RE Lindburgh’s Iron Cross:
That I did NOT know...! Will do some research on that one!
“...Since I’m in the arts...”
Well, I’m a musician too, so I think that also qualifies as “arts”, haha! I’ve run into my share of liberal “artistes” over the years.
But as for abandoning... look at this way: for a couple decades, Hollywood was dominated by the likes of John Ford and other people - directors, actors, producers, down to the guy who runs the lights - who had gone away to war in WWII and come home seeing what socialism and fascism had done to the world. These folks served in uniform, and were Patriots. Their movies showed their attitudes towards America.
That changed in the 60s; the folks who fought WWII came home and had their kids; but while they were overseas, the left was putting professors into the universities and colleges, and these POSs were now teaching the kids. There was a profound shift in the ideology of young vs old.
Those kids grew up into the Oliver Stones, the Steven Speilbergs, etc., and THEIR movies show their attitudes towards America.
When you have a group of people who went through a cataclysmic event such as WWII come home and use their talents to support their country, Hollywood reflected it. The same is true - in reverse - for what we have now.
“...why can’t we have it all?...”
Because there are no more John Fords, William Wylers, George Stevens’s. I think John Milius is the only one left that you could consider a Conservative...
You have to change the culture back, and maybe, after ten+ years in Iraq and and Afghanistan, and many young servicemen - and women - coming home, after having seen the crapholes of the world, they’ll bring with them a new understanding and appreciation of what we have here, what they helped to protect, and be a force for positive change - back to a new, muscular sense of Americanism and all the good that we’ve done.
Well, the Hollywood leftwing was well-established in the 1930s. The brutal, internecine fights of the 1950s among members of the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild was a direct result of insults and betrayals by leaders of those unions in the 30s and their direct line to the Soviet Union - forcing talented writers to rewrite their scripts to flatter that murderous regime and denying work to actors who would not bend to Moscow’s will. Ronald Reagan rose to glory fighting those bastards.
Parodoxically, most people think the “naming of names” and resisting HUAC was only about politics when in fact a lot of it was just personal betrayals in the hot-house of Hollywood. Jilted lovers, ripped-off actors and scriptwriters and overall the disgraceful, bullying behavior of one John Howard Lawson led to this miserable debacle for America.