A Practical Policy

When the bankers bailed out their own bankruptcy with the future earnings of debtors, we satirists surrendered.

We trooped en masse to a hastily arranged convention determined to write a Manifesto of Surrender. How could we knot? The world defeated us – had, has, and will have. We were so defeated we could knot even explain how defeated we were. Did knot even know where to start. Did knot know where knot to start, so defeated were we. So we called a convention. Isn’t that what you do when you don’t know what to do? You call a big meeting. At least then you can point to the ignorance of the guy beside you.

Well all these satiric fools my friends, probably seeing in me a remarkably dimmer version of themselves, nominated and appointed me, by unanimous descent, to be a Thomas Satiric Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Interrogation, to be author of our very own Manifesto of Surrender. I felt fooly honored.

“We give up!” I suggested, as opening line. More

Though available in English for a couple years, it’s worth a revisit. Reviewed by Aminatta Forna:

In the year in which the despotic leader of the fictional African nation of Aburiria announces a grand scheme to build the world’s tallest building, Kamiti, a luckless job seeker, wakes up on a rubbish heap to find himself possessed of magical powers.

So begins Wizard of the Crow , Ngugi wa Thiong’o's epic African political satire, his first novel in 20 years. Daunting in its ambition and scale, spanning more than 700 pages, it is, in the author’s own words, the story of “Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history.” More

Jennifer Nix:

I once again see the potential and power of literature, and hope to tell new and necessary stories. As activists, we must not lose sight of art. Let’s reach out to artists and publishers, and find ways to connect, cross-pollinate and collaborate. Let’s all tell some new stories.

In the meantime, here are some questions I posed to Aleksandar Hemon. Take another moment…I promise you’ll enjoy his sense of humor. And, if you make it to the end, I just have this to say: Page 150.

JN: How did you discover Lazarus Averbuch, and did you set out on this project with all of the political themes in mind?

AH: A friend of mine gave me the book called An Accidental Anarchist by Walter Roth and Joe Krauss. It was a straight, smart historical recounting of the Lazarus Averbuch affair, including the political fallout–the persecution of anarchists and foreigners, changes in immigration laws etc. I have deep interest in immigration and displacement, for obvious reasons, so the book was very fascinating to me. I am a history buff, because it interests me how people lived in the past and how we got to this point, whatever the point.

And history is always political, both in its form and in its content. On the one hand, what people look for and see in history is necessarily related to their politics. On the other hand, history to some extent always records the human consequences of political decisions and catastrophes, as well as the decisions and catastrophes themselves. Which is to say that I did not need to set out to do a political book. I simply knew that neither the politics of that time (and our time) nor the fallout of human suffering could be kept out of the book.

Spike Lee to Film Tony Award-Winning Musical “Passing Strange” as Show Comes to a Close on Broadway

Passing Stange was first commissioned by the Public Theater of New York, premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, and is now a hit show on Broadway. The last performance takes place at the Belasco Theatre on Sunday, but that won’t be the last time audiences get to enjoy the show. The acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee is planning to film the musical this weekend to bring it to a wider audience. Speaking at a press conference earlier this month Spike Lee described why he wanted to film the play.

SPIKE LEE: As a filmmaker, for me, the greatest artists are musicians. I know there are painters and sculptors and novelists, and what not. But for me, musicians are the greatest artists on this earth, because I feel the talents they have come directly from God, and I really feel that. And when I saw the play at the Public, I was knocked out. And I came back a second time with Wesley Snipes, and I go, “You gotta see this!” And the story—the story, the musicianship, the acting, it was a revelation. More

July 2000 article at US New and World Report, and extensive discussion at The Valve.

A view on the politics of some of Shakespeare’s plays:

‘Guilty in Defence’: Shakespeare’s Radical Political Theatre by Ken Jessome

in miniature

THE LAST CHARACTER IN THE WORLD

Once upon a time in a land very very close by, in something of a pious fraud of a mass email, lived a media figment of the imagination. His name was the President of the United States – POTUS. Potus, for short.

Potus was a real person but he did not play one on TV. His role on TV was that of corporate drone looking the part of a human being working hard at being a corporate drone – with fetching big military muscles – for which Potus was cherished lauded and applauded by many another drone-being-drone, DBD, on TV. Potus ruled over the entire world, or thought he did, or gave the impression he would want to as was expected of the last great hope on Earth.

Potus bowed so often to his paymasters, the Banksters and all their buddies, that he had silver dollars for eyes. Without all his banksters Potus was invisible, no one could see him, least of all the TVs. So Potus was a true TV hero and heroic only there, an actor in The Greatest Show on Earth! His was the reality shows of reality shows. Everyone wanted to play Potus, be Potus, see Potus. (Well, not everyone but so many did that it hardly seems an exaggeration.) Potus was popular.

Well not popular exactly. No Potus these days could scarcely get a quarter of eligible voters to so much as move a finger for him, other than the middle, once every four years. But popular enough! After all, his story was beamed through the media all the time, 24/7. Potus was a star, the star. He was sort of like the first and last character in the world. At least, that is how he appeared in America, if, sadly, not exactly everywhere else. More

Review by Peter Faulkner:

This well informed and clearly written book has two main aims: to tell the reader about the importance and extent of the tradition of anarchist or left-libertarian writing in Britain; and to argue for the urgent relevance today of that tradition of political thought, particularly in its pacifist and environmentalist forms. The latter aim is necessarily the more difficult to fulfil, since it may well come up against the reader’s existing political prejudices or commitments; and I will consider it later. But in that it provides a great deal of information in a form that is both accessible and suggestive of the importance of the tradition discussed, the book is undoubtedly successful. Eight writers classified by Goodway as anarchists are discussed at length, in historical order as follows: Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Alex Comfort, Christopher Pallis and Colin Ward. In addition, Goodway offers thoughtful readings here of three other writers broadly sympathetic to the anarchist tradition, but with more reservations about it: William Morris, George Orwell and E. P. Thompson. Each writer is carefully placed in his historical context: Morris in that of late-Victorian radicalism; Orwell that of Spain and the Civil War; and Thompson in that of nuclear disarmament and the ‘New Left’.

…

From Anarchist Librarian’s Web:

Favorite Anarchist/Libertarian Novels 1.0 – July 1998 – This list compiled from discussions held on the anarchy-list in July 1998:

In no particular (dis)order:

• Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin
• Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin
• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
• He, She and It by Marge Piercy
• Woman on Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
• The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant
• The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
• Illicit Passage by Alice Nunn
• A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
• Anarchist Farm by Jane Doe More

Great Novel of the People - Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
Leftward Whoa! The Academy
PEN and Public or Political Fiction
“Incompatible”? – Novels, Politics, News?
Literature, Teaching, Ideology
The Reactionary Ayn Rand
Huckleberry Finn and Effects of Story
John Updike’s Lit Establishment Rules
Noam Chomsky, Orwell, and the Importance of Caricature
The Power and Import of Purpose in Fiction
The Possibilities of “Political Fiction”
Impact of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Orwell’s Problem and Partisan Fiction [with links, clear quotes, see here]
Progressive Political Fiction 
Write a Political Novel?
The Power of Political Fiction and Mainstay Press — Interview
A Few Notes on the Literary Establishment  
Against Vicious Injustice — An Interview with Mickey Z
Politics and Art – The Personal is the Public and Private
Great Lit Is Based On Principle – Letter to ULA
The Future of Imaginative Literature – Roles for Novelists 
The Fate of Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery
Fiction and Social Change – Some Limits of DeLillo, Pynchon…
NYT Best Fiction Discussion and Artists in Times of War (Arundhati Roy)
“Best Work of American Fiction“
More on the NYT “best of” American fiction list
Barbara Kingsolver’s 2006 Bellwether Prize
The Politics of Literary Politics
Have They Been Banned? Iraq War Novels — Interview
Establishment Irresponsibility: Ana Marie Cox Wrong on Stephen Colbert…
Send a Novel Message
Nothing They Care to Hear — Stephen Colbert
The Power of Poetry

Karen D’Souza:

“Americans (and many others) are hungry for something beyond the political twaddle that passes for national debate in this country, and indeed globally,” says Stanford University drama professor Rush Rehm. “The Mime Troupe calls things as they are; our political debate at the national level has an ‘all wear gloves’ approach, only rarely can anything be talked about.

“The Mime Troupe uses one of the rare public spaces available – performances outdoors in the park, free, and there, lo! still some truths can be told. Audiences like that, and we need it.”

For the Mime Troupe, art and activism have always been flip sides of the same coin. These left-wing rabble-rousers don’t even charge for tickets (though they do pass the hat); they believe that if theater is to be for the people, it must be truly accessible.

Lisa Traiger:

It’s hard to get rid of the sinking feeling that occurs in reliving the run-up to the most recent invasion of Iraq. In Stuff Happens, onstage at Olney Theatre Center through July 20, British playwright David Hare takes on very recent American history, recounting the maneuvers and backroom alliances made and broken by the Bush administration. Truth and fiction intermingle as we see the folly of a few leaders, enamored of power, tear asunder nations and people.

That’s Stuff Happens, its title drawn from the simplistic shrug then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made in response to a question about rioters looting Baghdad following the U.S. invasion.

Within this larger landscape, there’s one gasp-inducing moment in the Olney Theatre’s three-hour production, strategically directed by Jeremy Skidmore. Naomi Jacobson plays a nameless Palestinian woman, her hair modestly covered, her accent thick with the sand and sun of the Middle East. Plaintive and accusatory, the woman, a Palestinian scholar, asks, “Why Iraq? Why now ֹ for us, it is all about one thing: defending the interests of America’s $1 billion a year colony in the Middle East.”

“We,” she asserts, “are the Jews of the Jews.”

At a theater like Olney, long ensconced in suburban Montgomery County with its heavily Jewish audience, a collective gasp at that moment comes without surprise. While Hare’s work is no shock-and-awe campaign, this monologue hits with surgical accuracy.

Nick Miroff:

Seeing the city’s efforts as a ruse to silence him, Fernandez insists he will not remove the sign, nor allow it to be removed. Instead — and this is where the standoff takes an especially strange twist– Fernandez plans to enlarge the structure, having spent $1,500 on architectural drawings for a new, bigger, L-shaped wall, 140 feet by 61 feet, that would span the length of the property.

The new sign, Fernandez said, would feature painted murals and captions depicting the history of American racial injustice. “I really want the community to see what has been done to us people of color these last 500 years,” said Fernandez, whose message to the “European Americans” of Manassas considers Latino immigrants to be “Native Americans” with a historical right to live in the United States.