Party Time: The Anti-Communist Film Festival

    This fall I’m putting on an Anti-Communist Film Festival. In association with the Victims of Communism Foundation, we will screen films like The Lives of Others, Trial, and Hail, Caesar!

    It’s also an excuse to have a party. America used to be a hard-partying nation, but no sooner had we shaken off our puritanical shackles than the wokeness arose after the Cold War to stomp on everyone’s buzz again. We’ve become a nation of tight-asses – both left and right. William F. Buckley was a conservative icon, but he was also a skier, a sailor, a party-thrower, and a guy who rode a scooter to work. Buckley knew how to have fun.

    On America’s 250th birthday, it’s important to remember that we are a fun people, and that our love of fun and parties is crucial in our defiance of the killjoys of totalitarianism. It’s also in our founding history. “The bar tab of a 1787 farewell party for George Washington was left intact and legible,” a Jan. 19 Facebook post reads.  “According to the bill, the Founding Fathers drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of Claret, 8 bottles of Whiskey, 22 bottles of Porter, 8 bottles of Hard Cider, 12 of Beer and seven bowls of Alcoholic Punch. There were only 55 attendees.”

    Our social conversation is based on what we see online, but too many of those people – on both left and right – are tight-asses. In his book On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, the Rev. James V. Schall, who was a legendary Jesuit and teacher at Georgetown University, argues for the importance of parties and fun. Dancing, gardening, movie premieres, and having parties are ultimately more important than politics. Parties are a way of acknowledging our limits and mortality. “The governance of God over his creation, His ability to bring it to its end, does not depend on the affairs of men, though it does include them,” Schall wrote. “He is present in our tragedies and our elations. The Cross is, as Kempis said, a ‘royal road.’”

The idea of the Anti-Communist Film Festival came to me after attending a lot of film festivals. Some of the best are held at the American Film Institute just outside of D.C. At the Irish Film Festival last year, the head organizer got up on stage and announced: “OK, this is the last movie on the last day of the festival. I want to invite everyone to McGinty’s afterwards for some pints and some craic.” The Irish still know how to do it.

    From its mental health crisis to its scabrous politics, America is suffering from a dearth of parties and fun. The new resentful and punitive left comes after writers, drinkers, comedians, and actors, if any of them show signs of having fun. As I explained in a recent piece, in his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, journalist Tim Mohr explores how the postwar German Stasi harassed, monitored, censored, and beat punk rockers. It’s notable how many times the word “fun” is used by the punks to explain what they were doing. Between 1981 and 1985, one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece that, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.” The Stasi eventually shut them down.

    Forty years ago, Washington Redskins running back John Riggins got tanked at a black tie dinner and told Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “Loosen up, Sandy baby. You’re too tight.” People didn’t call the cops, send Riggo to rehab, and have all-day seminars on the “sexism” and “privilege” Riggins displayed. Justice O’Connor herself laughed about it.

    In James Piereson’s groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, the author argues that modern liberalism, unlike classical liberalism, feeds off the desire to punish others. Piereson calls this phenomenon “punitive liberalism.” It goes back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Piereson argues that before Kennedy’s death, liberalism was pro-American, anti-communist, pro-labor, and for change to address social ills such as racism. When Kennedy was assassinated by communist Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals found themselves at a loss to explain the tragedy. It simply couldn’t be possible that the conservatives were right, that Kennedy had been a martyr not to the civil rights movement but to the Cold War, and that his blood was on the hands of the communists. Liberalism explained Kennedy’s death by blaming it on America. It wasn’t Oswald, a Castro-loving zealot, who pulled the trigger; it was “right-wing America,” the “climate of hate in Dallas,” and our collective historical sins. America was to blame.

    Piereson summarized his theory even before his book was published in a 2004 essay in The Weekly Standard: “From the time of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the Democratic Party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement.”

    Punitive liberalism is the manual for the American left. The right is better, although they haven’t really cut loose yet – Elizabeth Warren comes across as a drag, but so, sometimes, does Matt Walsh. As Father Schall knew, God made us as creatures. It’s arrogant and unwise to spend all day, every day trying to save the world. One of the reasons I insisted on showing Hail, Caesar! at the Anti-Communist Film Festival is that it is a fun movie. Totalitarians hate people who are smiling, drinking, watching banned movies or telling jokes, because those people are impossible to control.