Political Ideas
Simon remained conventionally liberal until the 1990s when he began asking questions in response to events such as the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Simon, a former civil rights activist in the 1960s, said he was shocked by "the kind of essential dishonesty to justice" of Simpson's acquittal. Simon said, "I found the use of racial politics in the O.J. trial so repellent to me, morally, but also, I couldn't believe it was happening right there in front of my eyes. It started to shake up some things. And then came 9/11."
Simon experienced a political transformation in which he felt alienated from what he saw as the excesses of the Left after the realities of the September 11 attacks affected him. He jokes, "I may be the first American writer who was profiled both by Mother Jones and National Review." He supports same-sex marriage and the War on Terror, and contends that those issues are linked. He also edits a weblog. In 2005 he founded, with jazz guitarist Charles Johnson, webmaster of the Little Green Footballs weblog, a startup company called Pajamas Media. Pajamas Media expanded in 2008 into Internet television with Pajamas TV, now known as PJTV. Simon, with screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, hosts PJTV's "Poliwood" show, covering the intersection of politics and Hollywood.
Simon's first non-fiction book, Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, was published by Encounter Books in February 2009.
Read more about this topic: Roger L. Simon
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or ideas:
“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)