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Better Dead Than Red: Nostalgic Look at Russiaphobia Red-Baiting, and Other Commie Madness
Examines American culture at the height of the Cold War to reveal the paranoia that permeated the era's films and literature
- GenresHistoryNonfictionHumor
144 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 28, 2023
"Anti-Communism is the basic foolishness of our time".---Thomas Mann
"How'd you like it if America went Communist and all the road signs were written in Mongolian? Can you read Mongolian? No, only Mongolians can read Mongolian".---John Belushi
Best/worst anti-Communist movie of all time: RED PLANET MARS, starring Peter Graves. God, broadcasting from Mars rather than His usual digs on Mt. Sinai, calls on the Russkis to overthrow the godless Commies, and we are treated to the spectacle of peasants throwing their collective farm boss off his tractor and angry crowds marching on Red Square. This is just one magnificent sample from Michael Barson's hilarious look at how American popular culture, books, films, television, books, and sports went batshit crazy during the Cold War, "From Churchill's Iron Curtain speech to the opening of the first McDonalds in Moscow". The visual arts proved to be both the most effective and zany. I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI (yes, I've watched it) chronicled how a Czech-American loyal citizen cleverly infiltrated the Communist Party U.S.A. by pretending to be a sympathizer. Tagline: "I had to turn in my own girl. So would you. You see, I was a Communist but, I was a Communist for the FBI!". Then there's the TV show I LED THREE LIVES, which a young Lee Harvey Oswald never missed. Our superhero is an FBI agents, a pretend Communist and just a regular Joe in his off-hours. (Why Oswald became obsessed with this program has puzzled his biographer, since Lee claimed he was a life-long leftists. Perhaps he identified with the idea of trading places in one's own life.) To confirm an old rumor, yes the Cincinnati Reds really did change their name to the Red Stockings in the Fifties. Who would want to root, root, root for the Red team during the Cold War? In popular fiction, Micky Spillane's Mike Hammer boasted of "Killing a half a dozen Communists" in one red, deadly night. The Sixties produced the trope of "the hippies, Beats, free-love advocates and other perverts" are really Commie dupes, too naive to notice. Just watch any episode of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, HAWAII 5-0 and even GET SMART. By the Seventies and the era of detente, following the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam and new friendship with China produced a "maybe the other side isn't so bad as we thought" mentality. One example is the James Bond franchise, British-made, which the American neo-conservative magazine COMMENTARY accused of "going soft on the Soviet threat". The Eighties brought us Reagan and now anything foreign was deemed a danger to God, flag and country, as we see in parables such as PREDATOR and blatantly, and stupidly, in RED DAWN. If you've never seen the pro-war U.S. mini-series AMERIKA, where the Soviets use nuclear blackmail to occupy the United States and implant a puppet president you are one luck S.O.B. Gorbachev managed to give Communism back some glamor, so that even the red-baiting movie THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER had to grandfather its anti-Communism. The film begins with a written script saying, "Back before Gorbachev took power, rumors of a mutiny aboard a Soviet submarine emerged. Both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. deny that what you are about to see really happened". Every page of BETTER RED THAN DEAD is filled with hilarity born out of hysteria; and, I understand, the Mongolians are learning to speak English.
"How'd you like it if America went Communist and all the road signs were written in Mongolian? Can you read Mongolian? No, only Mongolians can read Mongolian".---John Belushi
Best/worst anti-Communist movie of all time: RED PLANET MARS, starring Peter Graves. God, broadcasting from Mars rather than His usual digs on Mt. Sinai, calls on the Russkis to overthrow the godless Commies, and we are treated to the spectacle of peasants throwing their collective farm boss off his tractor and angry crowds marching on Red Square. This is just one magnificent sample from Michael Barson's hilarious look at how American popular culture, books, films, television, books, and sports went batshit crazy during the Cold War, "From Churchill's Iron Curtain speech to the opening of the first McDonalds in Moscow". The visual arts proved to be both the most effective and zany. I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI (yes, I've watched it) chronicled how a Czech-American loyal citizen cleverly infiltrated the Communist Party U.S.A. by pretending to be a sympathizer. Tagline: "I had to turn in my own girl. So would you. You see, I was a Communist but, I was a Communist for the FBI!". Then there's the TV show I LED THREE LIVES, which a young Lee Harvey Oswald never missed. Our superhero is an FBI agents, a pretend Communist and just a regular Joe in his off-hours. (Why Oswald became obsessed with this program has puzzled his biographer, since Lee claimed he was a life-long leftists. Perhaps he identified with the idea of trading places in one's own life.) To confirm an old rumor, yes the Cincinnati Reds really did change their name to the Red Stockings in the Fifties. Who would want to root, root, root for the Red team during the Cold War? In popular fiction, Micky Spillane's Mike Hammer boasted of "Killing a half a dozen Communists" in one red, deadly night. The Sixties produced the trope of "the hippies, Beats, free-love advocates and other perverts" are really Commie dupes, too naive to notice. Just watch any episode of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, HAWAII 5-0 and even GET SMART. By the Seventies and the era of detente, following the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam and new friendship with China produced a "maybe the other side isn't so bad as we thought" mentality. One example is the James Bond franchise, British-made, which the American neo-conservative magazine COMMENTARY accused of "going soft on the Soviet threat". The Eighties brought us Reagan and now anything foreign was deemed a danger to God, flag and country, as we see in parables such as PREDATOR and blatantly, and stupidly, in RED DAWN. If you've never seen the pro-war U.S. mini-series AMERIKA, where the Soviets use nuclear blackmail to occupy the United States and implant a puppet president you are one luck S.O.B. Gorbachev managed to give Communism back some glamor, so that even the red-baiting movie THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER had to grandfather its anti-Communism. The film begins with a written script saying, "Back before Gorbachev took power, rumors of a mutiny aboard a Soviet submarine emerged. Both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. deny that what you are about to see really happened". Every page of BETTER RED THAN DEAD is filled with hilarity born out of hysteria; and, I understand, the Mongolians are learning to speak English.
January 30, 2023
A fun romp through the "Duck and Cover" era.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews