Like all holiday movies, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” has ethics at the core of its metaphorical heart, though not to the extent of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street,” the objects of the three Ethics Alarms holiday ethics companions. (Is there another film I should add to the series?) But it really takes effort—and pernicious bias—to claim that the John Hughes classic contains a “dangerous” pro-capitalist message, as SUNY Purchase College Professor Mtume Gant claimed on the insane leftist podcast “Millennials are Killing Capitalism” with host Jared Ware. 

The podcast describes itself as a “platform for communists, anti-imperialists, Black Liberation movements, ancoms, left libertarians, LBGTQ activists, feminists, immigration activists, and abolitionists to discuss radical politics, radical organizing and share their visions for a better world.” Great. And it has to dig so deep for topics that it stoops to searching for sinister messages in a formulaic holiday movie?

Steve Martin plays an up-tight ad exec whose asshole tendencies emerge regularly when he gets involved in holiday travel hell as most of us have. He is desperately trying to get home to spend Thanksgiving with his family because it’s what you do, that’s all: he’s also especially sentimental about it. But circumstances conspire to force him to battle his way from Manhattan to Chicago with a gregarious shower-ring salesman (John Candy) who is his emotional and intellectual opposite.

It’s “The Odd Couple” crossed with “A Christmas Carol,” as Martin learns the values of empathy, kindness and good will by the end of the movie, while Candy, who has no family, is embraced by Martin’s in the misty-eyed finale.

You have to be a real “the half-full-glass-is-all-empty” jerk to get a “capitalist bourgeois mistreating the working class” endorsement from the movie, but Gant is up to the challenge. “If your executive boss is a little bit of an a–hole, just know that he can’t see his family that much. So, you shouldn’t be that pissed that he’s exploiting you, possibly harassing you in various ways … It’s just the stress of not seeing his family,” is Gant’s expert analysis.“You get this idea that because [Martin’s] not at home that kind of wholesome side of him gets destroyed by modernity,” not by his “really terrible” capitalist ideology, this genius adds.

Tell you what, professor: 1) Go away, and 2) but first, bite me.

In the podcast Gant claims that the contrast between how the Candy and Martin characters are played shows contempt for the working class. Martin, the upper middle class ad exec, is clean, organized, and physically fit, see, while the lower class traveling salesman is sloppy, “unscrupulous,” and overweight.

No, he’s overweight because he’s played by John Candy, who was cast because he was likable, sympathetic, and funny, as well as an excellent actor—better, in fact, than Martin. He also was in the film because writer/director John Hughes considered him a close friend and treasured collaborator: Candy appeared in seven of Hughes’s movies.

All because he represented the sloppiness of the working class, I’m sure….

The director is “constantly reinforcing these really terrible tropes that have become so normalized in our society around class,” Gant said. He’s an idiot. How the professor concludes that the film’s focus on the horrors of travel is part of a capitalist and imperialist agenda that “puts the burden on the worker for the benefit of the bourgeois” is beyond me…brain lesions, maybe? Candy and Martin share in their misfortunes equally, helping each other, except that Martin is repeatedly juvenile about it while Candy reacts with a positive attitude and cheerfulness. My father was like that during my family’s many messed up odysseys. My mother would be freaking out, and Dad just smiled and said, “Hey, we’re all together and it’s an adventure!” (And it better than being shot at by Germans…)

Hughes portrays the “working class ” guy as a mensch: how is that subversive? This is how: “What the poor are there to do is to help the bourgeois find their ethics, but not that ‘the ethics of the system sucks’ but ‘my personal ethics needs to be more giving,’ right? which is what the holiday spirit is all about and that kind of bullshit,” says Gant.

Gant, in addition to being an express anti-American ideologue who should never be entrusted with young, unformed minds, is also the kind of fanatic who has ruined popular culture. Hollywood today believes that rather than entertainment, ideological propaganda must be the first priority of movies and TV series. Gant clones are the reason why, and such a mindset leads to paranoia. The professor sees the world as a battleground pitting an evil philosophy (Capitalism, natch!) against the classless, kind and fair philosophy, socialism and Communism, so he assumes that everyone is soldier like he is.

But John Hughes? The writer and director of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” wasn’t pushing cultural messaging, but reflecting it, because he was in every way a product of American middle class culture. If he had any political agenda at all, I have never detected it, and I have seen all of his films. Hughes loved romance, Christmas, families and slapstick comedy. All of his movies celebrated the aspects of the United States and its public that he felt made the nation wonderful, while mocking the irritations that made life more stressful than it needed to be. His collaborators all say that he seldom discussed politics, but in his pro-America and Americans sensibilities, Hughes was a conservative.

Polls indicate that younger Americans increasingly distrust capitalism, want government control of institutions, consider violence acceptable as a political tool, embrace censorship of “bad” ideas, and all of the other beliefs of good little Commies. Universities employing professors like Mtume Gant are one of the many avoidable factors leading to this.

But what are the benefits, educationally or culturally, of employing a radical like Gant at a university at all? I can’t see any.