Capturing the Culture, by Richard Grenier

...And to do it he brings in details from the work of Orwell that donot come out of Cliffs Notes...

...They wear hats that say "Pray for War...

...I don't know if Grenier is familiar with Voigt, but that sentence wouldn't make a bad thesis statement for his book...

...churches, and popular culture...

...Homosexuality is prevalent among bodybuilders, and it is, oddly enough, an effeminate homosexuality...

...When he reviews Breaker Morant, he chooses to do it along with Fort Apache The Bronx...

...lack, while Washington had no knowledge whatsoever of the actual Soviet supply...

...Grenier is a cultural historian in the humble guise of a movie critic...

...Only the strong survive...

...he concocts a bizarre background to fit his bizarre body, so that the Mannerist reconstruction of self can be complete...

...Maclean had been taking an active part in top-secret meetings with the Combined Policy Committee (CPC), which included Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Undersecretary Dean Acheson, as well as key scientists and British diplomats...

...Our estranged artistic and intellectual classes have been as effective as Gramsci expected they would be...

...American pig...

...And he turns self-invention into an art form...

...George Gilder's inability to get his important book Men and Marriage published in the feminized ghetto of New York publishing has analogues in the university tenure debates, film production decisions, and PEN conferences Grenier describes, as well as in the school textbook biases that Paul Vitz has exposed, NEA grants policies, mainline church waffling on homosexuality and other issues, and so on...

...Paul Fussell, like most middle-class parents, tried to protect his son from the seamy side of life...

...Anything but...

...No kindness forgotten, no transgression forgiven...

...This was at the time, of course, when the U.S...

...The new "relevance" (in the Gramscian sense) of such makers of culture as Lucas tells a lot about the direction the culture is moving in and why: These people are both the effect and the cause of the movement of society away from its historical moorings...

...Feminists yelp about the disabilities that young women labor under...

...Pretentious...

...The professional bodybuilder Paul Harris "revealed his marriage to his 'husband,' male model Rod Jackson, and the joy they shared in their 'children,' two dogs and a macaw named Barney...

...That could stand as a paradigm for the Gramscian thesis, and it's Grenier's message as well...

...These phony documents were passed to Drew Pearson through his aide—a former Communist named David Karr—and appeared in Pearson's syndicated column...

...Most of the books on them—e.g...

...It's a more vicious system even than our own...

...Maclean gained access to all cables and reports coming to the British embassy in 1946...

...Soon afterwards, the Belgian Communists precipitated an international crisis by demanding to know whether their government had signed a secret treaty giving the U.S...

...Newton's solid grasp of this history puts the Cambridge group's espionage in context, a formidable achievement...

...When it's done right, it becomes a kind of prophecy, penetrating to the heart of what makes a culture tick and unveiling what a society will become...

...Change is expected, but is understood in cause-and-effect terms rather than those of metaphysical inevitability...

...Reading about the time Bertolt Brecht's mistress, Ruth Berlau, chased Grenier down a flight of stairs screaming "Filthy A virtual industry has grown up around tracing the dramatic careers of the Cambridge spies of the 1930s, led by the illustrious Kim Philby and found to include, most recently, the famed art critic and keeper of the Queen's gallery, the late Sir Anthony Blunt...

...Young men turn to all sorts of dangers—crime, drugs, skydiving, risky sex, bodybuilding—to go through the experience that other societies provide in a structured way, under the guidance of responsible adult males...

...The idea of a politics of culture finds its fullest expression in Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who taught that it is futile to try to change society without first changing human consciousness...

...Maclean's work justifies Newton's claim that "it is doubtful that any other Soviet agent in the postwar period . . . served Moscow more ably than Maclean...

...The transition from things imagined to things real is a very easy one," Voigt concluded, "and men, no less than children, will suit action to fantasy...

...It's best read as the sorely needed debunking of a man, more deeply flawed than most, who has been turned into an idol by the "soft left," a term Grenier uses to describe a woolly-headed mentality that flits from one variant of anti-Western and anti-AmerCAPTURING THE CULTURE: FILM, ART, AND POLITICS Richard Grenier/Ethics and Public Policy Center 392 pp...

...Grenier is so informative on the meaning of film because he arrives at the theater with a mind already well stocked with cultural history...

...In that capacity, Maclean helped sabotage U.S...

...But Maclean's reports made Stalin aware of the U.S...

...Grenier seems to share Lenin's belief that film is the most important of the arts in accomplishing this conquest...

...Just how much damage he did has long been unclear...

...History moves, but it is not God...

...When his mother came to visit him in the bunker apartment he had found, he was wearing military fatigues camouflaged to look like tree bark, spitshined black combat boots, [and] a T-shirt which read "Respect my spirit, for our spirits are one...

...A cardboard cutout of Arnold with loincloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian stood against one wall...

...Grenier has given himself a cosmopolitan education in Western civilization, which after all is the intended victim of the struggle in progress...

...Bodybuilders quote slogans reminiscent of that cripple and weakling Nietzsche: "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger...

...As Stalin sought access to the Black Sea Straits, Maclean tried to drive a wedge between the British and Americans...

...The Soviets then proceeded with classic disinformation, lacing classified cables with fabrications "intended to portray Stalin as a reasonable and compassionate man...

...The arousal of Belgian nationalist passion against the United States was the only way possible to force Belgium to cut off its uranium supply to America...

...He notes what they have in common (not much), but uses the contrasts to provide a startling cultural commentary...

...You can't defend what you don't know, and that is one reason much of the conservative defense of civilization is more nostalgic than effective: few of the defenders are aware of what is at stake...

...The custodians of American culture validate Lord Keynes's contention that tough-minded people who despise learning end up repeating the teachings of defunct scribblers of whom they have never heard...

...At the Y he encountered "a man dressed in a singlet and what appeared to be a tutu...

...They don't play to Grenier's strength, which is the use of the historical and philosophical backgrounds of a cultural artifact to explain its meaning...

...Among Newton's other revelations are these: At the time of sensitive communications regarding Stalin's betrayal of the Yalta agreement on Poland, Maclean handed over secret messages sent by Churchill to Truman, messages that cast doubt on the popular belief that Harry Hopkins's mission to Stalin had ironed out the problems regarding Soviet control of Poland...

...But although fascist, bodybuilding is not Nazi: blacks and others whom Hitler would have regarded as Untermenschen are successful and admired in the field...

...Grenier knows not only history but also contemporary Europe, evidently including several languages and the film cultures of the continent...

...were completely out of uranium...

...The transformation of Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby looms in the background...

...Characteristically, he seeks reasons in the biographies of the perpetrators and asks himself what happened to George Lucas between the two films...

...access to their uranium from the Congo...

...Newton reveals what the British in particular (but also the FBI and the State Department) have been anxious Ronald Radosh is professor of history at the City University of New York and co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth...

...But like William Henry Harrison with his nonexistent log cabin or Ben Franklin in London with his coonskin cap, Sam Fussell engages in reverse social climbing...

...The newspapers were soon filled with exact weights, prices, and amounts of uranium shipped...

...To review Reds, he recapitulates the biographies of John Reed and Louise Bryant...

...Maclean's role in the diplomatic game was to "foul the machinery of Western foreign policy" and to sow "confusion and distrust among Anglo-American diplomats...

...lb review The Bostonians, he gives us ten pages of Henry James's biography and associated criticism...

...M aclean may also have been one of the Soviet Union's key atomic spies...

...Health fascists," Fussell calls the gym rats...

...had managed to keep its dependency secret, and had worked out an agreement with the British to receive Congolese uranium from Belgium...

...to cover up—that the damage Maclean and his group wrought was enormous...

...What he does not point out is that bodybuilding is yet another symptom of America's failure to find a way to help its boys become men...

...Such films generally are financial failures in the United States (not Gandhi, of course), but find a more receptive audience overseas, especially in the European social democracies...

...Through Maclean's membership in the CPC, he was able to give the Soviets secret information about uranium movements, contracts, and quantities...

...Steroid use made Sam Fussell impotent...

...sexuality, after all, made him vulnerable, and he wanted to be cut off from all other human beings...

...The U.S...

...If he finds a heavy dose of New Agemysticism in The Empire, he relates it to hard facts—for example, that the director whom Lucas chose, Irvin Kershner, believes in a number of occult teachings, including "The Force...

...As the Brits' atomic-energy man in the U.S., Newton tells us, Maclean could "enter and move around [the Atomic Energy Commission] at will with no escort" and had access to classified material—access denied even J. Edgar Hoover...

...S ome of the fascination of this book comes from Grenier's personal acquaintance with many of his subjects...

...Newton reveals that, in 1947, both the Soviets and the U.S...

...the memo revealed that American policy would be to respect French desires in Indochina and British control of Burma...

...to descend into danger before it can mature...

...America was dependent on foreign uranium, as was the Soviet Union...

...Bodybuilders give their bodies the attention that women give theirs, and do not show the general lack of consciousness of bodily appearance that normal men have...

...But Grenier's search for meaning in biography never degenerates into ad hominem attacks...

...For Stalin, this was evidence that Washington meant to exclude the Soviet Union from any role in the Asian subcontinent—so Stalin encouraged his cadres to link up with nascent Asian nationalist movements...

...His book centers on Maclean, who had the longest stint at the embassy, was the senior and most experienced diplomat there, and managed to do the worst damage...

...The evidence for Maclean's involvement is circumstantial but overwhelming...

...odybuilding is a profound warp.ilq ing of sexual identity...

...By injecting the fate of the Katanga mines into Belgium's daily political life," Newton writes, "[the Soviets] were able to manipulate the fall of the Brussels government...

...Like his father, who wrote keenly on American social distinctions in Class, he enjoys slumming...

...And Belgian Communists set out to use this data in their active propaganda campaign against the United States...

...adds a sense of immediacy as well as a bit of spice to what is already a succulent intellectual feast...

...Andrew Boyles The Fourth Man, Phillip Knightley's Philby, and John Costello's penetrating Mask of Theacheryconcentrate on the British world from which they emerged, and the paths they followed to their careers with the Soviet secret service...

...He had worked on the very issues that defined the Cold War: "the Black Sea Straits, East-West troop levels, bases, and the West's atomic stockpile...

...Information leaked to C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times enabled Molotov, at the Byrnes-Molotovmeetings in Paris, to accuse the U.S...

...All other societies have ways of turning boys into men: puberty rituals, military service, or the hard and dangerous business of learning a father's trade...

...I first read Grenier's piece on the propaganda film Gandhi, paid for largely by the Indian government, when it was published as a free-standing book adapted from his still earlier Commentary review...

...Such background is important, for Grenier is one of the few modern analysts who do not see history as either static or invested with the Hegelian ability to define its own value...

...But bodybuilding is also narcissistic and effeminate...

...Bodybuilding bears the sweaty aroma of Mussolini's hypermasculine ideology and of the artistic game that Futurists like Marinetti made of war and masculinity...

...He even had access to the secret memos of Admiral William Leahy, including one outlining military strategy to drive the Japanese out of Indochina...

...Rather, we're grateful for the opportunity to read so spirited a writer with such an uncanny ability to plumb whatever depths this shallow medium possesses...

...and Britain of ganging up on the USSR, sabotaging the negotiations (and feeding the domestic agenda of the Henry Wallace "progressives" in the U.S...

...He is therefore able to show, for example, how the subsidized German film industry is trashing the culture of those who pay its bills...

...And the way to do that is to gain control of the institutions which shape that consciousness: schools, universities, Herbert Schlossberg is the author of Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson...

...but there is something in the young male personality that needs T he film reports and essays in Rich- ' and Grenier's Capturing the Culture are the latest contribution to the ongoing Kulturkampf...

...In one essay he relates the experience of the French actor Yves Montand, who turned his back on Communism after a long dalliance...

...confronted Stalin's expansionist strategy —one that included his move into Eastern Europe, his push for Persian Gulf oil, and his efforts to prevent the United States from obtaining African uranium...

...access to uranium deposits in the Congo...

...All that was missing was a rifle and the President's travel itinerary...

...Fussell also links bodybuilding with pornography, which is an introverted sexuality...

...As early as 1938, for example, F. A. Voigt's book Unto Caesar interpreted Nazism as having sprung right out of the literature, stage, and film of the Weimar era...

...24.95 Ronald Radosh 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...

...That historical sensibility enables Grenier, to cite one example, to observe and account for the differences between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back...

...The shorter pieces in the second part of the book, originally published in the Washington Times, are not as compelling as the movie reviews in the first...

...All of the crucial cultural institutions have been dominated—if not completely captured—by the alienated haters of Western civilization...

...They belong to an important genre that we need much more of than we get: cultural criticism, in its truest sense...

...It would be a miracle if our consciousness were to remain unaffected by the rot...

...But Maclean's coup de grace may have been THE CAMBRIDGE SPIES: THE UNTOLD STORY OF MACLEAN, PHILBY, AND BURGESS IN AMERICA Verne W. Newton/Madison Books/448 pp...

...For the proper role of a critic is not so much to say why an artistic thing is good, bad, or indifferent, as to help the reader to it himself: "Everyman his own critic," to borrow from Carl Becker...

...How else to explain Reagan Administration support for such monuments of cultural nihilism as the new Museum for Contemporary Art...

...some have suggested that the Soviets got little for their effort...

...Europeans understand the subject and know its Gramscian origins, but Grenier relates his experiences with American critics and moviemakers, for whom the whole idea is a mystery and the name Gramsci a cipher...

...I could see from the look in her eyes that her worst fears were realized...

...Montand told Grenier that he had never read a word of Marx but had become a Marxist after seeing Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin...

...He accepted that...

...I suggest they visit a prison, or an AIDS ward, or perhaps a military cemetery, and reflect on what happens to young men in our world...

...24.95 Herbert Schlossberg THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 45 ican thinking to another, and whose distinguishing characteristic is utopianism...

...But three of the spies—Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean—were posted to the United States for a time, and Verne W. Newton's The Cambridge Spies is the first book to uncover the sordid story of their dealings at the British embassy between 1945 and 1951...

...Hence the battle cry: Capture the Culture...