirt-poor kid of itinerant parents who grew up in the unfashionable precincts of the Midwest and never received one of the fashionable circle\u2019s fashionable degrees.<\/p>\n
Ronald Reagan was such a kid.\u00a0 So was Walt Disney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a child, I was fascinated by Walt Disney.\u00a0 Not by his cartoons.\u00a0 Not by the Mouseketeers. \u00a0Not by Davy Crocket.\u00a0 But by Disney himself, the creator of the company that produced all those films and TV shows.\u00a0 So I was dismayed two weeks ago when, as you have no doubt heard, actress Meryl Streep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[37,202,12,180],"class_list":["post-1706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-communism","tag-disney","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-reagan"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1707,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions\/1707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}