Posted on 02/21/2009 11:42:14 AM PST by SandRat
The Washington Post's Weekend section on Friday included an interview with left-wing actor Ed Asner in advance of his appearance at nearby George Mason University playing William Jennings Bryan, "the infamous attacker of Darwinism and evolution." Or so says his Post interviewer, Michael O'Sullivan. Conservatives are killing America, Asner proclaimed:
"Our education has just gone into the toilet in this country," Asner says, before fulminating in a way that begins to sound a little bit like, well, a more liberal version of Bryan. "Having suffered, from the time of Reagan until now, with onslaughts against government daubing at improving the welfare of American citizens, and the education and health of American citizens, the anti-government forces have struck, perhaps, mortal blows to our society."
Much against the usual Washington Post pattern, O'Sullivan was pressed into the using word "liberal" to describe Asner, because that's the label he prefers. ("Socialist" would also fit, since he's a member of Democratic Socialists of America.) O'Sullivan began with a kid-because-we-love line:
Ed Asner is a flaming lefty. Who knew?
I kid. The 79-year-old actor has long been known for his outspoken advocacy of pacifism, labor rights, free speech and other progressive -- sorry, the actor says he prefers the less namby-pamby label liberal -- causes.
So what is he doing playing William Jennings Bryan, the infamous attacker of Darwinism and evolution, in "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial"? Isn't the villain of the play based on the 1925 Scopes trial Bryan, who famously locked horns with pro-evolution lawyer Clarence Darrow? And doesn't playing him go against all that Asner holds sacred, as a self-confessed liberal and "believer in the secrets that science unfolds, no matter where the chips may fall"?
"Oh, yeah," the actor said by phone from South Bend, Ind., while on tour with the play. Asner has been performing the role with L.A. Theatre Works across the country, off and on, since 2005. "But at the same time that I'm doing him," Asner continues, "I'm hoping to present a man who explains the reason why the people so adored him, why his body lay in state after his death, five days after the trial. To show a very good man gone astray."
Asner confessed that mostly liberals will be showing up for "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial," so he'll be preaching to the choir, if that fits a thoroughly secularist production. But he explained that art has an important propagandistic function:
Yet as big a kick as the actor is getting out of portraying the creationist scenery-chewer, he has other, more urgent reasons for doing the show, and for doing it now, at a time when the country is, in Asner's words, "beset by the conflict between fundamentalism and science."
"Art must be the hammer," he says, bluntly paraphrasing [Marxist] playwright Bertolt Brecht, who once opined, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."
Yup, right after I get my quantum physics and global warming classes from Ed, I eagerly await his politics class. After all, acting is such a mentally challenging profession.
Folks need to quit beating around the bush.
Ed Asner is a communist.
Ed Asner = Domestic Enemy.
He can afford it.
Hearing a communist rail against the failure of education in this country, when the communists have been firmly in control of it now for decades, would be amusing if it wasn’t such a serious matter.
Lou Grant needs donations for new brain cells, he is running low.
Yep, still a commie after all these years....
OOOOOOOOOOOO ... Mr. Grant!
Sorry Eddie, you maggot you, CONSERVATIVES ARE AMERICAN SOCIETY! It’s you and your maggot freak friends who are “landing mortal blows.”
He’s still alive?
Will there be a reenactment of when Darrow faced Chesterton and had his head handed to him?
Long time communist.
Ed Asshat is competing to sound like the most ignorant Leftist ever, apparently. He doesn’t have a clue, obviously, that our failing educational system is controlled by Leftists, and that 0bama and co are his ideological fellow travelers. What a moron.
Ed Asner: Grumpy Old Communist
The man is delusional. The American education system has collapsed because the several states gave “Colleges of Education” (full of loony-left faculty of whom Bill Ayers is just the most egregious public example) monopolies on producing “qualified teachers”. Remember “ed majors”? 85% to 90% of them are air-headed ditzes who picked the major because it was the easiest one at the college they went to to get their Mrs.
The 10%-15% of ed majors who really are devoted to teaching get corrupted by the leftist Ed faculty and the rest were useless from the get go. (Vygotsky—Soviet learning theorist, ‘social construction of knowledge’ has been all the rage for the past few decades—Knowledge isn’t bloody socially constructed! If it doesn’t correspond to objective reality it’s not knowledge!—but that’s the pap ed majors get fed.)
And of course I think I can speak for all of us when I say when I think of National Education Association I think of right wing conservatism. Yeah Right. Liberals pretty much own the education industry in this country. If any conservative tries to crash the party the liberals chant "seperation of church & State".
Not when the U.S. bombed Christian Kosovo. The Left in general heartily approved of that military action, not surprisingly.
Lou Grant, the epitomy of the “Big 3”.
Still waiting to read the OBIT myself.
I'm sure he's aware. The liberal/leftists know that deflection and blaming the right is a successful formula, so he will keep using it until he dies.
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