Acquiescence:
ac·qui·es·cence...noun...the act or condition of acquiescing or giving tacit assent; agreement or consent by silence or without objection; compliance
Passive assent or agreement without protest.
Passive assent or agreement without protest.
Norman Lloyd, who is now 93 years old, was one of the victims of the blacklists of the acting industry which arose from the McCarthy hearings. Here is more about him here in this article.
At 93 and the subject of a new documentary, Norman Lloyd is still in the biz
If I were a young person today, I don't think I'd go into this business. We thought we could change the world. In many ways, we were wrong. . . . When I started out, theater was crucial! Immigrants, they'd rather have had education and theater than clothes. They'd wrap a herring in a loaf of bread and sit there eating it, watching a play."
Such passion helps provide an answer to the question "Who is Norman Lloyd?" but he is hardly an unknown. Younger generations might recognize him from Curtis Hanson's In Her Shoes. He was a regular on St. Elsewhere, guest-starred on The Practice, and was recently—and belatedly—inducted into the Players Club. Having started his stage career in 1932 with Eva Le Gallienne, who recommended that he take elocution lessons to rid himself of his Brooklynese, Lloyd was Cinna the Poet in Welles's celebrated, 1937 fascist-themed staging of Julius Caesar—and is one of the few surviving members of the Mercury Theater. And he participated in multiple WPA productions in the '30s, something he believes might have helped get him blacklisted in the '50s.
Such passion helps provide an answer to the question "Who is Norman Lloyd?" but he is hardly an unknown. Younger generations might recognize him from Curtis Hanson's In Her Shoes. He was a regular on St. Elsewhere, guest-starred on The Practice, and was recently—and belatedly—inducted into the Players Club. Having started his stage career in 1932 with Eva Le Gallienne, who recommended that he take elocution lessons to rid himself of his Brooklynese, Lloyd was Cinna the Poet in Welles's celebrated, 1937 fascist-themed staging of Julius Caesar—and is one of the few surviving members of the Mercury Theater. And he participated in multiple WPA productions in the '30s, something he believes might have helped get him blacklisted in the '50s.
He said something vital on Countdown tonight. Keith Olbermann asked him why so many actors gave up their friends to be blacklisted. It was like a communist witch hunt gone mad. There are so many ways to compare it to today's climate.
He said they "acquiesced." That word started my mind racing.
If you are not putting forth active resistance to things that are wrong-headed, you are acquiescing. It indicates a passivity that seems to exactly fit what is happening in our country today about major issues.
Keith Olbermann and Norman Lloyd hoped to tweak some consciences with that discussion.
We invaded a country that was no threat to us. Our leader lied about the reason. He later joked at a political dinner about where all those WMDs were...going so far as to look under a table. The Republicans and Democrats in attendance laughed as though it were funny.
We have killed hundreds of thousands of their civilians, unknown numbers of our military have died, we destroyed their infrastructure, bombed their neighborhoods carelessly. We hung their leader, killed his sons, put their bodies on public display.
Now we are talking about going on to the next country.
No one is actively opposing this president, at least not that openly.
When you go along to get along, to not make waves, to be "bipartisan"....when you go along to not offend your new powerful donors in the business world, you are acquiescing.
ac·qui·es·cence...noun...the act or condition of acquiescing or giving tacit assent; agreement or consent by silence or without objection; compliance
The media is going to try to destroy those whom it does not like, those who speak out and threaten to regulate, those who go on the air and are too outspoken about the horrors we have done.
They are going to do it whether we go along or fight. Our party should stop giving "tacit assent", and start standing up for what is right and moral.
The silence seems deafening to me sometimes. Maybe those of us who are older feel the betrayal of our country's morality more than some do. It seems like it is so far back to where we should be that my husband and I despair we will see it.
Lloyd and Olbermann were most surely speaking of today.
Posted in full with author's permission.
Originally posted at democraticunderground.com: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/1668
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