Orson Bean

Orson Bean, whom I haven't thought of in years but who holds a vague TV-shaped spot somewhere in my childhood memories of watching To Tell the Truth, was killed while crossing a much-too-wide street yesterday in the Los Angeles area where he lived. He was 91.

I wouldn't be writing about this except for a heads-up from pedestrian-safety Twitter, which pointed me to the odd fact that Bean bore a lot of responsibility for some aspects of our current political situation. It goes like this.

Despite having been a lifelong liberal or even radical (bouncing around as some Hollywood celebrities do, trying to find meaning amidst wealth and fame), Bean eventually found God fairly late in life, I guess. And along the way, one of his daughters married a guy named Andrew Breitbart, a charismatic journalist. Bean turned the then-supposedly liberal Breitbart onto the writings of Rush Limbaugh.

By 2014, when Orson Bean was 85 and Breitbart had been deceased for two years (after founding his eponymous scurrilous web publications in 2007), Bean sat down for a conversation with Breitbart editor Steve Bannon (!) where he described how hollow America has become and how patriotism and love of God have to be brought back to the center of everything. (I refuse to link to it but if you search Orson Bean, Bannon, and Breitbart, you will find it.)

As Dan Marshall put it on Twitter, Bean went from being...

...blacklisted for being a socialist in his youth [to claiming] in his old age that the blacklisting of Hollywood conservatives was even worse than McCarthyism. Did nobody ever call this guy out on this BS? I hate the way America allows people, especially white men, to reinvent themselves like this guy did. He made a substantial contribution to creating Breitbart, Bannon, and Trump. No one should die while walking down the street. But I'm hoping the media will reflect not just on his turns on Dr Quinn or the Twilight Zone but will examine why such a privileged person would adopt such hateful and hurtful ideologies in his old age.

It seems unlikely that anyone will notice those aspects, which are not mentioned on Bean's Wikipedia page, for instance. Only the Right knows, and cackles to itself.

Without Breitbart and Bannon... would we have Trump? It's hard to say. Mafia Mulligan's rise to power comes from social forces greater than his narcissistic self, for sure. But a lot goes into getting a person elected, and these people and their modern megaphones contributed.