We look back with an air of smugness at the rules of society that regulated manners in generations past. How quaint. How restrictive. How ridiculous, we opine. We are amused that people would invest time and money to maintain certain social “graces” that often complicated lives to no one’s benefit. So old fashioned. So un-American – at least that would appear to be our frame of mind, judging by what we see in traditional and social media.

Now I’m not against insulting people. I just abhor how mundane our insults are, especially in the political arena. The author of The Art of the Deal hasn’t mastered the art of the insult. There’s no originality. I’m frustrated that the most entertaining attempts at insults in recent political news arose from Sara Palin’s propensity for malapropisms (also referred to as Dogberryism, based on a Shakespearian character in Much Ado About Nothing). The insults hurled across such social media as Facebook also manage to be both intense and dull.

C’mon folks. We can do so much better than that! Let’s use our words, we have so many to choose from. Let’s lace them together to form the affable daggers that make their point as they get to the heart of the matter. To inspire you, consider these lovely literary lances:

“Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.” – King Lear by Shakespeare

“You blithering idiot! … You festering gumboil! You fleabitten fungus! … You bursting blister! You moth-eaten maggot!” – Mathilda by Raold Dahl

“Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on.” – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.” – Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

“He is simply a hole in the air.” – The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell

“I misjudged you… You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.” – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.” – Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoyevsky

“He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human” – The Collector by John Fowles

“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.” – The Rambler by Samuel Johnson

Finally, though not in a book, Gore Vidal after being punched by Norman Mailer: “I see Norman, words have failed you again!”

Of the many excellent movies I’ve seen this season, the one I’m recommending to booklovers is Trumbo, the true story of author/screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Blacklist. I first became aware of Trumbo as the author of the groundbreaking antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. Published by J. B. Lippincott, the novel won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1939. But Dalton’s greater fame came through his screenwriting (original or adapted screenplays) for some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and successful movies, among them Kitty Foyle, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus and Papillon.

In 1947, Dalton Trumbo was swept up in the hysteria of the Cold War with the paranoia stoked by certain people in politics and the media under the guise of patriotism. He became an upfront face in what became known as “The Hollywood Ten” — writers, directors and producers who were cited for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. As a result, these people were imprisoned and stripped of their livelihoods by being blacklisted by the movie industry.

The HUAC (1938-1969) continued blacklist hearings from 1947 to 1956. Over those years, the names of the defamed grew, destroying the lives of hundreds of others, including actors, authors, playwrights, composers, lyricists, musicians, comedians, dancers, artists, journalists and teachers. You know many of their names and I’m sure some of your favorites are on that list although you may be unaware, six decades later, of what they endured during this dark period in American history.

The HUAC gained its greatest notoriety under Sen. Joe McCarthy whose meteoric rise came from his increasingly egregious accusations against “known communists”. Tolerated by his Republican Party while he directed his unfounded attacks against the Democratic administration of Truman, the escalating erratic behavior became unpalatable to both parties once Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953.

McCarthy’s destructive path finally and dramatically started its downward spiral during open hearings when he, as Chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee, charged that the U.S. Army was infiltrated by communists. Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, effectively countered McCarthy, summing up with, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Then he added the now famous question, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Exposed for who he really was, McCarthy was (finally) officially condemned by the U.S. Senate for contempt against his colleagues in December 1954.

The reason Trumbo is timely and important is because our current American political rhetoric is becoming as much of a threat to our democracy as it was in a past generation; it echoes the dangerous broad and unfounded demonization of individuals and groups whose views are different. How this plague was allowed to spread from the 1930s to the early 1960s is worth exploring further. Playwright Arthur Miller addressed the issue in his 1953 play, The Crucible. Rod Serling wrote and narrated the memorable 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone titled The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, which ended with this wise warning:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill – and suspicion can destroy – and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children – and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is – that these things cannot be confined – to the Twilight Zone.

There are notable heroes and villains in the movie Trumbo but the point of the movie is not so much to look back in time and point fingers (pointless). Rather, it is to reflect on how easily “good” people can be pulled into the vortex of paranoia, turning on each other, to the diminution and possible destruction of the accusers as well as the accused. See the movie Trumbo. Then, as a booklover, read more about a time in our past that should stand as a lesson for now and the future.

There’s only one chance to make a good first impression. That’s especially true in books where the reader is asked to invest time and (often) money to travel to the end of the story. We don’t usually stop to consider the importance of the opening lines of a novel, or even a short story. Yet those lines, sometimes just one sentence, must hook us and reel us in.

You may recall some favorite opening lines from books you’ve read or recognize famous first sentences from titles you didn’t know … yet. How many of these opening lines have hooked – or will hook – you into great books?:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” – The Stranger by Albert Camus
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.” – The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
“I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. The time matters, too.” – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“I am an invisible man.” – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Island to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” – Waiting by Ha Jin
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish aboard.” – Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
“All children, except one, grow up.” – Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.” – Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy