by Peter Goddard
“People marching has been a theme of mine,” she says. “I’ve been fascinated by groups of people walking across the terrain. I’ve been painting that image off and on and for different reasons for 30 years. Usually they’ve been refugees or just ordinary people. But this is the first time I’ve painted politicians. This is about invasion and sovereignty.”
Vibrant as the Paint on the Walls
by John Ross
The walls of this city of painters have been freshly whitewashed on orders from a much-lampooned governor, the whiteout financed by transnational tourist moguls to promote the illusion that peace has returned to Oaxaca. Neat squares of blankness cancel out the visual rebellion that exploded on the streets of this colonial city, once declared the patrimony of humanity by the United Nations. There were seven months of dramatic confrontations between striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO) and security forces backing the despotic governor Ulisis Ruiz whose removal from office the insurgents demand. Over 200 prisoners were taken during the skirmishing and another 60 are listed as disappeared. 19 dissidents have been gunned down by Ruiz’s death squads.
But despite the savage repression, if one keeps an ear to the ground and an eye to the whitewashed walls once plastered with revolutionary slogans, tags, full-length murals, throw-ups, and ingenious stencils, it doesn’t much sound or look like the Oaxaca Intifada is done with yet….
Oaxaca is a city of painters, the cradle of the late master colorist Rufino Tamayo and the very much-alive Francisco Toledo who stands with the resistance movement, and during the long struggle the walls of the city were transformed into a dizzying open-air gallery of popular art. Despite the thousands of gallons that have been expended to blot out the rebellion in a doomed campaign to assure tourists that “no pasa nada aqui”, that nothing is happening here and it is safe to return, the images, like the anger, endure just beneath the surface. “The white paint cannot erase the blood of our comrades” defiantly advertises a spray-painted wall scrawl. A remarkable archive of over a thousand images of the struggle for the walls of Oaxaca offers poignant witness to the ongoing resistance.
Some of the works were spray painted freehand, others stenciled onto every available space, still others printed out on paper and fastened to the walls with a wheat glue tough as steel so that to remove the offending art requires dismantling the buildings to which they were affixed brick by brick. Although Ulisis’s obliteration teams stalk the streets, new art goes up every day right under the noses of the police.
Indeed, Ulisis is everywhere on these walls – as a burro, as a rat, a raccoon, a chimpanzee, a skull and crossbones, with shit on his head. A mammoth Mayan head was painted to scale by an apparently well-coordinated team of throw-up artists, a Playboy nude appeared curled up on the wall of the Cathedral rectory and tagged as “The Pope’s Girlfriend” – the Church played an equivocal role in the Oaxaca uprising.
Some murals are left unfinished, the work of the artists disrupted when Ulisis’s goons – mostly off-duty police – swung around the corner in the deep of the night spraying automatic weapon fire at the barricades. Some, in fact, were painted from the ashes of the tire fires the protestors burned all night on the thousand or so barricades piled up in and around the city.
by Marina Krakovsky
Fiction readers score higher on empathy and social acumen tests than do readers of nonfiction.
Two articles below with great flaws but nevertheless of some interest, regarding the vitality of fiction. As answer to the valid concerns and antidote to the analytic weaknesses of both articles — see Victor Hugo’s great novel Les Miserables, and this excerpt from his biography; see Mammonart by Upton Sinclair, his astute book of economic literary criticism, and see this powerful contemporary novel of love and geopolitics by my colleague Andre Vltchek, Point of No Return.
Has Fiction Lost Its Power? by Rod Liddle
The Spirit of Hugo by Mark Derian
Can fiction be a vehicle for social change?
by Valerie Weaver-Zercher
Gus Traynor never wanted to be an interior decorator. But this financially strapped Alaskan newspaper publisher, the lead character in Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s new novel Correcting the Landscape, was worried that an interior decorator is what he had become—what with needing to write stories that made his town “look good to itself.” “I suddenly saw the danger that all my words over these years amounted to nothing more than, say, a tablecloth,” he says.
If this kind of journalism is akin to pulling a tablecloth over a town (or a country) so that it looks pretty, then writing socially conscious fiction is something like cleaning out an old barn and sifting through the trash and treasures one finds there.
Novelists in the United States who dare to sweep the barn rather than spread the tablecloth—who examine social and political problems rather than conceal them—often find their work viewed with suspicion, says Barbara Kingsolver, author of acclaimed novels such as The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees. Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which is awarded biennially to a first novel that emphasizes issues of social justice, as a way to counteract what she calls a “phobic feeling about socially conscious literature from the literary gatekeepers” in the United States. “Trade publishing has become more commercial and money-driven than ever,” Kingsolver told Sojourners in a recent interview. “In some ways, commercial publishing has become like the movie industry—no one wants to take chances, and everyone wants to do what was popular last year.”
Even if it’s not popular, sorting through the unresolved issues that history hands new generations should be central to writing fiction, says Cole. Her Correcting the Landscape, which won the 2004 Bellwether Prize,is set three years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and hundreds of years after the onset of erosion of Native cultures, yet both disasters play out in the lives of Traynor and his fellow characters. “American literature contains our goodness and our grief, as a people,” says Cole. “I’d rather not get away from these realities by narrowing my scope and writing tight, tiny, safe stories or keeping my fiction on a leash.”
The Bellwether Prize, which consists of $25,000 and guaranteed publication through a prominent publishing house, is the only major North American literary prize that endorses the category of literature of social change. Internationally, the Nobel Prize for Literature often celebrates authors who write in this vein of social critique: Think Nadine Gordimer, Miguel Angel Asturias, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Readers the world over look to writers as cultural bellwethers,” says Kingsolver. “They look for leadership from writers in terms of forming the questions and putting a face on social justice.”
The American literary scene, on the other hand, has a “very strong bias against the literature of ideas,” explains Peter Kerry Powers, chair of the English department at Pennsylvania’s Messiah College. Russian novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka have been “much more willing to write fictionally about ideas,” Powers says, adding that societies in which war and material impoverishment have exacted a greater toll tend to produce writers who emphasize such issues in their fiction. “Art becomes a way to mediate the terror,” is how Nigerian novelist and poet Chris Abani has described the process of writing under an oppressive regime.
THE ROOTS OF U.S. publishers’ reticence to print overtly political fiction are deeply embedded in the history of the 20th century. Kingsolver dates the literati’s jitters about writing and publishing such books back to the 1950s, when McCarthyism dictated that “art and politics had to get a divorce.” Modern fiction’s anxiety about wedding art and politics can be traced back even further, according to Powers, who has written widely about multiethnic American literature. Up until the 1920s and 1930s, when writers such as John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell began describing the lives and oppressions of the working class, “most people thought of art as a completely separate realm from the everyday,” says Powers. Even as white writers such as Steinbeck and African-American writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison addressed social and racial injustice through their fiction, the dominant literary mode remained the domestic novel, which “looks at the complications of individual lives in relation to other individuals,” Powers says.
Literature that overtly connected individuals’ lives with political and social realities gained momentum only in the 1960s and 1970s, when the black arts movement and second-wave feminist movement exploded. Best-seller lists were front-loaded with romances and Westerns, and most literary novels managed to remain apolitical, but books such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room were connecting character and plot with larger social and political forces. While not constituting a dominant literary movement, writing about social issues and the academic criticism of such writing became an “extremely important strain in literature and talking about literature in the last 40 years,” says Powers.
So whose fault is it that the décolletage-baring and code-cracking crowd still hogs the top slots on best-seller lists, rather than the writers of literature of social change? Some blame politically engaged writers themselves, who—even in a world ravaged by war, hunger, and disease—make writing about such issues inaccessible or elitist. Others blame major publishing conglomerates—what Kingsolver dubs the “literary-industrial complex”—which assume Americans don’t want to clutter their beach bags and bookshelves with tales of social injustice, ecological decline, or political corruption. Then again, perhaps the fault lies with North American readers, who—like the toddler who requires a two-inch trench between her mashed potatoes and her peas—want our politics forked into newspapers and our pleasure spooned into fiction.
Blame and glory can never be neatly assigned, of course. And lest we fall into a two-kingdom notion that frothy pulp fiction sells and serious novels of social change don’t, it’s important to note contemporary titles in this vein of social critique that have gained both critical acclaim and wide readership: Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, and The Bean Trees, by Kingsolver, to name a few. In addition, even commercially popular books that lack overt political critiques often speak profoundly to issues of social conscience. Still, the Bellwether Prize’s claim is hard to dispute: “Social commentary in our art is frequently viewed with suspicion.”
That suspicion, according to Kingsolver, is largely due to the curse of the P-word: propaganda. Some writers gladly accept the label and rename it a blessing; W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1926 that “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.” Others, like Kingsolver, prefer a little more nuance. “Propaganda tells you what to think. Art invites you to come and visit a place and see what it means to you,” she says. The presumption that “if you address matters of social justice and imbalances of power, then automatically your work becomes propaganda” is a false one, says Kingsolver.
SO, DO WRITERS need to be careful that the aesthetics of their fiction don’t buckle under the weight of some larger agenda? Most people remember novels that read like one part story, three parts sermon (Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind, as does a contemporary apocalyptic series that shall remain nameless). Gayle Brandeis, winner of the 2002 Bellwether Prize for The Book of Dead Birds, says that if a writer allows political issues to arise naturally from the narrative itself, such fiction won’t be didactic. “In fiction, I want [social] issues to emerge from the characters and setting rather than impose them in an unnatural way. I think such issues are much more resonant if they’re woven into the fabric of the story,” she said from her home in Southern California.
Only the most egotistical—or naive—writer harbors any grand delusion that his or her work is going to alleviate poverty or end a war. Every so often a novel such as Émile Zola’s Germinal, which described the horrific working conditions in the French coal mines in the late 1800s and is often attributed with increased sympathy toward workers’ rights, contributes to direct social change. But change usually occurs at a sluggish pace, and being clear-eyed about that fact is important, according to Cole. “I don’t have any reason to suspect that facing these things in our literature helps us actually solve social or political problems,” she says. “I think it makes for better literature—that’s all.”
Yet it’s hard to argue that fiction doesn’t carry the power to change minds and engage hearts, even if it does so one reader at a time. “Fiction takes a person on the other side of the world, someone who is the potential enemy, and brings that person into your home and your emotional life,” says Kingsolver. “You see the details of her life, and that makes her your intimate.” In so doing, she says, fiction “creates empathy for the stranger, which is the opposite of war.”
If fiction fosters the imagination, and a good imagination leads us toward empathy, and empathy steers us to action, then perhaps fiction and social change are only second or third cousins, rather than distant relatives. “Empathy begins with a fictive act,” is how David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why, put it in an Orion magazine essay just before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. “Christ’s words ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ to cite a famously ignored example, demand an arduous imaginative act. … Christ orders anyone who’s serious about him to commit this ‘Neighbor=Me’ fiction” until Christ’s words are turned into reality.
This “Neighbor=Me” fiction can be a threatening read even to those who claim to be peacemakers, but it’s especially unnerving to those who build wars on the equations “We=Righteous” and “Neighbor= Terrorist.” It’s out of fear of this fiction that the United States, through its policies and invasions after Sept. 11, “forces literature into a dissident position,” writes Duncan.
If his claim is correct—that writing socially conscious literature is now a subversive activity in the United States—then perhaps writers are becoming increasingly emboldened by their marginalization and attentive to the exemplars of great protest writing around the world. In fact, Kingsolver predicts that readers will soon have no trouble finding U.S. novels that hinge on the invasion of Iraq. “It takes a while to process something as big as war,” she says. “Art takes time, and novels take a lot of time. But I believe that they [anti-war novels] are coming.”
Such novels may not ever muscle a place for themselves beside the thrillers and romances in big-box bookstores. Yet good books don’t need to be blockbusters to work their slow, quiet art of creating empathy for the stranger and even inspiring action on the stranger’s behalf. In this way, literature of social change echoes the great narrative of the Christian faith: a Word softly, humbly, becoming flesh.
Valerie Weaver-Zercher, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is a writer, editor, and mother of three young children.
This New Year makes 13 since the Zapatistas declared the vast tropical forests of Chiapas in south-eastern Mexico an autonomous region. There, among the Lacandon Indians, a rebel movement – which took its name from the indigenous leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and its strategy from a purported young academic – declared its opposition to governmental corruption, economic globalisation and ecological destruction. Little was known about its leader, although an industry soon arose to manufacture a reputation.
This week a few thousand people will come to Memphis, Ten, between Jan 12-14 for what is being billed as the largest Media Reform Conference in the nation’s history. Everyone from Jesse Jackson to actors Danny Glover, Jane Fonda and Geena Davis to activists and industry insiders like Rosa Clemente and Paul Porter will be on hand as folks will be discussing ways to deal with the impact of corporate media.
“After Laughter, Action” by Courtney E. Martin
Satire, of course, has a long and proven history as the source of bona fide social change. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, George Orwell’s Animal Farm – all of these led to new public awareness that then led to protest, even some pragmatic reforms. But does the one-millionth joke about President Bush’s preschool perception of global geography really regain the trust of the international community?
It seems that the difference between a satire such as Animal Farm and The Daily Show is that the latter too often makes us comfortable, satiated, even happy, as opposed to the very motivating and sometimes terrifying disequilibrium caused by Orwell. Rebels distributed copies of Animal Farm, a novella satirizing totalitarianism, to displaced Soviets in Ukraine right after World War II. The occupying American military discovered them and confiscated 1,500 copies that would later be handed over to the Russian authorities whom the Americans were, at least temporarily, trying to aid. The vicious and powerful humor contained within that small book sure scared the corrupt leaders of that time.
Clearly, the huge audience for sarcastic, sophisticated slapstick means an increase in public awareness of current events. This is an undeniable benefit, beyond the salutary giggle, of consuming this kind of news. The National Annenberg Election Survey released in September 2004 reported that The Daily Show ‘s viewers knew more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watched news.
But what are we doing with this knowledge, besides rehashing it at the water cooler the next morning?
The demure-looking Woeser seems like anything but a threat to the Chinese state. Yet the government has banned the Tibetan writer’s books, sometimes restricts her movements, and last summer shut down her two blogs.
Still, the censors have not fully succeeded in silencing the prolific writer, who works away on a computer in her simple apartment in a Beijing suburb, surrounded by the many Tibetan religious and cultural images that cover the walls.
Tibet experts heap praise on the 40-year-old writer, who is living in self-exile in the capital, saying her writings on Tibet have had an enormous influence.
Robbie Barnett, professor of contemporary Tibetan studies at Columbia University, says Woeser is the first Tibetan to play the role of public intellectual in China in the sense of using modern media. He says thousands of Tibetans have expressed their opposition through demonstrations and leaflets, but Woeser’s statements are “signed, enduring and have a very wide impact”.
Professor Barnett says Woeser is more of a cultural figure than a political one, likening her to public intellectuals such as Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller. “She writes as a humanist, as an author struggling to describe the emotions and experiences of individuals she’s met in a world where many of their most important memories and wishes have been forbidden,” he said.
Tseten Wangchuk, a journalist with the Tibetan Service of the Voice of America in Washington, says when he was in China, Tibetan intellectuals privately discussed the Tibet problem. “But she was the first one who really brought this from private conversational circles to the public domain,” he said. “In that sense, this was a big breakthrough for Tibet.”
Having never learned to read or write in her own language, Woeser is forced to express herself in Chinese. Wangchuk says Woeser is representative of a new generation of Tibetans who are using the Chinese language to challenge the central government in a highly articulate manner. He estimates there are between 200 and 300 blogs set up by Tibetans around the world. “It’s no longer just a state narrative, and that in itself is pretty important,” he said.
…
Woeser says she was also strongly influenced by the works of Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, and a long-time advocate of the Palestinian cause. Said’s theory of post colonialism particularly gave her a new framework for looking at China’s rule over Tibet.
Woeser says she’s determined to write “the truth” about Tibet. “As a writer, I felt I needed to write about these things, the real Tibet, and not the false Tibet presented by the government,” she said.
In an interview with Radio Free Asia she described how, for years, the party’s literary and art workers had “revised Tibet, repainted Tibet, resung Tibet, redanced Tibet, refilmed Tibet, resculpted Tibet”.
“Actual history was changed in this image, coloured by red ideology,” she said. “The memories of generations of Tibetans were changed.”
Looking back, it’s easy to deconstruct Tell Me a Riddle as a nest of prophetic texts on race war, class animus and feminism. From a sensibility formed in the Great Depression, in stories published in ’50s magazines you’ve never heard of, Olsen reported to the sassy ’60s on where we had been before America, and on those our steerage left behind; what blue-collar work was really like on the night shift or at sea; who lost out in claustrophobic marriages, and how it felt to be broke, trapped, female and speechless; on unions, radical politics, the immigrant experience, children lost and children sold, winter rage. To his grandmother Eva, who is dying of cancer, Richard explains the rocks. There are three kinds, he tells her: “earth’s fire jetting; rock of layered centuries; crucibled new out of the old (igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic). But there was that other–frozen to black glass, never to transform or hold the fossil memory.” And Eva, who was a revolutionary in Russia before she was a mother in America, who “can no longer live between people” because she was “nuzzled away” and “devoured” by seven “lovely mouths…drowning into needing and being needed,” sees herself as black glass. Which is why, out of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Victor Hugo, the native Samoan dance of a young Marine and a child’s cookie cut from some Mexican Bread of the Dead, the Book of Martyrs and a girlhood memory, she will sing herself to death.
But see how it’s done: First what Cynthia Ozick calls “a certain corona of moral purpose.” And then the prose that lashes like a whip, that cracks and stings. And then the judgment coming down like a terrible swift sword. And then a forgiving grace note, like haiku or Pascal. Memory, history, poetry and prophecy converge. Reading her again, and again, and again, I find that when you love a book, it loves you back.
Olsen, an activist, feminist and an influential and widely taught fiction writer who narrated and experienced some of the major social conflicts of the 20th century, died Monday night, two weeks before her 95th birthday….
Politically active and class conscious, joined to the world as if every soul were a soul mate, Olsen countered the literary myths of her male peers. She did not immortalize the cowboy or the outlaw, but the woman who stayed home. For her characters, the open road did not lead to freedom, but only to the next job….
For much of her early life, she was worker, wife, mother and journalist. She was arrested three times for union activism, and spent several weeks in jail after passing out leaflets to meatpackers.
“The charge was making loud and unusual noises,” Olsen recalled with a laugh during a 2001 interview with the AP.
“I was a lover, before this war.” Those are the first words sung on TV on the Radio’s “Return to Cookie Mountain,” one of the most widely praised albums of 2006. Whatever the line means within the band’s cryptic lyrics, it could also apply to the past year’s popular music. Thoughts of romance, vice and comfort still dominated the charts and the airwaves. But amid the entertainment, songwriters — including some aiming for the Top 10 — were also grappling with a war that wouldn’t go away.
Pop’s political consciousness rises in every election year, and much as it became clear in November that voters are tired of war, music in 2006 also reflected battle fatigue. Beyond typical wartime attitudes of belligerence, protest and yearning for peace, in 2006 pop moved toward something different: a mood somewhere between resignation and a siege mentality.
Songs that touched on the war in 2006 were suffused with the mournful and resentful knowledge that — as Neil Young titled the album he made and rush-released in the spring — we are “Living With War,” and will be for some time. Awareness of the war throbs like a chronic headache behind more pleasant distractions.
The cultural response to war in Iraq and the war on terrorism — one protracted, the other possibly endless — doesn’t have an exact historical parallel. Unlike World War II, the current situation has brought little national unity; unlike the Vietnam era, ours has no appreciable domestic support for America’s opponents. Iraq may be turning into a quagmire and civil war like Vietnam, but the current war has not inspired talk of generationwide rebellion (perhaps because there’s no draft to pit young against old) or any colorful, psychedelically defiant counterculture. The war songs of the 21st century have been sober and earnest, pragmatic rather than fanciful.
Immediate responses to 9/11 and to the invasion of Iraq arrived along familiar lines. There was anger and saber-rattling at first, particularly in country music; the Dixie Chicks’ career was upended in 2003 when Natalie Maines disparaged the president on the eve of the Iraq invasion. There were folky protest songs about weapons and oil profiteering, like “The Price of Oil” by Billy Bragg; in a 21st-century touch, there were denunciations of news media complicity from songwriters as varied as Merle Haggard, Nellie McKay and the punk-rock band Anti-Flag.
Rappers, who were already slinging war metaphors for everything from rhyme battles to tales of drug-dealing crime soldiers, soon exploited the multitude of rhymes for Iraq, while some, like Eminem and OutKast, also bluntly attacked the president and the war.
In 2006 songwriters who usually stick to love songs found themselves paying attention to the war as well. “A new year, a new enemy/Another soldier gone to war,” John Legend sings in “Coming Home,” the song that ends his 2006 album, “Once Again.” It’s a soldier’s letter home, wondering if his girlfriend still cares. “It seems the wars will never end, but we’ll make it home again,” Mr. Legend croons, more wishful than confident.
John Mayer starts his 2006 album, “Continuum,” with “Waiting on the World to Change,” a pop-soul ballad defining his generation as one that feels passive because it’s helpless: “If we had the power to bring our neighbors home from war,” he sings, “They would never have missed a Christmas/No more ribbons on the door.” The best he and they can do, he muses, doubtless to the disgust of more activist types, is to wait until “our generation is gonna rule the population.”
There is more rage in the guitar onslaught of albums like Pearl Jam’s politically charged, self-titled 2006 album. Contemplating the death of a soldier in “World Wide Suicide,” the song lashes out at a president “writing checks that others pay,” but ends up wondering, “What does it mean when a war has taken over?” And in “Army Reserve,” a wife and child wait: “She tells herself and everybody else/Father is risking his life for our freedoms.” The righteousness of old protest songs has been replaced by sorrow and malaise.
After three years of war, bluster has toned down, even in country music. Merle Haggard, a populist who has always been skeptical of the war in Iraq, tersely insists, “Let’s get out of Iraq, get back on the track, and let’s rebuild America first,” on his most recent solo album, “Chicago Wind.” In another song on the album, Toby Keith, whose “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” was one of country’s most bellicose war songs in 2002, joins Mr. Haggard for a duet, suggesting a reconsideration.
Like the electorate, all pop can agree on across political lines is sympathy for the troops. Bruce Springsteen’s “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” included an old song, “Mrs. McGrath,” about a soldier crippled in battle; the album’s expanded edition added an updated version of a blunt Pete Seeger song from 1966, “Bring ’Em Home.”
On the hawkish side, the country singer Darryl Worley had a 2003 hit, “Have You Forgotten?,” that justified the Iraq invasion as a reaction to 9/11. Now, he has a current Top 20 country hit that reiterates his support for the war but concentrates on its human cost, describing a returned soldier’s post-traumatic stress in “I Just Came Back From a War.”
In a song called “Bullet,” the rapper Rhymefest portrays a soldier who enlisted as a way to get scholarship money for college and dies “with a face full of hollowtips.” Even as cozy a singer as Norah Jones starts her next album, due this month, with “Thinking About You,” a song about a lover killed in combat.
There were plenty of other songs directly about the war in 2006. But beyond topicality, the war also seeped into popular music more obliquely. The year’s best-selling country album, “Me and My Gang,” by Rascal Flatts, includes “Ellsworth,” a song about “Grandma” and her dead husband, a veteran who left behind “his medals/A cigar box of letters.” Gnarls Barkley’s ubiquitous hit single, “Crazy,” is about self-destructive insanity: “You really think you’re in control? Well, I think you’re crazy.”
Thoughts of mortality fill albums like “The Black Parade,” by My Chemical Romance, and “Decemberunderground,” by A.F.I. War isn’t the only factor behind all the foreboding in current popular music, but it’s certainly one.
The 2000s are not the late 1960s, culturally or ideologically, but the musical repercussions of the Vietnam War may hint at what comes next. As that war dragged on, the delirious late 1960s gave way to not only the sodden early 1970s of technique-obsessed rock and self-absorbed singer-songwriters, but also to a flowering of socially conscious, musically innovative soul, the music that John Legend and John Mayer now deliberately invoke. It’s as if this wartime era has simply skipped the giddy phase — which didn’t, in the end, turn bombers into butterflies — and gone directly to the brooding. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was quickly followed by the rejuvenating energy of punk and hip-hop; there’s no telling what disengagement from Iraq might spark.
Music and the other arts, unlike journalism, don’t echo the news. They can be counterweights and compensations, the fantasies that work out, rather than the facts that don’t. In the weeks before Christmas, I started noticing that nearly every time I wandered into a store or heard holiday music from a radio, John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” — that chiming, purposefully optimistic song with the somber undercurrent — was on the playlist. When even Muzak programmers are facing up to life during wartime, pop is no escape.
A great article on Upton Sinclair’s run for the California governorship and the manipulation and control of the public by “the haves” at the expense of everyone else — by Greg Mitchell.
How Media Politics Was Born
To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign
The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California. Sinclair’s landslide primary victory left his opponents with only ten weeks until election day to turn back one of the strongest mass movements in the nation’s history. Extraordinary campaign tactics were clearly called for, and the Republicans pioneered strategies against Sinclair—including the first use of motion pictures to attack a candidate—that have now become the norm in the age of television.
“The Republican success,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has observed, “marked a new advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor.” In another two decades, according to Schlesinger, “the techniques of manipulation, employed so crudely in 1934, would spread east, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.”
Today television commercials make and break candidates, and campaign coverage by the media has a significant impact on public opinion. Substance sometimes appears to count for little, and image for almost everything. It is little wonder that image makers, not experts on the issues, now dominate campaign staffs. It all started fifty-four years ago in California.
In September 1933 Upton Beall Sinclair, the author of The Jungle and more than forty other books, decided to run for governor of California. The amiable, fifty-four-year-old Pasadena resident had run for governor twice previously, both times on the Socialist party line, where he hadn’t won more than sixty thousand votes. This time, however, he was going to run as a Democrat.
After living in California for nineteen years, Sinclair had come to believe that the state was “governed by a small group of rich men whose sole purpose in life was to become richer.” The result of their rule was “hundreds of thousands driven from their homes” and “old people dying of slow starvation.” Most of the land in California, he believed, had been “turned over to money-lenders and banks.” One in four residents of Los Angeles was on relief, receiving an average of four and a half dollars a month, and Sinclair was not confident that President Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was going to remedy that. After registering as a Democrat, Sinclair began his pursuit of the governorship, intending to win this time.
There were few original planks in Sinclair’s platform, but to his followers he was a prophet. To Time magazine he was an “evangel of nonsense” who “horrified and outraged the Vested Interests.”
“All my life,” Sinclair once boasted, “I have had fun in controversy.” His 1906 documentary novel The Jungle had led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Years later he had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He later won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was nominated for a Nobel Prize by, among others, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. He was friends with leading thinkers of his day, playing the violin with Albert Einstein and tennis with the radical poet and editor Max Eastman. Charlie Chaplin considered him one of his political mentors. “Practically alone among the American writers of his generation,” the critic Edmund Wilson observed, “he put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them.” Next to Debs and Norman Thomas, he was the most famous socialist of his time.
Sinclair was five feet seven inches tall. By 1933 he had thin, graying hair and wore the pince-nez that would make him easily caricatured during the campaign. To Frank Scully of Esquire he was a “skinny, middle-aged keypounder looking like a carbon copy of Woodrow Wilson that got left out in the rain and shrunk.” His closest friends—and his bitterest enemies—called him Uppie.
“We must summon the courage to take the wild beast of greed by the beard,” Sinclair wrote in his campaign manifesto, I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty. By early 1934 thousands of Californians, many of them on relief, were responding. Sinclair’s rallying cry was End Poverty in California, or EPIC for short. Chapters of his End Poverty League sprang up throughout the state.
Then, as now, California was a caldron of extremes. It had the most left-wing ACLU chapter in the country and the strongest Ku Klux Klan presence outside the South. Strikes by California farm laborers in 1933 were the first in the United States. The state—a land of promise gone especially sour in the Depression—was ripe for EPIC’s soak-the-rich philosophy. Sinclair called for a huge increase in inheritance and property taxes, an unheard-of “steeply graduated” income tax, fifty-dollar-a-month pensions for the needy and the elderly, and the return of foreclosed farms and houses to their original owners. But the heart of his program was a proposal to put the jobless to work in idle factories and on unused farms. “Land colonies,” complete with kitchens and dormitories, would be established. They would trade what they produced with other EPIC enclaves.
There were few original planks in EPIC’s platform. Sinclair had merely adapted ideas from economic salvation plans already put forward by such national leaders (or demagogues) as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. The local press poked fun at the EPIC plan, but thousands of Californians embraced it, creating what Turner Catledge of The New York Times called “the first serious movement against the profit system in the United States.” By primary day there were a thousand EPIC clubs across the state, and the campaign’s tabloid newspaper, the EPIC News, had a circulation approaching a million copies weekly.
Sinclair spoke to overflow crowds in high school gyms, open fields, and arenas. Observers likened EPIC rallies to religious revivals. Time called Sinclair an “evangel of nonsense,” but to his followers he was a prophet, even a savior. His framed portrait hung in their homes. On primary day, in late August, Upton Sinclair received more than 430,000 votes, a total greater than that of all his eight Democratic opponents combined. “Congrats on nomination,” the politically obsessed poet Ezra Pound wrote from Italy. “Now beat the bank buzzards and get elected.”
Sinclair knew that to become the first Democratic governor of California in more than thirty years, he would need the support of national Democratic leaders, especially of President Roosevelt. A few days after winning the primary, Sinclair journeyed to Hyde Park for a two-hour conference. The President offered no endorsement, saying he was staying out of state politics. Privately Roosevelt told his aides that “it looks as though Sinclair will win if he stages an orderly, common sense campaign but will be beaten if he makes a fool of himself.”
Sinclair’s impending victory in the nation’s sixth-largest state became big news nationally. H. L. Mencken wrote that Sinclair, who “has been swallowing quack cures for all the sorrows of mankind since the turn of the century, is at it again in California, and on such a scale that the whole country is attracted by the spectacle.” Will Rogers observed that if Sinclair could deliver even some of the things he promised, he “should not only be Governor of one state, but President of all ‘em.” Theodore Dreiser called Sinclair “the most impressive political phenomenon that America has yet produced.”
But Time, hinting at what was to come, declared: “No politician since William Jennings Bryan has so horrified and outraged the Vested Interests. … They hate him as a muckraker. They hate him as a Socialist. … They hate him as a ‘free-love’ cultist. … They hate him as an atheist. …” On Wall Street the market value of the twenty top California stocks dropped 16 percent following Sinclair’s nomination.
Sinclair’s friends started calling him Governor, but the title still belonged to a Republican party stalwart named Frank Merriam. The Los Angeles Times, backing the incumbent, declared that the Merriam-Sinclair contest “is not a fight between men: it is a vital struggle between constructive and destructive forces.”
California’s conservative leaders had not taken Sinclair seriously until it was too late to save the Democratic party. Now the whole state was up for grabs, and they would not make the same mistake again. “Those whose stakes in California are greatest,” Time noted, “hold themselves personally responsible to their class throughout the nation to smash Upton Sinclair.” A new kind of political campaign was about to begin.
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Music superstar James Brown’s influence was widespread. Count me in as a longtime fan of his. Brown’s recent passing marks the end of an era.
What I wish to add to the many accolades and tributes to him is just this. His song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” during the freedom upsurge of African Americans nearly four decades ago had an impact that, I think, is being sidestepped. This says more about commentators than Brown. Allow me to explain.
The lyrics in his 1968 song that I note aptly described the conditions of black workers. They were laboring for low wages. Their employers’ idea of upward mobility was a cruel hoax in ways big and small.
Paul Street is the author of many books, articles, speeches, blogs, reviews, and book chapters. The opening excerpt from his most recent ZNet commentary:
I keep having the same two crazy dreams. I’m just not sure what they mean. In the first dream, George W. Bush becomes obsessed with disproving the charge that he’s a “chicken hawk” – a military hawk who has never seen or experienced military action and its terrible consequences. He has a vision from God. It comes to him in prayer. He orders his staff to call up the Pentagon and arrange for him to be flown to Iraq to participate in a night patrol. “Make it a dangerous one,” he says. He reaches into his bottom desk drawer for a bottle of whiskey.
“This will show the world I’m not a wimp like they said my Dad was,” Bush thinks to himself. “Hell, I’m going to lead this SURGE myself.”
The Army sets him up with a unit three miles outside the U.S. base in the Iraqi town of Ramadi. He climbs into a moderately well-armored Humvee. Ten minutes into his adventure, with sweat pouring down from under his helmet and the smell of bourbon on his breath, the Decider hears a loud explosion.
Everything goes quiet and numb. His head is swimming. There’s a bright shining light. Soldiers and medical staff are yelling, but he can’t hear a word they’re saying. Everyone around him is staring at him in horror. Some are looking down to where his legs used to be. Bush looks down himself and sees two bloody stumps. “It’s so unreal,” he thinks, “why don’t I feel anything?”
He starts to lose consciousness but is jolted back awake by a sharper pain than he ever knew existed. He looks over to see a badly injured soldier. The soldier couldn’t be more than 18 years old. He’s lost half of his face.
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A Practical Policy 