Status Updates From I Married a Communist (The ...

That was my job all my life. It’s the job of lots of people. Ira was no rarity. Men trying not to be violent? That’s the ‘it.’ They’re all around. They’re everywhere.”

The second was when they buried Richard Milhous Nixon with a twenty-one-gun salute. I only wish the Italians from the old First Ward could have been out there at Yorba Linda with Dr. Kissinger and Billy Graham. They would have known how to enjoy the spectacle.

Well, damn right she got his attention. But surely the obvious thing about getting Ira’s attention by sticking a hot poker up his ass in public is that you’re going to enrage him. People don’t yield to that kind of shit cheerfully. People don’t like seeing exposés on the best-seller list that falsely denounce them, and you wouldn’t even have to be Ira Ringold to take umbrage. And to take action.

“And it didn’t hurt to name all the other Jewish Bolsheviks affiliated with Ira’s show. The Cold War paranoia had latent anti-Semitism as one of its sources, and so, under the moral guidance of the Grants—who themselves loved the ubiquitous troublemaking left-wing few just about as much as Richard Nixon did—

The consequences for Ira were part of their fun but largely beside the point. The Grants dreamed it all up for Bryden to ride his way into the House on the issue of Communism in broadcasting.

What does it mean, ‘a revolution’? It means a revolution. He took the rhetoric seriously. You can’t call yourself a revolutionary and not be serious in your commitment. It was not something fake. It was something genuine.

The atmosphere of accusation, threat, and punishment was everywhere. To a foreigner particularly, it looked like a democratic pogrom full of terror. There was enough danger around to justify Pamela’s fear. In that political climate, those were reasonable fears.

“I’m the only person still living who knows Ira’s story, you’re the only person still living who cares about it. That’s why: because everyone else is dead.” Laughing, he said, “My last task. To file Ira’s story with Nathan Zuckerman.”

Betrayal is an inescapable component of living—who doesn’t betray?—but to confuse the most heinous public act of betrayal, treason, with every other form of betrayal was not a good idea in 1951. Treason, unlike adultery, is a capital offense, so reckless exaggeration and thoughtless imprecision and false accusation, even just the seemingly genteel game of naming names—

“To me it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war—say, between ’46 and ’56—than in any other period in our history. This nasty thing that Eve Frame did was typical of lots of nasty things people did in those years, either because they had to or because they felt they had to.

In Murray Ringold, I thought, human dissatisfaction has met its match. He has outlived dissatisfaction. This is what remains after the passing of everything, the disciplined sadness of stoicism. This is the cooling. For so long it’s so hot, everything in life is so intense, and then little by little it goes away, and then comes the cooling, and then come the ashes.

Tell me, what could be further from being a raving Red hell-bent on overthrowing the American system than being a guy in Michigan who gift-wraps fudge to mail out to your old auntie for the holiday season? ‘Goodies Made by the Lake’—that’s the slogan on the box.

I ran into Murray, now ninety years old but in every discernible way still the teacher whose task is realistically, without self-parody or inflating dramatics, to personify for his students the maverick dictum “I don’t give a good goddamn,” to teach them that you don’t have to be Al Capone to transgress—you just have to think.