Billingsley on Castro, Commies, and Gilbert Arenas

I’m very pleased to see that my friend and former colleague Lloyd Billingsley has a new memoir out, Our Time After a While: Reflections of a Borderline Baby Boomer, which is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iUniverse. I am awaiting the arrival of my copy in the mail, and I am sure to have thoughts about it when it arrives. In the meantime, I thought I’d introduce you to Lloyd and his writing.

Lloyd and I worked together at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now known as the David Horowitz Freedom Center) in Los Angeles. I was a staff writer, and he a senior writer, for the Center’s anti-political-correctness monthly, Heterodoxy, and he also served as managing editor of the bi-monthly education reform magazine, Report Card. A remarkably industrious writer, Lloyd performed these responsibilities while also serving as the Washington Times’ California correspondent, filing several stories a month, and regularly contributing op-ed pieces to newspapers all over. By this time he was an experienced journalist with hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles to his credit, along with half-a-dozen books. Despite the disparity in our level of experience, he always treated me with respect, patience, and kindness. He was a terrific mentor and friend.

Currently, he is editorial director for the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute, where he keeps a keen eye on politics, education, and culture, writing from a libertarian and anti-leftist perspective, with a special emphasis on goings-on in the Golden State. He’s especially knowledgeable about the influence of Communism on Hollywood, and on a related subject, Hollywood’s treatment of the Cold War and of anti-Communism. On this score, check out his Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.

And now, for your reading pleasure, here’s a brief Billingsley sampler, consisting of some of his recent work and a couple of older pieces that I especially appreciated. Enjoy!

“Hollywood’s Missing Movies: Why Hollywood has ignored life under Communism” (Reason, 2000). The title says it all. This is a must-read, as relevant today as it was when it was first published. I’m putting this first, out of chronological order, because it is one of my all-time favorite LB pieces

“California’s Corporate Exodus” (PRI, January 2010) – on corporate employers fleeing the state its punitive approach to taxation and regulation.

“Gilbert Arenas, Guns, and Government” (PRI, January 2010) – contrasts the NBA’s no-nonsense response to an all-star’s bringing of guns into the workplace with the San Diego police department’s decidedly more lenient treatment of one of its own, and the treatment of government employees generally.

"New Castro, Same Cuba, Same Ignorant Apologists” (FrontPageMagazine.com, Nov. 2009) - An entertaining, maddening look at the American Left’s continued willingness to be charmed by the Cuban regime, even now.

"Seeing Red” (Claremont Review of Books, 2002) – a review of three books on Communism, the “Red Scare” and Hollywood anti-anti-Communism, including Ron Radosh’s memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left.