What’s so bad about being a Pinko?

By Tracey

16 Mar

We finally got around to watching “Good Night and Good Luck.” Tobey hadn’t been in any hurry to see it because he figured he would find it quite boring. Which is not to say that he doesn’t find US poltics interesting. He does. But only marginally so because I am. He figured he could go the rest of his life without ever delving into 1950s Cold War politics (which never quite reached Sweden) and McCarthyism and not miss a thing.

He can just look back over the last five years of US politics for the re-run and be completely up to speed.

He also figured he wouldn’t catch many of the cultural references. And on that point, he was right. We typically watch movies with the subtitles on: leaving English language films with English subtitles and vice versa if Swedish. I don’t enjoy watching Swedish films with English subtitles because the translations are often wrong and I use them to simply confirm what I heard, not to explain.

With “Good Night and Good Luck,” however, we eventually turned on the Swedish subtitles. It broke the flow to stop the film every few minutes to explain.

But something very interesting indeed came up during the film. After a few references to pinko Tobey finally asked, “What’s a pinko?” I stopped the film…and suddenly found myself at a loss for words. Did he really not know what a pinko was? Even more fascinating was his real sense of confusion. “What’s so bad about being a Communist?”

I gasped.

And that’s when it hit me. I live with a man who’s never been brainwashed.

He’s never thought of a government which is perhaps less (or perhaps more) efficient as satanically composed. He’s never thought of an economic system, while different than his own, as evil. He’s never thought of people who believe that government’s role is one of equalization as morally inept. And he’s never thought that taxes, while an imposition (and sometimes misappropriated) but which were voted for by the people, as anything but a necessity to provide government with the means to take care of its citizens and its infrastructure.

Sometimes the difference in how we were taught to view the world just shocks me to the very core.

Filed under: Culture Shock, Movies, Sweden

6 Responses for "What’s so bad about being a Pinko?"

Aaron March 16th, 2006 at 1:02 pm 1
I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with Communist ideology per se, it’s the practical application of that ideology. They did kill roughly 100 million people in the 20th century, after all.

That said, my own politics are quite left-of-center, and I find all witchhunts (McCarthyite or other) vile.
Tracey March 16th, 2006 at 1:15 pm 2
But “Communism” didn’t kill people…Stalin’s (et al) corrupt use of it did. It’s just as easy to say that Democracy is killing people today…right now.
Aaron March 16th, 2006 at 1:35 pm 3
But that’s what I said. The idea that wealth should be equally distributed of wealth, that no one should go without, isn’t so bad. But its imposition requires so much centralization of power that Stalinesque corruption is inevitable. I’m also making a big distinction between Communism and Swedish-style democratic socialism. If the people vote for a tax system designed to redistribute wealth, fine. But Marx was no democrat, and no one voted Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Tito, Ceucescu (sp?) into power. They took it by force, without any popular mandate, and imposed an economic system that, by design, concentrated huge amounts of unaccountable power in their hands. The results of this were predictable.

Point taken on the “democracy bombing people” line. My only counterpoint would be to argue that, when the US actually was still a democracy (ie, requiring a declaration of war by Congress before any shooting could begin) we bombed a hell of a lot less people. The US is no longer a democracy.
Tracey March 16th, 2006 at 1:53 pm 4
I realized after I posted that I simply repeated you. Apologies. I tend to be a skim reader, often to my detriment.

Interestingly, tho, one of the most surreal moments in my Swedish civics class, which is popuated mostly by 17 to 20 year-old “drop outs” (so not the brightest of the bunch…I go to an alternative high school/adult continuing learning center), was when we were discussing different forms of government, benefits and problems associated with each…

And this fairly simple girl in the back of the room, when specifically called upon while we were talking about Democracies said “yes…but isn’t the greatest threat to a democracy that the people vote themselves into a dictatorship?”

Trippy.
Not Me March 17th, 2006 at 8:51 am 5
Pinko
Chris March 17th, 2006 at 10:39 pm 6
I agree with Aaron. Fundamentalist religions and totalitarian political philosophies have in common a belief that human behavior can be perfected by understanding and applying certain immutable laws, as revealed by some holy figure and interpreted by an infallible elite. Once you’ve convinced yourself that perfection is possible, any atrocity is justifiable. Just think of the neverending utopia we’re getting in return for these dead bodies. Of course, history and human nature can’t really be reduced to a formula, a philosophy or a set of rules. We can’t be perfected, and history doesn’t have an endpoint, at least not one that we can foresee. Small-d democrats understand this, so they view themselves and their beliefs with skepticism, and impose limits on their own behavior.