The conversation with Doctorow and Kushner was so stimulating and tought provoking, and they were so animated in their responses, there were, unfortunately, several questions I never got around to ask. Perhaps I can get them to publish a comment to this post, but for now I invite the bloggers to our Forum to respond, as well.
Was Ethel Rosenberg the more tragic figure because she was truly innocent in ways that, perhaps, her husband was not?
Had they not been executed, but rather served their entire lives in prison, would we still have found them so fascinating, or was it the execution, for the reasons they were executed without mitigation, thta continues to haunt us?
Are artists completely seduced by people of conscience, those with great passion for their beliefs, who live for ideas and are willing to die for them, too–the kind of people who refuse to name names?
Why is it that artists find radicals so fascinating as fictional subjects, and why are these radicals always on the left side of the political spectrum? (For instance, you don’t see many heroic renderings of abortion protestors blowing up abortion clinics.) Is it that radicals on the left make for better fictional characters, or is it that artists are themselves on the left and therefore create characters, or are drawn to characters, who think like them, or act in ways that they wish they could act?
I think that the public’s fascination with the Rosenbergs is definitely related to the fact that they were executed. However, I think what is most chilling and yet oddly fascinating is how our government’s fear transcended that of the public’s fear, and resulted in the government executing two people without mitigation. Once the government’s fear was visible to the public, mitigation was not longer an option.
It is possible that artists identify more with the left, however I think that artists being the creative individuals that they are, they seek to tell an untold story. More often than not the untold story, which history tells us sometime is that which the government does not always want revealed in its entirety for obvious reasons, belongs to people who society finds different or idiosyncratic. Such people as those on the left are often on the edges of society.