Harlan Ellison, who is an award winning Science Fiction/Fantasy writer, was asked on his webboard, about why Harlan was so angry about Elia Kazan, the Director of On The Waterfront, and other so-called classic films, who gave up names to Joseph McCarthy during the red scare of the 50's. In doing so, cost the careers of many in Hollywood, who were labeled "Communists." Harlan was glad that Kazan had recently died, and this was his rant to a man named Noah Lemkin:

"Mr. Lemkin:

Your post demonstrates a degree of ignorance that is no less than appalling. That you have never read a book on the Blacklist puts you beyond the pale insofar as venturing an opinion. Any opinion. Not just an opinion as mud-fence ig- norant as the one you have embarrassed yourself with here.

I have no idea how old you are, but you manifest yourself in just the way a stupid teenager, insensitive to anything that happened before s/he was born, would arrogantly puff up and honk an opinion devoid of any relation to History, Reality, or Common Sense. How painful to see a brain turned off, as the mouth turns on. You admit you know nothing, yet you cannot keep your conversational dick in your pants, while jamming your conversational foot in your yap.

Go read a book. Go read ten books. They've all been listed here from time to time. They're in the Webderland archive. There's fifty years of heartbreaking, terrifying, documented reading out there, by dozens of men and women who went through it, not to mention all the savants who've analyzed and studied it as an American Phenomenon. But even if they WEREN'T that accesible to a questing mind, which yours, apparently, is not, you demonstrate what's wrong with the internet: it's all there, for anyone smart emough or curious enough to learn EXACTLY what yellow ratbastards like Kazan did, but you're as dumb or as lazy as the same sort of slovenly thinker who couldn't be stirred sufficiently out of his/her moronic somnolence to go to the fucking LIBRARY to read up on events as black and hideous as what we're dealing with here.

Clearly, the availability of the internet has not had a salutary effect on people like you. You're ignorant. And it's probably time someone told you that in the straightest way.

Do not, I beg you, embarrass yourself further. Go read ten books; read ONE book if you can drag yourself away from the tube. THEN come back and voice an opinion. Blank as a slate, I'd rather listen to the chittering of orangutans than your senseless palaver."

Harlan Ellison

Aaron, read this.

Wow that's harsh, but it is also true.

Yea, Harlan don't like dummies.

Ellison's a volatile old coot... but I still like him... even though he ragged on my fav movie (see my icon), and his criticism of a certain aspect of it's thematic agenda is actually its distinguishing factor that raised it into new arena beyond the classic but stale sci-fi purism. Part of the "verismilitude" revolution of genre films in the mid to late 70's which was pioneered by Kubrick...

Obviously! "suffer no fool to live"
[This message was edited Tue Sep 30 15:25:02 PDT 2003 by Childwithin]