Contrary to the Andrew Gumbel’s recent article “Hollywood Goes to War,” Hollywood essentially plays one side of the political fence, that of the status quo, as John Pilger makes clear in “Hollywood Hurrah” excerpted below. Are the coming films likely to break the mold? Probably not; we’ll see.

Pilger:

Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese were killed during the American invasion, and their land was destroyed and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood came to the rescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that invited the audience to pity the invader. These films provided a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to mount other Vietnams – in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current “war on terrorism” is underpinned by the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version of America’s killing spree in Somalia, act as cultural “softeners” before the bombing starts again for real.

Even in finely crafted films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon that look as if they might break ranks, there is an implicit oath of loyalty to imperial culture. This was true of Three Kings, a movie that seemed to take issue with the Gulf war, but instead produced a familiar “bad apple” tale, exonerating the militarism that is now rampant. So dominant is Hollywood in our lives, and so collusive are its camp-following critics, that the films that ought to have been made are unmentionable. Name the mainstream movies that have shone light on to the vast shadow thrown by the American secret state, and the mayhem for which it is responsible. I can think of only a few: Costa-Gavras’s Missing, which was about the destruction of the elected government in Chile by General Pinochet’s puppet masters in Washington, and Oliver Stone’s Salvador, which made the connection between Reagan’s Washington and El Salvador’s death squads. Both these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty and, in the case of Missing, dogged by vengeful court actions.

The slaughter of up to 8,000 urban poor in George Bush Sr’s attack on Panama in 1990 would make a fine action movie. And why not a sequel to Black Hawk Down, this time with the 8,000-10,000 Somali dead (a CIA estimate) who were airbrushed from the original? Or how about a David and Goliath epic set in modern Palestine, with young Palestinians facing down American tanks and warplanes operated by Israelis?

How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole

by John Pilger 

Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” The lone, honourable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.

He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, “What have you been up to today?” “I’ve been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask.”

For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious. What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.

In The Serpent, Marc Karlin’s dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry’s liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. “This is the silence of the democrats,” says the voice-over, “and the Dark Prince could bath in their silence.”

This excerpt from a ZNet Commentary, which are a premium sent to  Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet. To learn more consult ZNet.

an excerpt from “Thinking About Roque”

by Margaret Randall

from her Introduction to Roque Dalton’s Clandestine Poems

I first met Roque in Mexico, in 1964. Poets from some of the Latin American countries and the United States were gathered in Chapultepec Park, engaged in marathon readings where we reveled in and applauded each other’s work…. Roque arrived on the scene fresh from a jail break. He later often laughingly told us he thought he was the only Latin American poet who escaped a CIA firing squad because an earthquake had tumbled the walls of the prison they were holding him in, an episode that is reflected in his (tragically) posthumous Pobrecito poeta que era yo (Poor Little Poet, I Was)…an extraordinary novel about his generation’s grappling with the search for inner and outer liberation.

Roque was reality to us then, in our Mexico City of the mid-sixties. Many of us still thought that “politics was outside the realm of art.” Roque made us see that wasn’t so. He taught us, among many other things, that a simplistic sense of “socialist realism”, in terms of creative expression, was nothing more nor less than a  lack of respect for the work we were doing. That art was life, and that political commitment (not in the narrow sense we had been taught to view it, but in the fullest sense) was simply that: a commitment to life. That art, to be revolutionary in the first place, had to be good.

cross-posted from The Valve: 

Something positive about what is called the academic “new left” is that in some ways it is a multicultural continuation and advance from the best left/progressive work of the 20s and 30s, the time of strongest progressive advance in the past century. In other fundamental ways, it’s no advance at all. Especially with a prestige fixation on “theory” rather than an intellectual and normative commitment to socio-literary analysis of literature, English and other departments largely remove themselves from actual left/popular struggles and needed thought today. World Social Forum thinking certainly isn’t pervasive or “triumphantly” engaged within the academy. To the extent it does appear it is typically marginalized in myriad ways. In fact, neither the recent US Social Forum event in Atlanta nor much of its essential thought has even been broached here or in lit sites generally. Some “radical” “triumph”.

Michael Albert’s general overview and take on the event, “USSF – 2007 and After…”: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=13271

Key works in the liberation lit tradition aren’t even included in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (And it’s true I believe that there never even was a Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism? So we can see here quite clearly where the emphasis of the establishment is: on “theory” – which is far more tolerable, far less threatening to the interests of the status quo than more normative and directly engaged literary analysis.) V.F. Calverton isn’t exactly a marginal literary historical figure; his best work isn’t exactly a peripheral achievement. That is, shouldn’t be. Not in reality. Though he surely is in the reality of the academic lit establishment today (and previous days). What percentage of the lit establishment has even heard of The Liberation of American Literature, let alone read it? 1 percent? Let alone Bernard Smith and Forces in American Criticism. Who has even heard of V.F. Calverton himself, editor of the Modern Quarterly for 17 years, from 1923 until his death in 1940. Just as Calverton was eventually marginalized in his own time, for ideological reasons as well, so have many central progressive literary concerns been marginalized by the academy. The pillars and defenders and enforcers of the status quo who largely control the academies (the boards of trustees and their minions, and the corporate-state governments) would be smart to proclaim as loudly as possible, and often do, that there is an irresponsible Sixties Triumphalism of a would be, if not already, socialist faculty. The notion is comically false in its fully intended sense (despite any extraordinarily limited and/or trivial accuracy to such proclamations). As for English departments being different: Leftward Ho! V.F. Calverton and American Radicalism, by Philip Abbott, was published in 1993 as part of Greenwood Press’s series Contributions in Political Science. This seems to be how a limited amount of work of some “radical” substance gets done in the academies. It can be easier to get it published in someone else’s field other than your own. Less threatening that way, I suppose. It’s a way to both marginalize yet produce valuable work. It’s a way for the university to breath a little, sometimes very little, yet still keep the lid on.

A Soldier Once 

by John Irving 

As a college student, I chose to take my junior year abroad in a German-speaking country — because, in 1961 and ’62, I read “The Tin Drum” twice. At the ages of 14 and 15, I had read “Great Expectations” twice — Dickens made me want to be a writer — but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos — all with an unforgiving conscience.

In the fall of 1963, I went to Vienna and became a student at the Institute of European Studies, learning German and reading German literature; I wanted to read “Die Blechtrommel” as Grass had written it, in German. I was 21. (I would never learn German well enough to read Grass — even today, when he writes to me in German, I write him back in English — but it was as a student in Vienna that I began to see myself as a writer of novels.) I had marked certain passages in “Die Blechtrommel”; I’d memorized the English translations of these passages. It turned out to be a way to meet girls.

“Poland’s lost, but not forever, all’s lost, but not forever, Poland’s not lost forever.”

The novel’s hero, Oskar Matzerath, refuses to grow; because he remains childlike, small and seemingly innocent, he is spared the political events of the Nazi years while others die. As Bebra the dwarf warns Oskar, “Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it.”

…

The cultural front is not necessarily the flank of any movement. Can’t say it better than this:

In the words of Rickke Manazala, “culture is essential to sustaining our work.” Culture is not an adjunct, an add-on, something pigeon-holed and secondary. All throughout the USSF, from the puppets at the opening day march to the Indigenous drummers and singers at the final plenary, this truth was made manifest.

The leadership of the USSF understood that narrow “correct politics” or efficient organization alone do not do it. As Lillian Cotto Morales said, “we need to know one another as people so we can then talk politics and strategy.”

That’s from Ted Glick’s ZNet Commentary, “The U.S. Left Turns a Corner.”

Also of note:

“The left needs to start appealing to people’s hunger for hope and attraction to fantasy life. What’s more, Duncombe said, they have to let go of the belief—”naive at best, arrogant at worst”—that intellectual arguments should be enough to win people over, and that spectacle, as the Bush administration employs it, is something to which they shouldn’t have to resort, a tawdry means to an end.” – Stephen Duncombe 

An emphasis on culture also accords with Noam Chomsky’s point that: 

“Caricature is an art, and not an easy one.  But when well done, a very important one.  As for dealing with Orwell’s problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now.  No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways.  But others will have to find what works for them.”

And what works for them, for us, must be in large part what works for others. We might ask ourselves what the cultural component of our work is, at any place and time, and what it needs to be.

No US antiwar movement, per the recent article by Alexander Cockburn? How about serializing an overt anti Iraq War novel? 

Why hasn’t this happened, long since, at a progressive news site? News and culture.

Is it due to lack of resources? Or is it due to what James Petras nailed years ago in “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited”?: 

“The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today’s intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship.”

An activist “propagandistic” progressive partisan antiwar novel is the sort of thing that should be published in left news periodicals in serial form, just as Upton Sinclair’s partisan novels were – novels eventually turned into book form that people carried to work. Probably serialization should be done before book publication but seems to me just as useful to do it after book publication. Of course, I understand resource constraints may prevent any such publication, as we run into the same crunch at Mainstay Press. I wrote the fact-heavy anti Iraq War novel Homefront in the first six months of the March 2003 ground invasion of Iraq, then added a bit before its 2006 publication. Early on, the narrator was a reporter, but I later reduced her role. Still the novel reads as an investigative drama into the crime of the Iraq invasion and occupation. (I wrote two Vietnam-centered antiwar novellas in years prior to the ground invasion of Iraq. Homefront is the sort of antiwar novel for Iraq that was never written (or if written, never gained much of any prominence at all) for Vietnam, or Korea, or even WWII. The same holds for the antiwar fiction I wrote about Vietnam which I adapted to complete the Iraq invasion/occupation trilogy with Homefront. The trilogy is short enough that it ought to be combined into a single novel.) Homefront is perhaps more reminiscent to parts of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia than anything, though the main homage is to digging out the facts of the matter. The lack of progressive partisan fiction is one reason the antiwar movement in the US is as flat as it may be. It’s possible that Homefront’s like hasn’t been seen since Johnny Got His Gun in the 1930s (though Homefront is more explicit and detailed about ruling power), it seems to me. The culture has been that decapitated that long. Noam Chomsky: 

“Caricature is an art, and not an easy one.  But when well done, a very important one.  As for dealing with Orwell’s problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now.  No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways.  But others will have to find what works for them.”

What Chomsky says here of progressive partisan caricature in fiction is true of progressive partisan fiction generally, which was widely understood and acted upon by progressive news publications of the 1930s – a period that was the “most intensively political period of the century,” Terry Eagleton notes in passing in his recent article on the contemporary political decline of leading literary writers. Progressive partisan fiction is badly needed, always has been. Pakistan has banned all fiction from India; it fears the power, the influence of all imaginative writing so much, while accepting some nonfiction. We should take stock of the power and influence of progressive partisan fiction, and seek to perpetuate it.

John Freeman asks, “Has the Novel Been Murdered by the Mob?”

Not by a long shot. 

Novels serve as basis and fuel for TV shows, niche films and popular movies, and of course for readers in schools and universities, as well as in general.

by Terry Eagleton 

For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all; but his most explicitly political work is also his most artistically dreary.

The knighting of Salman Rushdie is the establishment’s reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Hare caved in to the blandishments of Buckingham Palace some years ago, moving from radical to reformist. Christopher Hitchens, who looked set to become the George Orwell de nos jours, is likely to be remembered as our Evelyn Waugh, having thrown in his lot with Washington’s neocons. Martin Amis has written of the need to prevent Muslims travelling and to strip-search people “who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”. Deportation, he considers, may be essential further down the road.  

The uniqueness of the situation is worth underlining. When Britain emerged as an industrial capitalist state, it had Shelley to urge the cause of the poor, Blake to dream of a communist utopia, and Byron to scourge the corruptions of the ruling class. The great Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough was known as Comrade Clough for his unabashed support of the revolutionaries of 1848. One of the most revered voices of Victorian England, Thomas Carlyle, denounced a social order in which the cash nexus was all that held individuals together. John Ruskin was the great inheritor of this moral critique of capitalism; and though neither he nor Carlyle were “creative”, they influenced one of the mightiest of English socialist poets, William Morris. In Morris’s entourage at the end of the 19th century was Oscar Wilde, remembered by the English as dandy, wit and socialite; and by the Irish as a socialist republican.

The early decades of the 20th century in Britain were dominated by socialist writers such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. When Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas of “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”, she places herself to the left of almost every other major English novelist.

Not all rebukes were administered from the left. DH Lawrence, a radical rightist, denounced “the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition”. Possession, he thought, was a kind of illness of the spirit. High modernism, however politically compromised, questioned the fundamental value and direction of western civilisation. The 1930s witnessed the first body of consciously committed left writing in Britain. Taking sides was no longer seen as inimical to art, but as a vital part of its purpose.

In the postwar welfare state, however, the rot set in. Philip Larkin, the period’s unofficial poet laureate, was a racist who wrote of stringing up strikers. Most of the Angry Young Men of the 50s metamorphosed into Dyspeptic Old Buffers. The 60s and 70s – the second most intensively political period of the century – produced no radical of the status of a Brecht or Sartre. Iris Murdoch looked for an exciting moment as though she might fulfil this role, but turned inwards and rightwards. Doris Lessing was to do much the same.

 It was left to migrants (Naipaul, Rushdie, Sebald, Stoppard) to write some of our most innovative literature for us, as the Irish had earlier done. But migrants, as the work of VS Naipaul and Tom Stoppard testifies, are often more interested in adopting than challenging the conventions of their place of refuge. The same had been true of Joseph Conrad, Henry James and TS Eliot. Wilde, typically perverse, challenged and conformed at the same time.  

The great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended. Rushdie’s was one of the few voices to keep alive this radical legacy; but now, with his fondness for the Pentagon’s politics, we need to look elsewhere for a serious satirist.

There are a number of factors in such renegacy. Money, adulation and that creeping conservatism known as growing old play a part, as does the apparent collapse of an alternative to capitalism. Most British writers welcome migrants, dislike Tony Blair, and object to the war in Iraq. But scarcely a single major poet or novelist is willing to look beyond such issues to the global capitalism that underlies them. Instead, it is assumed that there is a natural link between literature and left-liberalism. One glance at the great names of English literature is enough to disprove this prejudice.

Libertarian socialism – also known as a form of anarchism and/or an ever more fully realized form of democracy may well hold the best hope for humankind, as its various tendencies and manifestations show.

Some of the most central and detailed thought of what may be called the liberation tendency in US literary criticism of the first half of the twentieth century may be found in, for example, the half dozen books and their like below. The books by Sinclair, Calverton, Smith, and Geismar have been buried, in being scandalously neglected by virtually everyone:

1903 Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist
1924 Upton Sinclair, Mammonart
1932 V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature
1939 Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism
1941 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
1958 Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns–From Rebellion to Conformity

Rod Dreher’s article “Doleful Pleas of a Father” is thoughtful, but the ending statement by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa that Dreher concurs with is false. Literature is not ideology free. Depending on how or what is written, literature can and often has served to reinforce status quo ideologies, or reactionary ideologies, militant ideologies, etc. Or, conversely, literature can be written to have a libratory effect.

The reading group Dreher joined purposely chose books for discussion that are removed from the present war in Iraq. They did this not because they think Iraq is not important, quite the contrary, but so that they might be able to learn something about war apart from a conflict that is so immediate and affecting on so many personal levels. Such thinking has a certain logic, but it also seems quite baselessly fearful and largely inept. After all, most people in the US oppose the war. You would think they would be more engaged, and less turned off, by novels about the Iraq war, not least a strong antiwar novel.

by Dick Meister 

It was 50 years ago this summer that Americans finally won the unfettered right to read whatever they wanted to read, a half-century since poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” went on trial in a San Francisco courtroom. 

Like many works before it, “Howl” had been declared “obscene” by law enforcement authorities who banned its sale. But this time it led to the summer-long trial that cleared “Howl” and virtually ended government book-banning.

…