excerpted review by John Freeman:

…in Turkey…according to 35-year-old writer Elif Shafak, a new generation of writers is using the novel – a form that came to them from the West – to reimagine their society from within.

“Novelists have played a very, very critical role as the engineers of social and cultural transformation in Turkey,” says Shafak, when we meet in a New York hotel. “Maybe in that regard we are closer to the Russian tradition than the Western tradition.”

The debate over what these novels say about Turkish society, and how they say it, lurched to the forefront of life in Istanbul in recent years, as the Turkish Government began prosecuting writers for “offending Turkishness”.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and several dozen other writers were tried under this code of Turkish law. Shafak, too, was put on trial because of passages from her new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, which referenced the long fallout of what many call the Armenian Genocide, when up to one million Armenians were forcibly removed from Turkey and killed.

The book has become a best-seller in Turkey, selling more than 60,000 copies, but not without fallout for Shafak. Writing in the Washington Post, Shafak explained how critics within Turkey claimed she “had taken the Armenians’ side by having an Armenian character call the Turks ‘butchers’ in a reference to the Ottoman Empires deportation and massacre of Armenians during World War I.”

While Shafak was acquitted, others were not so lucky. In January, her “dear friend”, journalist Hrant Dink, the Armenian editor-in-chief of a Turkish newspaper, was murdered on a street in Istanbul, allegedly by an ultra-nationalist teenager.

“The debate on literature and art is very much politicised,” she says, her voice revealing palpable anguish, “sometimes very much polarised. I think my work attracted it because I combined elements people like to see separate.”

[satire]

There is nothing like apocalyptic chaos in Iraq now.

The US presence if peaceful. The US presence sustains the peace.

The US presence is warmly embraced by Iraqis, as proven by the fact that a mere 80 percent of attacks by Iraqis are directed against US forces, and by the fact that at least a small percentage of the population wish for the US to have not left years ago.

The current 4 million Iraqi refugees caused by the US invasion and occupation, a million per year, are people who actually enjoy travel in the dead of night a step ahead of death and destruction.

The US bombings, patrols, and presence otherwise provide an unspeakable degree of security.

US forces do not exactly carry out the unprecedented level of ethnic cleansing; they merely oversee it.

Who would remain to control the oil? Surely the Iraqis have no responsible idea what to do with it.

The hundreds of thousands of US soldiers and private contractors upon threat of joblessness would riot in the streets. Best to let them go on bombing and shooting in orderly fashion.

Oil control is “stability”. Massive violence is a mere inconvenience. Loss of oil control is increased chaos. But we repeat.

A couple hours of electricity per day and a few ounces of water on occasion during the week is enough for a person to get by on during this current, years-long, unprecedented and worsening social collapse. The US is on the right track. It’s on the right track all right.

Something for which we are collectively responsible, in literary realms not least.

John Pilger:

“These days, you see Good Ol’ Bill [Clinton], or the Comeback Kid, as he is variously known, wiggling his head on the TV news, campaigning for his wife, Hillary, among Americans who, terminally naive, still believe the Democratic Party is theirs and that “it’s time to vote a woman into the White House”. Together, the Clintons are known as “Billary” and rightly so. Like Good Ol’ Bill, his wife has no plans to address the divisions of a society that allows 130,000 Americans to claim the wealth of millions of their fellow citizens. Like GOB, she wants to continue Iraq’s torment for perhaps a decade. And she has “not ruled out” attacking Iran.”

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/08pilger.cfm

from John Pilger’s ZNet Commentary “Good Ol’ Bill, The Liberal Hero” – Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet – to learn more consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org.

books linked here

Key books by V. F. Calverton, Upton Sinclair and Bernard Smith explore the tendency (or tradition and lack thereof) of liberation literature far better – more thoroughly, incisively and in greater context despite flaws – than any other group of texts of their time period (add a number of essays from Kenneth Burke’s book below), and they remain unusually valuable, and buried.  

Continue reading →

I couldn’t wait to get to Iraq – after all, that’s where all the action is (not to mention the oil). So much to write about. (And yes, deep down, I did harbor vainglorious notions of returning with enough material to write a Great American Novel, should I survive, but I don’t know what it is about writing novels – they seem so damn hard to put together, I can’t quite figure out why, can’t figure out what makes it work. Is it my style? Maybe my mode, or linguistic orientation or something. I start writing about the novel bravery of our troops and the interminable perfidy of the enemy and everything starts sounding like cardboard, even to my own tin ear. All I can say is there must be some extra sense to writing a novel that I have as not yet developed. I don’t mind really since I know being a reporter and pamphleteer is a noble and great thing when performed in service to the mighty state – of, to, by and for the state. Besides, who’s not to say our work is not more powerful, more important, more moving, and – dare dream it – even more artistic in its own bare bones and muscular way than any novel can hope to be? And so I continue to write reports with conviction and daring-do, if I must say so myself. I continue to spread the good word about the great US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the US conquest of the oil-endowed bulk of western Asia in general, that is, the Middle East.

No I am no novelist, for it is far too difficult for me to get away from facts – and facts galore you shall have! facts we all need, and the world too. I feel that the vital facts of the world are far too crucial, far too staggering for me to much care if I have any difficulty mustering a novel or much of any novelistic psychological insight – nice but essentially superfluous – or special profundity of atmosphere, or virtuosity of setting, or mastery of plot details and events, or any extraordinary capacity for arranging the panorama and thrust of the world in any compelling narrative sweep, in any arc of explosive insight and delight. The overrated overblown novel! And so we shall have none of that fancy business here but instead engage in something equally momentous – the crucial facts of the main matters at hand facing all the world as expressed in sheer actual telling detail. And so I gladly rise to the occasion of settling for reporting as best I can about the world it is my great privilege to know and encounter by way of the most relevant and matter-of-fact details of our day, as borne out in the myriad crises and happy challenges of our time. The novel has nothing on me but what I lack, which, in any case, is of no real concern to anyone but myself. And possibly my employer.

So off to Iraq I went to embed as deep as I possibly could into everything Iraq related. I took off in that great and honorable tradition of an independent journalist embedding with an invading and occupying military force of unparalleled power blasting through an impoverished and stricken land. We blew up the country and thus conquered it, subdued it, destroyed it – no matter that they started blowing us up right back. We can handle it. We’re survivors – most of us.

Iraq may not make it, frankly, but we will. Most of us. Probably. There’s a real possibility.

I am the Official US Pamphleteer – Stan D. Garde. 

In effect, due to the global reach of our most powerful country, the one and only US of A, the functional stature of my office means I am pamphleteer to far more than solely the US itself, but also to the whole world.

While affiliated with the office of the US Poet Laureate and others such national offices, I am formally housed in the office of the official national US Historian, Dr. Hiredgunne, the recent successor, for the foreseeable future, to the generation-long stint of his immediate predecessor, the forever-great historian, Dr. Totalie.

I am proud beyond words to have been selected for the office of US Pamphleteer following the runaway success of Youthtopia, my humble Parents’ Handbook for Rockview Terminal School District. I am indeed a typical product of the traditionally great schooling enterprise of this mighty land, though the schools of course are now more commonly known as Terminals, as I document in Youthtopia.

In any event, the nature and purpose of this current book, Tropetopia, is to present the newstopian news of our times, with flair where useful, and with some private or otherwise personal touch where topical.

In other words, I have been encouraged by my superiors to put together a hefty selection of my greatest pamphlets. Thus – Tropetopia; or, The Life and Times of Stan D. Garde - In Defense of the Right to PR.

On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals

Noam Chomsky:

Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But, is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice — they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because, our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But, is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice — they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because, our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.

Thus, no use of an investigative anti Iraq War novel like Homefront in the universitites and schools – or even such novels being conceived and written in the first place - let alone reviews in the media, or publication by the literary establishment – let alone the proliferation of many such works. [-TC]

 Teach them to buy and be sold.

from ZNet

“There is no such thing as a value neutral educational process.”
 - Richard Shaull, Foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed

After the initial attempts by a section of Christian-bourgeois souls (Dickens, Carlyle, Chadwick, Mayhew, Mrs.Gaskell, even the honourable, although not Christian, Benjamin Disraeli who first enunciated the thesis that England was infact not one nation but two—the rich and the poor), to seek reformative state interventions on behalf of the new urban poor  who now swamped the industrial towns, towards the middle of the nineteenth century the inevitable exhaustion of goodwill followed

Where a Dickens had made visits to Yorkshire schools ( captured unforgettably in Nicholas Nickleby) in the thirtees and returned to raise a cry for amelioration, such  sentiment expressed from outside the lived experience of the suffering classes, was to wear thin in a growing fright  at the spread of what was to be christened “mass culture.” 

Dickens of course had repudiated the Chartists who had erroneously hoped he would go over to their side  (a story rather less often recited about him). Some flavour of that history may be savoured in what G.M.Reynolds was to write in the Weekly Newspaper of june 8, 1851:

This wretched sycophant of Aristocracy—this vulgar flatterer of the precious hereditary peerage—is impudent enough to consider himself the people’s friend!  A precious friend indeed when he ridicules universal suffrage (the elementary principle of Chartism) and proclaims himself a thick and thin supporter of Lord John Russell’s reform bill, even before he has seen it!”(1) 

Suddenly, as industrial England entered the fraught social contentions of the sixties, a whole falange of opinion-makers closed ranks to argue that writers, poets, “creative” individuals of all description had best wash their hands off this fruitless business of meddling with social matters.  It was best that they devoted themselves to their precious private visions of abiding truths above and beyond the piss and mire of this thing called history.

The ringing thesis here was to come from Matthew Arnold, who, in his perniciously influential Culture and Anarchy(1865)  drew the first distinctions between “high culture”  and the culture of the “populace”—the latter in his view constituting “anarchy.”  Pleading for an intellectual aristocracy, a return to the classics was advocated.  The aesthetics of Liberalism was thus inaugurated; and specially endowed individuals were henceforth to seek for eternal verities and universal truths outside the concrete processes of social and political  contention.(2)  

A great discomfort with the equalizing philosophies (chiefly of Marx and Engles) had of course been steadily growing.  Siezing the moment that Arnold articulated, Pareto, Mosca, Burckhardt were to float the new concepts of an “elite” and a “political class” that comprised individuals endowed by nature to be rulers of men.  Elements of Darwin, and Carlyle’s notion of the “hero” were thus drawn into the stipulation that not equality but inequality was the true order of “nature”.  Needless to remind ourselves that Nietzsche was to put all that together famously to tell us how the chief business of history—and women– was to give us the “superman.” (3)
 
Thus educational processes had to be those that absorbed and disseminated the ideas of the ruling class.  England’s first Education Act of 1870 was to be the first pusillanimous policy decision towards consolidating inequality eventhough, don’t you know, it was all about furnishing a sound education on the best principles of  English “humanism.”

As the manufacturers and the colonizers busied themselves in profit-making, education came formally to be regarded not as a rational aid to understanding how society came to be thus constituted, but in a forked programme to equip, on the one hand, the labouring classes with the minimal skills that industry needed from time to time (more profoundly, as Marx was to point out and Althusser in our time was to nail, inorder to keep in place the “reserve army of labour” or inorder to ensure the “reproduction of the relations of production”), and, on the other, to make available to the leisured classes the delectable riches of speculation.

Not for nothing was Arnold to argue that poetry would be the religion of the future. That injunction  was devotedly to be pursued by “modernists” like T.S.Eliot for whom, beginning with the twenties of the last century, the world was indubitably a “wasteland”. As you would expect,   the cure for the unvarying “human condition” was to be found in the Church. All that just when a revolution had happened in the  then czarist Russia, and when Gandhi, the Congress, and the revolutionaries in India were making big strides to alter the “human condition” in the colony—and, as a fallout, in some two-thirds of the colonized world.

(It is another matter that when “free” India came to establish its first Education Commission, its recommendations duly reflected the same ruling dichotomy: skills for the masses and the Humanities at tertiary levels inorder to keep ruling  spirits within the bounds of  “sensitivity.”)

Thus, when the American, John Dewey, wrote in 1920 that the true aim and purpose of education is education, he was articulating a seeming abstraction (what education?) that had behind it a whole  concrete history of class  interests.

III

International Corporate Capital has since made killing strides.   It no longer needs the pretence about poetry (read “poetry” as a metaphor for the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Arts, and for critical thought generally). The more it gobbles up the globe, the greedier it gets. In education also, therefore,  it is to be push-pin all the way.  The least monies spent on “poetry” seem unconscionably unwarranted according to  the  most advanced principles of that despicable thing called Commerce.  What used to be commerce between human beings—remember those “pointless” hours spent in the coffee house?—is thus superceded by commerce between computers which make the world a “global village”  even as they draw oceans between human being and human being.  Since you can email, where is the need to meet face to face? 

The captains of “utility” who move the levers of “knowledge” at the WTO, think that there is no more need to think.  Since all the thinking that the world needs is done in the board room, educational processes ipso facto invite to be geared to proliferate armies of the new conformism who in turn may be trusted to function as untroublesome engines of profit-maximisation.  When the GDP grows, the stock market booms, the middle class expands and fattens and comes into possession of commodities which advertising can then fetishise as the newage gods, pray where then is there any more need to think and speculate?

How many of us know that education (it must still be called that, per necessity) is today, globally, the third most lucrative trade worldwide, after drugs and armaments?  That being the case, teaching shops that come from far-off lands come necessarily inorder to set up franchises at zero levels of investment that the “market” may lap-up at hundred percent profit.  And those comprise utility items, not “poetry.”

IV

Alas, whatever is picked-up at school/college/university/institute had better equip young people to earn a keep.  But would it not be nice if we should also have learnt (and not picked-up) that which makes of those of us destined to become appendages of the ruling hippopotamus “warm and tender as can be”? And if that seems like a hopeless reversion to the class-based “humanist” argument, so it is.  Paulo Freire was to write, after Satre, that education must rid us of the “fear of freedom.”  Alas, only in Latin America do we now seem to have regimes that may encourage the “populace” to do so through their systems of schooling.  For the rest, it is still Cuba. Where are the movements elsewhere that have the least object or likelihood of making   education coterminous with that recovery of our humanness which the world craves?

Again I reflect how the Bard, as always, knew a great deal about such matters.  Recall that when Macbeth’s masculine nerve rather wobbles at the last minute, his neocon consort dares him: “thou wouldst be a man if thou durst do it” (that is, kill the king, inter alia, invade iraq, kill Saddam and so on).  And how telling, although pathetic, a riposte Macbeth delivers unto her: “I dare do all that may become a man;/ who dares do more is none.”

How that thought nails the monetary economist, the corporates he spawns, and the Neanderthal neocons (and they are not just in the United States of America) piercingly in the belly button.  But of course, as Henry Fielding would have said, shame is the first meal these kinds eat before they go for breakfast! They leave the business of being human to the rampaging Evangelist/Mullah/Mahant, who in turn teach  that being human means being victorious in battles of various kinds.  God has no room for “losers” they say. Blessed no longer are the meek but the mighty, for their’s is the oil and the uranium.  It is a weak prophet who says turn the other cheek.

V

Indeed, what does it mean to be human (and no ontological debate is intended here)?Recall the days not too long ago when walking down the pavement and noticing a self-contained person some distance away, you remarked to your companion “such a good man; she/he thinks of everybody.”

But as the world advances, Capital has taught us the truth about that  person—a “waster, shun him.”  Good is the human being who minds his own business at all costs.  He does not stop to look at the fellow just come under the wheels of the latest Chrysler; he does not let his mind waver from the shady deal to be signed at the golf club.  He if anything formulates the most efficient plan yet not for the alleviation of suffering but for the eradication of those who are no- good sufferers.  Ah, the fruits of education!  The least mongrel on the hobo street has lessons we could learn inorder to become human.  But we are on the road to progress and have ears only for the next announcement at the stock market, eyes only for the next piece of lucrative real-estate, and dreams only about the next career promotion or marvel of household technology. Where we once counted children, we count remotes to sundry gadgets.  And when a gadget goes Hawai, we curse the service fellow whose dying wife keeps him from attending our need!

And the evangelists and the godmen, they teach us to mind our own salvation through greater physical fitness so that we tire less in attending to profit-making.  Health services for all, community education, shared labour, shared partaking—these are the things that must be avoided like the plague. When you hear such sounds, say “the reds are coming.” And education that teaches respect for the other, for difference, or, god forbid, begins to examine the roots of our own rottenness, that indeed is the devil’s work.  That is when you forget the priest and call out the troops.

Thus, if Plato threw the poets out of his republic, we must add to those the humanists, the social scientists, the philosophers, the political activists, the  artists, the rebels without “cause”, the “wasters” who strangely do not value profit-making, the disabled, the old, the needlessly sick, the children who only make demands but add nothing to GDP. And we must make education available only to those who can pay.  To the rest we say, god prepares a heaven for you, so why need you the earth.

And WTO will say endorse only those authors, those academies, those entrepreneurs, those middle-men, those commission agents, those publishers, and those governments,  who can conjointly make of education not the third-most but the most lucrative global “service.” In Brahminical parlance, dethrone Saraswati, install Laxmi as the reigning goddess of learning– which she already is, de facto.

Make of your education a billion-pound note; and then go ask for the Presidential vote.  With that note in one hand and the evangelist/godman in the other, you cannot go wrong.  You may only end up destroying the world, a small price to pay for success.

As to the world,  may be the time for it to end  has come anyway.
________________________________________________________

1. See my Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth, univ., of Wisconsin Press, 1986, p.145

2. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, for a penetrating analysis of these ideological conjunctions.

3. See T.B.Bottomore, Elites and Society, Penguin, 1964 for a lucid account of these histories.

____________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com

“I swear to God on high I have not lived long at Corporate Headquarters. I swear it has only been a few years, Judge. I didn’t know where else to turn, who else had running water, clean showers, good food, medical facilities, and more.”         

“That’s no excuse, Mr. Peonne. You know prisons have the same amenities. Or nearly. You should have turned there. After all, we’ve set them up for you and your kind.” 

“Not the prisons, Judge. Please, I’ll do anything you want. I’ll go kill Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, anyone.”  

“Anyone?” 

“Well, almost.” 

“That’s the wrong attitude, Mr. Peonne. Here in America we don’t just send people off to kill people. Not without a good reason, at least. We send people off to democratize whole countries, while defending our own.” 

“I know it has nothing to do with oil, your Honor.” 

“It most certainly does not,” snapped the judge. 

“I know, I know. I owe, I owe, is what I’m trying to say. I’m sorry for robbing Corporate Headquarters by secretly living there. To survive. I’m willing to do almost anything to pay back my debt to society, to stay out of prison.” 

“Your debt to society may be to go to prison, Mr. Peonne. Ever think of that. And why not, you’ll be with your people there. You have something against your people, Mr. Peonne? Something you might like to share with us, hmm?” 

“Prison will kill me.” 

“Rise above it, young man,” declared the judge. “We must all learn to rise above our lot in life, while accepting it fully, whatever it may be.” 

“Some lots are harder than others, Sir.” 

“It’s the positive attitude that counts, in all things.” 

“Live and let live, Judge?” 

“Precisely.” 

“Or live and let die?” 

“Twenty years! Hard labor! Or simply no labor at all. Sheer confinement if you prefer. Be gone now, young man. Think long and hard about your role in this world. Be honest about it and you will be rewarded, inwardly at least. Trust me.” 

“Oh, I do, Judge. I trust you’ve killed me. More and less. I don’t mean that personally, you understand? I know you’re just doing your job.” 

“Thirty years! I don’t care! Make it forty! Be gone!” 

———————————————————— 

We found Joe Peonne unconscious at the edge of the woods near Freeland. We took him in, and he muttered over and over the name Stan D. Garde, Stan D. Garde, as if he had suffered some personal horrible experience at the hands of the Stan D. Garde. And so it was, for Joe Peonne soon told us his story of the state of the corporate world which it has been his fate to endure: Joe Peonne - Plutopia. 

from ZNet