The Great Gatsby was recently feted on its centennial anniversary at The Metropolitan Review by way of several thoughtful and laudatory reviews and the claim that “If there is a Great American Novel, it is The Great Gatsby” — a claim that I view as both haplessly antique and wholly off-putting.
Some days later, novelist and often deft literary critic and commentator Naomi Kanakia noted in a searching essay on literary “taste” that
if [literary taste] exists, then it is extremely noisy and error-prone when it’s applied to contemporary literature. Someone with ‘good’ taste is only right a very small percentage of the time when they say a contemporary work is truly great and is likely to last. And yet…this noisiness disappears when the ‘tasteful’ person applies their sensors to the great works of the past. For instance, during this Gatsby centenary, nobody posted a Gatsby takedown. Nobody said Gatsby is overrated. Why is that?
To which I jotted down in the comments, “The cringe factor, maybe?” and posted some of the additional commentary reproduced below — as a “takedown,” if you like, of the idea of Gatsby as lead contender for “Great American Novel.”
As a reminder to anyone who may want more Liberation Lit than is received in these periodic emailed posts, see the non-emailed “Notes” (blog) section of Lib Lit, where I expand on what by now amounts to a DIY lit mag.
The Great American Whitewash: The Great Gatsby and Imperial Culture
I think The Great Gatsby is wildly overrated. I also think that suggesting it as The Great American Novel amounts to the bankruptcy of American literature. It’s an accomplished novel. There are a lot of accomplished novels.
The canon has always been an intensely politicized creature, not only for those works closest to our own day and age but especially for those. So many works are distorted or neglected, for piercingly political reasons, especially by those literary critics (though far from only) who actually believe they are not making political judgments or discriminations.
I think Tamara Pearson’s recent novel The Eyes of the Earth is a great novel of the Americas, an important work. It is essentially unknown. Why is that? The reasons are plutocratic and political.
Would-be great American novels, especially as great novels of the people, face such barriers and challenges. Uncle Tom’s Cabin needed to be published (serialized) in an activist/abolition journal and was an unexpected hit. No establishment publisher — with far more resources and other advantages — would touch it. The situation is roughly similar today in many respects, maybe worse — so why should skilled novelists who value being published and their work made visible attempt their own explicit great “American” novels of, say, today’s blood thirsty imperialism, including of their own country, the death march rule of the plutocratic corporate-state and the lethal society that is its handmaiden — sprung from a gruesome and ongoing history of Native genocide and race-based slavery and imprisonment? Now that could deservedly be a great American novel.
While the situation is not monolithic, it is extraordinarily highly politicized right across the establishment spectrum. The canon and thoughts on the canon are infected by this.
And thus, the canon is devastated in conception and inception, and in editing and publishing, let alone in potential and eventual appraisal.
The Great Gatsby skated right through all this, being written by an elite white author, about elite white interests and concerns, and then being eventually vaunted by elite intellectual handmaidens to Empire. So touching. So thoughtful. And containing very limited elite criticisms and longings.
I mean, come on. We live in increasingly populist times. People are sick of the white-gloved and thin, glancing and indirect, or lively but weak criticisms and views and dramatizations of the miserable and undeniably murderous state of society that the rise of people’s media makes increasingly visible and felt to all.
In America from the latter part of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s the four most prominent left-wing magazines were probably Appeal to Reason, based in populist Kansas, and The Masses, The New Masses, and The Liberator based in New York City. These magazines provided reporting, culture, and social and commercial services for progressives trying to build a better world, live a better life — as did similar and related magazines like The Coming Nation and Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth — following in the mighty footsteps of the abolitionist The National Era (that first published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as serial) and Frederick Douglass’s reconstruction age newspaper New National Era.
The four main left-wing magazines published some of the greatest journalists and literary writers and visual artists of any time. Appeal to Reason published Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Mary “Mother” Jones, Eugene Debs, and Helen Keller — socialists all, or socialist kin. Upton Sinclair’s impactful best-selling novel The Jungle was first published in the weekly newspaper as a serial, just as a half century earlier Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s blockbuster novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published as a serial in the left-wing newsweekly The National Era.
The cultural and social impact of New Masses was also great and The Masses and The Liberator published many great writers and artists as well, including:
Maurice Becker, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Fred Ellis, Lydia Gibson, William Gropper, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, J.J. Lankes, Boardman Robinson, Edmund Wilson, Wanda Gág, and Art Young. Each color cardstock cover of The Liberator was unique. Poetry and fiction fleshed out its pages, including work by Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, Arturo Giovannitti, and others.
Eventually the US Post Office refused to mail copies of The Masses because of its opposition to US involvement in the imperial bloodbath of World War One. And so it was basically sued out of existence. See “A Brief History of The Masses” by Madeleine Baran in The Brooklyn Rail.
Courageous and brilliant anarchist Emma Goldman’s left-wing magazine Mother Earth was yet another vital left-wing journal of the socialist era in America, running from 1906 to 1917. Mother Earth was also forced out of existence by the Post Office and the Justice (Injustice) Department during World War One.
After being blocked and sued out of existence, The Masses was re-started under the name The Liberator (1918-1924) and was succeeded by New Masses (1926-1948).
Three of the greatest American novels written in the 1920s, maybe the three greatest — Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Jews Without Money — were written by the editors of the leading left-wing magazines of the day, The Liberator and The New Masses, both based in New York City, whose editors included Claude McKay and Mike Gold (Irwin Granich).
The world’s best-selling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, was first serialized in the progressive abolition newsletter The National Era.
The best-selling novel The Jungle was first serialized in Appeal to Reason, the progressive populist newspaper from Kansas. The newspaper funded Upton Sinclair the research for the novel, about $20,000 in today’s money.
You certainly won’t find engaged literature — any literature? — in, say, Jacobin magazine, or in most any left news periodical today — wholly unlike in times past when left-leaning progressive journals helped form and expand and strengthen the consciousness of the times by first serializing (or excerpting pre-book-publication) bestselling progressive cultural blockbusters, progressive literary classics, and other novels like The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, News From Nowhere, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Dred, Daughter of Earth, Jews Without Money, Hard Times, Germinal, Mother, Herland…
Does anyone think that might be a problem?
Look at the eleven populist novels, listed above, serialized in progressive journals — only two were published post World War One — Daughter of Earth and the proletarian populist standout novel Jews Without Money — and these two were merely excerpted prior to book publication, not serialized, unlike the others.
So serialized left fiction took a huge hit post World War One. And subsequently the great left-wing magazines of the socialist era in America died out. Correlation? Causation? Hard to say but a great general loss in literature and culture, society and politics, absolutely. Serialized left lit should be revived today, especially given the gutted contemporary publishing establishment.
Vastly aiding the abolition movement, Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was the greatest-selling novel of the nineteenth century and beyond, surpassing even the mighty progressive Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo (which can still claim perhaps the largest publishing deal in novel history and which may itself be the most overall influential novel in history, both ideologically and aesthetically). Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel The Jungle (1906) was also a best-seller and helped pass progressive legislation. Mike Gold’s socialist novel Jews Without Money (1930)remains politically, culturally, and aesthetically influential to this day, and is in every way a greater novel than the liberal and Cold Warrior favorite novel The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. These three great American abolition and socialist novels were first published in progressive, partisan newspapers and cultural journals that exceeded the establishmentarian liberal ideology of the day. This was especially true of the latter two socialist novels created and published during America’s socialist era. This era was rolled back by the “Cold War” that devastated much of the best of American art and literature, culture and society. The Cold War had severe mutilating and caustic effects, not least ideological, that continue to debilitate the present day.
At the time, Home to Harlem was a bestseller, award-winning, and more popular and widely discussed than The Great Gatsby. Banjo was more intellectually ambitious than Gatsby, and Jews Without Money was more politically influential. And today these three novels remain great and compelling reads that are especially populist and literary. But Cold War politics kicked in after World War Two, such that The Great Gatsby was ironically politicized and elevated as quintessential American lit — the Cold Warriors’ Great American Novel. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, in formation and canonization, Gatsby has become a liberal-conservative, establishment cultural fetish.
Meanwhile, the street-wise Home to Harlem, the exquisite populist Banjo, and the pulsing proletarian, rough-and-tumble Jews Without Money were devalued by establishment opinion when Cold War canon-making preferred depoliticized modernism — deliberate political blows to progressive intellect and consciousness, conception of self and society, and human awareness in general. It would take the insurgence of Latin American literature and multicultural literature decades later in American culture to begin to make up some of the lost ground of diversity and human consciousness, class consciousness and vibrant life in general.
Going all the way back to Marx and Hegel, the left has often been profoundly ignorant (not unlike the right) on matters of literature and ideology and aesthetics. The Old Left of the 1910s and 1920s had a better conception of art than Marx and Hegel (for example, Kenneth Burke was a far more advanced thinker on art than Hegel and Marx) but it could have been far better still, and then the New Left of the Frankfurt school and so on severely mishandled things and was co-opted by much Cold War ideology.
This highly politicized canon-mangling also greatly disfigures creation, production, and reviews of movies and TV shows — and the whole culture industry. The novel is very far from from being special in this regard or outside of these massive disfigurements, constraints, and wholesale eviscerations.
Time to put Gatsby back up there high on its decorative shelf and seek out and gut out far more, a good bit closer to the ground, in this blood-soaked and potentially terminal novel day of our lives.
The novel, it’s an art. It takes some craft. And a lot more of value besides. Including more than is conventionally esteemed — or even readily understood or admitted in a historically supremacist and imperial country and culture. The multicultural and class expansion has been a partial testament to some good change in American lit, despite continual backsliding. As for revolutionary expansion and change in lit, badly needed, or even progressive populist change, not nearly enough. To the point where the whole scene, whether elite or imitation elite, can discredit the enterprise of literacy, let alone of advanced literacy.
The Great Gatsby (1925) is not even the most lively, valuable, or artistic American novel written within five years of its male-dominated time, let alone of all time, not when compared variously to McKay’s Banjo (1929) and Home to Harlem (1928), and Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), and other contenders. These less decorous novels don’t fit quite so easily into the elevated sensibilities of what would do and not do to say in high culture.
Thus opens the free-rambling sometimes biting dramedy of Naomi Kanakia’s rough and raw first literary novel, The Default World. The novel presents a nipping critique and exploration of a world wherein “Excuse me, but” begins to set the bold tenor of the narration, though the novel often reads like one long cancel culture party at, say, Oberlin College — with all the psychologically intoxicated highs and lows that that may entail — while the main characters are twenty-somethings who live in San Francisco.
Kanakia can write, even as the story spins its wheels, which some might see as more a feature than a bug. A lot of the novel reads like a description of twenty-somethings who act like they are in their early and mid teens, or like a flock of fiery siblings who take turns thinking, suggesting, and essentially declaring, “I will kill you! And your whole life!” “No, I will kill you. And your whole life!” And then they make up with each other the next day — or they don’t.
If you like Céline, Houellebecq, Dostoevsky, and Ralph Ellison, then there’s no reason you should not like The Default World.
There’s an interesting class or class conscious line that runs through the novel, as the main character, Jhanvi, cannot afford multiple transition surgeries — or even housing. The aggressive and self-loathing, confident and self-effacing, self-propelling protagonist Jhanvi schemes to extract what resources and friendship she can from the wealthy clique she knows and hangs with while critiquing them, sometimes disparagingly. Love is also an immediate yet frustrating and seemingly distant goal.
This class line, class consciousness in the story is extremely truncated. All the focus of the class conflicts, pressures, and needs are pushed on Jhanvi’s acquaintances and sometimes receptive, sometimes skittish friends, also on the overwhelmed far-off parents, rather than on any sector or feature of society — government, religion, the media, or other organizations and officials.
Thus the stark but clipped class critique and exploration is made almost entirely a personal and cliquish matter, rather than a more encompassing societal critique, which creates nonstop personal civil war among the characters in their assigned roles, with essentially no thought or action or exploration toward social and political struggle. Bits of slightly broader class critique crop up, if micro-targeted, essentially clique-based too — Jhanvi wouldn’t fit in with this crowd or that crowd, and so on. To note the class limitation of this type of novel is not necessarily to criticize it but to critique it, perhaps it needs be pointed out. A criticism would be the sort of analysis I often put forth at length elsewhere — institutional analyses of literary forces and production, which I touch on later, though barely.
Kanakia loves to drop very novelistic reflections and takeaways on the personal scenarios and micro-social happenings and ways of thinking and being. It’s all very scrutinized, the plight of Jhanvi and her view of her default crowd, in this social and biological transitory (yet enduring) stage of her life — a study of alienation, resentment, kinship, and other modes of being in a soul-crushing situation where needs go badly unmet. To this distinct quest for fulfillment and the meeting of basic needs, the novel gives indelible witness and makes every attempt at felt comprehension.
The story consists of very domestic and personal drama and relationships much in keeping with the dominant ethos of commercial and establishment liberal publishing. Ironically — given Kanakia’s critical use of the title phrase of the novel — this sort of fiction is the default world of publishing. Otherwise, the novel is part of the limited though badly needed advance from the previous default world of publishing that existed decades ago, prior to the multicultural expansion, broadly defined.
There is much play with the notion of the scoundrel that helps propel the novel — the righteous and aggressive, turbulent and scathing Jhanvi pushing the conflicts and questions and paradoxes that drive story, along with the stoking of anger, desire, and fears. The rapscallion energy of Jhanvi is functionally propulsive even as some of the dramatizations and discursive breakdowns of the antagonisms between the narrator and everyone else are also the most belabored and drawn-out swaths of the novel, as if the author were searching for enough interpersonal conflict to sustain a novel-length quest and adventure story.
The inclusion of more broad or more systemic societal critiques would make the novel more capacious and insightful, more whole. And at a practical artistic level, doing so could seriously bolster the plot, character, settings, themes, and emotional fullness or resonance. Victor Hugo is a master of this in Les Misérables, the height of the novel’s accomplishment and power. Jhanvi is all about portraying herself as a misérable — a wretch, wretched — if sometimes ironically. In this case, a knowing wretch with great agency.
The critiques and dramatizations do not always land well or with much impact in The Default World, given that the targets can seem relatively simple and slight — or simpled and slighted. Jhanvi dancing with hammers among flies. The conflict for the protagonist amounts to the fact that her well-off liberal frenemies are not entirely pushovers, amid Jhanvi’s schemes to extract money and other resources from them for housing and transition surgeries and to meet other personal and social needs.
Because the protagonist operates in a near default mode of pressuring and presuming upon her target acquaintances, it would be more compelling to see ever more powerful comeuppance against Jhanvi by stronger opposing characters and plot elements biting back with far more force, either verbally or in action. There are moments. The most compelling section or two of the novel is when this actually happens, when the protagonist is pushed out and away from her place of shelter, as well as from her phone and money.
Otherwise many scenes can seem like a descent into the squabbling of young teens. The narration tries to rip through its truths but the would-be knifing criticism can come off as tuneless or immature squabbling — in isolation from a more intense gravity and greater range of more mature experience in a much larger world. Feature or bug — readers will decide. Some may lap it up, I assume. To its credit the novel handles what it can handle within its could-be city-sized but more often apartment-sized confines, and fraught excursions to bar and street and eatery, and phone.
Some descents into a naturalism of conversation and thought too often go nowhere — “one of the damned thing is ample,” thanks — or to little where, both critically and dramatically, one of the perils of realist mimicry, no matter how intent the narrative might be about precision depiction — especially then. If you’ve got something to propagandize or invent in telling your story, you should go for it like nothing else. Really make it novel. Or risk being mired in too-commonly known experience and states of being. People want more, so much more, underneath all the deathly conventions. (Not that all conventions are deathly.) Novels necessarily want to “make it new” or “make it news” and should go for it. It’s an art of course — you need to launch the work aesthetically, then follow through. That said, the especially vital new or news can make up for the bare minimum of aesthetics at least as well as great aesthetics can make up for worn out norms.
Fortunately The Default World is launched and driven by a sound set-up of character and plot, though some of the long lines of dialogue and reflection — discourse equivalent — seem to express little more than the imperative that certain well-to-do liberals should be more personally philanthropic than they are. Which is good, as far as it goes, but this only takes us so far into the big bad class-segregated and systemically ruled world of ours. After all, some liberals are very generous — if not necessarily the ones Jhanvi knows.
In any case, liberalism is not the way forward and fundamentally has not been for centuries. Sure, it’s better than fascism, the lowest of bars, and it improves upon a few other choking political ideologies but liberalism hits its own transparent dead end when tied to capitalism — as in the novel. The result, at best, is civil war — even among the upper middle classes.
Personal salvation and possibly some perceived retribution may be all that the protagonist and narrator need in this novel, but the narrator is telling the story, not receiving it. Countless others are receiving it potentially, most of whom are in situations far, far less advantageous than that of the protagonist — having not attended the elite Stanford University like Jhanvi, nor being able to wrangle their way among rich friends, nor with still other financial and personal fallbacks.
The upper middle class life mimicry and thematic conceptualization of the story is a bit confined given the wide-ranging and global situations of people everywhere — often truly desperately caught in catastrophe, life-mangled, life-ending — grim and pervasive realities of which most everyone is aware, or should be — in what might be thought of as the real default world. When readers are living in a bigger world than the novel presents, or are actively engaged with it, or are even very conscious of that bigger and more pressing world, then there can be narrative issues of gaining and sustaining attention and focus.
That said, the broad-based, street-level, and daily quests for surgery and housing, for mental clarity and human connection have their very real moments in the novel. The contentious and complicated coming-of-age personal and social struggles are intensely emotional, intellectual, and morally explored, and deserve most of the attention of the novel and sometimes get it in good measure. At other times, many of the interactions of the friends and acquaintances and narrative lines seem to tread water.
The gender and identity musings, analyses, and soliloquys of the narrator are heartfelt and rending — often conflicted, and endlessly aching. These seem the most searching and incisive parts of the novel, tying in with dramatic explorations of loneliness, exclusion, and stress-filled friendships.
Published by The Feminist Press, The Default World has found a fitting home, not least given the narrator’s ardent and explicit longing for the female and for the feminine and for a kind of justice and connection, in the personal and particular forms in which it is sought in the novel.
The Default World is a literary novel of personal self realization and multicultural peer pressure — if we understand gender and sex and even class and other forms of identity as cultural — narrative modes that may recall Kanakia’s Young Adult novel roots. And the novel contains some of the charm of quest narratives common to speculative stories of which Kanakia is also no writerly stranger.
All of a piece. Writing, stories are often cobbled together like lives and identities are cobbled together. The cobbler though as an artist does well to review and revise and reconceive with an eye toward the much greater whole, especially in the novel form, that “baggy monster” that threatens to fly part under the pressure of its mixed gravities and countervailing vectors.
The very ending of this novel — mini-spoiler alert — the end of the long last sentence — is more low-key clever and banal than powerful and resonant: “…Oh, I love her, she’s such a good friend.” An ironic joke almost, or nervous fillip. Writers often draw things out (especially online) — paragraphs, sentences, books — for one of two main reasons, the first involving great power and insight, the second involving a waffling sort of obscurity, a kind of attempt to sound good despite an underlying sense of insufficiency, incomprehension, or indecision.
I find it strange that people don’t first go to the final few paragraphs of a novel to decide if they want to read the book or not. After all, that’s where the whole thing is going and should give you a sense of the mass that came before. You cannot always tell if you will appreciate the novel by reading the final few bits but you sometimes can.
I also don’t understand people who claim to need to read blind to the end for sake of the final few paragraphs — for suspense, I guess — if such people are truly compelled in this way. A novel is a big lift. The bits are not all that much compared to the whole. So I’ll keep chipping away at any faux suspense here: the final sentence opens: “Maybe life was just filled with relationships that were” this, that, and the other. Not exactly a resounding culmination.
If you open the last paragraph with two sentences (before the final long sentence) that read, “The words weren’t right. And perhaps that was the point” then the words had better be right. You can’t beg off at this point into evasions of meaning. The meaning at the very end does not need to be grand but it does need to be spot on and not simply clever or seemingly arbitrary and inconclusive — unless those are your main themes which is not the case here. It’s not a bad ending. It seems to point to some blurred focus and notions in the story while partly undercutting the main narrative lines. Jhanvi the conciliatory, the detached philosophical, at the beginning, middle, or end — who would’ve thought.
I think this fracture in conception is brought on in part by last second swerves in relationships and crimped or curtailed understandings of relationships — swerves that seem in their own way much delayed and understandings too slim (while being somewhat satisfying and poignant), swerves in narrative that mistake main themes or revolve around ancillary themes right at the moment of final plot culmination, where all eyes are necessarily focused. Looking in one direction, writing in another — plural. Too much Jhanvi for the moment, too uncertain and unreliable in observation — amid insufficient clear-eyed depiction of others.
Does this seem too picky? Or does this get at a main fault line in The Default World?
A big part of the problem writing in a “third person” point of view very close to “first person” is giving too much “I” perspective and feeling and not enough other. When that happens, things can quickly skew — plot, theme, concept, character, value, evaluation, and more. America’s greatest philosopher, John Dewey notes that “Even if ‘consciousness’ were the wholly private matter that the individualistic tradition in philosophy supposes it to be, it would still be true that consciousness is of objects [including others], not of itself.” Those other people and objects, the world, have a lot to say, to great potential impact, when depicted for readers as unfiltered and expressive as possible.
Jhanvi is far less a scoundrel, or criminal, than she casts herself to be, and the other main characters are greater vacuums than anyone realizes — including the narrator. In America, it’s what might be thought of as a blue state novel. One need not look far to find counterpart red state novels and stories, where the protagonists are not as good as the narration perceives them to be (even with all irony) and the criminals or nemeses in the story are almost beside the point to any great story of our time, or totally wrong. Both blue and red state stories are not infrequently both wrong or beside the point of what they presume to be. Not that blue and red cover the entire spectrum of imaginative works, very far from it, at least on the outskirts. People have such strong affinities to their states of being — sometimes surprising.
Reading through the somewhat dramatic multi-stage history of this novel might indicate additional reasons for some of the veering nature of themes and literary lines in the novel. Kanakia describes how she force-marched this work to ultimate completion and successful publication. Quite the process, quite the transition.
Regardless, The Default World is driven by real purpose and meaningful content — typically needed and good things, especially in artistic forms that go long and in great detail, like the novel. Felt purpose, often gutsy purpose, is key in all kinds of ways, and form is the shape of content, except as exercise. Without great normative purpose, and without strong motivation, understanding, and effort, who would we be? What would novels be? We would be even greater prey to circumstance, and worse.
Without great purpose in art and life we are captive to the default world that Kanakia and Jhanvi strive to burst through — and do — each in their own way.
Plenty of strong passages in the novel could be quoted here, but for sake of time I’ll leave it to others to identify their own.
Imaginative writers must intervene directly and explicitly in the crises of the day. The day demands revolutionary art. The alternative is complicity.
Not all art need be revolutionary, for that would be a reactionary gutting of life, full life, but much art must radically — basically and clearly — engage the crises of the day.
One can draw upon explicit liberatory examples of art of the past or look at the world as it exists and might exist to create anew. Lack of revolutionary art is an utter loss of consciousness — let alone conscience.
The American literary novel today may not be genocidal, but is it anti-genocidal the way it might be if it were to intervene explicitly and directly in the day — as Uncle Tom’s Cabin intervened directly and explicitly and effectively in its day against the abhorrent institution of slavery?
This novel that catalyzed the abolitionist movement was serialized in an activist newspaper — because the establishment would not publish it. Much the same as today.
Likewise, today’s explicit and direct abolition and revolutionary novels in the form of movies and TV series go unproduced — gutting culture and consciousness and a better chance at any future at all.
And what of literary criticism, which has pervasively radically and falsely devalued and dismissed both the artistic and societal achievements of literary activist publishing and activist authors — like The National Era abolition newspaper that first published the mighty novel of the accomplished literary author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher-Stowe?
Who will defend Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by running to her left in a potential presidential primary in 2028. Sound ridiculous? Running a candidate to the left of Bernie was probably the only thing th…
Literary criticism too can and must engage explicitly in the day and not disparage the most liberatory art of the day.
Failure to intervene explicitly and directly in the day by way of literature produces a brainwashed, gutless, and debased literature and culture that is complicit in society’s most horrific depredations.
Never more true than today, not least given the gruesome US-Israeli starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. This is humanity at its worst, broadcast live and in exhaustive detail online onscreen around the clock. Literature and all art must create urgently against genocide, against Empire, in real time.
Resistance and revolution should be televised and narrated, canonized and celebrated — not the stories of those who look and write and record the other way and away. The official world is mad, upside-down. Literature and all art should fight this insane reality head-on. It must.
Today the slaughter in Palestine is even worse than the Nakba, the catastrophe. This new terroristic and torturous genocide is pointedly sadistic and wholly deranged. The genocide is ordered, funded, and armed by the leading officials of the plutocracy in America and Israel. No secret gas chambers for the Palestinians. They are to be exterminated in plain sight. And the lesson is to be broadcast globally. Palestinians are to be made a hellacious example to the entire planet — Don’t you dare resist your brutal oppression.
And so Palestinians are slaughtered in open air on dead-eye screens world-wide, like a real reality horror show and endless movie — the people starved, bombed, and bulleted out of existence.
Behind the gunpowder and explosions and fires, which are already unspeakable and unthinkable yet existing, the root weapons of Empire are the psychological mass terror, economic and cultural conquest, and the psychotic deprivations and threats that create genocide. It’s this social and personal battlefield where revolutionary literature and art must engage explicitly and directly.
The open air genocide of the Palestinians is a purposeful show of power and insanity, depravity and brutality by design, by the militant capitalist Empire that terrorizes the world into submission.
No getting around it. The plutarchy and the oligarchs want there to be no getting around it. So we get the US-Israeli forced-march slaughter on endless repeat — drones, missiles, guns, tanks, and bulldozers — Made in the USA! — chasing after homeless Palestinians who flee on foot from the psychotic and sadistic US-Israeli aggression.
It’s a Genocide Show from the bottomless pits of the perpetrators’ own idea of Hell — a Hell for others, a Heaven for themselves. Truly a Biblical genocide, ripped from the pages of one of the most genocidal books in the canon. In this way, this Hell is the officials own homemade spiritual and martial invention. It’s a Wild West genocide of Palestinians that can make the trains-to-death-camps industrial slaughter of Jews and others by the German Nazis look civilized by comparison.
But it’s all the same project now for the militaries and the weaponized economies of the US-led capitalist empire and its conquest of the world. And literature ought to have something to say about it. Literature ought to have a lot to say. Explicitly and directly. One must fight politically, analytically, and culturally.
By now, long since, literature and art and its criticism ought to be obsessed with ending genocide and ending the pillaging predatory empires wherever and whenever they assault the human species. Or what is the exploration of the full human condition for?
A fully sane human species would find a way to abolish bombs and bullets and starvation and economic conquest. It would imagine the many ways forward. And literature ought to make it all explicit and direct — in visceral relation to the carnage and the possibilities of the day.
Revolutionary poets can lacerate the reality of the worst of official society. They can demand better, demand the human in urgent particulars.
Liberatory novelists can create imaginative figures who make radical and necessary demands and acts. They can even depict revolutionary leaders of a People’s America.
Radical short fiction writers can fillet official depravity, and they can illuminate ways forward from barbarous insanity to a sanity that is humane, convivial, hospitable.
Engaged literary critics can hold all literature to account, and they can urge revolutionary new ways forward in this mad and Orwellian era of vast calamity.
Film, video, graphics, song, and other forms of art can proceed likewise, explicitly and directly against Empire and toward a liberatory revolution in the way people conceive of themselves and the world and act within it.
To the revolutionary question, What is to be done — in literature and other art? — we might well answer that we should reveal the truth to people explicitly and directly — the bad and the good, the existing and the potential.
First, don’t be grotesque, inhuman. Second, be revolutionary, fully human. And third, do whatever else it takes. Delight and instruct, inspire and move — an ancient task never more urgent.
People think and remember, know and act often in aesthetic ways, artful ways, which are complementary to the analytic. So our resistance and revolutions in analysis, expression, and communication should look to partner with the aesthetic, with art, and the art of culture. Culture is deeply aesthetic, and full of art.
To gut literature, art, and culture of the liberatory revolutionary is to shatter consciousness, and to deceive and condition people to accept the intolerable, including the genocidal, and by now the wholesale ecocide of Earth.
Probably the greatest living literary activist author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o notes in Decolonising The Mind: “…the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism … is the cultural bomb.” Former revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez echoes: “The Empire sows death with its weapons. In contrast, these are our guns: books, ideas, culture.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o states elsewhere that revolutionary literature is crushed or disappeared by authoritarian societies “to suppress the capacity of people to imagine different futures, because imagination gives our first picture of different worlds. The capacity to picture different possibilities is very, very important for humans, and literature is very, very important in that respect. Authoritarian regimes want to limit the capacity of people to imagine different futures… Literature is important because of its capacity to fire the imagination — and to say we cannot just accept the present conditions. So we need other energies that come and imagine a different world.”
Here in America, authoritarian regime or not, we do much suppression in literature and other art voluntarily — convinced and clueless, or fearful — lobotomizing literature and art of the badly needed revolutionary, stripping ourselves of our ability to think and conceive, feel and imagine, even sometimes despite any thorough analysis of reality or other expression.
The establishment too knows that “books, ideas, culture” have the power of guns and can in and of themselves be genocidal — destroying people’s minds if not their bodies — and then their bodies, along with the minds and bodies of others. Thus the battles for and against Empire, for and against Revolution are waged on many fronts. Imaginative story and art, its criticism and its production and distribution, are vital fronts with powerful impact where important battles are won or lost.
We should both create and distribute explicit and direct engaged imaginings much more frequently and far more widely than we currently do. Popular activist newsletters and journals should step up to meet that challenge. Otherwise they will remain a shell of what they could be and should be and, in some cases in previous times, once were.
Callbacks below to a few posts of explicitly engaged lit of the past year — a revolutionary poem, followed by excerpts from a liberatory novel, radical short fiction, and resistance criticism.
“Whether we [novelists] are able to influence human conduct will depend very largely upon the number of people in a given asocial society who react by rational aggression towards that society rather …
Standing strong behind the lectern in the Press Room, Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez raises both arms in a V-shaped sign of victory. She makes a power fist with her left hand — her right palm upturned to the ceiling, as if to meet the invisible indivisible sky above.
Then she points with alternating index fingers of first one hand then the other to emphasize each policy and order that she announces:
“All of my progressive populist Executive Orders must be implemented, effective immediately. The money-grabbing profiteers will no longer call the shots. We the People call the shots — now. And to this end, I, Alecta O’Roura-Chavez as Acting President and Commander in Chief of the United States military, including the National Guard — I hereby order the timely closure of 750 US military bases in 80 countries. Each and every soldier and staff person will return and be retrained as necessary and be redeployed on home ground as a Civilian Community Corps that will help rebuild and restore the country and the world to a green and thriving future. The vast bulk of our weapons and weapon systems will be decommissioned in simultaneous accord with those of the other powers of the world. We will exchange the bloody lunacy of our menacing and lethal swords for the cooperative acts of survival, prosperity, and peace. We will nationalize the banks. We will nationalize the energy and agriculture industries. We will nationalize the health care system. We will double the payment of Social Security and lower the retirement age. And we will provide monthly universal basic income. Or we will fail utterly in our potential. It’s time to get your money back — from the robber barons, from the lethal industrial giants, from the plutocrats and technocrats, from the plutarchy, from the weapons dealers, and from the billionaires who don’t give a damn! We will make our lives and planet and society new. Anew! Anew! We will make society civil for the first time ever. There will be real care now. Our torturing and slave-driving prisons will be vastly shrunk from their ghastly bloat — and those few that remain will be transformed into health centers and universities — lively campuses of human change and possibility. Our bomb-raining, genocidal, and profiteering military conquests will be ended permanently. Unlike all the American bomb-throwing Presidents before me, I will not be one who could be hanged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, post-World War Two, when the top Nazis were prosecuted and convicted of the ultimate crimes. No more genocidalists — no more genocides. The bloody plutocracy will be replaced in all sectors of society with a progressive, friendly democracy. America and the world will be a place where the Good Samaritan would be proud to call home. We will be a nation and a world of universal care and prosperity or we will be nothing.”
Preface: I wrote this satire against American Empire nearly a quarter century ago in response to the American sanctions and invasion of Iraq, and as an update of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” …
For Preventing the Children of Palestine and the World from being a Burden to Their Parents and Lands, and for Making Them Beneficial to Empire
It is a melancholy object to observe the plight of children in the ancient land of Palestine during this dynamic era of American-led economic conquests and military invasions. By now, it can only be agreed by all sane observers that the grotesque mortality and mass suffering of Palestinians and their children cannot be considered worth even the most high-minded motives behind the US-Israeli invasion and occupation, obliteration and mass-slaughter in Palestine; and, therefore whatever might be discovered to be a just, affordable, and compassionate solution to this dreadful situation should be implemented immediately — a Practical Policy for the betterment of Palestinian children and for youth everywhere.
After many years of earnest and devout work as an American international policy advisor, after serving on countless transnational corporate boards and investment councils, and after unusually intense introspection, I have at last arrived at a solution that I trust will be found in respectable circles to be quite laudable, if not altogether surprising. So let me judiciously advance “A Practical Policy,” which I expect will not be liable to the least objection, for easing the troubled situation of children in Palestine and Lebanon and beyond.
It is my well-reasoned suggestion that there be implemented a carefully regulated expansion of commercial trafficking in children worldwide — that is, the compassionate cannibalism of children — closely monitored to ensure the dignity of all.
The time has long since come to officially support and expand the body parts trade, with its great potential of many corporate byproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore unimagined. I have recently been advised by virtually every corporate and financial executive I’ve encountered throughout the American Empire that children of impoverished nations principally, though not solely, are to be understood in explicit terms as the next great global growth industry — children as a prolific cash crop.
Palestinian children and countless other youths of the world, having little to no use or prospect, would be harvested for their own sake, and be mercifully removed from hopeless predicaments of hunger, disease, danger, and massacre. In many cases, the children might be sold abroad, their cut-rate labor placed in service of others in more profitable situations. Or the children might simply be released from their degraded, agonized state of being — that is, they would be terminated, offered as edibles for those fortunate enough to live in more bountiful circumstances.
Regrettably, in Palestine nowadays medicines and food are so expensive, scarce, or non-existent that Palestinian children might best be sold, traded, and shipped abroad at the first onset of illness or thirst or hunger, or even at birth, given their likely grim future. Alternatively, for any children who survive well into their spirited youth, these spunky, gutsy, heroic, valiant, and courageous young creatures should be allowed every opportunity to market themselves piecemeal or in whole, for sale and distribution at home or overseas.
It only makes smart business sense that Palestinian children — and their unfortunate like — be bought and sold under international regulation — as opposed to the chaotic, unauthorized, and inefficient current illicit manner — perhaps as defined and invoked by a new round of global trade agreements, or by some minor modification of the preeminent institutions for global economic development, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. By auctioning off their children, the peoples of hopeless poverty and smashed lands — and, indeed, the poor in the aggrieved areas of any nation — may raise much badly needed capital for paying off debts to creditors of every type, American banks above all.
As one might expect, the nature of the vending process for Palestinian youths and others at risk would be multifaceted. Mature children might market themselves via body part sales — a kidney here, a lung there. I am informed by numerous industry specialists that discreet patches and strips of tender young skin can be Swiftly peeled off and sold as raw material for the manufacture of leather car seats or even for unique handbags and exceptionally fine wallets.
Let no one speak of nefarious and impossible solutions for vastly reducing child and youth mortality and misery in Palestine or anywhere like it, such as foregoing sanctions and invasions, occupations and bombings against a disobedient people. There’s no moral, practical, nor civilized way to stop the showering of 2,000 pound bombs on their razed cities and countryside, on their family houses and orchards, hospitals and schools blown to smithereens. These things happen in Empire. Fiends? Barbarians? Devils? Seriously — who would the anti-interventionists take us authorities and modulators of Empire to be? Our work of Empire is sacred and we shall not contaminate it. Our orders derive from the Whitest of Houses. Our Church is the Pentagon. We owe our lives to Empire, to all its martial and monetary Laws and Commandments. Anyone who opposes us is sick, indeed.
Let no one speak of a free and secure independent state for the Palestinians, as everyone in the world except the Americans and the Israelis demand.
Let no one speak of enforcing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, though both agreements have been signed and adopted into international law by every nation — however grudgingly, conditionally, and belatedly by America, we may note with no small pride.
Let no one speak of protecting and building local economies at the expense of the corporate and military will of Empire, or allowing subsidies and services for the public to address basic needs of any kind — least of all food, education, housing, sanitation, clean water, clean air, vital medicines, vaccines and other commodities whose domain rightfully and naturally belongs to the private and lucrative aspirations of Empire.
And precisely because so many rebels, guerrillas, insurgents, rioters, secessionists, separatists, agitators, anarchists, antagonists, apostates, demagogues, deserters, heretics, iconoclasts, malcontents, mutineers, nihilists, nonconformists, renegades, revolutionaries, subverters, seditionists, traitors, turncoats, and other enemies and opponents of Empire in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and beyond refuse to bend the knee and pay homage to the illustrious Euro-American order of things, let no one consider for a treasonous moment using any fraction of the behemoth military budget of Empire to improve standards of health and conditions of life anywhere for anyone on Earth, ever.
And let no one mention — as they hardly do anyway, in responsible, respectable society — any public solution at all for improving the welfare of children in Palestine or anywhere in the world until there is some significant hope that there might be a hearty and sincere attempt to put it into practice.
Note: I asked ChatGPT about Fiction Gutted and it gave the banal brief view below, which I’m content to let stand as perfunctory introduction, in part because I marvel at how it sands off the polemic…
Misrepresentation 26 — the reactionary and status quo as preeminent literary political fiction: “What I am writing now is a tendentious thing,” famously wrote Dostoevsky about his accomplished novel The Possessed. “I feel like saying everything as passionately as possible. (Let the nihilists and the Westerners scream that I am a reactionary!) To hell with them. I shall say everything to the last word.” Far from deploring this novel (and its kind) today the establishment loves such work. It’s not threatening; on the contrary. The establishment has long embraced this sort of work because of its focus on retail pathology rather than direct overt focus on wholesale state pathology. It has long valued such works for their limited efforts to clarify much beyond marginal geopolitical realities or for their success in distorting reality — as in prominent literary critic James Wood’s misrepresentation of terrorism in relation to the problems of the West. The new lords of the land in Iraq (US policy planners) are eating Iraqi babies for breakfast, as Jonathan Swift once discoursed in ripe literary fashion of the English devouring the offspring of the Irish. This is a far more relevant understanding — actually, central — to the problems of the West in regard to terrorism and much else. If Homeland Security wants to know the situation and the anger contained in many Iraqis and many others across the lands as concerns the West, then they should read with all intended irony, “A Modest Proposal” by Swift, and also take a look at the ongoing polls of the people.
Which brings up another problem in reality: to know and to not act appropriately is to not care, enough, basically. Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, leading US intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote satirically about the at best farcical consequences of a US invasion, and he wrote prophetically, as it turned out (given the catastrophe and what else the US is on track to accomplish in the Middle East, unintentionally shifting regional power to Iran, at the least). Chomsky wrote that the US might as well as urge Iran to invade Iraq. The US invaded and today we see Iranian power has grown, and Iraqis continue to want the US out [writing circa 2008]. Should anyone not now expect Bush or his successor (Barack “Half Withdrawal” O’Bomba or John “100 Years” McPain) to announce a globally implemented and Western regulated policy of commercial trafficking of children for pacifying the Middle East and the world. Has not the time long since come to officially sanction the body parts trade — with its many corporate biproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore untapped? the up-and-coming global growth industry — children as prolific cash crop? Would not such a move be as rational and ethical as the US invasion and occupation on whole? Need one wonder how the literary establishment would view such “A Practical Policy” as literary text? Too voicy? A nondescript style? Lacking much substance or any point of view of interest? Too weak or suspect in character? So goes the politics, the ever politicized aesthetics of establishment fiction. Progressive and revolutionary work is marginally tolerated or buried, in actuality if not in rhetoric. Status quo and reactionary work is enabled, advanced, glorified, contrary flourishes aside.
Not for Wood and the establishment are certain movements of progressive or revolutionary writing that touch too close to home, progressive and revolutionary writing and writers who, “As a group,” as VF Calverton notes:
are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive…. More than that, [these writers] believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes…toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one.
Such liberatory fiction contains “ideology” for which the establishment is too pure to engage in. Such liberatory lit is too “reductive” since we all know that literature deals in no particulars whatsoever. Such liberatory movements are impossible, for it must be that the poor will always be among us. And in any case “poetry makes nothing happen” nor fiction too — countless concrete and well documented examples to the contrary, which we must see as mere mere illusions, entirely unpredictable, forever uncertain, uncontrolled accidents, stemming from badly flawed and shallow literature. In reality, the great works of Victor Hugo and Jonathan Swift, for example, thoroughly disprove every aspect of this establishment line, this orthodoxy, this belief, this creed, so we soon run into sweeping problems of credibility, which are then ignored, rendered “studiedly irrelevant,” exactly as the establishment knows very well how to do.
It has long since gotten to the point where even Victorian type work that is particularly socially engaged is far too threatening to the establishment, which has exerted pressure to kill such work for over a century now (let alone more revolutionary works). Why did Tolstoy not win a Nobel Prize? Likely because he had become far too much an activist, dissenter, too progressive in face of the status quo, as shown somewhat in his posthumous great short novel Hadji Murad (1904/1912), about a Chechen rebel leader in relation to Empire. It’s a novel that should be front and center today, and of a sort we should be reading and writing, especially given the particulars of today’s long-standing freshly-explosive crises, especially given the cultural and institutional bigotry of the US (and West) in this regard. Wood cites Hadji Murad in his How Fiction Works merely for a stylistic brilliance. It’s a novel Homeland Security and others should better read, along with contemporary liberatory novels.
Instead, both bizarre and predictable, as we’ve seen, is this recurring underlying theme in the criticism of James Wood — and liberal criticism in general, let alone conservative criticism — only slightly exaggerated: Don’t bother to create great highly useful fiction of the world, dear contemporary novelists, the masters have done all your work for you. Go shuck peas, or do anything, but please don’t presume to work at your art in relation to society. History ended more-or-less, at least in the novel — Dostoevsky and Conrad took it all down. Forget Hugo and Beecher-Stowe. There is no future direction or tendency we can remotely point to. Liberatory revolutionary — balderdash! Back to sleep with you now, dear writers. Or do run along and practice your style (whether “free indirect” or whatnot) on something less threatening or less difficult than sociopolitical, engaged fiction for an establishment critic to speak meaningfully about. The thought of which, after all, is “slightly depressing.” The loafing about of fly-eyed young men has long represented “the classic novelistic activity” — the flaneur, you know. They are “traumatized” and “numb” so let us partake of their great visions.
Flaneuring — what else is there for those “who belong to the ruling class…those who [have] already won the battle and acquired the spoils…[who can] afford to be above the battle”? More typically, establishment critics intone the ostensible “extreme difficulty” of writing novels about ongoing events, especially in such supposedly “confusing” times. In any event, not for nothing today are Dostoevsky’s novels Notes from the Underground and The Possessed and Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent safe for the establishment, because they are studies more in retail pathology and retail violence, demonizing of easy targets, novels that fail to offer liberatory explorations of wholesale Western establishment oppressions and aggressions, blind to much progress and possibilities.
Misrepresentation 27 — 9-11 rallying cry for a turn inward, and worse: Less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01, Wood speculated and hoped that the aftermath of the attack would “allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’ — indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings).” He then declared, “Who would dare to be knowledgeable [in a novel] about politics and society now?” One hardly needs socialist David Walsh to point out “Who would dare not to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Wood’s counterposing of ‘human’ versus ‘social’ novels is deeply false.” Crucially, who should not have “dared” ever? Myriad people in general “dared” and have long proven to be sociopolitically discerning both within the US and without. Not the establishment though. Not its literary stars, or scarcely any of its stars, for that matter. Not then and not now. They can’t dare, marginal exceptions aside. It would be dysfunctional to the ruling status quo. Thus, had they ever been publicly acute in this regard, they would not have been granted their positions of prominence. Get wise of a sudden, or even accidentally step out of line – they are quickly disciplined, sometimes by a pointed status quo critique, put “on notice,” or, especially if they persist, simply “let go.” Case studies abound (via reports in independent media and analyses by independent scholars).
Not only star critics, but leading liberal “political” novelists are atrocious in this regard (let alone conservative or reactionary writers). For example, in 2008,The Nation magazine published EL Doctorow’s 2007 keynote address to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, in Washington DC, in which Doctorow states near its beginning that the leaders of “a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East…[have] mentally transport[ed] their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking, life-contemptuous jihad. [This]…declared enemy with the mind-set of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts.” In other words, until the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the primitive impulses of the US were sleeping soundly, only to be terrorized awake by those “criminal” and “tribal” and “shrieking” war-mongers from the lands of the richest oil fields. That’s quite a story. It leaves something out. Reality. The reality of decades-long US hopes, plans and efforts to control those oil fields, including support for the state tyrants of those rich kingdoms, not least Saudi Arabia, from where nearly all the 9-11 terrorists originated, which was considered to be an occupied country by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, due to the US military presence there, subsequently withdrawn. Doctorow sends down the memory hole the reality of the murderous US-UN imposed economic sanctions against Iraq[6] that helped destroy that country and other inconvenient facts, such as decisive US support for the state of Israel and many of its militant endeavors against its regional neighbors, including longstanding invasions and occupations.
After carefully inverting cause and effect of the current ongoing crisis, Doctorow pronounces to his intellectual audience about “knowledge deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.” Shortly thereafter he goes on with brazen (and ludicrous) hypocrisy to both romanticize and all but deify the “sacred text” of the US Constitution and its history:
The ratification parades were sacramental — symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society. And with good reason: the ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.
Meanwhile, some of the founders and states viewed the Constitution as likely inherently tyrannical, and so several states barely ratified it, and did so only by attaching lists of amendments and rights. Doctorow refers to the “sacred text” of the US Constitution at a time when it contained none of its amendments, thus, no Bill of Rights protecting many of the most important freedoms of the people. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are far greater texts of liberty than the original and still highly flawed US Constitution. Doctorow eventually levels some fairly strong criticism of US policy and acts generally but mostly confines his critique to Bush and the Bush regime. Along the way, he neglects to mention “oil” or “occupation” and rather haplessly refers to two iconic establishment novelists, Herman Melville and Henry James (see misrepresentation next). Near closing, Doctorow calls the US a “democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, [in which] we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest…” The US surely is in many ways a very free society. All the greater then is the delinquency, however predictable, of an establishment literature that cannot be troubled to create and produce topical anti invasion-and-conquest novels of oil rich lands in the spirit of what liberatory scholar Edward Said calls “the urgent conjunction of art and politics.” Nothing might stop the established authors and publishers in this “democracy” of the free but their investments and ideologies, their false realities and illusions, their misrepresentations of others and themselves. And how ever much they care.
It’s amazing how consumed the literary world is by gendered identity politics — masculinity not least.
The better to keep from focusing on class issues that crush people across the entire spectrum.
The better to keep people from focusing on the police state that points more guns than ever at the most vulnerable.
The better to keep people from focusing on the ongoing US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
The better to keep people from focusing on the world-ending threats of climate collapse and militarism.
The better to keep people from focusing on the plutarchy — militarized capitalism — aka fascism — a militant financial tyranny that pillages and preys like the ultimate predator on the most vulnerable and on the guts of the planet itself.
In the literary world it’s a lot of identity fixation and ego stroking and relationship navel gazing, not least to your own self.
Meanwhile, the world burns, and the most vulnerable are cut down and cut up and thrown as logs onto the terminal fire.
In “The Rage of the Literary Man,” fiction writer and cultural critic Alex Perez asks:
Why are American literary men so angry lately? They’ve been angry for years, but in recent months, the rage has reached insufferable levels. Something is deeply wrong with these literary men. It’s distressing. I don’t like to see my American brothers enraged and flailing. I think a couple of things are going on, but it starts with the last decade of “masculinity” discourse that’s dominated elite media. The Trump era ushered in this conversation, with talk of “toxic masculinity” bombarding the hyper-online literary man. This has resulted in a literary man who is extremely aware of his masculinity, even if he is opposed to the word and doesn’t consider himself traditionally masculine. The literary man is constantly haunted by the specter of masculinity.
Perez adds:
The American literary man is consumed with shame and rage, obsessed with projecting his brand of online masculinity, so I’ve put together a reading list for him. If there is to be a future for the literary man, he needs to get healthy first. This reading list will start the healing process.
The reading list is all male and ends with Hemingway — of whom Perez notes:
It all starts with him.
Does it though?
Alex Perez is persona non grata in many literary circles given his particular reactionary type of cultural critique, which is how he “makes a living now.” He states the following in a 2022 interview in Hobart literary journal that upended the magazine — the staff resigned:
My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals. This is a mindset that views “whiteness” and America as inherently problematic, if not evil, and this sensibility animates every decision made by publishers/editors/agents. White people bad. Brown people good. America bad. Men bad. White women, I think, bad…unless they don a pussy hat. This explains why nearly every book is about some rich fuck from Brooklyn confronting his white guilt or some poor black girl who’s been fighting “whiteness” and “patriarchy” all her life. All this stuff is ideologically-driven horseshit propagated by some of the most artless people on the planet. We know who they are.
Setting aside the lobotomized invective and the race and gender denigrations and the lucrative political swiping, here we can see that the Lit Bro mentality perversely mirrors the identity politics mentality that it fights. This is Lit Bro mentality as white identity politics, and often white male identity politics, and often even white straight male identity politics — the oldest and by far the most powerful form of identity politics in America and Europe continuing through today.
The establishment loves identity politics. Especially when it’s used to cut the People to pieces — to divide and conquer. And while the literary establishment may not love the identity obloquy of Perez, the political establishment feeds it and uses it to break people apart to keep them from uniting and turning on the financial elite, who rule the world, and who gut the world to their enormous profit.
Biden and Trump, establishment Democrats and Republicans, the plutarchy burns the world and entire Peoples to a crisp who bear identities of all kinds but especially people of color and women and children. There’s gold to be had in having identities for enemies.
The “earliest memory of the power of storytelling” to Alex Perez “came from my grandfather drunkenly telling stories about his days in Cuba and hating the dirty, rotten communists. Typical Miami shit.” Those “dirty, rotten communists” led by Fidel Castro liberated Cuba from the brutal US-Cuban plutocrat rule and military dictatorship of Batista. Just so, ostensibly in the name of “art,” Perez defends his chosen literary identity cohort and castigates against the identities of those who supposedly perpetrate against it.
As a 2009 graduate of the highly esteemed Iowa Writer’s MFA Workshop, Perez adds after the interview blowup:
Today, I will attempt to do the impossible: Explain to my Miami friends why I am now the “Iowa Pariah.” I will have to explain what the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is. I will probably also need to define “pariah,” since most of my bros barely speak English. I might get my ass kicked.
So the bros go, the traditional gendered identity warriors of masculinity bravely skirmishing the traditionally oppressed while sitting out the big wars for the survival, let alone the prosperity, of humankind.
The “Trump era” did not start the “masculinity discourse” that Perez obsesses about, nor the “toxic masculinity discourse.” Ask Norman Mailer.
Mailer and his like skirmished with “Libbies,” as he called feminists, more than a half century ago. And he was very far from the first so engaged.
Mailer wrote some great books. He also said some very stupid things about gender and race and other forms of identity. Stupid things die off in the literary world, when and if they do, for good reason.
More sweepingly, nor did the “Trump era” start the “fascism discourse.” Ask George Bush and Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the military backed plutocrats who opposed FDR and the New Deal. We can ask these people even though they are dead, as history lives on.
And we can ask some of today’s prominent People’s fighters who paid big prices for opposing the totalitarian capitalist police and spy state: Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and many others. And water protectors Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya. And countless more.
Nor did the current Biden-Trump Era, still more profoundly, start the “genocide discourse.” Ask Native Americans. Ask Black Americans. Ask the Vietnamese and Koreans. Ever wonder why North Korea hates America so intensely? America obliterated North Korea in the 1950s. People remember their own obliteration.
Ask the Jews. And now of course the Palestinians, among others.
These are the problems that we might better obsess about in our literary discourse — the genocidal problems of the day that strike at the fundamental realities of human consciousness and what it means to be fully human, or inhuman — the vast societal problems that threaten the existence of all of us and everything else on this planet.
What we need is a revolutionary art and culture and literature, not a race back through the murk of time to an establishment identity politics that persists in a world lucky still to exist.
Every revolutionary thought, feeling, word, concept, ideology, action, event, people, group, relationship, and so on that one could think of would be worth ambitious novels and stories of the times, needed by the times. Work it up with character, plot, setting, action and go. Any style you like. There are so many vital elements and features of story far beyond the tight box of identity politics.
Be a man about it. Or a woman. Or trans. And so on. Be human above all, under it all, through it all.
Then discuss. And if you don’t discuss — what again are you talking about today in literature? Internecine skirmishes, sometimes life and death on a retail level — while on a macro level the train of humanity and Earth goes unattended to the death camp.
Masculine identity politics “raging” against identities formerly conquered — bravo — you sit grotesquely on the sideline, very far from the great wars for the species and the planet. The final winter is coming — nuclear winter or otherwise, it’s statistically inevitable — if it is not stopped in advance — if conditions are not changed as soon as possible.
Maybe look into that tiny area of human consciousness today rather than to the masculine panorama of the past.
There’s a place for the identity skirmishes, no doubt and absolutely. But when that place becomes the whole, or most or much of the whole, then what goes wanting condemns us.
There’s a reason that establishment ideology bans explicit and direct revolutionary literature — from thought and talk as much as possible let alone from story publication and distribution.
It’s not a great reason.
And there’s a reason the establishment embraces identity politics — gendered and otherwise.
It’s not entirely a great reason either. It’s a kind of concession in place of far more whole solutions.
Give something of value with one hand. Divide the people. Then take the rest.
Identity exploration is of great value because it’s important to correct and to keep correcting malignant consciousness in society, but when reigning ideology pushes all of our identities into civil war against each other rather than against the oppressive class, then all hope for humanity and consciousness is lost.
Identity politics are weaponized at the highest levels by the establishment — the better to smash Bernie and AOC and the progressive populists working to gain power for the people. Progressive populists are gaslit to death by bludgeons of identity smashing class. That’s how Hillary Clinton beat Bernie in the 2016 primary. That’s how Joe Biden beat Bernie in the 2020 primary.
The literary world too is bad about this given its anti-revolutionary fixation at a time when revolutionary changes are needed like never — literally never — before. Even a moderate figure like Bernie Sanders notes that revolution is needed now.
Identity politics. That’s how Trump beat both Clinton and Harris — by using traditional supremacist identity politics — though Trump also faked part of Bernie’s class platform to winning effect.
Identity politics! Used by the establishment to divide the people and to gang up with the big donors, the financial elite, to pillage, profiteer, and plutocrat the planet into oblivion.
We need a literature to fight that oblivion.
If not a revolutionary literature, then what?
If not a revolutionary human consciousness, then what have we become?
What will we become?
What will our literary “policy” be? It’s a choice every bit as real as poverty is a policy choice — set by the plutarchy and enforced by the plutarchy when we fail to determine it ourselves.
Poverty in literature and art is neither a choice we should be willing to make — nor an imposition we should be willing to accept.
Art is not what Lit Bros defend as they rally around a retrograde identity politics, the oldest most destructive form of identity warfare in the culture.
What the retrograde identity warriors defend is division among the people, fake righteousness, and civil war rather than revolution.
Identity politics, in one way and another, continue to pave the way for Trump 3.0 — a militant family and pluto-dictatorship in America, Batista-style.
There is another way for literature and society to go. A revolutionary way. To open the path of life for people and the planet.
Mamdani, Albanese, Weiss, and Chomsky — notes on reform and revolution — and an extended excerpt from forthcoming “Target Revolution,” Chapter 33 of Most Revolutionary
Note One: In certain revolutionary circles you often see criticisms of reform and progressives as expressed like this, by Jaebien Rosario in “Zohran Mamdani and Reformism”:
Reformism has been a poison to the revolutionary socialist movement. A potent weapon that buys time for the bourgeoisie and disarms the working class from achieving the end of capitalism towards socialism.
First, it’s time to retire the word “bourgeoisie.” There are much more accurate and intelligible words available. Capitalism, big money, plutocracy will do.
There’s a difference between the way of revolutionary reform and establishment reform. Revolutionary reform shows the capacity to walk and talk at the same time — juggle flaming swords, keep all plates spinning, run the show and be in it too, and otherwise multitask like a pro — to put it in common language.
Yes, reform has often been weaponized against revolution, and far more often simply against greater reform, but so too have promises of revolution and great reform been weaponized against making any badly needed gains at all or even against fending off backsliding.
A revolutionary movement that is incapable of implementing reforms, or at least advocating for them, is typically dead in the water — kaput, toast, flatlined, circling the drain.
Focused revolutionaries need to make strong allies among focused reformers, and vice versa. One could write great essays, of both reform and revolution, explaining how and why. One could also undertake great acts of the same, including electoral acts. This is why revolutionaries should run in the Democrat primaries, alongside and along with the progressive reformers, and against the fake niceties of the establishment candidates.
Note Two: On the rise of Zohran Mamdani, recent Democrat winner in the NYC primary:
“Identity” derives from “the same.” “Populist” from “the people.” Zohran Mamdani and other progressive populists transcend identity by connecting it to the specific (typically material) needs of the people — the people in general. Progressive populists can and must connect identity to class and to the human condition(s), thereby creating a transcendent social and political identity, a human identity, a revolutionary identity to leverage power — to express, mobilize, organize, and act.
Dilshad Alia touches on this in Religion News Service, “Mamdani’s win unleashed a surge of Islamophobia — and showed how to beat it”:
Asad Dandia, a New York City historian, community organizer and early supporter of the campaign, agreed, saying Mamdani’s consistent messaging is what resonated with voters. “It doesn’t matter your religion, it doesn’t matter your ethnicity, it doesn’t matter your social outlook — everyone has to buy groceries. Everyone has to pay bills. That was much more powerful than (Mamdani rival Andrew) Cuomo’s message,” Dandia said.
Note Three: Related and telling facts about New York City and its mayors, Zohran Mamdani, and the rise of progressive populists, by Richard Tofel in “Mayor Mamdani and the News Judgments…”:
As no less than the Wall Street Journal editorial page recently observed, “If Trumponomics fails to deliver strong growth and gains in real incomes, the leftwing populists will be waiting as the main alternative.” Dismissing them by brandishing the word “socialism” represents weak news judgment and disserves readers.
Note Four: The leaders of Empire are the faces of Evil in our time. Someone should capture the full human condition and write a novel about it. See the great commentator on power and its abuses Caitlin Johnstone in “The Empire Is A Nonstop Insult to Our Intelligence”:
The US has imposed sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for using her position to oppose the most thoroughly documented genocide in history.
Note Five: In another Fiction Gutted moment for the establishment, at the influential hip literary journal n+1 Lisa Borst claims in “New TV Novels” that
A novel never got anybody elected President.
And yet many scholars and observers have noted that Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s accomplished and impactful literary and popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin paved the way for the Republican Party and for Lincoln to get elected President, and may well have been a decisive factor, or the decisive factor. Further, 100,000 copies were purchased and used in Lincoln’s campaign.
Tolstoy claimed that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had more impact than anything Lincoln ever did.
The novel was the greatest seller of its sweeping age, aside from the Bible, with great global appeal, and major geopolitical and literary impacts, including internationally, plus huge effects on decades of influential novels of social reform and revolution.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, second only to the Bible. As Biography relates, the book sold 10,000 a week, and in its first year of publication, over 300,000 copies were sold — even while, remember, the book was banned in southern states. …
During the 1860 presidential election campaign, Lincoln’s party bought and distributed another 100,000 copies as a way to gather abolitionist support for his run. It was Abraham Lincoln, now president of a nation fighting against itself in the Civil War, who met Stowe and allegedly told her, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” It was also Lincoln who observed, very aptly, “He” (or, in this case, she) “who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes.”
Novels like Most Revolutionary or Tamara Pearson’s The Eyes of the Earth or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow or Andre Vltchek’s Point of No Return and Aurora that set out to be epic in their own right, even if influenced by contemporary script writing, provide grounds for none of the insecurity that’s noted by n+1 author Lisa Borst as an “anxiety of obsolescence” in the same article:
“the anxiety of obsolescence”: an apprehension — expressed sometimes bitterly, sometimes with acceptance or opportunism — about literature’s diminished, even parasitic status relative to TV’s cultural might.”
Note Six: An interesting overview by Mark Iosifescu of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss — a difficult semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels of left-wing resistance against the Nazis.
Iosifescu’s overview of the trilogy spurs some questions and considerations, such as why was Weiss so convinced of his dense and difficult structural approach — and to what effect? “…a tough read in any language” is hardly compelling. Should it have been titled The Arcane of Resistance?
What is most compelling about the structure or content of the left trilogy for today? The idea of “Build unity” is important — at least there’s that. We can see the imperative expressed today in electoral realms, at the least, in the efforts and achievements of Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and (though she is much neurotically decried) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and similar others, not least Rashida Tlaib.
As for the trilogy’s debates between reform and revolution, some interesting and penetrating things can be said in general, but when either side flat rejects the merit of the other the thinking is typically simplistic and of no actual world. The Mamdani, Bernie, and AOC examples are telling.
Today remains a genocidal age in a newly ecocidal era, so novels today should manifest as an endless flow of Resistance rather than the glorified idiosyncratic Desistance that they too often are. Would be good if vital new considerations of The Aesthetics of Resistance could open doors in that regard.
Note Seven:
The great literary scholar and Palestinian-American Edward Said on the novel and power in Culture and Imperialism:
The modern history of literary study has been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism, whose aim was first to distinguish the national canon, then to maintain its eminence, authority, and aesthetic autonomy…. [There has been] an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the [ostensibly] civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the [supposed] barbaric brutality of those who for some reason—perhaps defective genes—fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment, so well revealed by America’s Asian wars, for example.
A novel is the choice of one mode of writing from among many others, and the activity of writing is one social mode among several, and the category of literature is something created to serve various worldly aims, including and perhaps even mainly aesthetic ones. Thus the focus in the destabilizing and investigative attitudes of those whose work actively opposes states and borders is on how a work of art, for instance, begins as a work, begins from a political, social, cultural situation, begins to do certain things and not others….
Contamination is the wrong word to use here, but some notion of literature and indeed all culture as hybrid…and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements—this strikes me as the essential idea for the revolutionary realities today, in which the contests of the secular world so provocatively inform the texts we both read and write.
And on art and Empire:
Much of what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its aftermath—in, say, the elaborate interpretative strategies of critical theory or the self-consciousness of literary and musical forms—seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric today. More reliable now are the reports from the front line where struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic and archeological descriptions, explorations in mixed forms (essay, video or film, photograph, memoir, story, aphorism) of unhoused exilic experiences.
The major task, then, is to match the new economic and socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale….
The fact is, we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment….
Surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts.
The émigré consciousness—a mind of winter, in Wallace Steven’s phrase—discovers in its marginality that “a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought.”
Note Eight: Is science superior to literature? It has been absurdly suggested so by a contemporary novelist at The Metropolitan Review:
“Insofar as fiction primarily seeks to examine human nature, it does so only in proportion to our ignorance of our own neurology. Science will always be above literature. One day, after filling the gaps in our knowledge, it will render the entire discipline obsolete.”
Without question, many of us dinosaurs hope that day never comes.
Science is not above literature and cannot render it obsolete — so notes Noam Chomsky, an all-time great scientist:
I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will…and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology…. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.
—
If you want to learn about people’s personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that’s the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that’s not science. Science isn’t the only thing in the world, it is what it is…science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things…. If I am interested in learning about people, I’ll read novels rather than psychology.
—
It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called “the full human person” than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. … That’s perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it’s not only unlikely, but it’s almost certain.
—
The sciences give you a certain kind of understanding—deep, precise, but very narrow. Other approaches, like literature, give you a different kind of understanding—less precise, but often much broader and deeper in a different sense.
Fiction examines human nature and the human person in large part in relation to our knowledge of society, ecology, and people. If you don’t dig deep into society and politics in story, and the full human and natural environment, you’ll miss most of what there is to know about the individual person and people, about the personal and the social, about human nature and the full human condition.
The revolutionaries and their captives in the Perez farmhouse wait for Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez to fly out to Iowa from Washington DC in the proverbial dead of night.
Sabia Perez stands between the kitchen and the living room reading aloud from the opening pages of George Orwell’s great personal and partisan account of the Spanish Revolution, Homage to Catalonia.
She reads to all those gathered who listen and try to understand the moment, the situation, and Sabia, each in their own way. Sabia reads to her abuelo Roca, and to her water protector allies Jenna Ryzcek and Jasmine Maldonado, and to her high school comrades Roane Alexandre and Gabe Makato, and to her young neighbor boyfriend Avery Yonkin, and to his older brother, Sabia’s spy neighbor nemesis, Billy “The Moto Kid” Yonkin bound on a chair, and to FBI Director Priama Steiner and Secret Service Director William Kingsley both bound wrists and ankles on the couch.
Sabia reads with calm and resonant oration through the opening of Homage to Catalonia as if she were creating a revolutionary tradition or leading a ritual of revolution, a revolutionary rite of passage in service to the People:
This was in late December 1936 … I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists… Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune…
There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.
Sabia walks over to the kitchen table and sets down the book and picks up the shotgun that she commandeered from Avery after he blasted his brother Billy’s spy drone for Sabia when it closed in on the winter greenhouse where she often works.
Sabia lifts the shotgun above her head with her left hand than holds it out in front of her. “We might not need this tonight. But then again we might,” she says.
She directs the butt of the gun at Billy bound in the chair.
“No one better laugh at me,” she says. Billy holds his retrograde emotions in reserve, for once. “Or at Jenna or Jasmine or Roane.”
Sabia waves the butt of the gun at the Directors Steiner and Kingsley bound on the couch. “You’re not the boss of me. Capiche?”
Sabia puts the gun back on the table. She picks up Homage to Catalonia and shows it again.
“These words we will always need,” she says and shakes the book like a promise, like a weapon mightier than a gun.
Dark, cold, windy — snowbound southcentral Iowa around the farmhouse of Sabia Perez — where the fate of a country, an Empire, and the world hangs in the balance.
Sabia is torn. Should she surrender captive President Kristen Silver, the fulcrum of the Revolution against Empire, for pardons from Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez? Or go to prison now at the iron hand of FBI Director Priama Steiner, to best extend the Revolution? The Perez farmhouse is entirely surrounded by the overwhelming weaponry and forces of the state.
Yet how much easier to fight than to surrender. How much harder to surrender than to fight. But what happens when personally you must lose for the Revolution to win? What happens when your personal win means the Revolution will lose?
Does Sabia go to prison like fearless anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti through two decades, off and on, leading up to the Spanish Revolution, or does she stay where she is and go down on the front line like Durruti did in the end, fighting in Madrid, Spain’s capital city on the high plateau.
During the Spanish Revolution, the gory civil war, freedom versus tyranny, the endlessly brave anarchists rammed taxis into machine gun positions in the cities and threw themselves into many other acts of life-and-death bravery, often hand-to-hand, bullet-to-bullet. The anarchists and socialists fought the Empire: the fascists, and the conservatives, and the military, and the big industrialists and landowners who were supported by Hitler and Mussolini and plutocrats everywhere, including in America — the usual suspects. The anarchists, the organized workers, attacked military barracks with homemade bombs, clubs, and stones. They fought against the supremacy of money and guns over the everyday lives of the People. They fought for democracy and their rights as human beings. They fought against the attacks and abuse by the big owners, the police state, and the church. The anarchists and socialists won briefly before being crushed by force and suffering the dictatorship of the plutocracy and military for forty years, until the late 1970s.
40 years is far too long. 4 years is too long. 4 minutes.
So in southcentral Iowa Sabia attacks the plutocrat state with her bare hands and mind, at first, before gaining weapons and allies to defend the revolution against the state’s monopoly on violence and material power.
The Revolution as it turns out has the people, the 80 percent, if not the 99.
Maybe now Sabia can let go of the sharp edge of the Revolution, and leave the far greater forces of the collective Peoples to push beyond what she and her close allies have achieved. A strategic hand-off — hands-off. Hasn’t she done enough already? Has she?
What does the Revolution demand? What can Sabia bear? What more can she and her close allies achieve?
Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez feels pushed around, all around the country now, half against her will — first from the White House to the South Lawn and Marine One, then to Joint Base Andrews and Air Force One, then to Des Moines International Airport in Iowa. What a difference a few hours makes. Here she goes in flight to ever greater crisis from the reporters screaming at her as she left the Press Room after her big speech, after her revolutionary declarations and Presidential Orders for social change. It’s her own mind screaming at her now that she will lose the revolution if she pardons Sabia to free President Silver. She will lose everything newly gained, newly changed.
Her emergency meeting with Chief of Staff Shakeeta Glazier and Press Secretary Tisha Nouri and her decision to fly out to Sabia in remote Iowa puts the power of the revolution at total risk, but what choice do they have? Sabia seems forced by Director Steiner to give up the whereabouts of President Silver, and if President Silver is found and freed and restored to power what good can come of it? No good. None and nothing. Alecta has the entire flight from DC to Des Moines to worry the twist in events, a couple hours to think away catastrophe. What can be done? What can be done now if Sabia is truly defeated? What must be done? Or maybe Sabia has something new and even more revolutionary in mind.
Alecta doesn’t see what it might be.
Air Force One lands in darkness in Des Moines, where Alecta transfers onto a newly staged Marine One helicopter that hammers the winter air and rises remorseless into the cloudy, icy sky. Marine one flies south and soon descends through the dark toward the snow-buried field and remnants of prairie by the Perez farmhouse. The helicopter aims for a cleared spot inside a semi-chaotic, semi-organized mob scene of uniformed officials and professionals and bared guns lining the remote country road, surrounding the Perez farmhouse.
Marine One lands amid endless snow.
Sabia is not ready, Alecta is not ready, no one is ready for what is to come.
Secret Service Deputy Director Grace Lamont sits near Alecta on Marine One.
They don’t speak beyond the perfunctory, each lost in their own lines of responsibility. Upon landing, Lamont exits first to confer with the onsite commanders. It’s on her now, to decide whether or not it’s safe proceed, to move the Acting President from Marine One to the Perez farmhouse for negotiations with Sabia.
No one advises her not to do it though no one insists it’s necessarily a go, no one except her boss in the farmhouse, Director William Kingsley. Deputy Director Grace Lamont separates herself from the ground commanders and looks to the farmhouse. She sifts through her thoughts. One might even says she rifles through her thoughts, though the etymology of “rifle” stems from old European words meaning to break, rob, pillage, and plunder. Lamont looks around at the many guns, at the nation state that aims dozens and hundreds of automated long guns at the Perez farmhouse tonight. Guns, guns, and more guns — what a state — with infinite more guns ready to be called up, manufactured and made, aimed and fired.
But you can only break and pillage one place, in one place, so much. A monopoly on firepower takes you only so far, strategically, Lamont knows. Sure, you can go all the way to complete obliteration. You can even destroy the entire planet with all the guns and other lethal weapons in your possession, but who really wants to go entirely terminal?
Other than the plutocrat fatalists and zealous fanatics.
Lamont worries.
Sabia is tricky, Lamont knows. How so tonight? Or have things changed? Has Sabia been forced to truly surrender to Lamont’s boss Kingsley and to FBI Director Priama Steiner?
On the farmhouse porch, a few exterior lights dent the black, while police state floodlights are prepped and ready to blow it all up.
The whole situation feels like a setup to Lamont, one in which there may be no real winner. It feels like a trap.
Deputy Director Lamont like Director Steiner would prefer to interrogate Sabia at a prepared site, dark or otherwise. But her boss Kingsley like Sabia wants it done here and now, and so it must be. Otherwise, Sabia says she won’t confess to the whereabouts of President Silver. Maybe she won’t regardless. Maybe though they will catch a break and Sabia won’t give in but can be broken, for once, to the will of the authorities.
Who can resist the seemingly infinite power and resources of the militant capitalist state? Not Deputy Director Lamont. How can any one person hold out, and for so long? Even Sabia Perez has her limits. She must. No one person can be a match for Empire. Not Sabia, not anyone. How much can anyone give? Even if Sabia gives everything, it won’t be enough.
Deputy Director Lamont thinks there is no victory in death, if it is death that Sabia wills from the police state tonight. There is victory only in life and triumph. That’s why Grace Lamont joined the Secret Service, an organization far larger and stronger than herself, to succeed and to survive in this life. Lamont is no Sabia, choosing to fight forces that cannot be withstood. Deputy Director Grace Lamont is a realist. Sabia is not. Sabia is—
What?
Lamont considers. She can’t really conceive. A revolutionary? That’s bullshit.
It doesn’t matter what Sabia is. Sabia is a threat to win against the authorities, against Lamont’s colleagues, and so Sabia must be defeated and that will define what Sabia is — not what Sabia wills herself to be, a revolutionary or whatever. Sabia will be what she is made to be. Prisoner, martyr, casualty of war, fatality of operations. She’s got it coming. Sabia and her allies, they’ve all got it coming. And Lamont is here to see that it gets done. Deputy Director Grace Lamont is here to make the official reality prevail over Sabia’s hopeless notions of the world. It’s what her boss would do too, and presumably is doing.
Sabia may be an alpha dog. But Grace Lamont and her colleagues are the alpha dog’s masters. No matter that the alpha dog theory has been debunked, and that dogs are not humans, Grace Lamont, like the plutocracy and the police state, is out here tonight on the cold hard white winter ground in Iowa to keep the world in its proper alignment, to keep Sabia in line.
Like a mean and brutal sun, FBI floodlights explode the dark behind Deputy Director Grace Lamont as she steps through the blast of raw electricity. She comes up through layers of snow onto the porch to the farmhouse front door where everything is illuminated and nothing is clear. Lamont holds four pardons in a hard-backed folder stamped with the the Great Seal of the President of the United States of America.
The office of Alecta. Currently. Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez.
Secret Service Deputy Director Grace Lamont stands at the Perez farmhouse front door not as herself, really, but as an officer and agent of the United States of America, and as a representative of Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez. She is thoroughly imbued with the idea and responsibility of her official role and position. In a life and world of much violence and chaos, Deputy Director Grace Lamont knows who she is, officially, and what she must do tonight.
She must help control and crush all opposition to authority in the Perez farmhouse — here and now against Sabia Perez and her allies.
Standing just inside the front door, Sabia and Jasmine flank the now unbound FBI Director Priama Steiner — though Steiner remains threatened physically by Sabia and her comrades, and threatened moreso by Sabia’s real options for noncompliance.
So even now Director Steiner feels free to do little or nothing against the will of the young warrior. Nothing, that is, if the negotiations to find and free President Silver are to have any great chance of success.
Deputy Director Grace Lamont rings the doorbell — a wireless device installed by the Perez family as less of an amenity and more of a security feature, linked to their underground home, than anyone outside the family can know. Not the Secret Service, not the FBI. The people, after all, can be as ultra cautious and clever as any police state, probably even much more so. A simple doorbell activated throughout the premises to fight any would-be intruders, official or otherwise — why not? — not that it might matter tonight given the totality of the situation. A pity.
Behind the barrage of lights, and on both ends of the porch, and all around the curtilage of the farmhouse, tactical teams of FBI and Secret Service agents level their guns at the front door and at the windows masked by blinds — the highly mechanized fire-and-metal-breathing police state designed to attack with overwhelming force.
Not that any of that might matter tonight either — in what would be a colossal shock to the police state and its systems.
Inside the farmhouse, FBI Director Steiner knows she will be the focus of all weapons from within and especially from without when she goes onto the porch. She breathes deep. She knows what can happen. She’s seen it. Not pretty. She’s ready. She needs to be.
Sabia’s allies and classmate Jenna and Roane grab Director Kingsley and Sabia’s opportunist spy neighbor Billy and push them from the front of the house to the back where they are sequestered in a utility room with a rarely watched TV.
Roca, Avery, and Gabe stand out of sight near Sabia and Jasmine by the front door. Roca is armed with Castelan’s stun gun in pocket and Kingsley’s handgun tucked in his waistband, while Jasmine has holstered Castelan’s handgun to her lower back beneath her shirt. Sabia’s shotgun and Roca’s rifle and all effects of the three hostages in the farmhouse are stored in the back room now with Jenna and Roane holding Billy and Director Kingsley.
Ah, yes, America — the country that remains the absolute worst, most weaponized place on the planet for a civil war. Armed to the teeth, household by household, business by business, military base by police headquarters, street by fortified street. Sabia’s revolution is not your Daddy’s protest march, in a country with an absolute brutal and bloody ongoing history of electing blood-slurping thugs to the Presidency on regular basis — call it what it is, let them be offended, who cares — the hired henchmen of the plutocracy who gather their gold by the predatory systems of pillaging and profiteering against the People and planet.
Sabia slits the blinds and peers into the burning glare outside. She knows. She knows the need to dispense with niceties in this seething age of genocide. The Big Shots have brought each and every recrimination upon themselves. All of them, almost, except Alecta.
Sabia feels it in her bones, every moment of every day, going back to the death of her mother and beyond, going back to the first blunt awareness of the truth of the deranged demolitions of Empire.
Angry in her left hand, Sabia reaches out and squeezes the right elbow of FBI Director Priama Steiner. “Remember, Steiner. Give the game away at any point, and I lock myself in this house with my happy hostage Kingsley, and it’s a mad standoff,” says Sabia. “Then I go to prison — or more likely be killed — and you will never hear from President Silver or Ellen Lin ever again. That’s on you — got it? You can look the world over and you will never find them, and they will never be found. Meanwhile, Alecta will rule and the People will be free and defended by her revolutionary rule. Anyway you like it, or don’t, I win. So now you decide if you want to lose Silver and Lin forever, or not. She’s your lousy President, not mine. Is it clear?”
“Crystal,” says Director Steiner.
“Good. We play this my way. Or no way. Especially not yours.”
Sabia opens the door.
Director Steiner steps into the icy winter wind on the porch. She takes the lights like a punch to the face as she squints against the floodwall of brute energy. She is the focal point of all weapons — angry, outraged weapons from every angle.
Everyone sees her bright as day by their bared eyes and weapons, while FBI Director Steiner can see no one other than Secret Service Deputy Director Grace Lamont directly in front of her, a shadow figure, otherworldly, distorted by the blaze of artificial energy, looking like a monster even, monstrous, shielding glare — her comrade-in-arms.
Sabia stands on the threshold of the doorway, watching closely.
Steiner sees the folder in Lamont’s left hand. She shakes Lamont’s right hand with both of her own, as if to make sure of the grasp, as if to convey that the two officials need each other here tonight more than can be openly expressed.
The bright lights indicate lots of power, at last, to Director Steiner, lots of officials and agents, weapons and control. Exactly what’s needed to show who’s boss, to be boss.
“Come in, Grace,” says Director Steiner. She leads Deputy Director Lamont past Sabia into the Perez farmhouse kitchen.
Sabia is struck and dazzled for a moment by the full light of Empire before she slams the door shut behind her, and locks it.
Occupy Wall Street takeovers were basically revolutionary acts crushed by the police state. The Dakota Access Pipeline attacks against lethal fossil fuel infrastructure were revolutionary and also crushed by the police state and deemed terrorist by official ideology and law.
In publishing of imaginative writing, even when the most radical aesthetics or seemingly cutting edge content is taken up by the establishment, novels feel overwhelmingly not merely nonrevolutionary but arevolutionary — disengaged from wholesale direct and explicit conception of revolution against the plutocracy and its state of military-police enforcement.
One must leave the so-called most serious literature, realist or social realist, to find indirect versions of revolution in speculative and fantastical literature — typically metaphorical, abstract, or vague. In society today, in this terminal time — in this seemingly magical internet space age of incredible scientific and technological achievement and massive wealth — the revolutionary can be and must be written in stories that at least approach the realistic and social realist, if humanity has any hope to survive this terminal age of genocide, ecocide, and anthropocide, aka omnicide.
Nothing should be conceived of today as more realistic than the revolutionary, because it’s revolution or death now, revolution in human and social practices in this increasingly terminal time.
Imaginative writing and publishing today is arevolutionary, outside of the fantastical, having little or no relation to explicit revolution — as if the idea of actual revolution is and must be absent from thinkable and existing worldviews.
Meanwhile the conception and instances of realistic revolutionary writing are smeared as subjective, partisan, nonobjective, biased, non-scholarly, unpopular, unserious, unrealistic, terroristic, or wishful and irresponsible thinking and acts. Arevolutionary writing and society is the goal of the police state plutocracy and its ideologues and systems that fight the emergence of a human rights based democracy and culture. It’s a lobotomized and brainwashed, repulsive and vicious state of being. And oh so normal(ized).
Several centuries ago, the word “antirevolutionary” was first created and used to describe opposition to the new Enlightenment political thinking and intellectual ecology — the new ideas on natural rights, a social contract, and government by consent, and a growing cross-borders “Republic of Letters” connecting an ever-expanding network of thinkers, creators, and activists.
Here’s a brief historical timeline of the apparent first use of terms mainly contra revolution and revolutionary:
1694 — revolutionary — supporter of change from the tyranny of monarchy to the rule of parliamentarian constitutional democracy, via the English Revolution of 1688 (the date is from OED)
1716 — antirevolutionary — actively against revolution— opposing revolutionary Enlightenment ideas (the date is from multiple sources)
1791 — counterrevolutionary — organized resistance to revolution — opposing the Enlightenment-based French Revolution (the approximate date is from multiple sources)
1867 — nonrevolutionary — political but not radically so — apparently describing federal “Reconstruction” efforts on behalf of African-Americans in the South post American Civil War (the date is from multiple sources)
1919 — apolitical — disengaged from all politics, often falsely so — coincides with the rise of the capitalist public relations industry, post World War One — the professionalization of societal deceit (1919 is from Merriam-Webster, while OED has 1952 as the earliest use)
1974 — unrevolutionary — bland, unradical — apparently describing a diminishment of social change goals in the aftermath of the American Civil Rights and antiwar movements (1974 is from Merriam-Webster; OED has 1830 as the earliest use)
2025 (today) — arevolutionary — complete disengagement from revolutionary frameworks — coincides with last-stage triumph of the plutocracy in a terminal age, negating the rise of needed revolutionary ideologies and actions
Today, an arevolutionary culture is even worse than an apolitical culture in an age when genocide, ecocide, and omnicide are all-consumptive and entirely terminal, lacking revolution. The reigning plutocracy and its ever-spawning and ravaging military-police state must be overthrown. Out with the kings and the kings’ guards and up with the People and the popular forces of resistance and revolution, in a rolling wave of progressive formation.
We live in a time, a day and age, and a society that is conquered and brainwashed by the plutocracy and the police state but that is also in active resistance and new formation, with an incipient culture that is Most Revolutionary, in desperate struggle against the predatory, pillaging, profiteering police and plutocrat death cult of the arevolutionary.
Meanwhile, it’s not migrants and the “deep state” destroying health care and everything else, as the plutocrat front led by the Republicans have caused half the country to believe. It’s the plutocracy and the police state that is killing and impoverishing people, democracy, and the world. The People are owned, ruled, and gutted by the financial elite — the plutocracy. A state of affairs enforced by the plutocracy’s bought and sold military police state.
No one can necessarily know exactly who or what the “deep state” is. The plutocrat front likes it that way, because out-of-control shadow actors are actually convenient fall-guys and mucky-mucks who do the bidding of the plutocracy and the official militants of the police state.
Ostensibly gutting the “deep state” is an excuse for Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck to actually destroy public jobs, services, and protections, including often good and badly needed federal jobs, to further enrich the plutocracy — themselves and other militant pillaging profiteers — not to benefit the People.
The plutocracy openly rules now with all the financial and military weapons of its high finance police state. The plutocracy continues to shadow-rule as well, through lawless “deep state” mechanisms and otherwise, but off-the-books, out of control state-related criminality has always been adjacent and minor compared to the plutocracy’s creation and capture, control and criminalization of the official political system.
Gutting the plutocracy is what is needed, and that’s what so-called right-wing populists like President Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck cannot pretend to do because they are the plutocracy. They are the ones with the grotesque and bloody power and privileges who must be overthrown, by ceaseless progressive populist uprisings and power.
The financial and militant elite and their mucky-mucks scream whenever they are constrained, let alone stopped, in their predatory, profiteering pillaging for the plutocracy. The plutocracy screams the loudest because they can, holding the biggest megaphones. They holler nonstop, even when there is little or nothing to holler about.
Right-wing populists like Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck opposing the Deep State is a ruse used by the forces of right-wing populism. The “deep state” is a recently invented term (1990s, in Turkey) of very limited scope and used now in America to deflect from the real and epic sources of mayhem and global disaster — caused by the plutocracy. In fact, the right wing in America has historically cobbled together deep state type networks specifically to subvert democracy and to terrorize against it — Iran Contra, the invasion of Cuba, “death squads” in Latin America and elsewhere, and probably the assassination of President Kennedy, among many other acts of “extra-legal” criminality. Now the right wing — and the whole plutocrat front — pretends to attack the “deep state,” as ongoing PR and a trick to crush democracy and popular government, to accrue more power and wealth to itself and its vicious military-police state.
It’s the plutocracy that constantly crushes democracy, every chance it gets, by any means necessary. A notion of some shadowy deep state is a distraction from the real villains, and used freely, because who can ever say if a “deep state” is being rooted out or not. There’s no accountability possible for what the right-wing actually intends, which is to continue growing and using shadowy actors and masked thugs to terrorize and control the population, beating it into submission, directing it to their will, to the will of the rich predator class.
Meanwhile, pretending there is an intellectual and liberal elite and shadowy “deep state” as enemy is perfect for the bullshit rhetoric of billionaires like Con Don Trump and Ecrap Muck to go wild against the People. When the mask comes off the face of plutocrats who rule, the masks go on the faces of the plutocrat’s most frontline shock troops. Such vile thuggery cannot bear the scrutiny of the smartphone camera — which may indicate that the depraved rule of the plutocrats may be nearing an end of sorts, finally. Time to haul the plutocrats before a tribunal and try them for their crimes, then let them choose between walking free after being stripped of their criminal wealth or being condemned and put away as the deranged plutocrats that they are.
It’s the brazen and often highly visible Military Police State — not the Deep State — that mainly does the bidding of the pillaging and profiteering plutocracy. Sure there are nasty things done in the shadows by hidden malevolent “deep state” bureaucrats and their operatives, as noted, but the vast majority of that sort of thing, and ultimately nearly all of it, is done on behalf of the pillaging and predatory financial elite and their systems of military police state rule.
Progressive populists need to and do focus on the real villains doing most of the damage, so often now in broad daylight, face-to-face, whether masked or not, the vile and brutal attacks of the plutocrats and their shock troop venal monsters as mercenaries. Lots of macho sickos are willing to attack with a gun for a buck in an utterly debased society, and lots of plutocrat sickos are willing to pay them to do so, for the same reason.
The great social commentator Caitlin Johnstone notes that
It has long been obvious to anyone with half a brain that Donald Trump is just another Republican swamp monster playing on public discontent with the status quo to win votes and support, but it is genuinely surprising how completely he has stopped pretending to care about fighting the deep state and sticking up for ordinary Americans as soon as he got back into office. He’s just dropped the populist schtick entirely and is giving the finger to anyone who complains.
The “deep state” notion is used by right-wing “populists” as a scare word and a ruse to pretend to attack a bad guy enemy and to avoid accountability while destroying and blocking democracy and popular government programs that benefit the people. It’s the new anti-government line. The deep state rhetoric is meant to win elections, and Trump knows by law he cannot be re-elected again, so why use it now, but he very much did and continues to do so, especially with Ecrap Muck hacking away at public institutions. Whenever the need arises Con Don Trump will resort to such fakery again. The plutocracy remains counterrevolutionary, let alone arevolutionary.
To the extent that there is a “deep state,” Con Don Trump is part of it — not least in being a former tight buddy with the sex-trafficking plutocrat spy and extremely predatory financier Jeffrey Epstein. Of course Con Don Trump is not going to out himself as part of any such deep state. Best for Con Don to pretend that Epstein killed himself rather than being murdered by the clandestine elements of the actually existing deep state — “a covert alliance of military, intelligence, political, and criminal elements operating outside the bounds of democratic control” as in Turkey in the 1990s — derin devlet — from where the term “deep state” was first coined, then applied for mainly right-wing use in America. Traditionally the libertarian socialist and anarchist left are the ones who most strongly oppose not merely the criminality in the shadows but the legalized criminality of the plutocrats’ military police state.
The plutocrats have created militant rogue nations and terror states, of which America is the preeminent leader, as it has been through much of its imperial existence. Of course the real nature of such states are deeply propagandized and constantly lied about — a “deep state” of brainwashing and imperial control if there ever was one. The American Congress is by-and-large a supremacist institution, true to its bigoted Constitutional history and structure, as is the American Presidency. But revolutionaries can occupy these positions and change all that. Progressive populists like Bernie and AOC and Rashida Tlaib are leading the charge in this nationally. And now Zohran Mamdani in New York City. And Kshama Sawant in Seattle. Among others.
In fact, progressive populists, let alone revolutionaries, threaten to break this cycle of criminal oppression and aggression. Progressive populists are incipient revolutionaries. They may or may not claim to be antirevolutionary or nonrevolutionary, and may or may not be, but the police state plutocracy does not react to them as if they are arevolutionary. Progressive populists are fought but not feared for their proposed reforms. They are feared because their proposed reforms may well lead to thoroughgoing revolutionary change — the revolutionary change that anyone with a brain should be able to see is wholly possible and badly needed, powerfully appealing and imperative.
No American novelist was more arevolutionary than the establishment-vaunted, late Victorian, early modernist author Henry James. He came from an endlessly wealthy family in upstate New York and wrote from the point of view of an arch-plutocrat. The American literary establishment embraced James deeply and weaponized his work against populist lit and populist authors. See Henry James and the Jacobites by the great liberal-then-progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar for a People’s view of the fiction of Henry James.
And see how two of the high priests of the mid-century hot and cold war corporate state, William vanden Heuval and Irving Kristol — the former an arch Liberal, the latter an arch Conservative — ended Geismar’s critical career on national TV over his criticism of Henry James. Kristol and vanden Heuval’s son and daughter Bill and Katrina remain significant political and literary figures still today — avowedly arevolutionary, at best.
Geismar was a mid-century victim of plutocrat establishment cancel culture, which has always been the most powerful and destructive form of cancel culture — the opposite impression given by the anti-woke.
The fiction of James, as Geismar revealed, often retreats from reality into aestheticism, is emblematic of a culture that is elitist and reactionary — supremacist — lacks moral courage and democratic spirit, of which the literary establishment is complicit, and generally weakens American literature, and literature in general. Geismar notes that Henry James and his advocates “amounted to the bankruptcy of our national literature.”
If you can set all that aside, or not see it in the first place, you may be able to enjoy the many careful intricacies of James’ prose, though “Poor Henry!” his renowned intellectual brother William noted, “chewed more than he can bite off.”
Some people genuinely enjoy the fastidious pointillist writing of Henry James. It’s possible to admire what people do while despising what they are — if James is even that consequential, or accomplished — like a fascist who builds electric cars. That said, a lot people are now loathe to drive a Tesla.
Serious fiction, sometimes known as literary fiction, has always been with us. These are works of imaginative writing that explore and expand consciousness, including conscience, and newly express and reveal the human condition in its ever-changing private and public realms — biological, psychological, and societal.
Some such fiction is written for highly literate readers, and some is written for the masses, for everyone. Such so-called serious fiction may be written in all genres, including the comedic, which may seem unserious superficially, but is often written toward serious ends.
A lot of factors affect market forces that can make or break the popularity of various books and types of books, not least the fact that public opinion for at least a century has been massively shaped and controlled by the PR industry to conform to the ideological demands of the plutocrat owner class and their thuggish rule.
The rise of the people’s media, which is social media at its best, has pushed back on plutocrat ideology and control somewhat, but the heavy hand of the plutocracy still exerts a lot of deadening control over publishing and distribution, visibility and mindsets, including over social media, which is what the most lively and liberatory lit struggles to fend off, escape, and overcome.
There is a constant struggle for human realization both within literature and without, and thus a real need for what might be thought of as resistance literature, let alone revolutionary literature, to fight against the mountains of dreck, vacuous, and retrograde lit — to fight against and dispel the arevolutionary.
We need to make our literature and our lives new and liberatory, rather than merely rehash what we already know and suffer from. Our stories, like our lives, should resist, transcend, and overcome ideally. We need to create an increasingly liberatory culture to vanquish the existing conquered, brainwashed, and destructive terminal one. Out with the arevolutionary. Up with the revolutionary in lit and life.
We live in revolutionary times. Last week Jeremy Corbyn’s new social democrat party gained half a million followers by email in merely its first three days of existence which is a list larger than the membership of any political party in England. The party is reformist but a novel development of the left that is attracting a lot of revolutionary zeal.
Meanwhile, in America as elsewhere, the right-wing populists want a fascist revolution (or they think they do) — the progressive populists want a social democrat revolution — the socialists want a socialist revolution — the Greens want a green revolution — the anarchists are always pushing for wholesale change. All these forces have come to a head in America and beyond. If not Bernie and AOC and the progressive populists, then Trump and the right wing populists, and vice versa. The establishment neoliberals in America had a last-gasp (hopefully) with Biden, relying heavily on Bernie and the progressive populists to hold off the reactionaries for a brief moment. Going forward, the establishment — whether Trumpist fascists or conservatives or neoliberals — thumps along by way of its endless money and material resources, while having less and less meaningful popular support.
The plutocracy that rules America (and much of the world) is happy to oblige the fascists and conservatives and the austerity liberals and no one else. This is simply because the plutocracy operates by tyranny and force, the corporate and financial tyranny that hammers a big military-police stick while mobilizing bigotry and ignorance, deceit and anti-intellectualism to divide the people. While the existing plutocracy is comfortably fascist against the needs of the people, in the plutocracy’s more liberal and somewhat less thuggish phase and forms, it goes by the name neoliberal, which is simply austerity politics plus a bit of social welfare — either way you impoverish the masses to enrich the plutocrats. Today’s fascism is the devolution of neoliberal austerity politics to increasingly bigoted and thuggish and impoverishing ends, though both neoliberalism and fascism are bigoted and thuggish.
Sane and knowledgeable people reject it all. With the rise of the people’s media, which is social media at its best, Revolutionary thinking and emoting spreads all over the place, including, seemingly, into some corporate mass culture, especially in graphic and movie form and other types of speculative and fantastical fiction, though this mock liberatory culture is strongly coded as revolution for somewhere far, far away, not for here (wherever you may be).
Corporate fake revolutionary culture is designed to be vague and indirect from the material realities and systems and figures of today, with some exceptions that prove the rule. Establishment culture sanctioned by the plutocracy is desperately pitched to be pervasive and marginally human or inhuman — entertainment and escape that appeals superficially or privately — rather than fully human and truly revolutionary — agitation and engagement that entices wholly and socially.
Meanwhile, contemporary novels continue to largely portray depoliticized “me” and “us” passion plays, also marginally political or apolitical, zooming in on identity of character and audience. Look at this plucky creature, how they persevere. Look at us plucky kin of a kind, how we get through. Look at that evil fellow, how he comes down, stubbornly and miserably so. The problem isn’t with the exploration of identities, the problem is using identity to obscure the scope and depth of the civil war raging through the whole world both without and within the billionaire bubble that has captured, destroyed, and overheated planet Earth and all its peoples and creatures — those more persecuted and vulnerable worse than others.
So what stage of culture and literature are we in today? Necessarily a revolutionary one — which is the only way out of fascism and neoliberalism, the only way out from the extractive iron banks and exploding missiles and bullets of the plutocracy. Green, socialist, and progressive populist forces of democracy must unify and overwhelm to defeat the militant pillaging plutocracy.
That’s where we are politically and in culture. So what tools do we have to work with for creating this new revolutionary culture? It might help to take a look at the cultures the world has been caught up in for the past century — much of that during the cold war. This is what Michael Denning does in “The Novelists’ International,” Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004). The three worlds of the cold war era are the Euro-American bloc, the Soviet bloc, and the global South — “decolonized and developing” countries.
In the long excerpts below, Denning focuses on what might be thought of as an increasingly populist social realism morphing into magical realism through and beyond the twentieth century. Picking up after Denning’s overview, only the revolutionary holds promise going forward, and the only way to get there is with the combined energies of the left — the progressive populists, the greens, the socialists and so on, always moving toward a unified popular left international that Denning depicts in struggle for human rights and democracy everywhere.
In the middle of the age of three worlds (1945-1989), the novel looked dead, exhausted. In the capitalist First World, it was reduced to increasingly arid formalisms alongside an industry of formulaic genre fictions. In the Communist Second World, the official conventions of socialist realism were ritualized into a form of didactic popular literature. Into the freeze of this literary cold war erupted Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967), the first international bestseller from Latin America and perhaps the most influential novel of the last third of the twentieth century. In its wake, a new sense of a world novel emerged, with Cien años de soledad as its avatar, the Third World as its home, and a vaguely defined magical realism as its aesthetic rubric.
Like world music, the world novel is a category to be distrusted; if it genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single cosmopolitan world beat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization, often as empty and contrived a signifier as the modernism and socialist realism it supplanted. There is, however, a historical truth to the sense that there are links between writers who now constitute the emerging canon of the world novel – writers as unalike as García Márquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadime Gordimer, José Saramago, Paule Marshall, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer – for the work of each has roots in the remarkable international literary movement that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century under the slogans of “proletarian literature,” “neorealism,” and “progressive,” “engaged,” or “committed” writing…. And though the novelists of this movement were deeply influenced by the experimental modernisms of the early decades of the century, they rarely fit into the canonical genealogies of Western modernism and postmodernism. Though the royalties were small, the writers not all proletarians, and the audience often more a promise than a reality, the movement transformed the history of the novel. By imagining an international of novelists, it reshaped the geography of the novel. It enfranchised a generation of writers, often of plebeian backgrounds, and it was the first self-conscious attempt to create a world literature. From Maxim Gorky to Gabriel García Márquez, from Lu Xun to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, from Richard Wright to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, from Patrícia Galvão to Isabel Allende: the novelists’ international spans the globe and the century….
The turning point was the world upheaval of 1917-1921. In the wake of the European slaughter, regimes and empires were challenged: there were revolutions in Czarist Russia and Mexico, brief lived socialist republics in Germany, Hungary and Persia, uprisings against colonialism in Ireland, India, and China, and massive strike waves and factory occupations in Japan, Italy, Spain, Chile, Brazil, and the United States. The “imaginative proximity of social revolution” electrified a generation of young writers who came together in a variety of revolutionary and proletarian writers’ groups….
Their books were experiments in form, attempts to reshape the novel. Several challenges immediately presented themselves: the attempt to represent working-class life in a genre that had developed as the quintessential narrator of bourgeois or middle-class manners, kin structures, and social circles; the attempt to represent a collective subject in a form built around the interior life of the individual; the attempt to create a public, agitational work in a form which, unlike drama, depended on private, often domestic, consumption; and the attempt to create a vision of revolutionary social change in a form almost inherently committed to the solidity of society and history. The early novels are often awkward and un-novelistic….
The worldwide migration from country to city was one of the central historical events of the age of three worlds…“the death of the peasantry”…. Out of the clash of peasant and proletarian worlds came the most powerful new form to emerge from the proletarian literary movements: magical or marvelous realism. Though magical realism is often considered as a successor and antagonist to social realism, its roots lay in the left-wing writers’ movements….
[Magical realism’s] insistence on the specific reality of the colonized world at the moment of liberation in India, Indonesia, and China, a moment that finds its historical precursor not in the French Revolution (as the Bolsheviks did) but in the Haitian Revolution.
If this is true, one can see why the notion of magical realism resonates far beyond the Caribbean islands and coasts where it began. The term comes to represent a larger shift in the aesthetic of the novelists’ international, from the powerful censoring of desire in the early novels (the works of the epoch of worldwide depression are novels of lack and hunger, and the utopian novel is rare) to an unleashing of desire and utopia, foreshadowing the liberation ideologies of the New Left. This is why it is common to see magical realism as the antithesis of an earlier social realism….
Magical realism finds its most celebrated avatar in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. The 1967 novel, part of the celebrated boom in Latin American fiction, came to stand for the moment of Third World hopefulness in the wake of decolonization…[yet] Cien años de soledad stands as both a sign of the crisis in the literary desire to represent workers that had animated a generation of plebian writers and as an attempt to bear witness to that desire. [The results are mixed at best, and] …nearly a century after the first calls for an international proletarian literature and socialist realism, that desire seems not only defeated, but nonexistent and unimaginable. Yet like the strike story in Cien años de soledad, the aspirations and aesthetics of the novelists’ international remain the forgotten, repressed history behind the contemporary globalization of the novel.
As Andrew Seal notes, Denning argues further that:
rather than a “successor and antagonist to social realism,” magical realism is best seen as “a second stage of the proletarian avant-garde: if the first moment in the wake of the upheavals of 1917-1919 was dominated by a paradoxically ahistorical modernism that tried to document the lived experience of radically new factory and tenement… the magical realism of 1949 [the year Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo—The Kingdom of This World, the preface of which introduced the term “lo real maravilloso,” the marvelous real] is the return of the repressed history” of the deeper traumas of “a history of conquest, enslavement, and colonization.”
This half-mythic past’s return unexpectedly resulted in the “unleashing of desire and utopia” most associated with magical realism, although the general interpretation of that release is highly depoliticized and given little or no context, political or otherwise. “World literature” sells best when shorn of its history of radical sympathies and stances. It sells a whole lot better if “the unleashing of desire and utopia” gets re-coded as simple tropical vitality.
Seal asks further:
Finally, whither the Left? Engaged leftist writers are, as Michael Denning among others has shown, considerably more transnational and transnationalizable. The special harmony of pursuing similar projects under vastly different conditions encourages comparative reading and vigorous response. If America produces a vibrant artistic Left in the coming years, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about being read all around the world.
While plutocrat dominance of world markets ensures that tsunamis of status quo and reactionary literature and art continue to deluge the world, more liberatory circles seek left fiction. Outside of left fiction now, outside of revolutionary fiction and culture, works of art often come off as done and dead or strangely ahistorical, mistaking or missing the times, unhistorical, oblivious to the living world — especially when a lot of arevolutionary society and life are included.
The arevolutionary lit of today entirely mistakes — often on purpose when not unwittingly brainwashed or negligent and uncaring — the most vital realities and possibilities of the time and of the human condition. Meanwhile oblivious unrevolutionary lit seems quaint and played out, weak, at best — whether magical realist, social realist, or fantastical and speculative.
Unify, unify, unify, the green and the socialist, the social democratic and the populist into the revolutionary against the predatory fascist and neo-liberal establishment of the plutocracy — that’s the need in art, culture, politics, and society.
We live on a scale of freedom to tyranny — left to right — diversity to bigotry — left to right — resistance to oppression — left to right — the generous to the predatory — left to right — the convivial to the violent — left to right — the people to the plutocrats — left to right — the humane to the monstrous — left to right — the revolutionary to the reactionary — left to right, and on and on. Our literature and culture and society and planet must revolutionize away from the right to the left or perish in increasingly grotesque ways until the ultimate end.
It’s human rights and people versus profiteering and money — left to right — and when so much money and material resources are stolen and weaponized by the right, only a revolution, a series of revolutions can recreate a world in the image of the ideals found on the left and away from the horrors found on the right. Any political scale that fails to range from the ideal to the horrific is deceptive. Any culture and art that thinks it cannot be categorized on a scale of left to right, sometimes in surprising ways, is clueless or mistaken, often willfully so.
If you’re going to write in the veins of classic social realism or magical realism or Utopian speculation and the fantastical, then make it revolutionary for high value and great ambition. And make it materially revolutionary, not vaguely, obliquely, and altogether out of grasp. Bring it on home into the revolutionary international culture of the time. The time demands it. Otherwise, a literature and culture will continue that abides genocide, ecocide, omnicide.
Imagine a flood of revolutionary art, story, and culture through the magazines and presses and websites and other media and spaces of the age, rather than the arevolutionary slices of life and infatuations of living mainly oblivious to the death cult that is society today. The omnicidal Anthropocene threatens and increasingly promises to make this era the final one of all. However big and bold we think we can be as artists or people in general, we need to imagine more, and create it, revolutionary change. We need to do this before everything blows up and collapses even more than we already see, the ongoing needless horrors of history that implicate us as we bear witness.
The left needs to start appealing to people’s hunger for hope and attraction to fantasy life. What’s more, says [NYU media and culture professor] Stephen Duncombe, 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.
Anticipating “MAGA” Trump and the Bernie “Revolution,” Duncombe’s perception made during the previous Republican administration, that of 9-11 and the American invasion of Iraq, indicates that culture helps drive and allow policy — whether as mask or revelation — whether in the interests of the pillaging plutocracy and their piles of gold or in the interests of the people’s needs and the planet.
We need a culture and an art full of people’s revolutionaries to displace the endless line of cowboy predators in white empire who make America genocidal ever again. We need to create a revolutionary culture that forces popular and brave but too often limited and mistaken progressive leaders like Bernie and AOC to step up with the most powerful revolutionary forces and fronts needed to change the world, in the most powerful ways, to the most constructive ends. By now and long since these imperative forces and fronts of culture must be necessarily more than reformist, liberal, and populist, they must be revolutionary.
That means rupture, breaking from the old ways of being and doing. Jeremy Corbyn’s new party in England is a start. It needs to go farther than is currently being imagined. Something akin is ripe to occur in American politics too. And in American culture something new must also break through.
Orwellian speech and Orwellian silence at the British Broadcasting Corporation, and throughout capitalist media, are used to deny the reality of the American-Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, even though the gruesome and maniacal reality is totally obvious despite the nonstop official lies.
Though Orwell’s novel 1984 was seen as a critique of the official enemy of capitalism, the Soviet Union, all of the Orwellian newspeak that Orwell coined, documented, and dramatized in 1984 was based on the standard propaganda techniques of the BBC and all state-capitalist media during World War Two (continuing through today), techniques and practices that Orwell necessarily participated in and saw firsthand as a BBC employee during that time, and led to his resignation in the middle of the war to write for a left-wing magazine.
Karyn Elizabeth notes how the genocidal legacy media continues unchanged today:
The BBC has worked even harder to avoid mentioning the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders. Despite overwhelming number of such statements — there are entire archives devoted to documenting them — the BBC has mentioned them precisely zero times. This, as far as I can ascertain, would also seem to be the approach of most other Western media outlets. Of course the BBC would no doubt argue that if such genocidal statements were given any airtime Israeli leaders look worse than Hamas leaders. This would, once again, make the BBC look ‘partial’ because, as all good Westerners know, Hamas is the very incarnation of evil so Israel cannot possibly be as bad as them.
Caitlin Johnstone and other great independent journalists and organizations like Drop Site News clarify relentlessly that the obvious is the obvious:
It was obvious in October 2023 that Israel intended to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza, in part because you would never treat a population that way if you intended to leave survivors on your border. Because you’d know they’d seek revenge later on.
Call it the Inigo Montoya problem — if you kill someone’s father right in front of him, it’s a safe bet that he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you. If you intend to act in monstrous ways that fill young children with thoughts of revenge, then you need to get rid of the children, and you need to get rid of the women who will give birth to them. Otherwise you’re just creating a problem for your own children and grandchildren down the road.
The Nazis understood this. Heinrich Himmler famously said, “I did not feel I had a right to exterminate the men — i.e. kill them or have them killed — while allowing the children to grow up and take revenge upon our sons and grandsons. We had to reach the difficult decision of making this nation vanish from the face of the earth.”
The savagery of Israel’s post-October 7 onslaught was so horrific right off the bat that it was clear they didn’t intend to leave anyone alive in Gaza.
Karyn Elizabeth incidentally indicates why all the cries for more “shades of grey” in our imaginative stories are so out of step with the times — not to mention with the reality of world history and humankind in general.
Fake claims of fairness versus partiality like fake ideals of moral grayness versus moral reality are the big lies of both establishment media and establishment literature that are a poison constantly pushed, for obvious reasons.
Apolitical types leap for it. “Apolitical” is a word that apparently wasn’t even conceived of until the middle of last century, as American empire peaked. One source claims the coining of “apolitical” at the time of the rise of the “public relations” industry, as I noted in a previous post, while other sources show the word not first appearing until a few decades later, in 1952, not long after the launch of the Cold War at the height of American might.
There’s nothing wrong with the morally gray in fiction as long as it’s contextualized within the morally stark. It’s not accurate to say that the American-Israeli genocide of the Palestinians has been hidden — all lying official rhetoric to the contrary. The genocide has been livestreamed and effectively flaunted — often explicitly — by American and Israeli officials and forces who want the world to see the genocidal vengeance, the gleeful insanity, the torturous mass murder and be cowed.
The Nazis mainly tried to hide their genocide from the world, but times have changed. The Palestinians from the start — in fact going back at least three quarters of a century by now, and not least of late — have been maniacally assaulted and purposefully made an open example of. Don’t cross Empire — America and Israel are here to show you — this is what you get. There is zero moral gray here or there, as intended.
Our writing in all forms should reflect this open monstrosity of American and Israeli culture and politics, and daily life. Much of the so-called civilized world, the plutocracy, imposes this berserk barbarism at the point of a gun. This is the real world that the most vulnerable people, and countless other creatures, remain trapped in, and it’s not morally gray, despite the many shades of gray that run within it, not of it.
In the new internet age of 24/7 global livestream, the constant lies of Empire no longer hide anything. The continuous lies of the plutocrat establishment are garbage fig leaves, junk shibboleths, pious fictions, empty platitudes, Imperial lies, CYA illusions, perverse polite fictions, and otherwise deranged official pronouncements. The real and the imagined stories that we the People tell should always reflect that:
It’s an evil so all-encompassing, so total, that if a novelist or a screenwriter came up with it prior to it happening in real life I’m pretty sure they would have been told it was too extreme — that the villains were just too villainous, the events were just too hellish. After all, you can’t reduce the world to a simple binary of good and evil — that’s simply not believable and it doesn’t make for good drama. There should be shades of grey even in our fictionalised worlds.
Believable or not, however, it is happening. Incomprehensible or not we have to somehow wrap our heads around it. But for those of us in the West it’s almost impossible to do this because we live in a narrative bubble where allies of the West (like Israel) are the ‘good guys’ and only our enemies (‘terrorists’ like Hamas and ‘barbarians’ like the Russians) do evil things; a bubble where ‘people like us’ are most often the heroes, occasionally the victims, but never the villains.
Except it’s all out in the open now and degraded farther than ever before. Overt viciousness, and the endlessly degenerate, has been normalized in the American Presidency and everywhere else. Yet what remains no less disturbing — and far more dangerous — are the even more lethal and far more common masks of professionalized viciousness still dressed up as “polite” society, in official talk, presentation, action.
Bernie Sanders and everyone else should refer to the American-Israeli slaughter of Palestinians as legally and generally what it is, genocide, mass murder, sadistic torture, and the most depraved thing in the world.
This is every bit as much America’s genocide, mass murder of Palestinians as it is Israel’s, given how much America funds and arms and supports and protects and enables Israel, which is basically an overseas state of America, the 51st.
Israel slaughtering the Palestinians in Gaza would be equivalent numerically to Ohio slaughtering the people of its capital and largest city, Columbus, with the full support and assistance of the federal American government. In either case, whether Israel or Ohio — America would be fundamentally responsible, and directly responsible for the genocide, the starvation, the colossal destruction, and horrific mass murder — whether it’s the people of Columbus, or the people of Gaza. Such holocaust could not happen and does not happen without American support and facilitation and direct American participation and ultimate underlying responsibility. The American Empire has long since taken over for and from the Nazis to very literally conquer and control much of the world by purposeful and unrelenting gun and dollar assault. Nothing has been more thoroughly documented — outside of official establishment circles of the plutocracy, and even largely within. And now it’s daily livestreamed.
The genocide of Palestinians is America’s genocide fundamentally. Israel does as it’s told and as it’s allowed to do by its puppet master, America — its funder, its enabler and armorer, its protector, its creator. Israel is most visibly engaged in the genocide and depravity, but America is most realistically and fundamentally responsible and driving all of it. This is the American Empire working the bloody throttle as it has for the past 250 years. It’s an official culture of depravity — of delirious demented predation. Go back through each of 25 decades and ask the massacred peoples around the globe, those slain and held captive by gun and dollar, not least on the continent of North America itself.
Much lies, deceit, and rhetorical flourishes to the contrary.
Johnstone:
I’m having trouble finding the words to talk about the people who are scurrying around lying and manipulating to excuse the deliberate starvation of civilians in Gaza today. “Evil” doesn’t cut it. “Monster” and “psychopath” are too kind.
How do these people live with themselves? They have to live each and every moment of their lives inside the sort of brain that would produce this kind of behavior. I sincerely cannot imagine living life in that way, for even one day.
Israel supporters are so shockingly, venomously evil that it makes you stop and re-evaluate everything you think you know about humanity. Every spiritual, philosophical and psychological insight you’ve arrived at over the course of your life will struggle to make sense of the freakish, gratuitous sadism you’ll witness in Israel’s apologists describing their own thoughts in their own words. It actually makes you question your entire worldview.
I’m out of words. I write words for a living, and I have no words. There is nothing I can say.
Everything can be said, and must be. It’s not morally gray. The American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians is utter abomination denied by meaningless official veneers. Genocide and the doomsday final cataclysms of ecocide and omnicide are consuming all Earth, and will terminate everything, unless resisted and reversed.
What is American literature, or even world literature, today in an age of omnicide? What need it be?
Following the height of the novel in its 19th-century form of sweeping social realism — works that sought to portray entire societies through interwoven character arcs and panoramic settings — the 20th century saw the rise of modernism, with its emphasis on interiority, fragmentation, and the subjective experience of reality. This was followed by postmodernism, which often combined that subjectivity with self-referentiality, metafiction, and a playful or critical engagement with cultural theory.
More recently, literary memoir and so-called autofiction have come to prominence — forms that can freely blend techniques from modernism and postmodernism with personal narrative, collapsing the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. In these works, the focus often rests on intense explorations of individual consciousness and perception, sometimes employing metafictional or theoretical devices that complicate or even contradict themselves.
Broader social and historical contexts, when present, are often implied or kept in the background. The primary attention is on rhetorical, private, and fragmented narratives rather than the panoramic, outward-looking depictions of society characteristic of classic social realism, a more civic stream of literature.
Though the sweeping social novel was in a sense overtaken by the more rhetorical, private, and fragmented stories, the novel continued to flow through its more civic stream of story in keeping with the social and public focus of the great 19th century Victorian novels as it evolved (or devolved) from social realism into various kinds of intense social studies like naturalism and class-based (“proletarian”) novels and historical chronicles — all the while continuing along with classic social realism. Then with global decolonization and the civil rights movements following the the devastation of the world wars and mixing with new imperial conquests in the 20th century, this civic line of literature morphed (or rather, leapt and flew) into the surrealism and myths of magical realism and the clashes of dislocated cultures and sensibilities. This refreshed civic stream of literature then flowed into various forms of increasingly progressive literary populism, not infrequently fantastical, speculative, or otherwise heightened.
Both of these broad literary streams, the civic and the rhetorical, somewhat akin to Aristotle’s delineation of two kinds of writers and imaginative writing in the Poetics, grew increasingly diverse in almost every way though decades of decolonization, civil and human rights gains, and the new battles against imperialism and the capitalist conquest of much of the world via military, police, and the weaponized finance of the global plutocracy, American-led.
Considering these two broad streams of the civic and the rhetorical in literature makes for a larger exploration and understanding of the “Two Paths for the Novel” that Zadie Smith noted in her much-remarked review of a couple novels in the New York Review in 2008. She confines her focus mainly to a type of social realism, “lyrical realism,” as one path, versus post-modernism as the other path, with its more meta, aesthetic, and theory-like focus. Meanwhile, so-called autofiction, hard on the heels of literary memoir, was pushing onto the literary scene, largely in the rhetorical stream, being lauded and gaining prestige. Autofiction (autobiographical-based tales) works for marketing and publishing in part because it’s so self-focused, as with memoir, in a society that is cultivated to be divided and self-centered and individually exploitable. The focus on self makes both literary memoir and autofiction very acceptable to the publishing industry — itself — because the intense private focus is so much more readily posed and understood as objectively and safely “apolitical” — however rhetorically politicized for marketing purposes — especially as compared to sweeping social novels with more overt and basic political and fundamental cultural emphasis.
Autofiction might seem to be the apotheosis of modernism given its typical intense private focus but is more a blend of modernism and postmodernism, and obviously memoir — a kind of autobiographical fiction infused with a century-plus of new rhetorical developments in fiction and consciousness, though this rhetorical stream of literature can and does mix with the civic stream to certain extents. Any approach can grab and meld with any other approach in clever and meaningful ways. Autofiction and other rhetorical forms are no different in this capacity.
All in all, the modern, postmodern, and fictional memoir stream — the more private, subjective, fragmented, theory-like, and rhetorical approach — runs alongside and intertwined with the stream of novels of social realism, magical realism, and most recently progressive literary populism — the more civic and public approach — both streams mixing and influencing each other. The civic stream culminates today in revolutionary literary populism, ever more profound and sweeping. Both streams of literature, the civic and the rhetorical, are not infrequently expressed with fantastical and speculative elements, and also incorporate features of each other.
In the establishment culture of publishing, largely guided by liberal capitalist mindsets and mandates, full-blown socialist and revolutionary stories and consciousness are kept to a minimum, and remain largely disappeared, discouraged, and barred — much inflamed rhetoric and rhetorical flourish aside — as is the case across the closely related mass media of film and TV. Reactionaries, cultural fascists, dupes, and the general establishment might largely or entirely disagree with this assessment that the literary establishment is not much left-wing, but that’s the result of callous, mercenary, and deluded ideologies, fueled by much fake news bullshit.
Any left revolutionary stream and development in story, consciousness, and culture has more success skating through the publishing world when hybridized with less revolutionary content and with the more rhetorical stream of literature, in which any overt and explicit public, civic, and ideological features can play hide-and-seek through the private, the rhetorical, the theoretical. It’s always convenient for the establishment to shift the focus to the private and rhetorical, to the depoliticized or niche-politicized lines of reality and possibility and for this fragmented sensibility to be posed as the full human condition, the full essence and scope of consciousness in literature and life, though it’s not at all. Too much of the liberatory left world goes missing. In literature as in society, the vital public realms are too often privatized and eviscerated — which destroys real and crucial conceptions of the personal and social, of consciousness, experience, understanding, and impact.
The public and the private, the civic and the rhetorical, with the ideological, combine to make up the personal. And the full scope of the personal — chock full of both private and social effects — reciprocates into both the most public and private realms of people and society. Writers need to figure out what approach/s work best for them, toward whatever purpose/s they intend, but they need to be wholly aware too that the grave and endlessly violent times also make imperative demands of story and consciousness, actions and creations.
Diverse different literary approaches or modes of consciousness and story can and do stream along together after they initiate or become prominent. They both swell and repel each other. After the height of the panoramic social-realist novel in the 19th century, the 20th century diverged with the overlapping of new more subjective and private forms and rhetorical explorations of consciousness in story, while the perhaps still predominant civic stream grappled with the increasingly vexed consciousness and conditions of the public, often war-torn. The new and seemingly more celebrated rhetorical stream explored much more private subjectivities for reasons both damning and liberatory, turning inward — in significant part driven by social, political, and financial pressures in America and Europe that included the horrors and devastation of imperialism and war. This new emphasis on inward rhetoric favoring the exploration of subjective experience and formal experimentation as early modernism (roughly 1890s–1940s) shifted the novel toward fragmented perspectives, stream-of-consciousness narration, and an ever more self-absorbed and individuated rendering of consciousness. Then postmodernism (1950s–1990s) pushed these experiments further, using metafiction, self-reflexive narration, and theory-laden play with narrative frames — and other fixations of rhetoric. More recently, literary memoir and autofiction have been lauded for their subjective and self-conscious impulses in the intensifying age of identity individualization— an internal theory-like focus often blending modernist interiority with postmodern self-awareness and rhetoric. In such works, broader social contexts are frequently recessed or implied, while the primary focus remains on private consciousness, perspective, and the rhetorical possibilities of storytelling itself. This is literature as self-absorption or theory-like game with individual focus, identity exploration, expansion, elevation. It can come off as a kind of individualistic set-aside on life as opposed to a collective engagement.
Meantime, the continuing civic stream of literature remained committed to the novel as a public and socially engaged art exploring vast society and more broad and collective consciousness. From late 19th-century naturalism through early 20th-century proletarian novels and historical epics, this stream followed the public impulse to document social structures and collective life, communal or group experience, and social mindsets. With mid-century decolonization and the civil rights era, this stream of literature flourished globally, incorporating the struggles and hybrid social and personal realities of postcolonial experience. Magical realism — with its roots in European art movements (the surrealist revolt arising from the horrors of World War One) as well as in the living cultural repository of Latin American political history and myth — emerged as one of civic literatures’ most influential forms, fusing the political and the mythic and surreal to recast consciousness of society and social being. Speculative and fantastical fiction with social or historical themes expands this civic lineage. And an increasingly progressive and revolutionary populism in literature has in recent decades begun to emerge full-throated not only in the civic stream of literature where it is most expected and best fits but also as part of the private subjective and meta theory-like rhetorical stream as well, though there it can risk being obscured.
Why revolutionary populism now and in pockets in the past? Because it can and must be. Because the extremely perilous times and the marauded and tenuous fates of the people demand it increasingly, and because literary forms, consciousness, and experience can facilitate and grow it. The private is so much a part of the public, in any person and society, if not presumed or decreed otherwise. For example, Victor Hugo’s short modernist novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man is far ahead of its time in its modernist approach, though written in early Victorian times in 1829, as an example of how private interior life and subjectivity and rhetorical exploration can have profoundly public socio-political significance, in this case as a protest against state homicide, so-called capital punishment. This private, subjective, rhetorical approach can be taken much farther toward public engagement, be made ever more integral to society and the public as it sometimes has been created in the two centuries following The Last Day of a Condemned Man.
Rather than entirely supplanting or displacing each other, these two currents, massive flows of literature — one civic and social in emphasis, the other private and rhetorical in focus — have conjoined, separated, and conjoined again, sometimes diverging increasingly, creating the potentially confusing complexity of contemporary novel culture and production and an at times wildly mixed creation of consciousness. Both streams of literature are of human consciousness that can unify experience across the private and the public, the subjective and the social, through personal engagement in society, despite their different approaches that are thought to be mainly different in form but are often best understood as different in content, given what actually makes up each stream. Regardless, these two streams may both unify and diverge. They are not polar opposites, not at all hydrophobic, not necessarily incapable of mixing and fulfilling one another.
However, neither of these formal approaches, neither stream, civic or rhetorical, nor their hybrids, are as important as the cultural content and the cultural effect of their expression. Stories in any approach are always leaping instantaneously back and forth from the private to the public, and both streams can be written as genocidal (Torah and Old Testament style), fascist, retrograde, bigoted, classist, liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist, or revolutionary. Even the most privately focused work can be classified on a political spectrum of tyranny to freedom — right to left — oppressive to liberatory. The private is an inseparable part of the public, and vice versa. The private is an inseparable part of the social organism (especially when expressed in the very public medium of story), just as the public is an inseparable and intrinsic part of the private and the personal. Neither the private nor the public can live or be understood in a vacuum wholly displaced from the other, or even much at all, except as willful distortion — which is the fake news of bogus perspective in service to the profiteering, isolating, individualizing, controlling, fragmenting, and predatory values of the establishment and its eye-gouging ideologies.
Literature, story, gives great tools for expression and communication, for revelation, for creating powerful experiences and consciousness, including conscience. In this way literature effects change in thinking and feeling, in culture and society, in politics and ideas, and it also reinforces particular existing realities — good or bad, depending on the story. Form matters because art is especially aesthetic, though far from sheerly aesthetic, and thus form can seem to be the most prominent component of art. But great art is far more than aesthetic and formal — it is normative and material, ethical and experiential, conceptual and emotive, and full of all kinds of life.
So much in art depends upon story content, its scope and qualities, and on the context of the cultural and social and political time and place. Form is based on content and is not the basis for it. Content drives form, and embodies purpose, the exact opposite of the establishment mantra so often echoed and pushed on creators through MFA creative writing programs and publishing industries and literary and art scenes, not least the art milieus and machines cultivated with plutocratic intent to plutocratic ends. If you want to be a star in the art world, be a formalist, with great aesthetic achievement. On the other had, if you want to create truly great and humanly and socially valuable art, including useful and effective art, be, say, a socialist or a revolutionary or something of great substance — great content — also with good aesthetic achievement.
The formal streams that stories live in have an effect but do not entirely or even largely dictate their qualities and impact, not nearly as much as does the author’s narrative purpose and ideology — the content — ideas and information, the critical public perspective, the emotions and experience imagined and delivered. The larger content matters greatly, decisively. Content gives shape and meaning to form. Form may even be thought of as the lesser content. Of course the status quo and reactionary culture, the literary and publishing establishments far prefer to focus on the lesser content, the form of story, and to inflate it to preeminent, because it’s safer, more acceptable to the powerful and controlling pressures, the domineering ideology, the owners of vast resources and wealth.
Status quo literary figures are shadows cast by the plutocracy. Thus naturally they are encouraged and tend toward being aesthetes and rhetoricians rather than public intellectuals and engaged figures challenging the horrific status quo, unlike the progressive populists, let alone the outright socialists and revolutionaries. Many political progressives think they are cultural and literary progressives, but they’re not, a matter for another essay. The literary establishment by its corporate-state dictates infects the ideologies of the universities and much of the would-be independent presses, which also tend to prefer, celebrate, laud, publish, and award literature on basis of form, and familiar content however pallid and toothless, especially any form (and content) shorn of overt and explicit revolutionary consciousness and ideology so desperately imperative today. For that would be partisan, you see, say the partisans of the vested interests. That would be ideological, don’t you know, say the ideologues of capitalist mentality, whether liberal or conservative in inclination. That would be put-on and propagandistic — for real, though not so real — say the propagandists constantly and often unwittingly putting-on the conventional wisdom of the highly politicized establishment.
Just so, there is always a strong establishment tilt toward celebrating the formal streams of the private self, of fragmented individuality and understanding, of blurred meaning and subjectivity, of the rhetorical, of the abstract, of the distant and the disengaged, of story divorced effectively if not ostensibly from the most socially, politically, and culturally compelling and vital public realities, experiences, and consciousness.
In a genocidal, ecocidal, omnicidal age, the most urgent and ambitious focus and content of the novel (as the most epic form of story) is that which is revolutionary across the board — in consciousness and experience, in idea and effect — regardless of its formal approach.
The medium of the novel isn’t the problem in this. And even the formal streams of the novel are a secondary matter. It’s the content that the authors typically elide that is the problem — elisions basically mandated, both explicitly and more often implicitly by the reigning ideologies and structures of culture and publishing. You mainly need to do it yourself, push the literary taboo, cultural taboos, on Substack and like places. It’s the most real and revolutionary way to go, a way to seek handholds in the larger culture and make an impact.
Many novels are less political and class based and certainly less revolutionary than they are emphasized to be by establishment commentators who praise the function of the establishment and its approved, published, stories far more in this regard than they deserve and actually are. You get rewarded for putting the best shine on things by both flattering and not offending the systems of the big owners and the brainwashed ideologies so widespread in literary realms. The establishment literati may think they’re not brainwashed, biased, or misguided, but this is the effect of broken old paradigms on the mind and it can be hard to both see and escape. Whether or not they care to is another story — for a wide variety of reasons.
Revolution involves big basic change. Breaks and ruptures from the past can be nerve-wracking and thrilling, dangerous and liberating in consciousness and culture, in society and politics, in relationships and material conditions. And while it takes a long time for certain conditions to change, great leaps forward can and do happen regardless.
Current conditions in literature and life can be simultaneously wholly apparent and utterly obfuscated, a wild mix of comprehension and lack thereof. In culture and literature, in society and politics, in the personal and the natural world, in reality and possibility, a chaotic mix of the invidious and the imperative reigns. Ambitious wholistic art of great content and simple effective forms can both clarify and galvanize. And in an omnicidal age, the needed shift in culture and consciousness, in society and politics must be as quick and complete as humanly possible. It’s story, probably even moreso than sheer analytic reason — look at what all must be tolerated and waded through here — that can help change, push, and convince culture and consciousness, society and politics to revolutionize beyond what is currently thought humanly possible and desirable, and it can transform what should be most feared and most despised for the people’s own safety and benefit. Cultural stories, political stories, are so very powerful to the good and the bad. Far too much about the literary world is negligent and derelict in this regard. The literary establishment goes to enormous and extravagant lengths to convince itself that its way is the way — that its heavily biased and prejudiced subjectivities and approaches are on balance fair and objective, most profound and most imperative. The staggeringly deficient results in what should be far more compelling, powerful, and enlivening currents can be seen in the two pinched and drought-ridden often misdirected streams of literature that struggle to source and realize full and fresh, revitalizing and, dare it be re-emphasized, revolutionary life-and-world-changing flows.
If as Michael Denning notes the novel looked dead early in the Cold War, in the middle of last century, until refreshed by the magical realism of the international novel and the civil awakening of the idea of a world novel, diverse populist globally conscious novels of human rights, struggles, and realizations, then today’s ambitious novel looks not dead but duncified, stunted and confined, with theoretical, rhetorical flailings pushing for returns to this or that newly warmed over formal mode or to the same old flavors of recurring moments. What gets little or no attention are the badly needed qualities and magnitude of the reach and the grasp, the great contents of lit and life that are today so desperately and piteously lethal and villainously plutocratic, and also so hopefully world-changing, and that therefore necessarily require and involve revolution to a wholly human rights based socialist consciousness, conscience, culture, and creation. This is full consciousness of life, and death, today and the typical ambitious novel barely nibbles at the edges of it.
The revolution is here like it or not, and it is too much fascistic and retrograde, and too little socialist and liberatory. Too much story putters along in this fundamentally depoliticized, fake politicized, culture as if civil war, revolutionary war, and the potentially final wars of climate and nukes and ideology are not raging all around.
It’s a new Day of Reckoning, the Age of Reckoning, possibly the final one, and the fascists believe it to be so for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile liberals and conservatives remain brainwashed and living not only in another century but in another era, pre-Anthropocene, believing faithfully that increasingly vampiric liberal capitalism will save them, believing the age is not neo-feudal, believing they are not slaves and whipping posts to finance for billionaires, believing the police state will whither and not intensify in the hands of the plutocracy, believing the water that they are near to boiling in will not get quite hot enough to cook them alive. Or believing there’s not a goddamn thing they can do about it. And their literature reflects that, and helps to guarantee that they are as terminal and useless as they think and act. All the while proclaiming and believing otherwise. True believers.
This is not the stream we should swim with but against. Call it what you will but make it revolutionary or forget it. The Israelis are massacring Palestinians in a genocidal horror straight out of the Torah and Old Testament and blatantly and wantonly lying about it, and the Americans are right there with them in full and total support, in wholesale authorization and active participation. All the while the Empire is destroying and terminating the atmosphere as we know it to great profiteering and predation and final apocalyptic effect. The ecocidal slaughter of species and vast ecologies is unsurpassed and accelerating, while basic human rights are often increasingly under assault everywhere.
So what ambitious literature of our times should be produced? Call it liberatory, call it revolutionary, call it populist and progressive or socialist, call it something imperative to the times. It should be created as if our very lives depend on it, because they do. It should be made and distributed as if the fate of the planet depends on it, because it does. Call it planetary woke, if you want to be spicy in certain circles, like Substack and Twitter/X and so on, a concept far beyond the valiant if sometimes excessive plain old woke, the now much derided attempt at psycho-social awakening in the broad populace that is currently being run over mercilessly, again, by the rhetorical, financial, and militant shock troops of white empire, of capitalist empire, of ethno supremacy, and good old-fashioned Biblical terror. No woke for them, planetary or otherwise. Genocide instead. White Empire and plutocrat supremacy.
Billionaire capitalist society is largely a tyranny, a kind of dollar monarchy, its harsh limits of life financially imposed and waged at the front lines as counterrevolution to both the Enlightenment and the age of human rights by gun-slinging, masked, and badgeless outlaws, the deputized mercenaries of the King Midas corporate estate called America. Oh, America — a heavily armed international conglomerate of a kingdom — White Empire with its billionaire’s banks rapidly building new prisons and concentration camps and treating economic refugees like cattle and as enemy combatants in a display of brutal insanity contagious across the globe. This is America past and present, its smoldering heart and central ideology of perpetual conquest, the European invasion ongoing all these centuries later, the missile-based financial Empire still on the march. The Great American Novel? Shudder to consider it.
So too do the forces of progressive populist and socialist resistance rise and struggle to empower and cohere in response, by the more generous hearts and sane minds and dogged strength and determination and willful imagination of the people. The people against empire are the only hope, and right now they are getting slaughtered and are on the defensive. Too many of their kin are brain-poisoned, mentally cleansed, and their financial forces and resources are too lacking, and the weaponry pounding them is too overpowering. The people are dying but fighting back across all societies as they must if there is to be any chance for a future at all. These are our times, so what is our literature? What form? Who cares the form! What’s the content. Form comes from content. Form is a type of lesser and technical content — the conceptual aesthetics are not the full art. Art makes life different from the distorted blur of the day. It makes life graspable, workable, and ever more inspiring — it can. The aesthetic component of art, the artform, helps the artwork to greatly resonate with humankind and human consciousness. The artform is made manifest by the artwork, both of which are driven and given fundamental and purposive meaning by the normative and material qualities and conditions of life, by the realities and the possibilities of the human and natural worlds, that is, by the content. And so story is not primarily composed of endless techniques and variations of aesthetics and rhetoric. Story is much bigger than the aesthetic. Story is new great and powerful creation that can and does change the world — one way or the other. There’s no getting away from it, from the responsibility of story, with its fundamentally moving and decisive, fearsome and wondrous implications and effects.
Creators must look past the external — the skin, the form — to the internal — the guts, the heart, the brains, the content — and write from the inside out and not get lost playing around and doting on the seductive curves and lines, colors and textures of the surface. Creators must dive deep into the belly of the social beast, the plutocrat monster, the military and police labyrinth, the financial pillage machine, the political hurricane, the cultural chaos, and they must emerge full-throated with the horrors encountered there. Creators must walk with the gutsy people, with the clear thinkers, and the genuine emoters, with the caregivers, and the fixers, with the dreamers and organizers, the builders and protectors and growers and healers, with the partisans and the revolutionaries of culture and society, politics and consciousness — and they must communicate the great struggle for society, life, human rights, and the planet. Or what on this Earth are their art and their stories for?
Liberation lit, the future must be liberation lit. Lit from the inside out. It must be revolutionary in aim and scope if it is to be something more than reallocating the doomed seating assignments on the Titanic. We’re all on the Titanic now — whether we know it or admit it or not — a potentially condemned and sinking ship of climate collapse, ecological collapse, nuclear collapse, civil collapse, and other forms of civil suicide, civil homicide, civil war, and pending omnicide. The situation is so bad now that it may not matter that the profiteers of the ruling plutocracy have carried out preliminary mass murder by eliminating universal lifeboats — Lifeboats For All. What matters most now is stopping the gigantic death cult ship and charting new safe passage, for the planet and all that’s riding on it.
That said, creating universal lifeboats can’t hurt in the meantime and may be the way to build progressive popular people’s power to be able to wrest command of the Titanic away from the deadly billionaires of finance and industry and their fellow travelers and lackeys of retrograde, fascist, and supremacist ideologies. What literary form, what rise of social consciousness helps? Postmodern autofiction? Social and magical realism? These notions can seem so slight as to be laughable. But go with it, as long as you make it overtly and explicitly and fundamentally liberatory and revolutionary to our gasping times. Don’t hold your breath as to how the publishing and critical establishments will react to that. But to proceed otherwise is to create new ghastly vistas of the Joycean Dead, per the classic story of the name — “The Dead” — the haunted and living dead of a zombie society. Lacking imperative content, form doesn’t matter in story. Fueled by imperative content, form can power great change in story, in society and all life.
All the endless arguments over vital forms are, at best, proxy battles for arguments over compelling and imperative content, though establishment obfuscation and ideology holds otherwise. If your form feels flat, thin, weak, or nowhere, take a long hard look at your content to discover the basis of the problem — as long as you have an essential handle on aesthetic tools, no small thing in art. So it is with consciousness and life, with society and politics, with conversation and labor, with story and love, with the fate of the world. What the Hell is your content? What really wakes you up and might move the world? Form follows.
Do we live in metamodern literary times — a cross between the modern and postmodern? This is the subject of a recent article “How Metamodernism Can Save Us All” by Thaddeus Thomas at the Republic of Letters — which is a new liberal online literary magazine.
As virtually all the genres of novels and literature show, including the literary genre, the Enlightenment and Victorian age in imaginative writing never ended — and for that matter, the Renaissance too — still going strong. Modernism, postmodernism, etc, can even appear to be wrinkles upon the brow of Enlightenment and Victorian era lit, and the Renaissance.
Public and private meaning never left the building of literature. It did fragment, diversify, and expand, roughly in accord with social conditions and varied expressions of individual opportunity and genius, marketing fashion and publishing constraints.
So here we are today, but where is that? Look at the changed and changing social conditions and the varied expressions of individual opportunity and genius, marketing fashion and publishing constraints.
See the godsend of diversity and instantly accessible information and knowledge and the people’s media. See genocide and climate collapse, inequality and oppression perpetrated — by whom? — by the plutocracy, by capital, and by their social commanders and cultivated shock troops grinding society to pieces.
So are we an age of rebirth (R)? An age of conceptual and political revolution (E)? An age of social comprehension (V)? An age of private and theoretical obsession (M & PM) that flees the military police state, the plutocrat propaganda and power?
Or are we a mix of all that, plus increasingly a new people’s age of interconnectivity and engagement, continuously asserted human rights, including full democracy, against the omnicidal rise of the Anthropocene and the plutocracy?
We had better be the latter, in some profound liberatory, progressive populist, or revolutionary push or there will be no civilization to host literary movements at all.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Anthropocene originated about the same time, middle of last century, and their promise and carnage are increasingly coming to bear in this new age of the people’s media, interconnectivity, and populism — whether retrograde and supremacist, or progressive, liberatory, and revolutionary.
Literary movements can choose to be reflective, conceptual, or visionary — and detached or engaged — in regard to social conditions and individual or group expression. It’s what creators make it, and it’s what publishing and literary organs cultivate and emphasize.
From rebirth, into enlightenment, into social engagement, into privacy, play, and diversity, into, now — the all-out fight for human rights and against the collapse of the Anthropocene in an increasingly interconnected age of the people’s media — what kind of movements in literature does that stimulate and demand?
Literary populist partisans know exactly what they are committed to — rebirth, enlightenment, and social engagement, with good diversity and some private or playful focus — all the best power of the past — with a current basis and edge in human rights populism and revolution — summoning all the powers of the past, present, and future for the task at hand. Call it whatever you will — liberatory, revolutionary, populist, anti-omnicidal, global, anti-Empire.
Creators work in other diverting ways, which can be lively and nourishing too. As form comes from content in art, literary movements come from social, cultural, and intellectual conditions, forces, and imperatives.
Other literary manifestations are manufactured by wealth-backed publishing industries and ideologies, for which the rise of the people’s media at its best affords less and less tolerance.
Leading literary movements must be more than a blend of the past, though they will be also that. Crucial and gripping new literary movements should incorporate and expand upon the changed and changing conditions in the most vital and imperative ways. It’s what the full human creature in new times, novel times, demands. It’s what the full human person in both its individual and collective realities and manifestations, conceptions and possibilities insists upon and can create in and against the prevailing culture and society.
Once you get grounded in the times, in yourself and your groups, and your broad understandings, you can create story from there. What it’s likely to be is anyone’s guess, but all the streams of life and literature are highly visible today and refracted in the infinite opinions of people and the populace like never before, both fracturing and enforcing empire that shapes society, whether by towers of Babel or by the fertilizing and restoring floods of people’s consciousness and power.
There is no definitive theory of literature except that it’s what people make it. You can talk about what it is and what it was, what it is thought to be, and what it ought to be. And you should, for all kinds of reasons. But then, or first, go make it, if you’re an imaginative writer. Render the conceptual material. Create the consciousness of the time, if you like, by a conscious or unconscious conception expressed as experience and artefact, as story, that compelling mix of experience and knowledge.
Only the “metamodern” will be metamodern. The rest of us, the rest of the world will be something else. Many will write in a more civic focused stream of literature while others will write primarily in the rhetorical.
In one sense, John Pistelli’s novels Major Arcana and The Class of 2000 are basically fictionalized flights within Mr. Pistelli’s neighborhood – Pittsburgh’s houses, streets, and various public and private institutions. Events are largely episodic, if loosely causal over long periods. Neighborhoods. Cultural scenes. Characters talking ideas, social and personal commentary. To what end? To what events? Domestic violence and crippling attacks. Philosophical stances. Coming of age. Affairs. Symbolic and real suicide. Poverty, deadly accidents. Careers. Social and personal expression and care. Criticism and lit. The high school world. The college world.
Such novels are sometimes written as autobiographical fiction, or autofiction, for a variety of reasons. It’s a way for imaginative worlds to more readily transcend their make-believe constructs to create powerful impressions, by the automatic touch of the daily real – a mix of autobiography and fiction, with purview often smeared between real and make-believe. Autofiction’s throwing the real self of the author into the narrative mix adds literal authority, if not certain fact, to the make-believe. Autofiction may come off as lazy but can help authors achieve what especially well-constructed autobiographical fiction achieves, a compelling intensity, perhaps because we are never more intense or caring, or imaginative, than when detailing our own selves and our loved ones. With fiction there is the greater need to tightly, intensely craft constructs – pure fiction – to give inherent, internal tension – often by way of great conflict, deepest fears and desires, compelling questions, and staggering paradox, with powerful causality, escalating everything as you go.
If your make-believe construct is not tightly wound in these ways, then some other major skill needs to be employed to captivate an audience. This can be as true of nonfiction as fiction, but more imperative in fiction, because fiction needs to create and prove its internal integrity, the actual gravity of its construct, unlike, say, the irrefutable fact of life itself. Pistelli’s Arcana and 2000 both seem to pursue a pure fiction route, and both seem more milieu descriptive than story expressive – more intricate portraiture of character and culture than rush of event. Major Arcana, with its obnoxious professor protagonist, might as well as have been titled My Life as a Troll for its first half, at least; whereas, The Class of 2000, with its besieged late teen protagonist, might as well have been titled My Life Trolled – to give a sense of the rough, tough nature of these worlds, however highly drawn.
Stories fundamentally consist of more than two things happening in a row – resulting in a revelation of knowledge and experience. This thing happened, causing this next thing to happen, resulting in this other thing. That’s basic story. Beginning, middle, end. The basic three act movie. Throw in a couple more things happening (ideally causally) and you’ve got a five act prestige TV pilot. And the same holds for any number of subsequent TV episodes – themselves causally linked, ideally.
Of course within any one “thing” – or act or part – any number of other things (scenes and events and exposition and so on) can happen in myriad ways. Tight and intensifying causality, among other literary tools and devices, can be useful to hold many disparate parts together in compelling ways, especially in the dramatization of conflict, questions, paradoxes, or greatest fears and desires of main characters and actions. Ideally, all this makes up some great event, the great event of story – that sequence of more than two things happening in a row to great impact of experience and knowledge. A main character or characters doggedly pursuing a goal may be the simplest and most profound way to create and understand story.
Less intense and less powerfully constructed stories can wander around the neighborhood of an author’s familiarities and interests and moods. Unless, I’m missing something, Pistelli’s two novels under consideration here prioritize sketches of character, concept, and personal history over event. Plus, the author has an ideological ax or ten or ten thousand to grind. Who doesn’t? Your stories would be dead if you did not. The quality of the grinding is often a matter of taste, which leaves no one off the hook for making and receiving the story – author and audience.
Note #2
There can be a “Who Cares?” problem with literature, and that’s one of the difficulties that the would-be big social, political, or epic novel faces with readers this century in face of extremely popular film and video stories, especially as compared to the video-less peak of the novel’s height of expression in the 1800s, the Victorian novel.
The problem is at least two-fold. The first part is that society is radically different in crucial ways than it once was – environment, technology, population, and so on – and the second-part of the problem is that big storytelling is also radically different given the creation and rise of video – as movies, TV series, and endless shorts.
Any ambitious contemporary novel that does not account for these radical changes by way of its content and structure is a throwback, often a trying throwback to an outmoded time. That said, some people like throwbacks, and it’s always possible to write interesting novels in dated fashions. It’s also easy to wonder, why would you want to, especially if you sacrifice the essence of much of what has been learned and changed in the meantime.
Any shrinkage of the reader’s attention span may be an issue, and may need be accommodated in novel form but doesn’t seem to be the main issue, which is more with changes in the world and storytelling, with shifts in types of attention rather than duration. Differing kinds of attention have always been a competitive challenge in storytelling – the differing pulls of the advanced literary versus the mass popular, for example. Big Victorian social novels that most effectively bridged the gap between the high literary and the popular like Les Misérables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin have a lot to teach authors about ambitious storytelling, to this day, but so do contemporary big movies and TV series amid the radical transformations of the world.
So much that is immediate today is remote, and so much that is remote is immediate and visible, unlike in the time of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Les Misérables, given the birth of video and especially the internet and how the world exists audio-visually (as if magically) in a computer in your hand in a smartphone. Reality, always a tricky thing, can be hard to figure given this intense and paradoxical contortion of intimacy and exile in our lives. What world do we actually live in the most anymore, and how – the intimate or the remote? Which is more real, more meaningful – and how can we best put our hands and minds on any or all of it?
Note #3
By now it seems to be a crime if even non-script-writing Master of Fine Arts programs in imaginative writing fail to offer contemporary audio-video storytelling 101 courses. After all, billions of dollars have been involved in honing powerful, emotional, and conceptually compelling storylines and worlds in big industrial storytelling centers like Hollywood and far beyond. Storytellers of any type must to some extent compete with what is produced by seemingly infinite dollars, labor, and other resources. It’s wise to do so, since much of what powers the great video epics today both overlaps and correlates strongly with key and core precepts, seemingly eternal, articulated in Aristotle’s Poetics millennia ago.
If you would rather do your own alternate thing in story, fine, do it, as there is inherent value in that as well. But if you want to creatively compete with the greatest storytelling both of history and the current day, then you might do well to employ all the most powerful tools and insights and modes of telling that exist, that have endured, and that are so very forceful, prominent, and advanced in more-or-less grand fashion today. Don’t write a novel that imitates Netflix – write a novel that encompasses and bests it, that subsumes it.
If as storyteller, you think you can just ramble on in the mind of one character or another episodically and in pinched mental and emotional orbits, then you’ve amputated most of what storytelling can do and is currently doing to sweeping effect in this extraordinarily comprehensive and explosive, fragile and fractured age. The character-driven episodic can be done and done well but it can also appear ironically both clipped and aimless, whether in print or video.
We live in endlessly perilous and brutal times – no matter how domestic our lives, or how international – and if we are not so aware in our stories increasingly then we risk fiddling while Earth burns, while despair, disease, aggression, genocide, ecocide, omnicide condemn us all, and all life. If Earth goes up in flames, then none of the social or personal justice issues matter. It’s over. This is the event of our lives and of all life. That doesn’t mean don’t focus on infinite kinds of justice and causes, high concepts, myriad life cases, and other vital issues and realms, it means put things in great perspective. It’s all-hands-on-deck time, not least in the capital country of rapacious and deadly Empire, America, which is increasingly embroiled in a kind of simmering civil war that masks the wholesale depredations of Empire, the plutocracy, against all the people and the planet.
This is what the big social or political novel or any truly big ambitious novel is all about – or should be about because it needs to be if it is to explore and reveal the full human condition and its possibilities, and interact with it and impact it in imperative ways. The civil wars of gender politics and other forms of identity politics rage while the Empire’s war on the People and Earth consumes all, and, oh-by-the-way stokes all the identity wars to great profit. Is there only one war that should be fought, one story that should be told? No, there are many but the fact is that all stories now are contained within the great war for species and planetary survival.
Note #4
What is an experimental novel?
It’s sometimes said that an experimental novel is simply a novel that doesn’t work. But if so, as with a failed science experiment, you can learn something from it. To a certain extent all novels are experimental, though many fit into long established orders of form and content. As form is the shape of content, experiments in content can result in more profound experiments than experiments in shape that attempt to re-form well-worn content.
Dynamic consciousness of people and the world, people in the world makeup the guts of the novel, but this consciousness is nothing without the events of the world. The human consciousness explored can seem to be a consciousness of the events, of life, as if life itself is conscious through us, through human apprehension of guts, heart, and mind. Whether the consciousness explored is robust or diseased, suffocating or liberatory, retrograde or revolutionary, basic action underlies story and its structure that the author builds to convey the novel world. In a fundamental sense, actions are story. Unfortunately, an all-encompassing sense of event or action is too often elided from literary novels.
It’s structure, the scaffolding of the novel, not content where the story may typically be most directly felt to work or not work – often no matter the consciousness and events depicted, but structure is an easy and too-obvious target for considering the quality of story. When great consciousness and events are depicted on rickety scaffolding little but shallow critique fusses over imperfections, limitations, or even yawning gaps of form and style, structure and expression.
Structure as easy target is also why stories with great imperfections, limitations, and voids of consciousness and event – which are typical in establishment literature – are commonly obsessively critiqued for any shortcomings of technique. If only the technique were better! Then another gutted story from the ideologically warped and constricted publishing establishment could be saved.
Aristotle’s Poetics laid out basic structural tools for telling effective story, millennia ago, rather than focusing on content and expansive qualities of human consciousness that are vital to effective and powerful story – though some modal qualities of human consciousness and the human condition are touched on, such as tragedy and comedy. In other words, Aristotle left the especially hard part to artists to figure out going forward. In Poetics, Aristotle is no revolutionary of human consciousness but a skilled technician of certain types of story.
Some of the techniques and types have become classic. To deviate from them can be said to be “experimental” – whether as success or failure or some mix. Pistelli’s novels Arcana and 2000 can seem more familiar than experimental (despite a kind of video play within the novel 2000 and various jags in Arcana), but are they? Could the structure not be more compelling? The familiarity is found in the reliance on the characters as the focus of the story rather than on the larger event or events of the story which can seem to exist almost nominally in the background rather than being foregrounded to drive story.
There’s a long history of such literature, and to each their own, but the effect is telling. You can’t easily get swept up in the events in such novels, so if you don’t resonate with the characters or the thought (which Aristotle ranks second and third behind action), you’re in trouble as a reader. Events encompass characters, whereas characters are mere parts of events, even in the extreme, say, in a Beckett play where you’ve got mainly only one character who can do practically nothing while buried up to her waist and then neck in the ground. Poor Winnie! “Poor” because she’s Winnie, extraordinarily valiant but wholly overpowered, due to the crushing event of her life that buries her alive.
Now that’s a story point-blank told by the whale of an event happening to the main character. Happy Days, ironically, indeed. Deed first. Character second. Per Aristotle and the Poetics, no less. That said, given a larger frame, what is most crushing to us all today is very different from the baggage of Winnie’s life, as it was during Winnie’s day too if you look more fully. This is why the moderns and postmoderns can be so maddening. Call them all post Victorian – post great social engagement, very roughly. They sort of rolled over in the face of world wars and the escalations of Empire. And the plutocrat establishment loved it and praised it to the skies! And still does.
We need to move beyond that in a big way, including past the Victorian age, which was itself far from fully engaged, let alone revolutionary. Oh, how controversial! In the literary world. And to the liberal and conservative mindset. And even to progressives. The most pressing content of our day is far more desperate than anything the modernists and postmodernists expressed. And far more than the Victorians could imagine. Why mainly look back to find your inspiration? Look ahead, to what might be imagined. You can look back to be inspired, even guided, there’s value there, but it can also be like seeking needles in haystacks. If you go big, ultimately, today in lit you go anti-omnicidal or you go home. The obliteration of Gaza and Palestinians shows us the horrific infernal reality and the scourge of the full human condition on the planet in our time, especially when extrapolated to Earth’s ongoing ecocide, and potential nuclear omnicide. It shows us the limits and the need for change and action, not least in the stories that we learn and live by, that transform and move us.
Is this, our fundamental contemporary state of being, unfair to raise in relation to the big psycho-socio-conceptual novel of Major Arcana? The Intellectual, or the Intellect, as Troll? Let alone the more conventional and focused, almost broken male neighborhood novel, The Class of 2000? My Life Trolled, by Life. Fair or not, the double point emphasized is 1) the distinction between novels as big action and event and novels as episodic sketch, and 2) to note where contemporary novels sit in context of the major event of contemporary life that is the ongoing sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene, the terminal glide path of all life that we are currently riding and driving, some more quickly and forcefully, desperately and fatefully than others.
Arcana and 2000 mainly read as a series of character sketches and conceptual asides, Arcana in particular with sometimes seemingly interminable private personal histories. Great character analysis and philosophical dissections of these novels could be undertaken. I will not do so, and will leave that to those who resonate much more to that sort of thing. It’s quite a study though. The states of being – warped, beat, and lost – come to mind. Or – twisted and demoralized. Trolled or trolling. The novels also focus on the occasional inverse to these brute realities and psychological sketchiness. If you can take a step back from it all in both novels, what you’ve got is a kind of high-minded low comedy or dramedy, of contentious Pittsburgh area and high school days on the one hand and a contentious Steel City university and intellectual world on the other. That’s not all that these novels are but a central chunk.
Clearly, this is not a proper review of these novels but rather notes on an encounter and reflection upon them. A character analysis of Simon Magnus, a foremost character of Major Arcana, could be blistering in many ways, private and public, for example, but also utterly redundant of many cultural and character critiques long-since waged in the culture wars. So to that I say, No thanks. I’ll focus instead on these novels’ relation to the nature of story in and of the nature of life today.
Note #5
What most does Mr. Pistelli wish to bring to these novels? In The Class of 2000 he seems to be attempting to draw up and draw out and memorialize a sense of his Pittsburgh childhood home – unless I’m mistaken – Pittsburgh or various areas in Pittsburgh, in his way and time, his once-upon-a-time, as made distinct by his sensibilities. It’s not autofiction, I assume, but you wonder if it may as well be. Then in Major Arcana, the story grows up, metaphorically not literally, from the high school senior protagonist matched with a high school teacher to a college professor matched with college students and various associates. Pistelli continues the socio-culture wars from the vantage of higher ed and greater adulthood rather than secondary ed and lots of adolescence. These are not really political novels and not really epics. These are social and cultural and conceptual novels. Where these novels “descend” to brutal realism or snide jabbing, they can be tough to take, though some people like that. Where the novels live is in the mournful or simply willful ambiance of people trying to muddle their way through a too often violent, mad, and broken world.
Pistelli writes as much, knowingly and perhaps partly unwittingly, in nearly the last lines of The Class of 2000:
That day I began writing these reminiscences and speculations, these records distorted by passion and prejudice, in an effort to understand my life and my times.
I have only avoided speculating about Lauren—hers is the only life, in its goodness and simplicity, that I can’t comprehend.
Now that author Pistelli has trolled about in these his two most recent novels via his characters mainly, and much less so by his plots, one wonders if in his next major work he will explore something that he has not as fully comprehended in these novels but might like to, something simple and good, something Lauren-like, where character is more revelatory of event or action than even of character itself, less meandering chronicle and essay, more dramatic action and vast stakes, less gazing upon the bewitched face of the human species and more on some gripping action that reveals the full play of life, and that, ironically perhaps, may better cast indelible character.
Stories that are structured strongly by action, though with some reflection, even a lot, are not for everyone, and possibly not for the author under consideration here, though he makes some gestures toward it in both Arcana and 2000, and comes closest in 2000. Scholarly turns toward fiction often tend toward discourse and reflection foremost and fundamentally rather than toward action, despite the form and content being necessarily novelistic – story – not essay.
2000 achieves more of the heart, Arcana more of the mind, as intended apparently. While both novels think and bleed, love and hate, Arcana and 2000 seem to be more victims of society and the past than new agents within and transcending, a not uncommon fate of what might be thought of as novels of reflection, as opposed to novels relentless in their wholesale novelty in new event and action, writ large and often paradoxical, and yet novels more often than not propagandistic. Not infrequently, great novelists are great, sometimes notorious, ax grinders who throw everything into showing the sharpness of their ax. Reflection, character, even plot may come secondarily.
Pistelli reaches for the ax, no question, though he flips the script, so to speak, structurally against story in favor of discourse. When considering the ideological basis of any novel, it’s hard not to notice first whether or not the ideology is artfully thrown, while hard-thrown it often is, more directly so than typically realized. When considering the ideology of story, it can be difficult to overcome the prejudices and biases of your own ideologies. Both after and with the ideology, comes the action. Character third and thought fourth. (Second and third, as Aristotle has it, after the action – ideology aside.) Less character upfront and more or better action can lead to bigger and better character, and to greater story. See the heights of story, and the peaks of popular fiction, such as they were and are, and see Hollywood and Netflix at their best. See how the ancient epic and other forms of story have moved through the novel to film and video. That said, there are no guarantees in story approach. It’s an art and a complex one at that, the massive form of the novel in particular.
The problem, the temptation, the mirage, the false lead for creators of story often comes from considering, or rather feeling – what’s more compelling on its own? – a character sketch or a plot sketch? A character sketch typically, because it contains emotions, personalities, and intimate ideas rather than a stark outline of events, places, and people. But it’s the events that cause the characters to transcend themselves and fully manifest in and of the world, to generate experience and reveal the universe, our lives, life in far greater whole. Without the events, the characters remain sketches, or lone portraits. It’s the events, the actions that bring great life to individuals and to groups and to societies.
Note # 6
Where to draw the line? How to flyte the wicked, praise the good, and shade every grade of grey imaginable in story? The classic way is to show action, character, and thought – the world – preferably in that order. A curious order, especially in the lead, it may seem to those most mind-heavy or star-struck, those most idea or character focused, but such is story. Classic story, at least. Popular story. High story. We always want to know what happens because we always want to know – to be able to judge for ourselves. The people and ideas are only part of it, the story of life, even if they are the flesh-and-blood stars and the abstract points of brilliant illumination. The people and ideas are wholly bound by the world in motion, in act, in story. You can deny this – many try to – but not escape it.
In any novel it always needs to matter whether your main characters live or die, especially when they seem likely to live for long. This compelling state is a lot easier to pull off in a novel where your main character is a besieged teenager rather than an obnoxious professor. It’s not impossible by far to foreground the half-daft, the warped, or the spiteful, or even the violent, but you had better call upon some serious level of talent to do so for any sustained period of time.
The more you read in Major Arcana, the more detail you get of a couple students of Simon Magnus and their mothers, curiously, among others. The novel-opening and on-campus suicide of Jacob Morrow, filmed by fellow student Ash del Greco, serves as more of a culminating event than an inciting incident, which is indicative of the novel’s mode of reflection upon personal histories, and conceptual and cultural battles, rather than the creation of new action in the world. You’re basically reading fictive biography and essay rather than story, call it biofiction more than autofiction, or conceptfiction, or philosofiction, or psychohistory and cultural critique – it can give the feel of a textbook – with parallels drawn between tarot archetypes of the Major Arcana cards and the novel’s characters.
Note #7
Where does it all end in the big novel that is Major Arcana? Where it began – with a couple of college students’ descent into madness, in a life-ending event in the middle of campus, somehow inspired by the angry professor, graphic novelist, mockingly genderless or “all-gender,” Simon Magnus, topped by a dollop of Youtubed psycho-babble from the suicidal Jacob Morrow:
“You can tell them you think I died to prove that the mind is the most powerful force in the universe,” he said, “but tell them I think I died to prove that love is even more powerful than that. Tell them I died to prove I’m not the only thing in the universe.” …
For almost a month, Jacob Morrow’s death became the local habitation of the always ambient culture war.
Aristotle might have said, Pistelli, take your novel and condense it into this “almost a month” to which you refer and make it one great big action. But Pistelli being Pistelli metaphorically footnotes Aristotle and goes his own way, for the better or the worse, readers will decide.
Well, if Pistelli can do it, so can we – let’s hit the idea and hit it again: What contemporary lit too often slights or outright ignores is that the characters are not the story. The characters may be the reason for the story, but story begins and runs through action and event and ends in ideas and experience. If we want to know, if we want to “get the story,” we ask, “What happened?” not “Who happened?” We might want to know “Who was involved?” but we will definitely want to know “What was done?” You want to know the actions first. The particularities and complexities of the persons and reasons involved come second and third in importance. True in life, true in story, as ongoing event and action.
If you say, One student killed himself in a fit of psychobabble on campus while another student filmed it and said they were inspired by a bizarre Professor and the class they were in together,” you’ve got the story (sort of in reverse order, the several causal things that happened). If you want to continue the story, you go to “What happened next?” In this case – professor lost professor’s job, some revelatory discussions were held, life hiccupped, people reassessed, and everyone moved on. Or almost everyone.
But if that’s all that happened then what was the long novel about, the big story? Well, in the end, in Major Arcana, it takes awhile to sift through the denouement, post-climax, which unspools most naturally, but mainly the novel consists largely of episodic fictive histories slipping toward the culminating event, pre-told. So what makes it compelling if the story barely exists? You need to find yourself invested in all the biography and philosophy, because the story itself is quickly dispensed with. And even the resolution is longer than the story. Everything is.
What to make of it all? There is a lot. Tellingly, we might do well to recall the near final lines of The Class of 2000:
That day I began writing these reminiscences and speculations, these records distorted by passion and prejudice, in an effort to understand my life and my times.
I have only avoided speculating about Lauren—hers is the only life, in its goodness and simplicity, that I can’t comprehend.
From The Class of 2000 to Major Arcana, John Pistelli moves from the daily trials of a socially and domestically besieged high school senior in an embattled Pittsburgh neighborhood, and his embattled and fraught households, to what is ultimately a cautionary tale about friends and lovers, professionals and students – the two Steel City college undergrads and the Major Arcana archetypes of the doomed Jacob Morrow and his friend and lover Ash del Greco – a young woman who may not be “good and simple” like Lauren of 2000, but who is complex, caring, and confused in an adult milieu that is just as hapless and seemingly chaotic as that of The Class of 2000.
Rather grim recurring themes similarly expressed, differently exemplified. Is Pittsburgh Evil? Or emblematic of some kind of doom and gloom? It’s not clear. But if you need to know, John Pistelli might be the one you want to hire to try to find out.
John Pistelli has published three previous novels of which I’m largely unfamiliar, all five novels apparently set in Pittsburgh or a city of its type. Oh, Pittsburgh! Are you marked by three rivers, or four? Including one underground that Pistelli metaphorically boats about on? The Steel City seems to be quite the buckle on the Belt of Rust in the novelized visions of this author. Don’t know if he has ever given Pittsburgh the Hollywood treatment, at its best, in any of his three early novels. Especially if not, it might be worth taking a shot at it in his sixth.
So there is a great need to get powerful world-changing stories going!
Republicans rely on story, imaginative story, more than Democrats do because they have more need to lie, and stories can be warped to that malign purpose. Bad as Democrat policies are, Republican policies are worse. So they need to create potent narratives to mask and distract from their god-tier level of deceit. They need the malleable power of story — badly, in every way — to defeat the good — good things, good people, good story.
Consequently, Democrats need the power of story too. They need to fight fire with fire. They need to create the fire of protective and brilliant illuminating stories to counter the destructive fire of fake and brutal stories.
Doing so is beyond the capacity and interest of establishment Democrats because they are deeply invested in the destructive fire of the fake and brutal stories of the plutocracy that result in endless carnage, though somewhat less so than Republicans.
Therefore only progressive and revolutionary stories, libertarian socialist stories — which happen to be popular stories, policy by policy, per polling — can effectively fight the fire of Republican and establishment Democrat stories.
This has long been known and needs to be put increasingly into action. There’s a great need to get these revolutionary stories going, that is, to create the new protective and life-giving stories of the people.
Ira Chernus, “Presidential Fiction: The Story Behind the Debates” (2004):
For most of human history, most people have lived in abject poverty. They survived, in part, on stories. They told stories to interpret their suffering or to distract themselves from their suffering, to participate vicariously in magnificent events and give meaning to an existence that might otherwise seem meaningless. In most cultures, the truly powerful stories — myths, legends, or sacred narratives — were religious ones. In the United States, where we have no religious myths that we all share, the history of the nation has become our most powerful shared myth. Like all religious stories, the most popular versions of American history are a mixture of fact, fantasy, and wish-fulfillment. Judging from the first debate, it’s not clear that Kerry and his campaign strategists understand the power of this potent brew. The Bush campaign understands it all too well.
Note #2
Most violence is right wing, both at the retail individual level and at the wholesale state level. It’s right there in the statistics that the right wing constantly tries to cover up or distort.
And in fact capitalism, in practice, is a right wing top-down tyrannical ideology, the rule of big money in the hands of a few. Capitalism is right wing. Most violence is right wing, today and for many, many decades now.
The political spectrum runs from left to right, that is, from freedom and peace to tyranny and war. And it plays out over and over again, all the while the right wing claims the opposite. Disinformation is their specialty as much as war.
The People are rising, like they did in the sixties and seventies in America, and so right wing violence is rising in reaction against the people. An old story.
The right wing scapegoats the left, the better to attack them. It’s quite a story.
Note #3
Meanwhile the genocidal violence of the capitalist plutocrat empire is livestreamed like never before. Juan Cole: “Gaza and the Death of Conscience”:
Western governments supply the bombs while speaking of peace. The United Nations counts the dead while doing nothing to stop the dying. Media outlets repeat official lines while children are buried under rubble.
As Talal Asad reminds us, secular modernity has perfected this art: to kill massively while convincing itself it remains moral. To dress violence in legality, to turn blood into statistics, to make atrocity look like policy. Gaza has become the stage where this moral corruption plays out openly.
Note #4
Universal goods are needed to literally heal the people of the country, and world — universal health care, basic income, free college, living wages, free child care, weeks paid vacation, affordable housing, healthy food and environment, and on and on, and this only comes from the left wing, not from liberals and conservatives who fight against the people on behalf of the plutocracy nonstop.
Last week, buried among the noise of the Republicans’ battle cries for “civil war,” Texas Congressman and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar published an article on Data for Progress that showed that progressive, populist Democratic platforms beat Republicans by +15, opposed to +6 for a generic Democratic platform. Voters want someone who will lower costs, fight corruption, and make the rich play by the rules.
Note # 5
You shouldn’t kill people. Ask the Palestinians being obliterated in the ongoing genocide against them in Gaza and surrounds.
You shouldn’t kill people, and you should be truthful about any killing.
The mass economic and socio-political assault against the populace in America, and elsewhere, has been the reality not for mere decades but for a century, and all history, depending upon the demographics attacked.
Charlie Kirk is more deposed king than martyr, though perspectives will vary wildly. And casualty of civil war, which is actually the plutocrats’ war. You shouldn’t kill people. Orders of magnitude more Palestinians in Gaza were killed than rich white Christian nationalists in America like Kirk not only on the day Kirk was killed but every day for years preceding and every foreseeable day thereafter.
Kirk functioned as a major leader of the violent plutocracy in America, which means globally. Malcolm X famously described what that can lead to, and so it has again.
Only a progressive populism with a revolutionary bent against the bloody tyranny of money can heal the endlessly brutalized and exploited society, the smashed and warped lives of the people and the planet.
Whether or not Charlie Kirk was killed as part of a right-wing civil war, part of the case for Christian nationalist Republican operative Charlie Kirk as more deposed king than persecuted martyr can be found in the commentary of Dr. Stacey Patton. Perspectives vary widely and wildly, some far more truthful than others:
His so-called “Professor Watchlist,” run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA, is nothing more than a digital hit list for academics who dare to speak truth to power. I landed there in 2024 after writing commentary that inflamed the MAGA faithful. And once my name went up, the harassment machine roared…
America has always rewritten its racists into patriots. We’re watching it happen in real time.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, just look at the Confederate generals turned into marble saints, or the segregationists recast as “men of their time.”
So when you see them baptizing Charlie Kirk in MLK’s legacy, don’t mistake it for respect. It’s desperation. It’s the sound of a fragile order screaming for legitimacy as the ground shifts beneath it. They don’t just mourn Charlie Kirk. They mourn the fantasy of invulnerable whiteness. And the rest of us are not obliged to play along with their delusion.
But let’s call a thing a thing, Y’all: the fantasy of a white MLK. A racist recast as a saint. A grifter painted as a prophet. All of stitched together in Canva with funeral fonts and Photoshop halos. Because when reality won’t cooperate, whiteness invents its own messiah. And in doing so, it adds yet another chapter to America’s long tradition of rewriting racists into redeemers. It’s a fragile order gasping for a hero it never had, and proof that the struggle for honest memory is far from over.
I wanted to know what I was really looking at. So I reached out to a couple of psychologist friends to help me put words to the spectacle we’re witnessing. What they told me confirmed what my gut already knew: this isn’t just politics and grief. It’s pathology.
Now, the DSM-5 doesn’t list “whiteness” as a disorder, but what we’re witnessing might as well be pulled straight from the manual.
It’s textbook narcissism, which is the grandiosity of comparing Kirk to King, the entitlement of demanding everyone “mourn properly,” the paper-thin ego that shatters at the faintest mention of his racism. Any critique about Kirk is treated as an attack on the tribe, and so his canonization a way to defend their sense of superiority.
It’s delusional thinking, clinging to the fantasy that he was “just like MLK” even as the evidence piles up to prove otherwise.
It’s cognitive dissonance on full display, knowing his record, but soothing the discomfort with glowing halos, redemptive captions, and sepia tones.
And underneath it all, you see the defense mechanisms stacking up, projection, denial, idealization, like a psychological house of cards, built to keep the truth at bay. Put it all together and whiteness in this moment looks like a collective personality disorder: fragile, delusional, desperate for validation.
But this ain’t nothing new, Y’all. We’ve seen this behavior before. America has always rewritten its racists into patriots.
The bullet that showed up at that MAGA rally didn’t come stamped fragile from somewhere else. It came straight from inside the house. That was your boy, Governor. Your homegrown, God-fearing, raised in your pews, fed on your casseroles, baptized in your guns and your whiteness son of Utah.
And the Bible already told us about this in Galatians 6:7. “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” You sowed the gospel of guns, and now you are reaping the gospel of bullets. Isaiah 59:6 says: “Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works: their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands.”
Don’t act brand new, governor. Don’t stand at that podium with crocodile prayers, pretending you don’t recognize your own harvest. For as the prophet in Hosea 8:7 declared, “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” And church, let me tell you, that whirlwind didn’t blow in from Baltimore, or Chicago, or some immigrant caravan. That whirlwind came swirling right outta white-ass Utah.
Amen!
What we heard from the governor was not prayer. That was scapegoating in tongues. That was whiteness trying to slip a lie past the ears of the people of God.
But how many of y’all know the devil goes to church too? How many of y’all know the devil knows scripture too?
But the Bible says in Isaiah 5:20:“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” And saints, that’s exactly what the governor did. He called denial prayer, he called scapegoating intercession, he called a lie the truth.
The governor of Utah wanted the devil outsourced. He wanted the devil imported. He wanted the devil to come stamped with brown skin, a hijab, a Spanish accent, a rainbow flag, anything that screamed “not us.” But the scripture says in Luke 12:2: “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.” And what got revealed in Utah is that the face of violence in America looks just like the governor.
And yet he prayed, “Not one of us.” That’s the exoneration. That’s the innocence myth. That’s whiteness doing what whiteness always does by laundering itself clean while looking for a scapegoat.
For centuries, whiteness has written itself into the story of goodness and written everybody else into the story of evil. Whiteness gets to be the innocent farmer, the loving father, the good kid, the wholesome patriot, the faithful Christian. And everybody else is the boogeyman, the criminal, the terrorist, the threat.
But John 8:44 tells us: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” Sothose who claim righteousness while casting others as evil are exposed as children of violence and lies.
This is why after every mass shooting, every school shooting, every grocery store massacre, whiteness looks to pin it on somebody else. “Must be gangs. Must be Chicago. Must be Islam. Must be mental illness. Must be video games.” It is always anything but itself.
But family, Matthew 7:16 tells us, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
And the fruits of white conservative Christian America are right there in the body count. The fruits are Sandy Hook, Charleston, Buffalo, Uvalde, Nashville, and now Utah. The fruits are the AR-15s polished like idols. The fruits are children doing active shooter drills while politicians send out thoughts and prayers.
So what the governor did in that moment wasn’t just a slip of the tongue. It was whiteness exonerating itself in public. It was whiteness saying: “We are not like that” when the evidence, the receipts, the statistics, the blood on the ground all say otherwise.
Galatians 6:7: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
You sow gun worship, you reap gun death. You sow white supremacy, you reap white shooters. You sow violent masculinity in the name of Jesus, you reap bullets in your own sanctuary. The whirlwind is here, and it doesn’t care about your skin tone, your politics, or your prayers.
Now here’s the deeper truth, Saints . . . People of color have always known this. We’ve always known that whiteness will burn the house down and then say the smoke came from somewhere else. We’ve always known that when violence erupts, whiteness looks for a brown body to blame, a Black face to criminalize, a foreign accent to fear. And for once, the mask slipped. The governor said the quiet part out loud. He admitted it. He gave voice to the lie we’ve been living under for 400 years.
And that tells you something about whiteness. Whiteness is not just about skin. It’s about absolution. It’s about making sure the mirror never points back at itself. It’s about taking centuries of blood, whether it is Indigenous genocide, slave patrols, lynch mobs, police shootings, January 6, and still saying with a straight face, “We are not like that.”
Oh, but once again Isaiah 5:20 warns us: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.” Woe unto them that build a culture of violence and then claim innocence. Woe unto them that anoint their hands with blood and then lift them up in worship as if they are clean.
Saints, here’s what I need you to see. The governor’s prayer was not just about one shooter. It was a parable of how whiteness works. Whiteness demands innocence. Whiteness demands the benefit of the doubt. Whiteness demands that when bullets fly, the blame be laid at someone else’s feet.
So what do we do with this, church? We name it. We don’t let it slide. We don’t let them tell us “we are not like that” when the whole history of this country says otherwise. We refuse the absolution. We snatch away the innocence. We hold up the mirror and say, “Look in the mirror. This is you. These are your fruits. This is your whirlwind.”
Turn to your neighbor and say in your Shug Avery voice and say, “You sho’ is ugly!”
Because at the end of the day, beloved, the governor’s words were less a prayer and more a confession. He confessed that whiteness depends on scapegoats. He confessed that whiteness cannot face itself. He confessed what people of color have been shouting from the margins for centuries: you are like that. You’ve always been like that. And until you repent, you will keep reaping the whirlwind you sow.
So let us leave today with the words of John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” But freedom doesn’t come from pretending. It doesn’t come from scapegoating. It comes from facing the truth that whiteness has always tried to bury.
And the truth is this: America’s violence is not imported. It is homegrown. It is baptized. It is sitting in the governor’s pews.
And until that truth is faced, no prayer in Utah, no scripture on a bumper sticker, no “we are not like that” will save them.
Note #7
Victor Hugo, writing in William Shakespeare (1864):
Cases of rabidness—that is to say, the works of genius—are to be feared. Hygienic prescriptions are renewed. The public high-road is evidently badly watched. It appears that there are some poets wandering about. The prefect of police, a negligent man, allows some spirits to rove about. What is Authority thinking of? Let us take care. Intellects can be bitten; there is danger. It is certain, evident.
Note #8
For creators and participant readers and observers, what is the full role of story today and days gone by and days ahead? A bit more from V. L. Parrington in a forthcoming post, but to put his contribution in context, Bernard Smith notes in Forces in Literary Criticism (1939):
The academy was growing up. It was beginning to share the emotions of serious adults who were trying to adjust themselves to an America become rich and imperialistic. In its own special field, literary history, it was beginning to achieve mature and realistic interpretations. In 1927 it came of age: V. L. Parrington, professor of English at the University of Washington, published the two completed volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought. With that work the academy was at last brought face to face with the ideas, sentiments, and historical methods of today…. Parrington’s Main Currents arrived to supply the most needed things: an account of our literary history which squared with recent works on the history of our people and a realistic technique for analyzing the relationship of a writer to his time and place—in addition to a militantly progressive spirit. Professorial and literary circles had consciously been waiting for such a work, and if the one that did come forth was far more radical than some people cared for, it simply could not be rejected. The author was a professor too; his scholarship defied scrutiny; and his ideas were couched in terms that were native American, most of them having come over shortly after the Mayflower. One must emphasize Parrington’s radicalism because it is probably the most significant aspect of his work. He sharpened, gave point to the economic interpretation of literary movements because of his desire to reveal the motivating interests and real direction of specific works of literature… (330-331).
The “economic interpretation of literary movements” has become power politics, stories in and against Empire. Great stories of protection against Empire and liberation from it are immanently needed and directly wanted.
Note #9
Meanwhile the Gaza Freedom Flotilla pushes across the Mediterranean Sea like some cinematic seafaring David versus Goliath story — see Ron Dee at PsyOpticon Now: Tales of two Genocides:
This entire event reminds me of Apocalypse Now and the journey to the heart of darkness. In Coppola’s masterpiece, Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, a war veteran tasked with assassinating a former US Colonel named Kurtz who has gone insane and is now the ruler of a jungle tribe that he slaughters and enslaves at will. The 37 ships comprising the Gaza flotilla, consisting of unarmed citizens from 44 countries – are also on a mission to overcome a psychopathic ruler, Netanyahu. This real life monster is every bit as insane and cruel as Kurtz, only Netanyahu has committed butchery on a much greater scale. The unarmed crews of the Gaza flotilla will confront the red-hot hatred of the IDF with ready-to-eat meals and baby formula for starving Palestinians.
Note #10
Might be time for another interview with that damned Deist god who claims to have created Earth and then walked away. There are some things that need to be answered for.
Imagine yourself a god free floating in the sky looking down at the little Freedom Flotilla on the Mediterranean Sea desperately trying to make it all the way to the Gaza ports blockaded by the almighty powers of Israel and its creator and protector America.
The flotilla of humanity trying once again, for a decade and a half, to bring food, medicine, shelter, and other resources to the Palestinians in Gaza being livestream starved, bombed, and otherwise genocided by Israel and America, and by much of the rest of the official powers of the world.
Imagine you are that god looking down, and you claim to have created this? Maybe go hide, god, while the people battle for their lives.
Is there something Evil about Big Culture? Right wing populists certainly think so — often for all the wrong reasons.
What about leftists — what do they see as Evil in Big Culture? Plenty. Going way, way back, but never more problematic and dangerous than today given the omnicidal state of the world.
All the while, liberatory, anti-Empire revolutionary art is often quashed out of existence, frequently under the cover, often fervently believed, of good taste, objectivity, and intellectual or normative impartiality that is anything but.
Such intellectual toxicity is perpetrated unwittingly, so deep can the brainwashing run — it can afflict anyone unconsciously at various times — though the falsehoods are also often propagated as consciously as the most egregious plutocrap, plutocrat propaganda, deceit and denial.
The terminal cultural questions and realities cannot be avoided in an age of nonstop livestream genocide and the ongoing climate collapse that is the ecocide of Earth — occasionally bursting into consciousness as massive hurricanes or wildfire infernos that drown and char people trapped and trying to flee in alternate demonic spectacle. Or choking on smoke across vast regions and many states, reversing all progress on air pollution. Then there’s the continued nuclear threat that can obliterate the world and any hope for decent survival, or any survival, lacking abolition.
Culture, society, and politics, including art in culture, society, and politics determine the fate of the world. So what are the roles of artists, of their art, in helping to determine the fate of the world, of the everyday, and of the great day, the Age?
I’ve written this manifesto six thousand times already over the decades, so why not again? It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last attempt to foreground some of the most vital expressions of culture and life in art that further impel art, consciousness, and action that creates cultural, social, and political change. Something as powerful as art affects a lot in life — creates it or changes it or preserves it for the good or the bad. Here I’ll mix and match and cut and paste and collage from previous commentaries to address romanticism, populism, and other ideologies, while expanding on the topic and emphasizing the novel in particular, an epic form for epic times, amid the imperatives of the age.
Any revolution worthy of its name in culture, in art, in society, in politics will be progressive populist, or bust.
Why? Because we live in a plutocracy-dominated age, where the few rule the many, where the rich rule everyone, where big money controls the guns and bombs and owns the world, buying and selling people and their IDs like the lords and vassals of old bought and sold serfs and land and livestock.
Except people, while treated as serfs and livestock by the plutocracy, are not serfs and livestock. People hate to be treated like cattle and tied down like slaves and bullied, pushed and pulled, hit and demeaned. People hate to be bought and sold by AI, by tech bros, by corporate executives, by high finance, by all these choking tentacles of the plutocracy.
Progressive populists revolt for human rights, for humanity, to live a cooperative and egalitarian life, not a sicko-god-ruled-plutocrat-owned and administered Hellscape of a life.
The revolution in society and art, culture and politics will not be romantic. It will be populist. It had better be. Progressive populist. It already is.
The right-wing fake populist movements and so-called revolutions are mere masked and recursive regurgitations of the tyrannical status quo — militant capitalist and supremacist.
The revolution will be material and spiritual but not capitalist and religious. The revolution will transcend and intervene. It already does. The revolution will be liberatory and healing and fulfilling, and it already is, even while battles are lost and terrible defeats suffered.
The revolutionary will be planetary and planet-wide, as it is. It will not be a singular aesthetic, it will be all-but all-aesthetic and an art.
The revolution will also be un-aesthetic and scientific, in vital ways, and it already is.
Will the revolution be everything all at once to all people? No. The revolution must be a kind of triage, or it will not deserve the name.
Great battles will be fought and great cooperative endeavors will be attempted in all domains in the struggle. And they already are.
The revolution will be content specific, and its forms must follow its content.
The revolution will be televised and not televised, live-streamed and not.
The revolution will be. It already is. As need be.
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) mass hysteria basically means Get Everyone Brainwashed Again (GEBA) into believing a white supremacist plutocrat social order is the height of civilization. Make American Medieval Again (MAMA).
Progressive populists and libertarian socialists have a different idea, one rooted in the enlightenment and human rights and libertarian socialism against tyranny, against militancy, against financial exploitation, against capitalism, and against attacks on vulnerable identities that have been the traditional whipping objects of supremacists everywhere.
There has been some talk among Substack art, literary, and cultural circles in particular of a “new romantic” movement against the rise of the tech billionaire surveillance state AI dystopia, against the cultural and mental policing and the Blakean mind-forged manacling (in “London” the capital of Empire, the poem against Empire, in the time of William Blake), the algorithmic controlling and exploiting by the Big Tech Brotherhood, against would-be unique and prosperous, communal and social individuals seeking the good life in the contemporary world.
But a romantic aesthetic and romantic ideals are too limited. While it’s true that the surveillance state tech bros of high finance and the surveillance state itself are as one with the capitalist plutocracy and the police and military that rule America and much of the world in incredibly dehumanizing and violent, destructive and deadly ways, in no way can merely an aesthetic and an often largely depoliticized notion of “new romanticism” fend off much of any of that, or even create a bubble of culture, wholly vulnerable, amid the daily assaults and depredations of empire.
Romanticism can contribute to the liberatory populist revolution in art, culture, and society but cannot be the whole of it by far.
Especially limited are depoliticized notions of romanticism as laid out in “The Power of Art in the Age of AI,” Megan Gafford’s account of romanticism in a Metropolitan Review article, where more than a dozen renowned romantic artists are referred to as notable historical figures, but there is no mention of Victor Hugo, the greatest literary romantic of them all, and arguably the greatest romantic artist in general. And easily one of the greatest artists of all time. Hugo was incredibly productive over a long life, and his work made great use of romantic imagination in intensely populist ways, even revolutionary, mixing in social and political conscience, and consciousness, epic scope, emotional depth and power with intellectual brilliance, resulting in great impact — socio-political and intellectual, cultural and personal. He also incorporated realism, and modernism far ahead of its time, along with any number of other potent literary modes. We might even say that no individual artist was more maximalist than Victor Hugo. (Though “Shakespeare,” also persecuted by power, may be tough to challenge. Hugo surpasses him, in my view.) Regardless, any overview of romanticism that fails to account for the greatest romantic figure and the politically daring progressive populist nature of such works is ideologically riven and ambling with averted eyes.
There’s a reason (or many reasons) that a lot plaints for and against romantic art elide the name and work of Victor Hugo — he and his work transcend the stereotypical and spectacle-laden and ideologically retrograde notions of romantic art and much else. Hugo’s art cuts deep against the tyrannical and the inhuman in politically, intellectually, and ideologically challenging populist ways. There’s a reason, many, that Hugo was kicked out of polite society and his entire country. The same reasons that other artists who work in similar veins live essentially in internal exile.
Intellectual and political tendencies typical of the establishment disappear the greatest romantic figure and artworks from discussions and movements of romanticism, and long have. Hugo is inconvenient to mention by conventional establishment thinking even though as the pre-eminent figure in romanticism he and his works are essential when considering literary romanticism at all. Hugo’s name and works appear not to have surfaced once in the string of essays by multiple authors about romanticism over the past couple years on Substack, literary romanticism in particular. What kind of discussion of literary romanticism skips the greatest figure and achievements, gutting the great populist thrust of the movement? This is a literary phenomenon that I examined in detail nearly two decades ago in “Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel,” part of an old and larger story in lit whereby establishment literary ideology typically buries crucial lines of liberatory literature — progressive, populist, socialist, revolutionary — even as the establishment ideologies often pose and proclaim and delude or dupe themselves into thinking they do not — that they are cutting edge, enlightened and progressive.
The revolution in society and art, culture and politics will not be romantic. It will be populist. It had better be. Progressive populist. And it already is.
Only a progressive populist revolution in culture, society, and politics can overthrow the omnicidal establishment and implement human rights based universal programs to heal all. Only a progressive populist revolution can create and cultivate the universal and specific norms and aesthetics that transform, liberate, and illuminate the fully human and the vital human, especially when it cannot otherwise entirely express or enact itself.
America is a homicidal, genocidal, ecocidal country as capitalist empire. It’s complex — there are a lot of good things too, but the militant capitalist police state is run basically as an omnicidal criminal enterprise. The literary establishment in such a country is loathe to assess, produce, or present writers who are plainly willing to engage this reality. Witness the radically depoliticized male stars especially of the American (and Western) lit establishment — depoliticized or marginally politicized — the product of the depoliticized or marginally politicized publishing establishment and administratively cowed intellectual and institutional culture that predominates, much fraudulent and hysterical right-wing blustering to the contrary.
Less of this reality exists farther from the center of empire but often still holds, as the empire’s grip on ideology and resources is in many ways global. It’s not entirely monolithic. And, grimly, it helps when someone can do a favor for their works by conveniently dying, like Roberto Bolaño, such that their works might better live in the fashion the empire desires, even and especially when the works’ politics are not wholly revolutionary by far. The empire is very controlling that way. Though there are some cracks.
The great challenge for left writers in a corrupt culture, for writers with a vivid and vital political pulse, is to break through, break through, always be trying to break through into the consciousness of culture, and into the material reality of the times.
Is the greatest art truly of “beauty” and “originality” and expressive of the “soul” as an all-too-familiar romanticism would have it? Sounds quaint and clichéd, also inscrutable. My wonderfully adorned coffee mug happens to be all that. Doesn’t make it an ultimate work of art.
Romantic art can be intensely progressive, liberatory, revolutionary, socially engaged, and far more powerful than beautiful, far more material than soulful, and far more challenging to power and far more useful to people than necessarily original. All these intense elements and effects of great art can dwarf whatever may be beautiful, original, and soulful about the artwork — those incomplete or arbitrary and nebulous traits that aesthetes especially prefer to uphold as the ultimate aspects of artwork.
Victor Hugo fulfilled but also broke establishment creed to powerful effect and was sent packing for doing so. Other artists through time have done the same, including today. More power to them.
To create their artworks, artists must of course look not only back but around and forward, for as Edmund Wilson noted in “The Historical Interpretation of Literature,” The Triple Thinkers (1940):
The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered….
Artists need to do far more than reinterpret or “misread” the past art and times, however Harold Bloom would have it. It’s necessary for artists to possess a head and heart and gut full of not only the past but the present and what may come even moreso.
The creation of great art is an old and ongoing challenge. Things change, as progressive scholar Vernon Louis Parrington showed a full century ago in 1927 in his groundbreaking or at least formative Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920:
This much is clear: an industrialized society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick concern for human rights, that was the novel bequest of our fathers who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt….
By now, conditions of life change extremely fast even as literature stagnates, in the paralytic grip of the plutocracy. As far back as 1987, Maxine Hong Kingston commented in the progressive Mother Jones magazine, “The Novel’s Next Step”:
I’m going to give you a head start on the book that somebody ought to be working on. The hands of the clock are minutes away from nuclear midnight. And I am slow, each book taking me longer to write… So let me set down what has to be done, and maybe hurry creation, which is about two steps ahead of destruction…. All the writer has to do is make Wittman [hero of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey] grow up, and Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield will grow up. We need a sequel to adolescence—an idea of the humane beings that we may become. And the world will have a sequel…. The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the Global novel…. The danger is that the Global novel has to imitate chaos: loaded guns, bombs, leaking boats, broken-down civilizations, a hole in the sky, broken English, people who refuse connections with others…. How to stretch the novel to comprehend our times—no guarantees of inherent or eventual order—without having it fall apart? How to integrate the surreal, society, our psyches?
The Empire is always intent upon disappearing literature that exposes the depredations of plutocracy directly, explicitly. Capitalist culture does everything it can to destroy progressive populist let alone revolutionary consciousness, culture, art, politics, and action. The mental and physical attacks against the public are nonstop. The need to resist could not be greater as novelist and brave activist Arundhati Roy in War Talk “Confronting Empire” notes pointedly:
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
To overthrow the deathly tyranny of empire — whether economic, political, military, or cultural — nothing is more imperative today in art, and elsewhere, given this genocidal, ecocidal, omnicidal age — from which no “souls” may survive to imagine or be imagined, unless anti-Empire and liberatory intervention in life is successful.
Beauty, originality, “soul” — that’s only part of art, whether artform or artwork. Such features are only a sampling of core elements in form, content, and effects of art.
Meanwhile, vital art can be but is not always going to be even remotely romantic.
Highly accomplished and effective indispensable art carries a lot more on its plate than all that. Seemingly countless networks of art struggle to come to grips with this reality, or work forcefully to distort and evade it.
Today it’s in the most penetrating of the people’s media where you find much of the greatest signs of the artistic life of the age. You find the most freedom there, the most insight, great achievement, the most heart and guts, typically by far. Notably the same often holds true for social, political, and intellectual commentary as well.
Speech is political. The verbal is political. And social and cultural. And ideological. Not least when rendered aesthetically in some artform as an artwork.
Just as liberatory universal goods are needed to literally heal the people of the country, and world — universal health care, basic income, college, living wages, child care, vacation, housing, healthy food and environment, and on and on, universal goods that come only wholly from the left wing, not from liberals and conservatives who fight against the people on behalf of the plutocracy nonstop — so does a liberatory populist art need to flourish universally among the people. There can be and should be other kinds of art than the populist of course, but there must be a liberatory populist art that predominates to both save and sustain life itself, a liberatory culture, society, politics — anti-Empire, anti-tyranny, anti-plutocracy. Not fake populist, not tyrannical populist, not supremacist populist but progressive, revolutionary, liberatory. Whatever the aesthetic — romantic, realist, satiric, ironic, comedic, tragic, epic, minimalist, maximalist, you-name-it — the imperative revolution today as always against inequality and tyranny, in art and culture, society and politics, is progressive populist. It’s liberatory.
People are conditioned and encouraged nonstop to think and believe otherwise by those who exploit and profiteer. Especially in a plutocratic status quo that is highly politicized and exploitative, the greatest art will rise to the occasion of the people’s defense and liberty. One cannot escape the intensely politicized world. One can only either engage it or ignore it. The greatest art, most human, will engage it. As it can and it must.
Most Human — great title for a novel. Assign the title to multiple novelists and you would get wildly different novels. Assign Most Human: A Populist Novel and you would still get wildly different novels, you should. The point is, there is nothing necessarily prescriptive nor staid about ideology in literature. It’s inescapable. Best to be conscious of it and maximize it.
Some will call it propaganda and dismiss it. Some will call it political and dismiss it. Some will call it wrong form and dismiss it. Some will insult it, decry it, belittle it, fear it, loathe it, and feel threatened by it. Others will be appreciative and inspired. Some may act, think, grow, live anew. The authors too.
Our fundamental contemporary state of being, the major event of contemporary life, is the ongoing sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene — the terminal glide path of all life that we are currently riding and driving, some more quickly and forcefully, desperately and fatefully than others. We live in endlessly perilous and brutal times — no matter how domestic our lives, or how international — and if we are not so aware in our stories increasingly then we risk fiddling while Earth burns, while despair, disease, aggression, genocide, ecocide, omnicide condemn us all, and all life. If Earth goes up in flames, then none of the social or personal justice issues matter. It’s over. This is the event of our lives and of all life. That doesn’t mean don’t focus on infinite kinds of justice and causes, high concepts, myriad life cases, and other vital issues and realms, it means put things in great perspective. It’s all-hands-on-deck time, not least in the capital country of rapacious and deadly Empire, America, which is increasingly embroiled in a kind of simmering civil war that masks the wholesale depredations of Empire, the plutocracy, against all the people and the planet.
This is what the big social or political novel or any truly big ambitious novel is all about — or should be about because it needs to be if it is to explore and reveal the full human condition and its possibilities, and interact with it and impact it in imperative ways. The civil wars of gender politics and other forms of identity politics rage while the Empire’s war on the People and Earth consumes all and stokes the identity wars to great profit. Is there only one war that should be fought, one story that should be told? No, there are many but the fact is that all stories now are contained within the great war for species and planetary survival.
And so the imperative revolution in art and everything else today is progressive populist or bust — across all aesthetics and artforms and artworks. So what is libertarian socialist and revolutionary art exactly? That’s what needs to be found out. Tough to do so while its efforts are being quashed by the reigning ideologies and institutions. Wittingly and unwittingly pathetic, retrograde, and vile as they are. If you think there is nothing pathetic, retrograde, and vile about, say, Disney in either what it creates or excludes, think again. Of course, Disney art and institutional productions can have some good in them. A lot of ideologies and institutions have some good in them, as they are complex. And yet, in the empire, in the plutocracy, all the prevailing institutions and ideologies — the plutocrat establishment and fellow travelers — manifest in a wide variety of ways as bigoted, supremacist, and tyrannical — core inherent features of the system.
Wouldn’t it be good to propagate an ideology of art and culture, society and politics that rejects and counters all that — explicitly and directly? Wouldn’t that be fully human? Almost, you know, romantic — but far from that limited. The satiric bite, for one, is too delicious and effective to forgo. And the comedic call-out. The tragic insight. The epic sweep. The Utopian ideal. The realist condemnation and exaltation. The speculative jolt. The fantastical freedom.
Don’t be limited by aesthetics. Do enhance your content. Make it revolutionary. Or at least progressive populist in pitched battle with the supremacists and other tyrants and tyrannies of material, mind, and emotion. Make it art or break it art. Revolutionize it for a better today and a livable tomorrow.
A few thoughts on Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros. Pictures) released September 26 — or, how not to make a liberatory movie.
One Battle After Another comes complete with a nondescript title that gives away the weak episodic movement of the structure even though it’s loosely causal, technically. The story moves from one spectacle to another such that, as it turns out, there is mainly spectacle and next to no story and content.
The movie opens and sometimes continues as a “blaxploitation” flick that otherwise tries to present as a topical thriller. The main character is entirely miscast as a white male, a comedic white male, no less, in a movie that revolves entirely around sobering and grim race and class issues. Meanwhile, a satiric virtual side-story of militant and rich white males is tagged on by means of insulting blaxploitation and pasted into what little plot there is.
The plot? The story? Weather Underground type revolutionaries liberate immigration prison camps and rob banks to fuel their revolutionary ideas circa 2010. A revolutionary as new mother is captured after killing a bank guard, and then gives up her allies to the authorities. This allows her to escape to Mexico never to be heard from again. Her male partner goes underground into rural America with her infant daughter, and they live quietly until the present day, when they are hunted down by the militant state while the daughter is in high school. A racially motivated chase and hostage tale unfolds replete with militant white plutocrat supremacists. The mixed race daughter is pursued and held hostage while the white dad both flees authorities and attempts to find and save her. Spoiler — but you knew it would work out, no? It’s Hollywood: The daughter saves herself as it turns out, while her Dad is saved by surviving revolutionaries and other social justice workers, mostly minorities. The white supremacists are fought off, if not beaten. Sounds socially conscious and good?
There are some problems. 2 hours and 45 minutes of problems. There is precious little content in the entire 2 hours and 45 minute run of the movie. Next to nothing happens, nonstop. And what does happen is often, well, wanting.
The mixed genres of the film are crudely thrown together: violent rich white males in the movie are presented satirically; the empathetic white male lead is presented comedically; the female and minority characters are treated as haphazardly dramatic, cheeky, hip, larger than life, super savvy, or victims. The plot is threadbare. The character exploration is near zero. Any social discourse is severely muted, even in face of and despite a few telling visuals.
The continuous musical score is interesting and compelling about ten percent of the time and otherwise serves as sheer filler in place of story and content, or is redundant of the continuous spectacle, again in place of story and meaningful substance. And the music is relentless on your skull less like a lively ticking clock and more like a psychotic woodpecker. Because so little of substance actually happens in the film, the score sometimes gives a chewing gum like relief. But you often want to spit out the gum and can’t.
The arbitrary and unearned slapstick transformation of the main character from revolutionary and doting dad to burnout bumbler doesn’t play much better in the movie than do the too-thin cartoon characters play in the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland,on which the movie is remotely based.
Go back and take a look at a century of macropolitical movies, or nominally macropolitical movies, with at least some modest leftish bent made from the time of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator and you’ll find that they are almost all made by men, very much like all American Presidents have been men. The Presidency, like this type of movie, consequently suffers greatly as a result. It’s long since time for macropolitical movies to be made by leftish women directors and especially by women of color directors just as it is long since time for women and women of color Presidents to preside in the most powerful country of the capitalist empire — for the purpose of changing its whole nature.
Had that been the case for this film, it’s not difficult to think that the minority exploitation and the wholly superfluous white male lead elements of the movie would have been cut or not even considered in the first place. And any need for spectacle would be far reduced, by building up the substance of social discourse and character development, with not unrelated and far better control of plot, and actual content and character revelation in dialogue.
It’s not that a white male director or writer is incapable of doing all this with an exposé of white empire and with characters of all races and backgrounds in macropolitical movies (or novels), it’s just an absolute rarity to see it in big American cinema, and in establishment literary novels.
In collaborative ventures like movies, you should collaborate. Paul Thomas Anderson clearly needed some help in this regard. I would not want to see my three anti-empire novels be treated like this film, at all. The novels involve a diverse populace of characters, Loop Day and Empire All In and Most Revolutionary — and if these novels would ever be filmed, then either the directors or script adapters or both should be women of color to add and combine their perspectives of life in white Empire to my own depictions. Similarly, if these novels would be adapted into TV shows, then the script adapters or showrunners or both should ideally be leftish women of color to give a broader spectrum of insight on the diverse cast of characters and the charged personal, social, and political situations.
Theoretically you could get by without such diversity among the creators but it would be difficult to do. There are so many reasons to absolutely want cross-race, cross-sex, and cross-class collaboration, especially for such sweeping macro projects. You still need a core group of creators with leftish, progressive populist sensibilities that overlap with the progressive populist ideology of the novels, otherwise you might as well surrender the thing entirely to corporate executives. One Battle After Another could have benefited enormously from a diverse writer and director collaboration rather than Paul Thomas Anderson proceeding all by his lonesome, with a white male lead no less. It’s painfully obvious. The great diverse cast salvages what can be salvaged in such a setup, mainly including Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, and Chase Infiniti.
This is a Hollywood director’s spectacle of a film, not a writer’s movie of revelatory consciousness and story. The movie is far more about imagery as warped Hollywood caricature than compelling narrative and insight. The caricature of spectacle manufactures continuous decapitation of thought, even though it is said a picture is worth a thousand words. Clearly the reason so much money, or any money, was thrown at this movie is the moneymaker himself, Leonardo DiCaprio. Put Leo in the film and you’ll get your money back! What do we do with him? Make him the main character. Brilliant! Except he’s superfluous to the story. Nothing is about him. He’s a pointless main character — played off literally as a running joke to no end, no point, no purpose. He’s there in the movie for reasons that have nothing to do with the story. He’s there to get the thing funded. And it guts the movie.
DiCaprio is talented but in the way. There is far more drama, theme, meaning, reality, and possibility to be found in the excellent (when not exploited) black women characters and their stories, especially if they were to raise the daughter of the runaway mother, rather than the do-nothing beside-the-point DiCaprio character. DiCaprio gets in the way of anything interesting in the movie and everything that is most meaningful. The DiCaprio story is hollow and vacuous and spans the entire length of the film. The farce of following this guy takes up the space in which the great issues could be fully engaged. In this way the actually compelling events and characters are badly slighted, almost all people of color. Also, the vicious militants and supremacists of the plutocracy of white empire are skewered far from any real office of power, and far from any systemic illumination of their violent and profiteering oppression.
One Battle After Another? One spectacle after another. One mistake after another. One wasted moment after another. One DiCaprio after another. One PTA after another. If you could only get DiCaprio and PTA and the Hollywood executives out of the film you could have something far more vital and meaningful.
“A” for effort, I suppose, great enthusiasm wholly flawed. Warped and hollow result. The supporting cast far outdid the boss class in this one. A pity to be so badly handicapped by the funders and the conventional stars. Spanning seldom seen small cities and the vibrant countryside of the American northwest and southwest, at least the movie is sometimes scenic and the music is sometimes good though robotically overdone. Exasperated scoffing should more likely be summoned from the audience than great emotions, if you’re paying attention at all, not least when the main character is onscreen. While the movie is a vacuous, twisted mess thanks to the writing, directing, and structure, the actors are good or better. Why can the actors be such accomplished professionals and the writers, directors, and corporate executives such tools of capitalist power? To ask is to answer.
Look who’s in charge. Not the people. The power is elsewhere. Until the people come to power and a progressive populist ideology prevails, the movies will be mainly spectacles cast by the plutocracy, with all the prevailing whiz-bang, gee wow, and psychotic dross that that entails. If you go see this gutless, garish spectacle of a chase movie, you’ll need to bear it for what it is — a vapid caricature of physical movement and social movements — and what it is not — a critical cultural moment on the path to a better future.
The actors go for what’s vital more than the movie does. The movie was made to push flash-bang as content and does not even offer clichéd platitudes as theme. Just one spectacle after another. What is to be done by the socially conscious observer? Flee, or hang on to the best of the characters and the best moments in a few scenes, especially the scenes of scores of people in distress, and dream — dream of what might have been. An entirely different movie, an entirely different story of and for our perilous times.
There’s a major difference between the two recent political and culturally critical movies One Battle After Another and Eddington that is telling and that may account for One Battle being more enthusiastically received than Eddington.
For all its flaws, One Battle takes a clear and strong partisan liberatory stand with the oppressed and would-be revolutionaries against the oppressors. One Battle is clearly “An Antifascist Movie at a Fascist Moment” in the words of Michelle Goldberg even though it massively kneecaps its own potential and achievements.
One Battle glamorizes and validates action for social change while empathizing with and somewhat humanizing the plight of the oppressed. The movie also excoriates the derangement of the vicious sick white male plutocracy and their hired guns who uphold and benefit from the destructive and unjust status quo.
Eddington on the other hand minimally nods to bits of unjust reality and some delineation of good and bad while engaging it much more marginally than One Battle. For all of Eddington’smimetic accomplishment, the movie undercuts intelligence, especially liberatory and protective partisan intelligence. Eddington discredits or contradicts nearly everything and everyone’s professed positions and actions and thereby guts life of a lot of the clarity and power of principle, knowledge, healthy emotion, and protective partisanship, the liberatory. The movie guts much sense and stability and meaningful ways of being by presenting the half-blind and the irate and the uncertain and the confused as full reality. This is not exactly what anyone needs more of in these purposefully deluded and inflamed times.
Eddington‘s cross-spectrum negativity and discrediting effectively hides much good reality and healthy possibilities, giving a false and unhealthy impression of life; whereas, One Battle After Another revels in vital liberatory moments, including some very badly needed expressions of healthy emotion and insight for use in this turbulent and desperate day and age. One Battle does all this despite being the unfortunate structural and representational trainwreck of a movie that italso pervasively is.
Journalist and literary critic Rebecca West once noted that “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned thing is ample.” Eddington appears to copy the universe in presenting the depressing oppressive and confusing elements of reality, while botching and gutting the liberatory elements, and so does not present a full sense of reality. Illumination, inspiration, healthy emotions, and effective actions — these too are features commonly found in reality or readily imagined but are scarcely found in Eddington — let alone much greater possibilities and transcendent or impactful ways of being, artistically presented and created as story.
Eddington the movie is fixated by what becomes its own murderous mess of Eddington the town. In the movie — “spoilers” here — the conservative sheriff murders a mentally ill homeless man and then murders his political opponent, the liberal mayor, and his son. The sheriff’s right-wing pro-gun public bellicosity leads to voiceless antifa figures flying into town on a private jet — or fake antifa figures being flown in by the wealthy as a false flag operation — it’s indeterminate — to confront the sheriff, leading to a spiral of ever greater violence.
The end result is that the big data plutocrats wind up in exploitative material and political control of the town, which the murderous sheriff never actually cared or knew all that much about — the data plutocrats, not the town. The conservative sheriff was just sick of being contradicted and humiliated by the liberal mayor — and his private family life was going badly, also connected to the mayor. Self-contradictory and ultimately homicidal grievance politics in America — Eddington as Little America, or Little White Empire. And that’s it — the movie Eddington, the town Eddington. It represents the negative elements of society that everyone already knows all about — what is discussed and demonstrated over and over and over again online, on phone, in real life, on endless repeat. But that’s not all of reality and life — let alone the possible and the imaginable.
Rebecca West where are you now? “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art” — especially not the merely most confusing, violent and contradictory elements of the universe — “one of the damned thing is ample.” Thank you very much. I’ll pass. It’s possible to admire a work of art, the fastidious intimacies of its construction and action, while despising what it is. Give us an other to know and to experience so that we and our world may become greater others ourselves. Of course, on the flip side, be wary of giving us an equally fake alternate version of reality that may be allsunshine and light. These fractionally realistic types of art are not the worst things in the world, by far, but they can have their trying and troubling limits.
If only in place of the humbly-bumbly Joaquin Phoenix Sheriff in Eddington a bright orange Trump caricature had been cast instead — call it, Empireton! Now that would have been a sight to behold! — and possibly an epic story — especially if a true inspired and inspiring hero, however genuinely humble, were also cast alongside the fluorescent murderous incarnation of Evil in Little Fascist Eddington, America. Bye-bye miasmic and torturous realism, hello heightened reality!—
Lecturing a gathering of the top American military officials yesterday in Quantico, Virginia, American President Donald Trump declared war against his own country — supremacist military war against t…
Instead we get a kind of suffocating, fractured, noxious realism that we already know and experience all too much — and in much deeper texture and broader scope than can be experienced in Eddington. Not only are there other options for art that surpass Eddington both aesthetically and normatively, Eddington, while posing as realism, falsifies reality in debilitating ways:truncating, distorting, and further confusing reality. One Battle After Another perverts and insults reality, too, on the one hand but on the other hand it upholds a clear and strong and often liberatory sense of life. One Battle also at least partly transcends reality to indicate greater possibilities and impulses for vital consciousness, action, and being.
While One Battle After Anothergets a lot wrong, including much that undermines most anything and everything it might otherwise achieve as an aesthetic work of art and accomplish as a social and political artefact, Michelle Goldberg’s “An Antifascist Movie at a Fascist Moment” touches on a few important strengths of the story:
The film’s artistic success shouldn’t be reduced to its politics. But at a moment when an autocratic administration is trying to force cultural institutions into submission, it’s invigorating to see a Hollywood movie so fearless in its progressive convictions. “One Battle After Another” has complicated things to say about left-wing political violence and self-serving radicalism, but it takes a clear side in the broader fight between authoritarianism and resistance. …
…if “One Battle After Another” doesn’t celebrate revolutionary violence, it also doesn’t condemn the broad goals the French 75 fought for. Indeed, it celebrates those who quietly keep radical hopes alive. Its most winning character is Benicio Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos, a karate sensei who runs an underground railroad for undocumented immigrants, and who moves through the film’s chaos with Buddha-like serenity.
There is something subversive, in the best possible way, in the film’s vision of good and evil. The same week it came out, the [Trump] administration released a national security memorandum denouncing movements that “portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.” Watching “One Battle After Another” feels liberating in part because it’s heedless of all the new taboos Trump and his henchman are trying to force on us. The movie could scarcely be more relevant in Trump’s America.
Just as a “film’s artistic success shouldn’t be reduced to its politics” neither should a film’s artistic failures “be reduced to its politics.” But the film’s political failures are real and loom large and otherwise undercut its political, cultural, and social achievements and potential — as well as its own art.
People want to like One Battle After Another for a wide variety of compelling reasons, including its liberatory and antifascist qualities, and it has a lot of other positive qualities too, despite being otherwise so terminally vacuous. The film is obviously and fundamentally vulnerable to accurate critiques of blatant racism and sexism, not only in prominent scenes but structurally also — in particular, the upfront “blaxploitation” not least with its hyper-sexualization, plus the relative marginalization of all the minority characters who seem to be largely placed in a string to propel the plot for the near continuous presence and benefit of the white male main character and his one-note story. Deeply biased, at best, this tale, seemingly as old as time.
Such a critique barely scratches the surface of the problematic issues in One Battle After Another. There’s a lot of truth to Colleen Claes’ view that the movie is
pretty hollow: full of hacky Gen X humor and faux progressivism, with little point and even less character development (especially for the female characters, who are still somehow the driving force behind the story?) I cannot for the life of me understand how the “what time is it?” joke lasted for what felt like thirty minutes – precisely twenty-eight minutes longer than it needed to.
Because the plot is a showdown between two white men fighting to hold onto Black and biracial women for reasons that keep them in constant conflict with each other. There’s no choice then but for the film to feel incongruent and exploitative of those thinly written Black women characters. …
Because Anderson is not interested in revolution. He’s not interested in vulnerable immigrants. Despite the many jokes about lusting for them, he’s not interested in Black women. He’s only interested in the interiority of white men.
That most reviewers of One Battle After Another seemingly do not or cannot readily see the severe and debilitating flaws of the movie is not much credible at this late stage of cultural history. Vacuous garbage and cesspool liberalism — these are significant elements of this film, woefully misjudged by writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson and producers. The movie’s skewering of hideous reactionaries, and the condemnation of fascist oppression, and the valorization of social justice workers and so on helps offset these flaws but does not eliminate them.
That most reviewers overlook these problems or ignore them and then hype what often amounts to a lot of tedious or warped Hollywood clichés as wonderful features of art or society is symptomatic of many other cultural problems besides. Look at him run, look at him drive, look at him shoot, look at him pose — what does he say? not much — what does he do? not much — what does it all mean? not much! Alas. Not in the time given. Not in the context of the story nor in the society outside the story, life. It could have been, should have been so much more. The most vital and crucial characters, politics, and elements of culture are frequently exploited, distorted, and marginalized throughout the film, badly undercutting the film’s genuine qualities and strengths.
The empty or loaded, offensive and otherwise demeaning elements of One Battle After Another are all too vivid and predominant in a story that in other ways has a generous, liberatory, and sizable heart. There appears to be a lot of critical overcompensating going on in both lauding it and remaining largely silent about the (white) elephants in the movie that essentially suffocate and lobotomize it. The movie gives itself its own poison pills, however unwittingly — to negative artistic, political, and cultural effect.
Eddington, written and directed by Ari Aster, similarly commits intellectual and experiential, ideological and emotional butchery on itself by falsifying reality in one gutted distortion after another. Sure, pockets and swaths of reality can be perceived through a fundamentally claustrophobic, chaotic, and violent lens, which the film constantly pushes by discrediting virtually everything it fronts. The internet bombards people with these sorts of self-discrediting, bewildering, and poisoned pockets and panoramas 24/7 — even and especially as huge areas of the internet and larger world are liberatory too. Anyone in their five senses avoids online carnage or explains and counters it and does not recreate it, even as many fall or dive often unwittingly into the madhouse and risk breaking their own neck and that of others.
It’s not that nothing can be learned or gained from movies like Eddington. It’s not that these shrunken-partial, gritty-chaos, or horror-view works of art are necessarily wholly unengaging. But it can quickly be suffocating to mind and imagination, redundant to the worst of life, and off-putting to both consciousness and intelligence. “One of the damn thing is ample.” Or, if you especially like this kind of crazed-gutter aesthetic and content, you might find a way to make it more revelatory, moving, impactful. Give us something more, something other, something moving up and out from the utter “damnation” so that we and our world may be and become something more alive and whole too. It’s badly needed.
If the self- and socially-eviscerating characters of Eddington, that is, Eddington, don’t know any better about themselves and the world, surely the director writer/director does. Find a way to express it. Show it! Tell it! Instead, in Eddington viewers are left to choke on the incoherent violent spectacle of forced chaos as all reality. If anyone wants to experience aggravation, chaos, and horror, they can quickly browse the internet, or even sometimes simply look across the office or worksite, or glance at the street outside. A one-to-one recreation of disaster does not rise to the level of a cautionary tale when it merely keeps viewers sunk in the bowels of the daily disaster of an omnipresent kind of life.
Oh, Ed! In the movie, we see that the Big Data ruled town of Eddington is fundamentally awful, violent, confused, confusing, all of that. No shit, Sherlock. What else ya got? Pity the people trapped in this universe and torn apart by its limited notions and crimped expressions of reality. This is the tragedy of a very limited and warped vision of life, in some ways reality, far from all ways — which is news to whom exactly? Liberatory epics far more than tragedies are needed today, including liberatory epics far better than One Battle After Another. Transcendent impactful epics that provide as much progressive or revolutionary possibility and inspiring reality and imagination as can be conceived and created are needed far more than stultified and claustrophobic tragedies of chaotic and violent life like Eddington.
If it’s tragedy you find compelling and insightful, any sweeping epic can easily contain the tragic, and much more besides — the comedic, satiric, the dramatic, the essayistic, the poetic, and so on. Liberatory epics can encompass and inspire all. You can find a few of these revolutionary epics at Liberation Lit, along with critiques and referrals for more beyond.
A Stoner Dad and a Murderous Sheriff Go To War. Against each other. Against the universe. It could be epic! And truly revolutionary, illuminating, and moving — such a movie or other long story. Who would win? Hopefully someone unexpected, for the sake of us all and everything, not the stars of these two shows — warped and dull, broken, and gutted of the liberatory, as they too much are. My vote is for Sabia and Leif and Dhyna but that’s just me.
“Sinclair’s The Jungle was a socialist tract that changed labor law.”
In fact, the originally serialized international best-selling novel, The Jungle, helped directly cause enactment of both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act; whereas, Sinclair had hoped the novel would affect labor laws.
The power of serialized fiction in progressive periodicals:
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle “first appeared serially in Appeal to Reason on February 25, 1905, and it was published as a book … a year later…. Roosevelt, an avowed “trustbuster,” was sent an advance copy of The Jungle…. The novel was an instant international best seller and prompted massive public outrage at the contamination and sanitation issues raised in the work, even though Sinclair’s primary intent in writing the story was to promote socialism….By early 1906 both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act had long been stalled in Congress, but, when the Neill-Reynolds report had fully confirmed Sinclair’s charges, Roosevelt used the threat of disclosing its contents to speed along the passage of both acts, which became law on the same day.
Upton Sinclair famously said that with The Jungle, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Probably would have been more accurate if Sinclair had said that he aimed “primarily” at the public’s heart, because the novel takes aim at many things of public interest — the public’s stomach, food quality being one of them.
Ottoman suggests that for incorporating ideology and propaganda in novels it should be done in a certain way, a familiar establishment caution, when propaganda is tolerated at all:
“If you want ideology, fuse it to form so it can’t be peeled away.”
In fact, writers can incorporate ideology or propaganda in novels that can be “peeled away” from it, lifted out wholesale, just as it can be cut and pasted into a novel, in ways as aesthetic or unaesthetic as you want to make it.
In my view, Burger’s Daughter is Nobel Prize winning Nadine Gordimer’s greatest novel, originally banned by the apartheid regime in South Africa because judged to be blatant propaganda. In Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer includes various kinds of sheer propaganda, incorporating propagandistic speeches, dialogue, and an actual banned student pamphlet.
In a 1980 interview, Gordimer stated that she was fascinated by the role of “white hard-core Leftists” in South Africa, and that she had long envisaged the idea for Burger’s Daughter. Inspired by the work of Bram Fischer, she published an essay about him in 1961 entitled “Why Did Bram Fischer Choose to Go to Jail?” Gordimer’s homage to Fischer extends to using excerpts from his writings and public statements in the book. Lionel Burger’s treason trial speech from the dock is taken from the speech Fischer gave at his own trial in 1966. Fischer was the leader of the banned SACP who was given a life sentence for furthering the aims of communism and conspiracy to overthrow the government. Quoting people like Fischer was not permitted in South Africa. All Gordimer’s quotes from banned sources in Burger’s Daughter are unattributed, and also include writings of Joe Slovo, a member of the SACP and the outlawed ANC, and a pamphlet written and distributed by the Soweto Students Representative Council during the Soweto uprising.
Some readers will always have problems with the aesthetics of Burger’s Daughter or lack thereof. Other readers will wrestle with the novel and come to mixed conclusions, including some reasonable sense that in certain ways, in certain contexts, aesthetics are beside the point. Sometimes content supersedes form, can and does, probably far more often than may be thought:
American writer Joseph Epstein had mixed feelings about the book. He wrote in The Hudson Review that it is a novel that “gives scarcely any pleasure in the reading but which one is pleased to have read nonetheless”. Epstein complained about it being “a mighty slow read” with “off the mark” descriptions and “stylistic infelicities”. He felt that big subjects sometimes “relieve a novelist of the burdens of nicety of style”. Epstein said that reading the book is like “looking at a mosaic very close up, tile by tile”, and that the big picture only emerges near the end. But he complimented Gordimer on the way in which she unravels Rosa’s fate, saying that it is “a tribute to her art”.
In creating art, you can’t please everyone. Some people will always disagree with what’s aesthetic and what’s not in various cases. And there are plenty of individual and organizational prejudices and biases deeply entrenched. Doesn’t mean analysis doesn’t matter, though flawed analyses are often used to justify and enforce aesthetic and content prejudices and biases.
Sometimes content can be so vital that weak, broken, or non-existent aesthetics don’t matter. And in fact this is sometimes a way in which new aesthetics are created. So, for instance, a novel consisting of nothing but “peeled away” ideology could be both fascinating to read and/or highly aesthetic, let alone novels that just incorporate a bit of that sort of thing.
There’s even an aesthetic name for one kind of technique that often embraces this: breaking the fourth wall. And detachable ideological content can be incorporated in other ways too, as soliloquy, or Greek chorus, pastiche, cut-and-paste of actual or fictitious documents….
It can be done in highly aesthetic ways or in ways that are clumsy and heavy-handed, but if it’s otherwise substantively powerful, it’s powerful.
Lots of great and classic art, including that of Shakespeare, was intended and successful as propaganda. Propaganda is a feature in art. It may also be a bug, depending, but is surely a feature.
What shall we call it — odd? — that a lot of literary criticism repeats, as if a mantra, that they don’t want propaganda in literature even though de facto propaganda is as much a feature of literature throughout the centuries as anything. And then if it’s explained that they mean they don’t want deceit and dishonesty in literature — it boggles the mind. Who does? Goes without saying.
This is all to use “propaganda” in its original non-pejorative sense. One might even say in its original honest sense.
The effect of denying propaganda in lit is to bow to the prejudiced and biased propagandistic gods of capitalism and the state, and the broad establishment, in pushing for fundamentally if not marginally depoliticized literature — meaning actually only a particular censored kind of establishment ideology is allowed and no other, with some marginal variance and exceptions aside.
Should literature contain propaganda? Only the most astounding, fraudulent, reactionary-propagandized culture could lead to this discussion and question. Great literature has always been steeped in widely ranging degrees and types of propaganda and ideology, across all types and genres. There is nothing specially non-propagandistic or non-ideological about imaginative literature.
It only takes one example to prove that extremely ideological or propagandistic lit can be created at the highest level — and examples are everywhere — even in popular songs from rap to folk to rock to country. But as for high lit: William Blake’s anti-empire poem “London” with its “mind-forged manacles.” Jonathan Swift’s short “autofiction” “A Modest Proposal” with the satiric suggestion that the English directly consume Irish infants, Victor Hugo’s epic novel of the “wretched” people, the “underclass,” Les Miserablés, that led to sweeping national social reform a decade after Hugo was forced into exile after denouncing Emperor Napoleon III for abolishing the French republic. Also Hugo’s modernist type anti-state-homicide novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man.
Evidently far more civilized and sophisticated than America’s literary establishment and its reigning ideology, Venezuela’s past President Hugo Chavez distributed
one million free copies of Don Quixote and 1.5 million free copies of Les Misérables in 2006 when he “inaugurated the Second Venezuelan International Book Fair … [and] addressed the opening ceremony after having handed out copies of a massive edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserablés to workers of the ‘Negra Hipolita Mission,’ a social program aimed at helping Venezuelans in situations of extreme poverty,” reports the Cuban paper Periódico 26. “The Venezuelan leader said: ‘The Empire sows death with its weapons. In contrast, these are our guns: books, ideas, culture.’ Earlier, participants had attentively listened [to] and applauded the reading of the poem ‘Che,’ by its author Miguel Barnet, to start off the Book Fair tribute to the historical legacy of Ernesto Che Guevara…” “Books Liberate” was the theme of the book fair.
The propagandistic response of the French establishment to Hugo’s massively internationally popular Les Miserablés:
…Perrot de Chezelles [a public prosecutor], in an ‘Examination of Les Misérables’, defended the excellence of a State which persecuted convicts even after their release, and derided the notion that poverty and ignorance had anything to do with crime…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo…[exiled] had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862
as Hugo had intended.
And the consequences of Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s propagandistic and literary abolition novel Uncle Tom’s Cabinare well known — also published in a progressive periodical like that other best seller, The Jungle.
As for “Shakespeare,” in his time he was notoriously political and locked up for it — that is, if you understand the pen name of “Shakespeare” to be taken from the family crest of Edward de Vere. But even if you don’t, forget his pointedly political plays for a moment and think of his poems aiming to be so powerfully persuasive — that’s propaganda, that’s ideology — the poems urging marriage, the poems bestowing beauty — those are lines of ideology and propaganda —whether political or not — not in any cheap caricatured sense of those terms but in the fully intellectual, political, or cultural sense.
There is voluminous scholarship on this, from both Oxfordians and Stratfordians. It’s not just the aesthetics and content but the timing and staging of the plays as well that were sometimes geared to very pointed propagandistic effect. Propagandizing doesn’t necessarily hurt the art. In fact, it often enhances it and is necessary in the first place. Not to mention it serves vital social functions.
Of highly conscious thinking people in the world, including artists, and across all time, there is only a very narrow and extremely ideologically imbued stratum of thought that declaims literature to not be propagandistic and ideological. It is, inherently, to great and vast degrees. It is known. Simply that. One can quibble and mistake the meaning of propaganda but that’s quibbling and mistakes.
Ideology and propaganda are not the only features in literature and other arts but they are certainly prominent. This is why the most perniciously propagandized and toxically propagandizing people in the world ban books, including something like 23,000 cases in America since 2021, with Stephen King being the most banned author last year. Is King propagandistic? Ideological? Of course. That’s literature. According to PEN “The next most banned author [last year] was Ellen Hopkins, author of young adult fiction including Crank, Burned, Impulse and Glass, who had 18 titles banned totaling 167 times.”
Some people ban books physically, others ban them in their own minds. Composed experience is inescapably ideological, with propagandistic features and effects. One cannot deny ideology and propaganda in literature (as far as is known). One can only engage with it or against it consciously or unconsciously, and to a wide range of degrees. When people say they don’t want ideology and propaganda in story and other art they mean they don’t want the kinds of ideology and propaganda they don’t like, because these are inescapable features of art and intelligence. Nothing crude please! What’s crude to one may be sweet music to another: Fuck the King! Power to the People! And so on.
If anything we need far more ideology and propaganda these terrible days, of the best most inspiring, most epically moving and culturally rocking kind. We need ever greater propaganda in lit against the book banners and many other disasters.
This unfettered book banning is reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1950s while the report notes: “Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country.”
Between July 2024 and June 2025, the fourth school year of the book ban crisis nationwide, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts.. For the third straight year, Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texas with 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622. Together, PEN America reports nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since 2021.
“No book shelf will be left untouched if local and state book bans continue wreaking havoc on the freedom to read in public schools,” said Sabrina Baêta, senior manager of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program. “With the Trump White House now also driving a clear culture of censorship, our core principles of free speech, open inquiry, and access to diverse and inclusive books are severely at risk. Book bans stand in the way of a more just, informed and equitable world. They chill the freedom to read and restrict the rights of students to access information and read freely.”
The report said these pernicious censorship trends are sabotaging the basic values of public education as district after district respond by removing books targeted by extremist groups who take anti-woke, anti-DEI, and anti-LGBTQ+ stances. Educators and school boards comply out of fear of losing funding, being fired or harassed, even being subjected to police involvement. This is especially true with state laws that are purposefully vague and instill fear and apprehension.
The top five banned books for the school year were: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess with 23 bans; Sold by Patricia McCormick and Breathless by Jennifer Niven with 20 bans each; Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo with 19 bans and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas with 18 bans.
The literary crisis, longstanding, is that there is a great desire for political stories and insight from readers (if not as much as you might like), while the publishers’ financial and ideological interests are wholly opposed to it. Thus you get the crap of weak allusions to the political, posing as something more. Goes against the grain to say that Thomas Pynchon — a non-public figure, notably — has been a master of this, thus a darling of the establishment. Many others like him. This crisis, call it a constitution of lit crisis, guts literature, video, culture. Lit should do more. It should describe the day truthfully, and it should imagine better days that could be, ought to be, need to be.
The ailing seemingly dying Trump tells epic stories. You need to if you want to become Trump the Great and conquer the world. The main epic story that Trump tells is the story of American Empire, from its founding — white financial and military supremacy — White Empire. Conquer the Natives. Kidnap and buy and sell and enslave Africans. Be an immigrant but then brutalize immigrants. The culture is primed for this story, and power and big money love it because it continues the extremely militant, controlling, and profitable exploitation.
It’s amazing that American tyranny has stopped at genocide and slavery and never gone as far as open cannibalism, though perhaps it can be judged that it has. Jonathan Swift certainly thought this of the English Empire, of which the American Empire is an extension.
Trump is all in for this deeply bigoted capitalist supremacy — his epic life’s work. A supremacist Pax Americana in a male white supremacist society and culture, deeply bigoted in general. Prejudice gets you gold. Pillaging and exploitation at the point of a gun in a police state makes you rich. Trump is the hero villain of the ages, gangster capitalist, genocidal and ecocidal, all plunder and profiteering. Trump is the avatar of a vicious populist degeneracy, as opposed to a liberatory human rights based populist revolution.
Some claim that “identity politics are and have always been extremely unpopular in this country and for obvious reasons” — Freddie deBoer — though in reality one and only one identity is allowed to be in power and political in the extreme. White supremacy identity politics reign supreme. Funny what is meant by “identity politics.” White male capitalist supremacy reigns supra supreme. Some identities are more exalted, equal, than others. George Washington was the first in a long line of affirmative action identity politics Presidents of the United States of Empire.
Donbo King Tyrump the most recent, pushing and pursuing his pillaging epic to the hilt. Progressive populists need to respond in kind, in stories and otherwise. Where to turn? A corporate-captured publishing establishment makes it difficult. And the corporate mindset bleeds into university and other presses and in fact throughout the culture. Thus the resort to independent and DIY publishing on uncertain platforms.
And what is the state of the story form of art?
As far aesthetics go, and limited politics, the better TV series far surpassed the better movies long ago. Now when a movie comes out, an apt reaction is — It’s just a movie. The better TV series have a lot more integrity, stamina, depth, and scope in general. You would like them to have more, both in quality and quantity, but especially now they beat even the big movies by miles.
Movies have become, and to some extent always were, the short stories of culture; whereas, TV series are the novels, the epic novels. Going at least as far back as MASH then surging forward in the age of streaming.
In serializing Most Revolutionary this past year, I simultaneously serialized an epic novel and a seven episode season one of a TV series, each chapter an act, five acts per episode, or part. 7 parts, 7 episodes — 35 chapters, 35 acts. How did I do this? Trained for a year with scriptwriters then wrote the whole novel in script forms first, before adapting to literary prose.
The conversations of our times in art, in story, are happening online and far more in TV series than in movies, so I tried to bring the magnitude and vibrancy of life back from TV series into the literary novel. I also tried to re-conscience the novel, as well as restore to it a vast sweep of consciousness. You can’t help but push the establishment’s buttons — ideological bounds and aesthetic defaults and crutches — when you do this.
Meanwhile there’s something very distorted about book fiction, ranging from genre/commercial to upmarket to literary fiction, a tendency, something insipid that the better TV shows get away from, a bit moreso. Not that the state of TV is all that great in absolute terms, by far.
Luke McGowan-Arnold at The Metropolitan Review:
What does contemporary literature have to say about riots? Namely, why does it have so little to say about riots? Past literature gave us accounts of the strike. Steinbeck’s novel In Dubious Battle,for example, does an exciting play-by-play of a picker’s strike in the fictionalized Torgas Valley. The strike has wavered as the main form of class struggle in the United States as history turned, and circulation struggles have become the norm in many ways. Circulation struggles are defined by the poet and political theorist Joshua Clover as struggles that occur in the point of circulation rather than the point of production, like public squares, freeways, ports, business districts, or airports, as opposed to factories.
The question becomes: Where is the riot novel?
Whether or not you agree with riots, novelists concerned with race and class struggle should probably write more about them, as they are ways that people express their distaste with the current ruling order.
A crucial topic. Can apply this analysis to movies and TV shows too. Songs and other art. Political stories, whether they are shorts, novels, TV shows and series, or movies, the most vital political stories are monuments to sanity, even if wildly satirical. Les Misérables is a monument to sanity. Wizard of the Crow is a monument to sanity. Parable of the Sower, a monument to sanity. Sweeping societal sanity that encompasses the personal. This is not all that literature should be, but it is one of the most ambitious things it can be, maybe the most.
Going all the way back through literature and to the present day, society would be lost without a steady stream of solid political stories and other socially conscious art.
(There’s always the role of religion and its influence upon society, but for that one would do well to go direct to the source and Interview God.)
It’s up to today’s artists across all genres to capture and express in stories the myriad and sometimes gargantuan battles against oppression and tyranny, and the expressions of anger, outrage, sorrow, and determination found in riots and among many rioters, and much more. Acts of resistance and rejection, protection and aggression need to be coalesced and dissected and otherwise rendered in story, including the riots, and the monkeywrenching, the hacking, the strikes, the boycotts, the slowdowns and all kinds of actions, the new People’s Navy, the sabotage against deadly fossil fuel and military/police infrastructure, the myriad revolutionary forays in culture and society on the streets, online, in households, at work, in government, in classrooms, everywhere.
These are crucial elements of the great battles for consciousness and conscience, for a humane and livable world, and they need to be vividly portrayed and enhanced in story to help expand consciousness, build it up, and spur action.
People of all races, classes, and genders need to write (well) about people of all races, classes, and genders, etc. The world is far too diverse, increasingly, not to do so. How on Earth can a person write about, say, white supremacy and its targets and opponents without writing with great diversity, for example. People, writers need to be brave and go for it.
Today President Trump’s military invasion of Chicago crossed another Rubicon. He not only activated and took command of the Illinois National Guard, but just in case the hometown troops are not willing to do his bidding, he has shipped in National Guard troops from a politically reliable territory.
From Loop Day (2025), Chapter One, “Day of the Devil” — the literary novel that the publishing establishment dares not touch:
Unhealthy and morose, plopped like a big shapeless lump of incredibly ambulatory cheese and — to use his own words against him — garbage at the Resolute Desk, President Tyrump hypnotically strokes his ancestral Bavarian sword. Con Don Tyrump would appear to be the very “garbage people” that he decries, with no irony, though he is very rich garbage, and supremely positioned, very dangerous in power.
Tyrump curls his upper lip at the Wolfe News anchor.
“My wonderful glorious invasion,” he says. “My gentle and lovely incursion.” He taps his billion dollar nails on the smooth where not sharp blade of the sword.
Let’s attack and invade them all! screams President Donbo King Tyrump. These people are the scum of the Earth! They are so very different from me it’s as if they are not even of my own human species! The Blacks, the Browns, the Reds, the dirty Whites, the hideous poor! Haters! Free-loaders! Carpers! Complainers! Useless Losers! Annoying! Obnoxious! Obscene! Nothing like me! Nothing to me! I will purify the country! All I need is their votes! And their dollars! To keep them in my debt! To push them deeper in! Or I can just sweep them away!
The courageous and principled Greta Thunberg after being kidnapped and tortured and abused by Israel:
“I will never comprehend how humans can be so evil. That you would deliberately starve millions of people living trapped under an illegal siege as a continuation of decades of oppression and apartheid.”
Greta Thunberg and Sabia Perez would have a lot to talk about:
Who is anyone — compared to them, compared to anyone — who is anyone to judge? There are laws and then there are laws. Higher laws, lower laws, and outright lawless laws. They are to judge. Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia. They preside. Human beings acting in self defense. So they rule.
Political films can be like eating your vegetables. There are many exceptions of great films that are political; however, right now the only thing I want to see is a story that I can relate to. And the only thing that matters is the emotional. The emotional comes from the story of a family. It comes from the way we love and hate. When films preach, I stop listening. It’s impossible to keep pace with the state of the world—this is why it’s best to focus on the things that never go out of style. You can figure out what never goes out of style by realizing what in a story is going to be the thing an audience really cares about. Our question is: Can a father find his daughter? Or: What does it mean to be a family?
An apolitical film director, who can’t keep pace with the world, preaching hypocritically and falsely while smearing political films for preaching.
As if domestic dramas are the only story that is “emotional” and that never goes out of style. I guess Erin Brockovich has gone out of style. Spotlight, about abuse in the Catholic Church, no style. Dark Waters, about DuPont poisoning people, no style. Romero, about the imperial war and the assassination of the Archbishop, “Stop the repression!” — no style.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s antipolitical claptrap creates a debased culture that breeds malevolent political actors like Trump. This is what happens when sane and badly needed progressive and revolutionary politics are brainlessly belittled and silenced and culture is radically gutted. Meanwhile tyrannical politics and culture — generated in one cop and military show after another — are everywhere — as art and otherwise. And freedom fighters? Human rights warriors? No powerful political art for them! Unless we can shoehorn some minor and warped version of them into domestic dramas. Tyrants rejoice.
Though the film is badly gutted and counterproductive in many political, social, and cultural respects, One Battle After Another can be worth seeing for the token of revolution and social justice — and the cast is great, as I’ve noted, including DiCaprio — but this says more about the radically depoliticized, politically inept, weak nature of culture and art in America, across the board — movies, novels, music, and so on. The cultural production is so bad when it comes to macropolitics that the ultimate political vacuity of the movie is worth putting up with, if you can put up with the rest of its flaws because at least there’s some leftist life in the movie, which you don’t always get. I mean, you need to sit there for a long time to get not much, along with a host of political and aesthetic insults. It’s a typical liberal production — has its moments but often bankrupt and worse. If not for the skeleton of left liberatory elements, it’s not much more than an off-putting and tedious gun and chase flick.
A day after I posted “One Spectacle After Another,” my filleting of One Battle After Another, Brook Obie posted her “annoyance” and the defining critique of the movie in “One Fetish After Another” at Black Girl Watching:
Paul Thomas Anderson’s empty foray into white leftist revolutionary ideology and iconography hypersexualized Black women, left much to be desired in both ideology and revolution and simply refused to end.
A propaganda laden story — whether novel, show, or movie — does not guarantee that it will be a good or bad work of art. No precondition can guarantee it. Intent matters, substance matters, but intent and substance are not entirely responsible for the final construction and effect. And yet there is a drumbeat against certain kinds of intent and substance in novels — for being too political, or wrongly political. This ideological pounding and de facto censorship is all prejudice and bias. It needs to be countered by liberatory criticism and revolutionary aesthetic production — in intent, substance, and effects, in ideological revolution with corresponding aesthetic changes as well.
I appreciate plenty of depoliticized or marginally or niche politicized novels for the ways in which they can illuminate various aspects of life and tell moving stories. That’s what the culture and publishing world emphasizes and encourages so it would make sense that quality novels of this sort appear with some frequency; whereas, especially overt and fundamental political novels are often discouraged or de facto banned, so they are attempted far less frequently and are less well understood in both creation and reception. Those are real problems to their production when attempts are made or any publication is allowed.
The gutting and mangling of such novels happens in all kinds of ways in a culture hostile to them and frightened of their production. This has been true throughout history in oppressive cultures.
That’s why it’s important to build up the culture of production for such liberatory works — the intellectual culture, the material culture, the artistic and social culture, and so on. I see this site, Liberation Lit, as a kind of magazine toward this end — fiction, criticism, poetry, and texts commenting on other texts and the world.
So very impressive that satiric literary novels of Trump and his assault on America are not pouring out of the publishing world, long since.
Trump attacks America nonstop. The attacks must be stopped by wholesale popular progressive uprising. This means defeating establishment Democrats too, by progressive populists and socialists.
Trump and the plutocracy want it all. Loop Day, again:
“Sir, the People have every right to resist—”
“Fuck the people, Leif! People are stupid. People want things like free health care and education, jobs, wages, houses, clothes, food. Green space. Good weather. It makes no sense. No one owes the people anything. The people owe me. I’m the President. This isn’t a place for people! I’m a businessman, did you forget! The business of business is business! People have no business interfering in business! Who do you think you are talking to, right now? I’m in the trillionaire business! I’m the one who fokkks! I own the USA! I own the whole filching world!”
President Tyrump slaps his hands on the map of Texas and crumples the paper in his grip. The martial figurines go flying.
Nuance is overrated in art. That’s to say it is too often used to undercut what should be striking and prominent. Nuance often has a central place and role in art, but it’s not the only thing, and in important ways not the main thing.
“Nuance” is a word that so often flatters itself as wisdom, when in reality it can function as a delay, a cover, or a fog. For years, when Palestinians and their allies spoke of occupation, blockade, and apartheid, the response was: It’s complicated. A way of saying: don’t speak with certainty, don’t speak with conviction, don’t name what you see.
Many were lulled into silence, told they were overreacting, and yelled at for being too demanding of a situation they were told they didn’t “truly” understand.
But when the United Nations and majorhumanrightsorganizations now use the term genocide, nothing truly new has appeared, except permission. The violence was always asymmetrical, the dispossession always visible. “Nuance” only served to defer moral clarity until institutions of power caught up, at which point the very same truths suddenly became admissible.
This is the danger of nuance, as it can disguise domination as debate. It can turn oppression into a puzzle to be solved rather than a reality to be opposed. The oppressed don’t need nuance to recognize their suffering; it is the comfortable who need it to delay their responsibility.
Moral clarity is not the absence of complexity. It is the refusal to let complexity erase accountability.
However, sometimes, the idea of ‘nuance’ is vital for sketching out the complex complicity of power structures and dominating groups towards people’s suffering.
Nuance is valuable when it helps us see systems more clearly rather than excuse them. For example, when analyzing global events, nuance allows us to connect how colonial histories, economic structures, and political alliances shape the present. Without nuance, we risk reducing conflicts to caricatures like good vs. evil or “ancient hatreds,” which can flatten agency and obscure root causes. This deeper analysis doesn’t weaken moral clarity; it strengthens it by showing how oppression is structured and maintained.
The problem is that, as nuance can be weaponized to delay action in morally clear instances of oppression, it can also be weaponized by those who want to misuse it to spin their own interpretation of events.
Misrepresentation 14 — preeminence of the “subtle“: “Subtlety of analysis is what is important,” says Wood. Not striking analysis, subtlety, which is another word for nuance — the establishment’s all-time favorite word for the truncated range of its preferred fiction. Nuance is even more cherished than “limn.” Subtlety — that by which never have so many nuanced so much to limn toward so little.
The abuse of nuance is often used to deceive or to disappear thought, to brainwash. It’s a sophisticated form of the Orwellian — a kind of doublethink and effect of the memory hole where truth goes to die.
And so it goes in the corporate-state and American culture that have a long and ongoing history of destroying anti-supremacist, liberatory art and artists, society and politics. The pathology of capitalist supremacy runs rampant through America, through Empire, badly infecting publishing, literature, and art production and distribution.
A few thoughts on Debora Cahn’s The Diplomat — the unmaking of liberatory TV by topical evisceration — TV gutted.
Warning — “spoilers” galore—
The Diplomat is a Netflix political thriller as TV series currently streaming its third season. Why critique it? It’s a political thriller — also comedy, drama, and romance — with some relevance, or staggering lack thereof, to contemporary politics and culture in troubled times. Whatever its yawning lacks in politics, this showis easily in the top tier of current TV series for its narrative qualities, given the restrictive reigning culture. Season by season, The Diplomat generally surpasses most any trilogy of long movies that would be its equal in run time. Movies can feel like short stories compared to the novelistic sweep and detail, sometimes epic, of quality TV series. That said, The Diplomat goes only so far and no farther in bang for your buck and time, let alone in illumination of the contemporary age it portrays.
What The Diplomat delivers is not what one would hope for in any revealing show about the world and its geopolitics but it may be nearly as good as it gets dramatically. This seems strange to say given the amount of fluff and pomp and circumstance in the show. The bar is not high. The very different and relatively recent La Casa de Papel (aka Money Heist) Spanish TV series thriller and the French political riot and uprising movie Athena are lively rough equivalents in their own way, while the Danish political drama as TV series Borgen may be considered The Diplomat’s best quiet counterpart.
The Diplomat focuses on the politics — institutional and imperial — of America and Britain and the domestic politics of an American diplomat couple — and then several additional political couples — their private and public trials and battles waged through seemingly weighty cultural themes, contemporary topics, domestic issues, and bureaucratic scheming and diplomacy.
“The Diplomat is a show about long-term relationships, about marriages between people and marriages between countries and it gets hard to keep that going for a long time, be it a marriage or a military alliance,” series creator Debora Cahn (The West Wing, Homeland) told Netflix. “We change, we grow, the world changes and yet we want these relationships to last. It’s a show about a bunch of good people doing their best to keep their partnerships alive, while trying not to kill each other.”
Unfortunately, for these increasingly desperate political times, The Diplomat focuses on preserving existing power relationships, political and otherwise, rather than much improving the conditions within those relationships. This is far from the kind of political portrayal needed today, where so much of the populace, trapped by oppressive existing structures, is so badly abused, so outraged and unhappy, that they are doing everything they can to dissolve the existing political constraints and forces to create new and liberatory ones entirely. Additionally, there exists great destructive unjustified and confused right-wing populist outrage everywhere, but only in real life, not in the show.
To The Diplomat politics is about maintaining and containing change among high officials, by one formal tweak or another, while simply ignoring the most relevant current crises of the world. There are also little or no problems portrayed of ruling wealth in the form of menacing plutocrats who seem to exist almost entirely outside the scope of the show. There is much posturing and pushing and pulling among high government officials instead about concerns either remote from the concerns of the people, or very narrowly focused. Almost the whole plot of The Diplomat hinges on two passing and purported nuclear crises — the fate of a Scottish nuclear submarine base, and a missing Russian nuclear submarine and nuclear weapon off the coast of Britain — what is the fascination with Britain? ah, yes, it’s as if this show is a study of contemporary monarchy, yet no plutocrats are anywhere to be found. The two minimally examined nuclear plot pretexts seem dropped into the story merely to strain relationships between elite government officials — fires to be put out so that nothing changes — while the deadly troubles of the rest of the world, of the people, might as well not even exist to the American President, Vice President, and top diplomats in this big “political thriller” on Netflix.
The result is micro-drama in a macro-setting, producing yet another apolitical political show, that all-too-common cultural product of empire, a show that appears socially and political relevant but scarcely is. The result is akin to fluffy soap opera with a big budget. But The Diplomat is watchable because the show also offers a deft novelistic examination of skilled professionals in a working milieu interlaced with quandaries of their private lives and relationships. In this way, with intense focus on both the public and private qualities of people’s lives, The Diplomat is able to portray some sense and insight into the full person, the human condition — that complex combination of the public and private both — in great and often compelling detail. A portrait far from as complete as it might appear. Extended workplace matters and extended bedroom and home matters are evoked with a close eye, while the greater social and political, terminal and pressing issues of the peoples are basically written out of contemporary history — let alone dramatized, examined, and illuminated to any great benefit or for badly needed change.
In the first two seasons, Keri Russell stars as Kate Wyler, an American career diplomat unexpectedly thrust into the high-stakes role of ambassador to Britain amid an international crisis. The series delves into the complex interplay between her political maneuvering and personal difficulties. The character is written and played well to pointed comedic and dramatic effect, very classic novelistic. A seasoned crisis manager accustomed to working behind the scenes in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Kate deals with public scrutiny and escalating global tensions in Britain and America while struggling with her troubled marriage to Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) — a former American ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq, where he met and worked with Kate and proposed marriage to her, and where she accepted. Hal’s ruthless tactics, destructive wake, and outspoken nature eventually saw him sidelined, after accusing the Secretary of State of being a war criminal.
The Wyler couple’s volatile chemistry drives the show, which tells you how much more this show is a case study of characters — ultimately four couples — in long-term relationships rather than a topical political thriller, despite the many professional political details of setting, plot, and dialogue. Hal’s charm and cunning make him both an asset and a threat, in every way. He is torn between loyalty to Kate and his own restless ambition. In fact, both Kate and Hal are walking dangers to themselves and to others, personally and politically. It’s all very dicey! That is, it’s supposed to feel that way, and often does.
Keri Russell as Kate Wyler
The Diplomat is a melodrama of the American police state, rendered nearly atopical, amazingly enough but this is what one may expect in a de facto police state of a capitalist empire that denies it is a police state. American Empire writ large but rendered vanishingly small. War, war, war is one of the big concerns in the show — avoiding it, initiating it, controlling it, potentially fighting it but the real basis for violent conflict, missile politics, is almost not addressed at all. The empire loves to obscure the real financial reasons for war and myriad other conflicts the better to cloak its vile and brutal actions in noble rhetoric — not least in Ukraine and all across Asia and Latin America, and everywhere else.
How much of the public knows, for example, that the ghastly war between Russia and Ukraine is basically a proxy battle between America and Russia over the flow of fossil fuels, both Ukraine’s and Russia’s, and America trying to shape and control that flow? This actual basis of the war in Ukraine is all-but-never discussed openly by the establishment. American economic hitman type manipulation and interference in Ukraine’s politics, economics, and government leading up to the military war was an attempt to interfere with and cripple Russia’s economy, which is heavily fossil fuel based. Russia responded by invading Ukraine to protect its economy, and America responded to that by secretly blowing up Russia’s Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 undersea natural gas pipelines to western Europe, crucial for sales. (America, naturally, denies doing this.) These are all crimes, international crimes, domestic crimes, war crimes, Russian and American, and Ukraine is caught in the middle committing crimes of its own, while America pushes the war to be fought to the last Ukrainian, more than a million dead on all sides of the war already. Meanwhile, also in real life, the politics and economics of the American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians are equally distorted by establishment ideology and proclamations and reporting, going so far as to deny genocide in the first place, let alone American responsibility for it. Ah, the lies of empire, aided, abetted, and ignored by Empire TV.
The Diplomat reveals nothing of this magnitude about international politics, let alone about domestic populist struggles, left or right. At least The Diplomat is not your typical gun-first, gun-slinging, warriors-marching police show or military glamfest, so typical in Empire TV. Much though not nearly all gratuitous militant flourishes of empire are kept just off-screen through each season.
The show is well made, with seemingly higher production values than the somewhat similar The West Wing, where showrunner Debora Cahn began her career as writer and producer. Season two of The Diplomat brought in West Wing alumnus Allison Janney as the American Vice President. She ascends to the Presidency to start season three, and another West Wing alumnus Bradley Whitford joins the show as her husband in a small but humanizing role — Empire TV aging right along with the seemingly ever-aging leaders of the increasingly ghoul-like empire. A refresh of younger faces may be along shortly in real life and in the stories of empire. Or not. Cahn is creator, writer, and producer of The Diplomat and evidently a consummate professional. Which is in some ways a pity, for to be wholly professional in American storytelling is to be wholly captured by the establishment. More comprehensive and illuminating, crucial and powerful stories are to be found among creators of personal and political stories who are pushed far outside the establishment — due to the ideological pressures and mandates of cultural production in empire.
The Diplomat skirts or avoids entirely the current most prominent international catastrophes in Ukraine and Gaza, along with nearly every other real and severe crisis, ongoing. Previous political thriller TV series with at least reasonably high production qualities like The Blacklist and Homeland (for which Debora Cahn also wrote) and The Americans (in which Keri Russell also starred) were far more topical and politically relevant — while being even more falsely propagandistic and skewed by ideology of empire, simply for taking political topics more directly — in being more explicit, more sweeping, more dire about many topics of the day — within the strictures of empire.
Keri Russell and other cast members and the writers prepared for The Diplomat by reading background material, including, in Russell’s words:
…a book called TheAmbassadors by Paul Richter. Another film that I found really useful was called The Human Factor, the documentary about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It’s about all those negotiators who were behind [the Camp David Summit in 2000], who started at this young age within the Clinton administration, which is very apropos to our show.
Rufus Sewell read up on the figure about whom his character is loosely based — once prominent diplomat Richard Holbrooke, former American Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to the U.N., and President Obama’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a person sometimes called the last great diplomat. The creator, actors, and writers of the show all steeped themselves in George Packer’s book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. So there is significant intent at real world grounding in the show, plenty of research but precious little of the real world is actually revealed.
Screen Rant notes that “The Diplomat‘s creator Debora Cahn was inspired to create the Netflix series after meeting with U.S. ambassadors while writing for the show Homeland,” a show in significant part revolving around the Israeli-American-Palestinian conflict and American “Middle East” politics generally, though badly distorted. It’s not as if it’s possible for a contemporary political thriller to be created in a vacuum of continuous and longstanding political crises, and the creator, writers, and actors of the show know this, but The Diplomat simply opts out of addressing nearly all contemporary crises, except on rare occasion and in passing.
The first season of The Diplomat began airing in April 2023 more than a year after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and six months before the Hamas-Israel conflagration blew up in early October 2023. Season two of the show premiered in late October of 2024, and season three, now, a year later while President Trump has bombed Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and South American ships while feeding the Ukraine-Russia war and the American-Israeli genocide in Gaza and beyond. Trump of course is also committing other depredations in the global reach of empire, such as kidnapping and imprisoning many of America’s own residents and taxpayers — in one racist assault after another against the people and institutions of the country. In other words, Trump has been attacking the four largest continents on the globe — the Americas, Asia, and Africa — and basically none of it appears in this show about the highest ranking government officials in America. The American empire, the capitalist empire, is hinted at but not visualized, let alone the people — battered, killed, and fighting back within and against empire. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was barely alluded to in season one, in a grim remark by Hal that Russia was “busy,” while the American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians has not been alluded to at all in any of the three seasons, let alone referred to as a genocide.
Such is the state of police state American TV. You want truth and reality, you need to go elsewhere. You want lies by framing and omission, you know where to go — plutocrat TV. When you watch American TV, or many shows throughout empire, especially when they delve into politics, you are often forced to admire what they do, how they are made, the professionalism, the effects, the drama, while despising what they are — both on the surface and underneath, in detail and omission, the slants, twists, lies, distorts — basic whitewash for capitalist empire, for the crimes and the basic criminality of empire. The bigger the contemporary political stakes, the bigger the failure in portrayal and omission. So much to admire in formal production, so much to despise in content and lack thereof. It doesn’t need to be this way, except empire makes it so, by propaganda biased and prejudiced rather than illuminating and awakening, and by plutocrat ideology and other force.
The people’s woes, the people’s greatest hopes and possibilities, politically and otherwise, go so often unexplored in Empire TV. No revolutionaries of the real and the possible there. The blacklist continues, unspoken, unannounced, wholly declared. It is of course systematically built in. No wonder the people are so unhappy and restless and aggressive. Their most important issues and pressures and problematic qualities of life go unaddressed in the largest ways on the largest and most predominant screens — unseen, ignored, denied, counter-visualized. Apparently the only great question and story for the plutocrats who control society, politics, and culture in empire is how best to ignore or control the angry populace, to keep them from the throats of the plutocracy. Diversionary depoliticized culture in song, story, sports — or falsely politicized culture — are the great tranquilizers and lobotomizers and dividers of the people — to great pillaging and profiteering effect, for the plutocracy. The old story.
The Diplomat plays its role in empire as a show about empire, no populist place. The Netflix thriller is not thrilling enough to be an exception to the colossal rule.
The show must go on and so it does — in style. To start season one of The Diplomat, unknown “terrorists” blow a hole in the side of a British warship in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Iran, killing many British sailors. Iran is instantly blamed for the attack. What is a British warship doing in Persia’s Gulf? It’s too obvious. One need not even ask. But let’s answer anyway. Seeking to control Persians (and others), and their vast stores of fossil fuels! and not vice versa — to subjugate the fossil fuel rich people and lands of western Asia and everyone else in the world to the mad profit of Western capitalist empire. Given The Diplomat’s crisis of attack and death on a British warship off the coast of Iran (of course it’s an American ally being attacked near Iran and not America bombing Iran to pieces, inflicting mass death, a neat and typical inversion of reality, part of the steady drumbeat of lies of empire — even if in this case it turns out to be the empire bombing itself as false flag operation to help keep ultimate nuclear control over the globe) the American President personally directs Kate Wyler not to begin her ambassadorship in Afghanistan where she is the leading on-the-ground American expert already and a natural fit. Instead, the President directs her to become America’s ambassador to Britain, a fancy formal posting in which she has no interest or expertise whatsoever. But the President insists, during this time of crisis. And so — Why? Why her?
As with most highly popular (and mixed literary) movies and TV shows, “question engines” often drive the story, along with engines of conflict, paradox, and deepest fears and desires, all the while the plot reverses itself as it moves forward, then reverses itself again, driving through the fabled twists and turns of story to keep generating questions, conflicts, paradoxes, fears and desires to most fully reveal life, society, people in compelling ways. The story reveals that Kate is being groomed — literally, non-fashionista rebel that she is — by the President and his Chief of Staff to be appointed Vice President of America in a few months, when the current Vice President will resign due to scandal — supposedly, due to massive misappropriated funds involving her husband. After many more twists and turns, viewers learn that none of any of this is true. Hidden, ulterior motives reign. Unfortunately not the most politically or culturally revealing motives but dramatic and plot-advancing ones nonetheless.
As it turns out, colleagues of the British Prime Minister attacked their own warship — in a violent attempt to rally nationalistic fervor, propaganda, and support for stopping the secession of Scotland, home to a key NATO nuclear base. They succeeded too well, in accidentally killing dozens of their own sailors in the terror deceit. First thinking Iran, then Russia, then the British Prime Minister himself ordered the attack, Kate, along with other key diplomats and government officials, learns event-by-event in season two that this false flag bombing was originally suggested by her own American Vice President! as a violent and deceitful means to preserve the key nuclear NATO installation in Scotland (which actually exists, HM Naval Base Clyde, commonly known as Faslane, home of Britain’s nuclear armed submarine fleet). And so the international crisis spirals, or is seemingly made to spiral, in very tight political circles that are especially dramatic to the key figures in the know and otherwise involved. The main characters learn of these devious and damaging machinations of Empire and try to contain its secrets. The story genre truly involved in all this is more a cozy mystery posing as epic political thriller. The seemingly macro masked by the micro, a kind of natural imperial sleight of hand for minimizing and hiding its full self, which too many people would find too revealing (the plutocrats) and wholly objectionable (the bulk of the people).
So that’s the very limited topical relation to any major political issue of our times international or otherwise that these high diplomats and the very top government officials, the elite officials of empire, focus on — a scarcely threatened nuclear submarine base in the North Atlantic, potentially putting Britain and Scotland and America at odds — oh my!
So the political drama goes, in its narrow channel. Kate is appalled by the Vice President’s reckless and disastrous approach to politics (as she often is by her husband Hal’s very similar recklessness), and Kate begins to accept that it is for the best that the President has slated her as replacement for VP, even though she had been both resistant and reluctant to eventually assume the role. But then the President dies! And the reckless and Machiavellian Vice President who had wanted to remain in office despite her mass-murderous lawless bombing — and despite Kate as ready replacement, and seemingly also to spite her — becomes President instead, now with nearly unfettered power over both Hal and Kate Wyler, she-who-knows-too-much. Season two ends, and the question is will Hal and Kate follow law and expose the new President?
Of course not! They will rationalize doing nothing for now and try to contain any future damage and danger by staying close to the new reckless, lawless President, who must keep her friends close and her enemies, who know too much, much closer. And so it goes, the writers of the show reveal quite a bit about human personalities and relationships and various kinds of political and personal scheming, but next-to-nothing, or worse, about topical politics or human rights and conditions, let alone prospects for social change.
So, that happened — seems to be the theme of season three of The Diplomat as it sweeps through the public and private relationships of government officials and their lovers and spouses. It’s difficult to think of a single cultural quality, let alone topical political quality, that makes the show worth watching, especially as a purported political thriller. It’s that by now familiar show about professionals being too often unprofessional, though mainly striving not to be. However, to its credit the show approximates a significant literary quality, roughly equivalent to the quality of Victorian novels, the height of the novel, and a height of story, it’s probably fair to say.
The Diplomat is essentially an atopical show, partly posing otherwise, and the cultural dynamics are by now endlessly familiar if not yet to the point of cliché. It’s a tribute to the details of microplot and the seemingly spontaneous inter and intrapersonal moments that the show sustains as much momentum in minor revelations as it does — if sometimes tediously and inadvertently comically. A lot of the time you just chuckle ruefully at what is played up as important — you think, so they’re going to assume that matters that much — when it’s really not so important and you are sighing and scoffing at the show on a regular basis rather than fully going with it in its genuinely comedic, dramatic, and revealing moments. Nevertheless, the show excels in its own ways, and season four is approved to continue this insider’s look at upper echelon bureaucrat melodrama in empire — though, incredibly enough, in a topical near vacuum, while the real world actually burns and threatens to melt entirely down, quite apart from almost anything that occurs in the show.
Almost the entire macropolitical plot of this political thriller revolves around scandals between America and Britain. What is this — 1776? Is a second revolutionary war at hand between Britain and America? This is one of the scoff-worthy and unintentionally comedic elements of the show in its seemingly unintentional vacuity, up to and including the most recent season three finale and cliff-hanger. Oh, how the modern-day monarchists chatter, cluck, and squabble. In minute one, episode one, season one, dozens of British sailors are accidentally killed in what was supposed to be a minor false flag attack against a British warship that was ultimately revealed to be suggested by the American Vice President, now President, with all operational details carried out by British political insiders and Russian affiliated mercenaries — that’s the whole basis of the plot, until season three adds another nuclear twist involving more America-versus-Britain deceit. Should this show instead be called, The Revenge of the British? Upon this thin reed of a political plot all the story tension is supposed to hang — pressures of careers, relationships, and geopolitical effrontery. But between Britain and America — not between the militant capitalist empire and the world it subjugates, for that would require genuinely free culture and art. (White) elites are not to fuck with other (white) elites, but they are happily free to plunder and pillage the rest of the world, especially if non-white. And so the many molehills of the show are transformed into small mountains of political and personal passions and obstacles of diplomacy, at the highest levels of government. Meanwhile plutocrats and the ruling plutocracy along with the people they subjugate are written entirely out of the script and existence, that is, reality.
The hotheaded British Prime Minister constantly threatens to make a colossal stink of everything, while in the real world his political pressuring would be handled across the Atlantic by a few under-the-table threats, if not limited reparations, and that would be the end of that — plot, story, politics. But the show must go on, even if the great crisis of The Diplomat manages to focus only on the diplomatic maneuvering between America and Britain — not exactly the hotspot of geopolitical tension today or ever, not since the War of 1812. The War of 1812 could have passed for the title of this show, rewritten entirely as a comedy of government bureaucrats who take themselves a little too seriously, given the realities of the plot that they are doomed to act within. Things get a bit too cute at times in this melodrama, including with the main characters, Kate Wyler and her husband Hal Wyler — The Wily Ones, another possible show title, belittling but at times more fitting. The show is somewhat sophisticated but far too minor, too cute, topically empty, and badly skewed compared to what it could and should far better be in an ideologically free culture and art. Meanwhile much of the acting and dramatic and comedic tension within the scenes — it’s vivid and well done. The musical score is lively and resonant and at times even clever. Top notch visuals. The Diplomat is a well-funded high quality production of empire.
Alas, Ukraine, NATO, and Russia get barely a passing nod in season three, zero on Israel-Palestine, zero on President Trump’s attacks against the Americas, North and South, Asia, and Africa, zero on domestic issues and on most any actual grave international issue at all. Nothing on climate. Nothing on pandemics. Next to nothing on actual nuclear threats, let alone possible abolition. Fascism rising — little or nothing on that. But we’ve got high diplomacy! International stakes! Between Britain and America. And interpersonal stakes. Among Americans and the British. Why again? Now? One look at the mini supercomputer screen in your hand shows you, if you wish, apocalyptic levels of fascist and omnicidal global horrors shocking humanity like never before. Even Jane Doe in East Podunk, USA, can immediately see and partly comprehend the sheer grotesque and vicious Evil of the Biblical butchery livestreamed from across the ocean in Palestine, but she gets illuminating dramatic shows not about genocide but instead about diplomats dancing around the politics of British-American make-believe acts and squabbles.
So much the worse for Jane Doe of East Podunk and the populace writ large, globally, their appalled humanity utterly shrugged off, written away. Just get away, stay away from the real issues. Go watch and listen to the head-trauma Super Bowl or any other distraction far from changing the basic quality and potential of your life and other lives too often broken apart or destroyed. As a consequence, Jane Doe may see fit, again, to storm the capital of empire when the bigoted fake populists of America next tell her to do so. She certainly sees all the reasons she needs to feel that there is some sort of Evil out there that desperately needs to be attacked. And she won’t learn much of anything fundamental about it by watching The Diplomat, or other manifestations of Empire TV, nor by reading much of establishment lit in general. Let alone learn of opportunities and possibilities for change, and be compelled by them, into actually constructive action.
Just so is the country cultured and decultured, politicized and depoliticized. Apoliticized and disinformed. The Diplomat is a literary soap opera, that is, melodrama, and only incidentally, skeletally, a political thriller despite the advertising and hype and superficial structure. It’s a curiosity of empire, made engaging by a diverse cast, with quality acting, production, and some novelistic flair. The characters show a lot of big heart, for their fellow diplomats in particular, and quick minds and a lot of complex personalities and just enough depravity to keep it somewhat real, to keep the problems coming, far away from basically all the great political topics of the world.
In establishment culture, The Diplomat is a critical darling for a variety of valid and some not so valid reasons, with some minimal criticism:
Over two high-stakes seasons, this drama about a US ambassador to the UK who finds herself moonlighting for the president and the entire state department has proved itself to be a rare beast: a political thriller that is frequently excellent, often erudite (a character once referred to another as “the Hecate of Highgate” instead of just calling her a stirrer), but which also requires the total and utter suspension of your disbelief. Question any of it for a second – as I did in the final episode of this third series, when the new US president asks the prime minister whether Chequers is his family’s ancestral seat – and it begins to crumble. But if you file it firmly within the category of spicy geopolitical soap? Boy oh boy, is it good.
[The deft characterization and plot] plus the show’s visual splendour and high production value, all add up to a riveting third season, with twists and turns galore, personal drama we can really engage in and political machinations that are thrilling to behold.
Meredith Loftus, Collider:
For as all-consuming as politics can be, there is an element of escapism in the political thriller genre. Instead of trying to keep up with the never-ending news cycle, it’s infinitely more manageable to keep up with the machinations of a fictional show. However, the best political shows reflect the real world through nuanced storylines and compelling characters. In the case of the Netflix critical hit The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell, this remains true — and Season 3 succeeds once again, thanks to its addictive, intense nature….
When political thrillers are done well, they can be as entertaining as they are meeting the moment in history. Where the U.S. previously carried a reputation for being the hero of the free world, The Diplomat Season 3 reckons with its status as a bully. The tag line for this season is “No alliance lasts forever,” and this rings true even into the season’s final minutes. The Diplomat remains as electric as ever, thanks to the depth of its characters, intriguing plot, and ever-changing dynamics. It grabs you for its opening scene and doesn’t let up until its finale
It’s meaty to the point that it could easily feel overstuffed and yet never does. It bounces between characters and locations with ease, maintaining a jaunty pace while still allowing moments to breathe as needed.
Tonally, it’s light on its feet, switching between comedy, drama, romance, and political thriller elements without ever feeling jarring. It’s serialized, but each episode is still its own satisfying meal, and no character is perfectly good or bad, but rather messy, believable, and incredibly fun to watch.
Martin Carr, CBR:
Audiences will certainly revel in the evolution of these characters as America and the UK continue to lock horns over matters of political policy. But beneath the pomp and ceremony, there is a focus on personal relationships that elevates this drama.
Once again, creator and showrunner Debora Cahn (“The West Wing”, “Homeland”) squeezes the most salacious juice out of political intrigue and emotional fallout. The wit, power plays, and addictive drama don’t disappoint. Especially when domestic troubles—as in family issues—are mixed with the diplomacy, it’s gleeful. Surprisingly, President Penn and the First Gentleman have a real marriage, which might be the first time we’ve seen one in this series.
…Season 3 is fueled by duplicity, disillusionment, diplomatic disaster, doomed romance, and domestic discontent on every level of society and politics. It’s one disaster after another, and that’s what makes the series engrossingly dynamic. Yet somehow it still finds humor in the failures of détente between states and lovers. It’s easy to see why “The Diplomat” is Emmy-nominated; this show deserves the praise.
Season 3 of “The Diplomat” is the first installment of the Netflix political drama to come out since the 2024 presidential election, which means the series is now even more of an escapist fantasy than it already was. Watching Ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) stalk the halls of the United States embassy in London, earnestly working to satisfy Danish concerns over British oil drilling in the North Sea and gushing over bipartisan treaties as the key to domestic popularity, it’s hard not to think of Elon Musk’s minions laying waste to USAID or trade wars conducted via Truth Social.
…Season 3 goes beyond extending the pre-existing story and meaningfully alters the status quo. Paradoxically, shaking up “The Diplomat” also returns the series to its roots: the tug-of-war between the aspirations of two ambitious people, both straining against the gender dynamics of monogamous heterosexual marriage.
[The show’s] institutionalist worldview, inherited from Cahn’s old workplace “The West Wing,” can grate in light of recent events; a casual mention of the Jared Kushner-negotiated Abraham Accords of the first Trump administration raised my eyebrows given ensuing developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s also less tenable with Hal working out of the White House, an office with a much broader portfolio than that of a diplomatic mission — including domestic issues “The Diplomat” still largely avoids…
Ultimately, “The Diplomat” doesn’t have much to say about international relations, being too in love with surface pageantry and process to dive into the real power dynamics beneath. Rather, it’s a story about the messy intersection of love, work and the battle of the sexes, with a setting grand enough to heighten both the stakes and the eroticism. In Season 3, “The Diplomat” recommits to this core mission, a pivot that pays dividends.
Maybe it’s time to lead prominent TV creators by the hand to meet the activists and organizers on the front lines of social change who are pushing mightily, oftentimes at great risk to themselves, to humanize the world rather than to administer to the rampaging beast.
I frequently note that epic stories may help inculcate and expand sanity while acting as great catalysts to change. Stories can also destroy and oppress and deceive. It’s worth repeating: it’s up to today’s artists across all genres to capture and express in stories the myriad and sometimes gargantuan battles against oppression and tyranny, and the fights for great possibilities of change and expanded human rights, to find and follow the stories of protest riots and monkeywrenching, the hacking, the strikes, the boycotts, the slowdowns and all kinds of actions, the desperate plight of the People’s Navy, the sabotage against deadly fossil fuel and military/police infrastructure, the myriad revolutionary forays in culture and society on the streets, in households, online, in independent reporting and progressive organizing, at work, in government, in classrooms, in art itself, everywhere.
These are crucial elements of the great battles for consciousness and conscience, for a humane and livable world, and they need to be vividly portrayed and enhanced in story to help expand consciousness, build it up, and spur action.
The Diplomat, almost like a slice of War and Peace among the gentry, the ruling elite of government masking the rule of capital, dramatizes politics in another world seemingly, as if high above it all, a world that can nevertheless be rocked and wrested from below by the people and by progressive and socialist popular forces for human rights, and must be, including by art and culture, story, and countless social and political actions, both liberatory and topical — all of it liberation lit. The Diplomat at its best approximates the Tolstoyan features of War and Peace, while falling far short of Tolstoy’s later political and human maturation into the anti-empire storytelling of his equally sophisticated short novel Hadji Murad.
In Empire TV, what you get is what you might expect from a capitalist-choked culture — one in which vicious ideological and monetary chokeholds crush ideas and opportunities alike. On the other hand, in anti-empire liberatory literature and culture, there are to be found far greater illuminations of reality and possibilities that truly push both the necessities and greatest possible reaches of imagination, via compelling and vital stories of the age, and for the ages.
A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is almost the type of movie that should be made and distributed every day of the year. It’s almost freakishly good, though fatally flawed. Despite the movie’s massive contextual weaknesses, if the Academy has any brains, heart, or conscience, A House of Dynamite would win best picture. Released to scandalously few theaters a few weeks ago and now available on Netflix, A House of Dynamite — referring to nuclear-armed civilization — may be the best movie made to date on the nuclear threat, and likely the best since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s gut-ripping Fail-Safe, both appearing in 1964, over sixty long years ago during which time the world is literally lucky to have survived total nuclear destruction.
The world has come close to the terminal ultimate on multiple occasions, including the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when American President John Kennedy recklessly gambled the fate of the planet while moving like a tough guy against Cuba, threatening invasion, and pressing Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, which had been placed there to both protect Cuba from American invasion and as retaliation for American nuclear missiles placed near the Soviet Union in Turkey.
During this crisis, the American navy encircling Cuba bombed a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine in the area. The only reason the world didn’t blow up that day is that Vasili Arkhipov was the only one of three officers on the Soviet submarine required to approve nuclear missile launch who, instead, alone refused consent to do so amid the American bombing. Thus it has been widely noted (though little known in America) that Vasili Arkhipov is very possibly the most important person to have ever lived, saving the world from total nuclear destruction. The American Navy, aggressive and belligerent on the seas as so often, had no idea what they were doing, bombing a nuclear armed sub. And Kennedy — the bomber-invader of Vietnam, as belligerent as any American President — also had no idea what he was doing menacing and bullying Cuba and the Soviets. Kennedy and badly blinkered American intelligence had no idea about the quantity of nuclear weapons already in Cuba or how close they came to compelling the Soviets to launch those nukes at America.
President Kennedy and American intelligence thought they knew but weren’t even close to knowing. And so it has gone ever since, not least when decades later the USS Vincennes — accidentally? — shot down an Iranian airliner in the Persian Gulf when the plane was 12 miles off the coast of Iran. The USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser, was inside Iranian territorial waters, even closer to the coast of Iran than the Iranian plane, that summer of 1988 when it shot down the Iranian airliner killing 299 people including 66 children.
Iran retaliated 5 months later by blowing up an American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people — though both America and Iran, intent upon deflecting blame for their own actions, continue to tacitly conspire to deny the tit-for-tat sequence. A year later, a report from U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings would note that the American Navy was too reckless and dangerous to be allowed to operate where it pleased — let alone, unlawfully, within the territorial waters of other countries.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that would inspire the two great anti-nuclear weapons movies two years later (two movies not as propagandistic as need be) — the American Navy got lucky. President Kennedy got lucky, and the world did not blow up. That kind of dumb luck runs out, and eventually the world will blow up unless nuclear weapons are abolished — entirely. Other times, computers have malfunctioned, showing false incoming attacks forcing officials to make desperate wholesale life and death decisions based on faulty and incomplete information. A House of Dynamite does a good job showing this horrific predicament in its scintillating non-stop slice of life hair-raising, hair-trigger dramatization. Unfortunately the drama and illumination of A House of Dynamite stops at these last second slice of life depictions and gives no insight into the crucial structural and historical context of the nuclear death threat we all live under, let alone the very real possibilities, and even near miss, of nuclear abolition.
During the 1986 nuclear summit in Reykjavík Iceland, American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to nuclear abolition, in a stunning moment of mutual sanity, shocking their aides. This idea was quickly rolled back by the high officials of the bureaucracy representing the military-industrial establishment. Nevertheless, the massive worldwide Peace movement of the 1980s helped force into existence nuclear arms control talks, agreements, and subsequent massive nuclear weapons reductions. Unfortunately, enough nuclear weapons remain to destroy civilization multiple times over, and nuclear weapons stockpiles and plans for use are growing again, while America and Russia retain control of about 90 percent of global nukes. You will learn none of this from A House of Dynamite, let alone that America is the only country to use nuclear weapons, is fundamentally responsible for nuclear proliferation, and has been historically the one country that has both blocked and stands in the way of nuclear abolition.
Oh no, in A House of Dynamite, it’s the poor United States of America that is under attack from the sheer madness of nuclear weapons — a madness America started, weaponized, proliferated, maintains, and has always been fundamentally responsible for. America is the nuclear enemy of the world, so of course an American movie of nuclear weaponry portrays America as the victim of a nuclear strike, with zero context that America is responsible for the crazed nuclear tragedy in progress.
At least key characters in the movie seem to show utter disgust for the existence of these weapons in the first place. And it does make sense to show the nuclear threat to even the big bully of nuclear weapons, America, if you want to try to convince Americans that nuclear abolition is not only a good idea but necessary for human and ecological survival — but even that is not well portrayed. You need the relevant context and facts of responsibility and possibilities to clarify and drive the point home, to sufficiently expand consciousness, knowledge, and conscience. A House of Dynamite — gripping, topical, timely, and vital as it is — badly lacks that insight and context, when it would have been so easy, so much more compelling, so vital to include to make something more of the movie than merely a slice of life nuclear thriller.
Much more could be said, and hopefully someone will have the brains, and the guts, and the heart to portray it in sequels and follow-ups to this movie, including in other films, TV shows, novels, songs, and so on, in any kind of art, grafitti, you name it. Awarding A House of Dynamite best picture of the year, for the heart-breaking, mind-bending, high-quality dramatization of one of the most, or the most, critical topics in the world might help spur the creation of greatly needed contextual sequels to this movie, to advance culture, so that people and the world itself might have a sequel to their own current tenuous and perilous existence.
Thomas Addison Richards — Entrance to a Coal Mine in the Valley of Wyoming, Pennsylvania — 1852
I. An American Epic Disappeared
Well over a century before former American president Jimmy Carter tried his hand at his lone novel in 2003, a Revolutionary War historical novel, another national political figure from Georgia, Thomas Manson Norwood in 1888 wrote a “politico-social” novel titled Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery set contemporaneously to its time, a lost work of literature, which, despite egregious flaws — including sweeping racism — could be considered an important epic of American imaginative writing.1 Part classic Victorian novel, part satiric epic, this literary hybrid has long since been forgotten, even though it presages today’s resurgence of right-wing populism and Trumpism, and even though both the literary reach and cultural relevance of Plutocracy is comparable to other major American imaginative works of any era, including major works of its own time, such as Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Scarlet Letter.
Plutocracy is a racist novel written by a racist author but is instructive nevertheless of American society, culture, and literature past and present. Plutocracy has been disappeared from history likely due to a combination of aesthetic issues along with cultural and political factors that are neither necessarily surprising nor difficult to understand — and which may in part be indicated by the novel’s full title: Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery. Still, the complete disappearance of a major American work of the imagination by an American statesman from not only literature and literary history but also from nearly all historical record indicates that there may be even deeper retrograde social and cultural forces and prejudices at work than the entrenched racism and sexism systemic in the country. While society and critics’ racism and sexism are powerful forms of bigotry and chauvinism, institutionalized and otherwise, which have functioned to bury vital and accomplished literary works by minorities, including women generally, it seems that some equal or more fundamental forces such as classism or economic ideology may have helped to essentially blank Plutocracy from history.2
There is little critical reaction of any kind, even though Plutocracy was not published in some far off unsettled western territory, having been brought out by Metropolitan Publishing Company and The American News Company of New York City. Nor was the author an unknown or an unaccomplished figure.3 Thomas Manson Norwood was a noted statesman, scholar and historian, and multi-credited imaginative writer renowned in his time for his satiric wit and for the literary mark of his political speeches, in particular. He was the first Democrat from the South seated in the Senate after the Civil War and served in a wide range of professional capacities as historian, lawyer, judge, as US Senator from Georgia, and, at the time Plutocracy came out, as US Representative from Georgia.
Beyond its immediate years of publication, there is apparently virtually no reference to Plutocracy, apart from regional historical references and one footnote listing its title in a somewhat recent sociology article on the “white slavery” concern of the early twentieth century. To my knowledge, no reference to Plutocracy exists even in any of the many excellent works on political fiction. What’s more, there is no reference that I know of by even the strong “radical” literary criticism of the middle and early part of last century written by Maxwell Geismar, V.F. Calverton, Bernard Smith, Kenneth Burke, and others. It’s not unlikely that they were unaware of this satiric epic novel, or if known they may have disregarded it due to Norwood’s blatant racism which reportedly intensified as he aged, dying in 1913.
Plutocracy was published in 1888 three years after the publication of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which Plutocracy rivals and resembles in some ways, not least in its harsh critique of basic elements of American life. That said, Plutocracy is much more a combination of the sociological and melodramatic novels of Charles Dickens and the biting satire of the imaginative works of Jonathan Swift. Half classic comic melodrama and half satiric epic, Plutocracy dramatizes, explicitly, the fundamentally exploitative nature of America’s national “wage-slave” economy in a way that has rarely been attempted so directly and forcefully in American fiction.
In 1852, literary writer and partisan activist Harriet Beecher-Stowe took similar aim at the inhumanity of chattel slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that The Nation magazine discussed in 1868 as the sole novel that might lay claim to being a “Great American Novel,” the novel which President Lincoln, not solely in jest, suggested caused the Civil War. Since Stowe’s novel from the North, which dramatized and analyzed the depravity of African American slavery in the feudal South nearly a decade before the Civil War, met with immense popularity, why did Norwood’s novel from the South about the increasingly plutocratic “wage-slave” depravity of the North nearly two and a half decades after the war not meet with similar popular effect?
You can count the ways — Plutocracy’s lack of serialized publication in popular activist newsletters such as those that launched the partisan bestsellers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle; the author’s racism; and the context of the historical moment — scarcely two decades after white Christians like Norwood fought to the death, massive death, to maintain chattel slavery. Just so today does the Christian-backed right-wing Plutocrat-Populist movement continue to persecute and oppress Black Americans and many other minorities — per the insane wailings and decrees of President Trump and the Trumpists in that Whitest of Houses. Hello, American culture! The chattel slavery of the feudal Southern system decried in Stowe’s novel was soon destroyed (at least officially, contemporary American prison populations aside), which facilitated the expansion of the plutocratic northern, become American, system of wage servitude/slavery that still very much exists today — modified by the fact that many though not nearly all such wage manacles currently are often made of platinum, gold, silver, nickel and copper rather than the leather of whips and the iron of chains.
There exists no American President nor nationally empowered American public that has ever signed a decree or fought a national war to liberate the American wage serfs, except by marginal if important reforms — though America does have one of the bloodiest labor histories in the world, fought largely in pocket battles from coast to coast, and throughout the Appalachians and the Rockies. Thus there’s not much readymade appreciation for a novel that dramatizes the inhumanity of wage slavery — especially not for a problematic novel written in evident defense of the South a mere two decades after the monstrous and endlessly grisly Civil War fought to maintain chattel slavery. Thomas Manson Norwood was Trump-level racist, though both the former Georgia Senator and the current New York President did and do always deny it, all the while wrapping themselves tightly in the twin cloaks of country and Christianity — patriotism and the ostensible divine. President Trump is the accused pedophile and Bible waving militant billionaire this year alone assaulting people on the four largest continents in the world including his own — beyond grotesque but that’s what it is — a Reality TV President manufactured and elected by the deeply instilled delusions of a so-called and inadvertently ironic “Reality TV” culture and country.
By the mid-nineteenth century, abolition of chattel slavery had become a relatively easy cause for northern elites and the northern reading public to champion, for economic as well as moral reasons. Far less easy to champion later that century would be the withering novel Plutocracy as penned by the literary and devotedly racist author, despite its trenchant analysis and dramatization of the base relations between authoritarian capital and coerced labor, and the monstrous consequences of such relations. Such a socially challenging and culturally flawed novel could not be expected to receive much if any welcome or facilitation by a culturally, intellectually, and materially schizophrenic country that to this day is half-decent, half-deranged, and yes half-drowned in the mythic propaganda that the basic economics of the country — which are essentially capitalist feudal — are fundamentally sound, free, healthy, proper, inevitable, and if not entirely fair, as nearly fair as can be.
Medieval feudalism was abolished in Europe and chattel slavery in America more than a century ago, but both systems of ownership and exploitation were replaced by new more durable kinds of oppression, various types of capitalist ownership and rule, debt-and-wage bindings, figurative balls-and-chains with real consequences, a new feudalism — commonly known a century ago, and sometimes still today called, wage slavery — officially lauded and praised to the skies by provincial officials across the land and by powerful rulers of empire alike. The financial plutocracy and the novel Plutocracy are examples of the schizophrenia of Empire, and the convenient and imposed illusions and delusions — both works of plutocracy, one societal, one literary, authored by racists opining about liberty and justice in the wakes of horrific wars for and against slavery — chattel, capitalist, neo-feudal, and otherwise.
It remains the progressive and revolutionary activist and partisan organizations, individuals, and newsletters who most strongly oppose the widest range of oppressive and inhumane conditions. Among the public today, this manifests itself most broadly as movements of progressive populism. Meanwhile the right-wing populist culture and lineage to which Norwood belongs is a strange and distorted mix of desires for liberty and justice coupled with a defense of different types of oppression and inhumanity. Some right-wing populist officials or authors like Trump are knowing and complete frauds, while other officials and authors like Norwood may as likely be largely deeply cultured in retrograde ways, effectively brainwashed. Of course, a lot of people work hard to brainwash themselves when there’s significant financial or other compelling benefit to be had.
Countless establishment officials and their fellow travelers today argue for the basic necessity, even the propriety, of the current empire’s de facto system of capitalist feudalism just as mainly white Christian Southerners, and others, argued and fought ferociously for chattel slavery in the nineteenth century. From this dehumanized and intellectually bankrupt point of view, to dramatize against real-world capitalism, plutocrat rule, is to make a case for chaos, barbarism, pointless fantasy, anti-Americanism (that totalitarian concept), or the Devil of irresponsible fancy — unworthy propaganda as literature. Likely in part due to such ideology — Plutocracy as unworthy propaganda — American culture has functioned to send the novel down the memory hole and makes its retrieval difficult, if not impossible. Not only has the disappearance of the novel been a loss to American and world literature, it is a significant historical, political and broader cultural loss as well — despite its racism. Many otherwise valuable Victorian novels have been accurately understood to be in part racist. Plutocracy’s near total absence from literary consciousness handicaps the creation of novels that contain intense, explicit, and systemic criticism and dramatization of capitalist exploitation and dehumanization. The novel is obviously socially and culturally defensive and vindictive against the North in indefensible ways, but its value in blistering capitalist depravity in scathing and direct ways makes it a rare find and a rare literary artefact that should not be remotely as scarce as it is in the culture and in cultural production.
One can readily see much of the intent of the novel in Norwood’s brief preface and opening pages of the epic story, with very obvious implications and connections to the present day, Trumpian tariffs and all, penned by the hand of this Southern politician and literary figure. Norwood opens epically by appealing essentially to the muse of poetry and by quoting and paraphrasing Shakespeare-era poets, including English poet Francis Quarles and Italian poet Tasso, whose most influential poem, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), dramatizes the Christian knights’ campaign of war in the First Crusade.
PREFACE
“—Forgive the wrong, If with grave truth light fiction I combine And sometimes grace my page with other flowers than mine.
“The world, thou know’st, on tiptoe ever flies Where warbling most Parnassus’ fountain winds; And that Truth, robed in song’s benign disguise, Has won the coyest, soothed the sternest minds. So, the fond mother her sick infant blinds, Sprinkling the edges of the cup she gives With sweets; delighted with the balm it finds Round the smooth brim, the medicine it receives, Drinks the delusive draught and, thus deluded, lives.”
This fabric is a woof of some fiction on a warp of many facts. The warp is strong—hemp-strong—to the sufferers; the woof must be judged by the reader. It was woven in the hours that I could snatch during a long and busy session of Congress. The work was undertaken with the intention and aim to do something to point out certain political wrongs, mercantile evils, and social follies and vices that are growing at rapid and dangerous speed in our republic. As, in the “View of Society” (Chapter 33), Mr. Woolhat and others, when they turned and looked back, could not see the churches, because the decline had been so sharp, so we, as a people, have made such descent, that certain landmarks—freedom, equality and justice—established and reverenced at the beginning of our march as a republic, are now lost to sight. If the effect of this work shall be to arrest, in any degree, that descent, I shall rejoice that my labor has not been in vain.
A people, like a man, slow to anger, is TERRIBLE WHEN AROUSED.
T. M. NORWOOD
October, 1888
The medley of various types of rhetorical persuasion and propaganda referred to and leaned into in this preface is impressive. There even seems to be a creepy prescient allusion to the intense rise of the business and financier class propaganda industry in the early part of the next century in the seemingly necessary illusions, or delusions, lyricized in regard to the defenseless infant under maternal care, rendered paternal in description.
And the locating of virtue and the good life in the mystical ancient Christian beliefs rather than in the modern Enlightenment understanding of human rights is also telling and can in part serve to distinguish much of today’s right-wing populism from progressive or left-wing populism. Without Christianity the Republican Party and right-wing populism would likely not exist, though something similar might take its place in this settler colony become “sea to shining sea” “manifest destiny” genocidal empire. Without the Enlightenment, progressive populism also might not exist in its current forms yet popular left struggles have made it so. Norwood, like today’s right-wing populists, poses the ancient belief of the Christian God and Christian virtue against the financial exploitation of an increasingly capitalist plutocracy, though such ancient cultural forces today often make common cause with the plutocracy, or are captured by it, or exploit it themselves for their own ends.
The opening chapter of Plutocracy reveals more of the focus of the novel and the understanding that in large part America is a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy.
CHAPTER FIRST.
THE HAPPY SPECULATOR AND HIS BROKER.
In the afternoon of a Friday, early in December, a few years ago, Mr. Galusha Smiling sat in his office which was on Wall street, New York, between Broad and William streets, waiting for his broker. Mr. Smiling was many times over a millionaire. His father had amassed what, in his day, was called a fortune, by a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the son, under the high protective tariff, small wages and increased plant, had added greatly to his inheritance. When the son was at the age to receive a thorough academic training the father, grasping and avaricious, did not think he had money enough to keep his son at school; and when he had become wealthy, Galusha was too old to take a regular, or even an irregular, course. The bulk of the father’s estate was accumulated during the war by contracts to supply the army with tent-cloth, and hospitals with sheeting. Galusha inherited three of his father’s possessions, to wit: his estate, his capacity for getting money, and his avarice.
Over the course of the next thirteen pages of the first chapter, Mr. Smiling makes a killing on Wall Street, whereupon:
Mr. Smiling, in as good humor and temper as a Grizzly that has just devoured an elk, rolled noiselessly up Broadway to his Fifth avenue home, while Comfort, Luxury and Power reposed in their warm bed unconscious of the many new subjects just reduced to slavery by their master.
Mr. Margin, reflecting on the big gain of his customer, consoled himself, when looking at his small profit in commissions, by repeating mentally as he went to his office, “Heads I win—tails you lose.”
But which of them thought of or felt for the Lambs they had shorn and turned out to the winter, and, may be, to want? That three-quarters of a million reaped without a scythe, garnered without work, represented the active brawn and sweat of seven thousand five hundred laborers for one hundred days at one dollar a day, and yet that vast sum was not the addition of one dollar to the country’s wealth. It was but one more, a very slight turn of the thumbscrew; one more transfer, with no equivalent, from the credit side of labor to the credit side of capital; one more stone laid in the temple being erected in this land of Democracy to Mammon; one more accession to the power and ultimate rule of PLUTOCRACY; one more step in the decline of the Republic.
Who sees the coral insect building its wall that finally wrecks the ship? Who notes the decay of the twig in the bank, and the water creeping in and out, until the crevasse is formed and the flood rushes over the growing grain?
Here we can see the fact-struck essence central to the Victorian height of the novel, which critic and novelist Mary McCarthy traces through a bit of history in her suggestive essay, “Characters in Fiction” (1961) in On the Contrary, discussing “the birthmarks” of the novel, as elements of form that are to be found in its content, and which are designed to render the fullest possible understanding of consciousness and culture, of society and life:
The word novel goes back to the word “new,” and in the plural it used to mean news – the news of the day or year…. Many of the great novelists were newspaper reporters or journalists [and “students” of criminals and prisons] “confirmed prison-visitors”…Defoe…Dickens…Dostoevsky…and Victor Hugo …Tolstoy…. Coming to the twentieth century, you meet the American novelist as newspaperman: Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, O’Hara, Faulkner himself…. Novels carried the news – of crime, high society, politics, industry, finance, and low life…. The epic, I might put in here, is the form of all literary forms closest to the novel; it has the “boiler plate” [“durable informative matter”], the lists and catalogues, the circumstantiality, the concern with numbers and dimensions. The epic geography, like that of the novel, can be mapped, in both the physical and social sense…. Whenever the chance arises, Jane Austen supplies a figure.
This is the novel as a kind of both quantitative and qualitative accounting and dramatization of humanity and the world, a form unlike any other, capable of containing anything and everything, including every other form of content. That said, epic novelistic films or video by now very much challenge both the stature and capacity of the novel, or surpass it. Big artwork, big story. The kind you might create, conjure, or wreak to comprehend and impact the world in big ways, as was Norwood’s stated goal, and at least the implicit goal of many creators in a wide variety of forms and fields.
In the six parts of this research project of an essay,4 I sample, summarize, and analyze some strengths and weaknesses of Plutocracy, showing the importance of the work and the magnitude of its loss, and the loss of works akin to it, works with liberatory tendencies, flawed or otherwise. Politically, the novel is both Trumpist and anti-Trumpist nearly 150 years ahead of its time — that is, a confused mix of right-wing populism and old-fashioned idealism that overlaps with elements of left-wing or progressive populism. The novel includes appeals to liberty and justice of real and deluded sorts, with calls for tradition and cultural order and rebirth, while manifesting racist rationalizations. The novel also happens to rail against the effects of tariffs imposed by financiers and politicians that harm the agricultural economy of the American south and west.
II. Epic Aesthetics
Plutocracy has essentially all the marks of classic epic narratives. Set in New York City, Boston, Washington DC, and Arizona, the novel encompasses a national scope, with significant international implications. Spanning the heights and depths of society, from the most prosperous elite circles, to the urban middle class, the slums of despair, and to the rural frontier, Plutocracy covers remarkably varied, broad social and political spectrums — high income to low, rural to urban arenas, reactionary to progressive values and trains of thought. In addition to its wide sweep, the novel is epic in theme and style, large on the one hand and elevated on the other by irony, literary allusions and figures of speech not least.
Possibly the epic feature that most concisely demonstrates the novel’s main theme is a descent into Hell, which occurs in and around New York City about three-quarters of the way through the book (292-315). A group of four men visiting from the American West and eager to learn about the city arrive in downtown and meet up with a gentleman named Mr. Playfair who gives them a comprehensive tour, beginning with the “magnificent…churches…dedicated to God and vanity,” before proceeding to the stock exchange on Wall Street at the top of the monetary ladder and ending in the “dives” and pits of despair at the bottom.
At the sight and sound of the stock exchange, in a purposefully melodramatic and comic fashion characteristic of the novel, one of the westerners, Mr. Woolhat “trembled as he heard the bawling, screaming, yelling, and saw men jumping, running and pushing each other, as if trying to escape from fire or an earthquake.” Regarding the stock exchange, he cries out:
“Why, [Mr.] Jeans, this is a lunatic asylum! a mad-house! And look! not one of them chained! I am not going to stay here. Draw your knife, Jeans, and let’s get away.”
A policeman assures Mr. Woolhat, “They don’t want you. All they want is your money.”
Continuing on this tour that will culminate in Hell, Mr. Playfair leads the men to the Produce Exchange, describing it in some detail as an organization of wealthy robbers, to which Mr. Woolhat replies below and thus prompts from Mr. Playfair an explanation of the “politico-social” system that is shaped by the economic set-up:
“The Devil and Tom Walker,” exclaimed Mr. Woolhat, “why – why – what kind of people is this, that they don’t break up this gambling house? Where’s the police?”
“Be quiet, Mr. Woolhat. You are talking about Society. Be careful. Do you expect Society to turn on itself, to break itself up? This is Plutocracy – one of the phases of Plutocracy – the very hub of it, I may say.”
“Explain that plutocracy,” Mr. Jeans requested.
“Plutocracy is the Rule of Money, or the Rule of the Rich. It is the lowest and last stage of every Government.”
“Do this people let betting go on in faro banks and such?” asked Mr. Woolhat.
“No indeed. The police will raid them, destroy the cards and chips, and put the gamblers in jail. Then they are prosecuted and punished.”
“But where’s the difference?” insisted Mr. Woolhat.
“You astonish me. The difference! It’s in what you are inspecting – Society. Society condemns one, and Society approves the other. One is forbidden by law; the other is established by law. Besides, while faro, etc., will rob one man, ruin him and his family, drive him to suicide, and his wife and children to the poor-house or to something worse, this style of gambling will do the work of ten thousand faro banks. To kill one man is murder, a thousand makes a hero. One is villainy, the other respectability.”
“Well, thank God! this thing is not out my way,” said Mr. Woolhat, with an air of relief.
“There you are mistaken. This gambling house covers every foot of ground in the United States.”
“Well, durn my eyes, if I don’t sue out a warrant, and -”
“No, you won’t. Why, Mr. Woolhat, Society would laugh you out of town. This is where all classes of people gamble, from the clergy down to black-legs. Why, my friend, many of the men you see in there are pillars of the churches we have just passed.”
“Look here, Mr. Playfair, if there is anything ahead here worse than this, I am going back.” Mr. Woolhat looked sad as he slowly uttered these words.
“I assure you all, gentlemen, bad as some things you will see are, there is nothing worse. You will see effects most horrible, but they are not worse than the cause. But we must go on.”
So the men after viewing the suite-life, call it, encounter the street-life — economic and social situations that are far worse in terms of immediate impairment and violence, which may thus appear more ethically grievous. However, as Mr. Playfair has taken care to explain, these scenes are the predictable consequences of the legal crimes and intentionally oblivious values of the financial and cultural elite — and of those who are selected to do their bidding in political and social realms, or who otherwise adopt their asocial and anti-social mindsets. The western visitors go on to see “factories, foundries, mills, refineries” full of deplorable conditions and child labor. They read a committee report from a state legislature endorsing such labor. Then subsequent scenes of fairly accomplished aesthetic touch — highly Dickensian without Dickens’ full control — further mix the novel’s curious blend of discourse and melodrama, as the style shifts and ranges from comedy to tragedy, from naivety to wisdom, from understatement to exaggeration, from the deft ironic to the blunt literal, from realism to fantasy — Mr. Playfair leads the travelers on, first to the edge of the city where Mr. Woolhat is startled by a man emerging from underground. He does a double take:
“Wait a second. He is not a Negro. That is the shaft to a coal mine. The miners are coming up. Look at them!”
They kept rising up till a hundred or more were moving off, black as coal-dust, towards their little huts stuck about on all sides, each with a little bucket in one hand.
After a brief explanation of the mining industry, Mr. Playfair explains:
“My friend these are our Siberian slaves. They are a fair sample of American White Slavery…. The Plutocrats demanded of Congress to pass a law sentencing these beings to perpetual slavery, them and their children after them. Slavery has always existed somewhere, in some form, and, you see, when the Executive issued his proclamation freeing the black slaves, the Legislature Department issued its decree in 1861 to establish white slavery. These beings are a few of the white slaves…. These slaves, now and then, rise by getting up Strikes, but, like the Negroes, they are put down, starved out, and punished…. They have no money. There is not one in a hundred passing us now who has ten dollars in the world. How can they go? They are imprisoned here by Poverty, the most cruel jailer of the strongest jail ever built, and Plutocracy built it!”
Mr. Playfair guides the men back into the city slums:
“Here, right and left, are what are called ‘dives.’ Men and women walking along here suddenly disappear. They dive in there – underground. We will go to the door only and look in…. On the right, sitting in that little den, are five burglars. That one talking is giving a diagram of the premises they intend to break into tonight. Those on the left are dividing what they got last night. They are of the most cunning at this end of Society. You see, the upper end of Plutocracy robs the people, and the lower end robs the upper end.”
The touring group witness a quarrel over money and a murder, before going on to view a scene worthy of Dante’s Inferno:
“We have not far to go now. There is much to be seen, but it is late, and we will hasten on.”
“What noise is that ahead of us, Mr. Playfair? It is a strange, confused sound.”
“I will answer by leading the way to the place. It is steep and slippery here; so, keep your footing. Stop now. We are near enough. You notice just ahead that this steep incline suddenly turns straight down. Now look closely, just beyond.”
The strangers gazed anxiously for a few seconds, when Mr. Woolhat inquires:
“What are they? Are they human beings?”
“Yes and no. They are wrecks of human beings. You see a vast multitude of men women and children….”
Mr. Playfair describes at length their types and circumstances, one by one.
“These tens of thousands you see here are the castaways of society. Society has pushed them over that brink so steep, into that pit so deep, they can never escape or rise again….”
Just then they heard a wild scream to the right. They looked and saw a beautiful girl, with hair streaming and arms outstretched, falling over the brink into the pit.
“There’s another gone! There’s another! I will catch the next one and try to save her,” said good-hearted Mr. Woolhat.
“Stand just where you are. You cannot change the decrees of Society. You could not hold her back, while the whole of Plutocracy is pushing her in. You would fall in with her. There come several. Mr. Jones, hold Mr. Woolhat. Don’t let him move.”
“Oh God! This is too horrible!” exclaimed Mr. Woolhat, as the woman went over uttering a wail of despair…
They discuss the scene, then Mr. Playfair comments:
“Thus, my friends, you have had a very imperfect view of Plutocratic Society. You have seen the extremes, but not near all that lies between. At the upper end you were regaled by perfumes sweet as those of ‘Araby the Blest.’ You find here foul, fetid, sickening smells that make your gorge rise. You saw at the upper end millions wasted in riotous dissipation. Hundreds of millions buried in stone, marble and mortar, equipages, paintings, statues, sacrificed to appease Ennui, to gratify Vanity. You see here squalor, misery, hunger, nakedness, disease, danger, drunkenness, crime and death.
You heard a preacher cry as we passed a church:
‘Though you have all these things, and have not Charity you are become as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.’
Oh, for the heroism that would demand of the Plutocrats in those congregations to assemble on this brink, and would point out to them this pit and say to them:
“Oh, ye generation of hypocrites and robbers! Spin your false theories; run your printing presses; buy your scribblers; weave your sophistries; juggle with figures; falsify balance sheets; delude your victims; rob labor; roll your millions up to billions; but remember, ‘for all these things,’ sooner or later, the People ‘will bring you to judgment!’ And may they show that mercy they have not received!”
Then, in the manner of Huck Finn, who, at the end of Twain’s masterpiece, “lights out for the Territory” because he “can’t stand” to be “sivilized”:
Mr. Grange and Mr. Green hurried to their lodgings, packed their trunks, and took the first train that was leaving for the West.
In the final quarter of Plutocracy, the story continues from the “descent into Hell” to dramatize the fates of characters who have chosen to not light out for the territory but to fully engage in society in both private and public arenas knowing full well how much is at stake and how daunting and serious and potentially wonderful are the matters at hand — the fate of civilization and society. In this regard, at least, Plutocracy significantly surpasses the scope of Huckleberry Finn, a scant three years after Twain’s novel was published. And in the character of George Otis, Plutocracy anticipates by two decades the heroic socialist Ernest Everhard of Jack London’s powerful progressive partisan epic, The Iron Heel. The characters of Plutocracy whose stories continue to be explored are both as compelling as Huck and as repellant as the Duke and the Dauphin, and Twain’s other marvelous creations. They represent from various strata of society the “rightmost” forces of authoritarian power and “sivilization” moving fatefully against the “leftmost” forces of democratic power and humane civilization. The resulting end of Plutocracy — though technically rushed and sloppy in its construction — is fateful and revelatory.
III. Epic Range
Some of Plutocracy’s strongest moments as a classic novel occur in the dissection of ideologies, manners and behaviors of elite society at a ball hosted by one of the leading ladies of monied society, Mrs. Secretary Nonavie — who attempts to maintain her high standing in society by holding a “Diamond Ball” more resplendent than any other, with more of the “Respectability” gathered in one place than anywhere else. As Norwood notes, woe be unto any naïve questioner who wonders who exactly constitutes respectable society. To one such query, Mrs. Secretary Nonavie explains with both acid and comic propriety:
“there is respectability, and there is Respectability. And when Respectability, backed by millions, sees fit to do anything, it is always respectable.”
For emphasis she adds that what anyone might “consider respectable matters not-millions is a law unto itself. Millions is Society, and Society is Respectability itself” (221).
As the ball begins, the narrative’s scathing satiric style continues unabated and is accompanied by what are usually considered to be more realistic novelistic depictions of psychology and personality, per below. Though Miss Smiling, the daughter of an industrialist, is far from wholly approved of by Society, given that she associates with those of very low income and works on their behalf, she is nevertheless invited and welcomed by the host, Mrs. Secretary Nonavie, who:
received Miss Smiling kindly, because she was a millionaire’s daughter, but not rapturously, because her dress being plain, her decorations simple and inexpensive, her presence wasn’t brilliant.
A glance around the room satisfied Miss Smiling that she was out of place. Nearly every female figure, as far as it was covered, was a bank of satin or silk, each of different colors trimmed with costliest laces of every width, while the large portion of each figure, uncovered, glistened with diamonds….
As a rule the older the figure, the more wrinkled the skin, the more sallow from age the complexion, the more the diamonds; as if they were intended to dazzle the eyes, so they could not see the age beneath.
One “elderly” woman, the Widow Simpers, who had been for many years desperately battling with Time, had built an escarpment of diamonds around her neck, letting it drop as a curtain far down in front and rear to conceal the furrows Time’s arrows had made on that part of the works which she had defended with sleepless vigilance. The crowfeet and furrows in the cheeks were not covered, only because they could not be. She never admitted that they were wounds inflicted by her enemy, Time….
Miss Smiling felt lost – she was in solitude. Her good sense, her womanhood revolted. She instantly thought of her friends, her wards, the poor. She wished she had not come, but she had come to please her father, and her sense of duty softened her regret.
Still, she had a feeling of shame for her sex. She soliloquized, “Why will women be so silly as to lay bare their arms to the shoulder, their backs down to the waists, their bosoms so, so low? Why will society tolerate such exposure at a ball, or reception, and frown on it as indecent and vulgar on the street, at small gatherings, at church, or traveling, and even on stage?”
…But Miss Smiling did not feel lonesome many minutes. Her eyes, in scanning the statuary, saw two figures that were covered very like herself and her heart went out to them. They were Miss [Pythagorea] Euclid and Miss [Virginia] Lovelace. She asked Mrs. Secretary to give her an introduction, which was given at once….
“I know that you three graces will agree, in fact fall in love with each other, if you don’t with anybody else. Excuse me now, I must arrange for the dance. You all dance, of course?”
Miss Smiling did not dance, Miss Euclid and Miss Lovelace might after awhile. They preferred “to look on.” The scene was too attractive, too much of a study, to Miss Euclid, for her to lose any time just then in watching her own feet. She was studying Society. She had already thanked her friend Miss Virginia, a dozen times, for insisting on her coming….
Miss Euclid possessed far more vivacity then her new friend. Her sense of ridicule and the ludicrous was keener. She had seen less of the follies and weaknesses of mankind; less of their sorrows and woes; less of the grinding, crushing power of money, less of its brutalizing effects. But she was learning rapidly and was deeply interested. (241-242)
Apart from Plutocracy, Norwood had a reputation for literary satire and invective in his political speeches, and plenty of that sparkle and bite comes through in the novel. The narrative conflicts are powerful and many, cutting across and within age, gender, family, professions, culture, politics, class — and also race, to a lesser extent, and in a prejudiced way. Plutocracy is a novel of society and a novel of ideas, a novel of manners and a novel of history, a novel of romance and realism, laced with classic literary and historical allusions, diverse modes that in the best moments feed off one another contrapuntally, augmenting and enhancing their effects.
At well over four hundred pages, Plutocracy cannot be said to lack development except in comparison to the longest Victorian novels, and what Plutocracy may lack in elaborate refinement and expansion of novelistic detail, it replaces with satiric play and cogitation. The scope and weight of Plutocracy also contribute to the novel’s liveliness and power. Together, this satiric development and epic magnitude combine to make Plutocracy a unique and standout Victorian novel, by American and world standards both, despite its rejection from history.
IV. Epic Satire
Plutocracy is both a serious novel and a strong imaginative work in a long, marvelous, and often vital line of satiric literature, stretching from Aristophanes’ plays, through such landmark works of prose satire as Petronius’ The Satyricon, Lucian’s Lucius or The Ass, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens’ Hard Times, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and on up to Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary at the dawn of the twentieth century. Norwood’s Plutocracy easily belongs in this list, fitting in well in quality and content chronologically between Twain and Bierce. Moreover, Plutocracy is a prime direct descendent of what may be, according to Kenneth Rexroth, the greatest of all satires, The Satyricon, known for its ridicule of opulent decadence, primarily in the form of the ludicrous debauched tycoon, Trimalchio, depicted in the novel-length extant fragment of the massive original. As Petronius did in The Satyricon, Norwood does in Plutocracy, satirizing the elite corruption of the overseers of mass misery in his dramatic assault against members of the American plutocracy, who go by names indicative mainly of their exploiting industries and professions: Mr. Ferrum, Mr. Clinkers, Mr. Cinders, Mr. Weaver, Mr. Spinner, Mr. O’Le Margarine, Mr. Petroleum, Mr. De Stilling, Mr. Lagér, Mr. Skinner, Dr. Nostrum, Mr. Bonanza, Mr. Bond, Mr. Banks, Mr. S. O. Stocks, Mr. Haslet, Mr. Smiling, Mr. Margin, Mr. Recker, and so on.
V. Epic Political Statement
Given that its central themes revolve so much around the abuses of ruling power, economic and governmental, the focus and concerns of Plutocracy remain as urgent as those of any novel written today, a time of increasingly anti-democracy corruption, legalized and otherwise. Though Norwood was in many ways reactionary and racist, as is the novel in severe aspects, Plutocracy dramatizes action and articulates thought to a significant progressive extent, possibly far more so than Norwood intended. If anyone wonders where the right-wing populism of Trump and Trumpism partly comes from, look no farther. If left-wing populism fails to counter this extremely deep-rooted and mixed retrograde-and-rebel component of American culture, then all culture and hope for a decent future may be destroyed entirely. Deep-rooted support for Trump and Trumpism grows out of the human strengths and insights that Norwood dramatizes as much as out of the oppressive and debilitating human faults and flaws that Norwood and the novel demonstrate, wittingly or not.
While Plutocracy delivers a scathing critique of capitalism on the one hand, the narrative voice of Plutocracy makes clear, and is in fact explicit at one point, that Norwood favors reformers, not radicals, socialists, anarchists — even if much of the drama and satire belies this. And though Norwood is to some degree as reactionary and racist in Plutocracy as he is in some of his non-fiction writings, it is not unlikely that the radical progressive elements of Plutocracy help account for the novel’s dismissal from history, given that, as a distinct minority of American literary critics and other intellectuals have shown, American intellectual (and general) culture is steeped in regressive capitalist political prejudice and bias. John Whalen-Bridge, for one, explores this tendency in Political Fiction and the American Self, especially in relation to Jack London’s remarkable political epic The Iron Heel. Though Plutocracy is more typically literary than The Iron Heel, somewhat like in London’s epic the heady mix of politics and literature in Plutocracy makes for compelling reading:
“Mr. Chairman,” said [Mr. Bonanza], “the Committee on Elections has made some progress. We employed a detective for seventy-seven Congressional districts. Their duty is to find two discreet men in each district, a Democrat and a Republican, into whose hands we can safely trust money. The two men are to be used to beat the candidate for Congress opposed to our interests….”
“Why do you hire a Democrat and a Republican?” asked Mr. Skinner.
“I will explain,” said the speaker. “We millionaires, as you all know, have no politics. Money is our politics. We don’t care a cent whether a Democrat or a Republican is elected Representative, Senator or President. Jeffersonian doctrines, strict construction, States’ Rights, and all that stuff, will do for young Fourth-of-July orators. The fact is, those doctrines are in our way. We have nearly killed them, however. But what I mean is, we don’t care what a man thinks on them, if he is all right with us on the tariff, gold, and monopolies…. If the Republican candidate is not orthodox, we give money to the Democrat to beat him. If the Democrat is not orthodox, we give the Republican the money to beat him.”
“How do you manage when both candidates are of the same party?” asked Mr. Skinner.
“…that is easily arranged. We send money to elect the one who favors our views; or, if they both have views opposed to us, our detective finds out the characters of both, and we help the one we can buy. When he comes to Congress, we turn him over to the Committee on Surreptitious Legislation, to use one of the many methods employed by that committee” (383).
Labor leader George Otis thinking aloud to advocate of the poor, Miss Smiling:
“The pending struggle was not brought on by the poor. Nor will I say it was intentionally started by the rich. They may not mean to crush. The increasing degradation is not the object, but it is the inevitable result of this unthinking, heartless Plutocracy. I doubt that the man exists who would seize the reins and lay on the lash, intending to ride down and crush pedestrians in the street. Yet, if he should, the law says he is as guilty as though he intended. The injury or death is the same.”
“You and I are laboring in the same field,” said Miss Smiling. “You are trying to prevent the weak from being crushed, while I help them in my feeble way, after they are crushed” (362-363).
Note that labor leader Otis here is offering a strikingly generous view of plutocrats and the plutocracy of his day and any day, including of course the livestreamed blood-soaked era of today.
Though one often senses Norwood aiming his “politico-social” narrative at northern capitalism in particular, because he focuses his denunciatory energy on satirizing capitalistic exploitation in general, the novel dramatizes, explicitly, the fundamentally exploitative nature of the American national (and now international) state-capitalist economy in a way that has rarely been done so directly or well in fiction. And when the rebellious adult daughter of Mr. Smiling engages her father in conversation, this dialogue from the century before last covers topics and points regarding militarism and the economy that are utterly contemporary, and urgent. Mr. Smiling speaks first:
“This is a free country, and this government don’t oppress any man,” said Mr. Smiling, with an air of patriotism. “If he don’t like his employer or business, he’s free to get another.”
“All oppression is not by governments directly,” said the daughter… “The oppression in this country is financial, and I am satisfied that most of the suffering all over the country has been produced by legislation.”
“What legislation do you mean?”
“I mean legislation in general, and some special legislation. The General Government since 1861 has been in the control of a victorious war party. The war sentiment and feeling have prevailed in every Presidential election. General Grant twice elected; then Mr. Hayes, a war candidate, and then General Garfield. And if Mr. Blaine had been a general in the late war he would have been elected by a large majority. The single feeling of those in control has been, and is, that they saved the country, and therefore it belongs to them, to do with as they please. The men who saved the Union, the men who did the fighting, have been deluded by the belief that they have shaped public affairs since the war. Demagogues have so flattered them, to get offices, but the rank and file of the army have had no more voice in shaping legislation than the negroes in the South. The masters of the situation are the men whom the war suddenly enriched, and those whose colossal fortunes have been acquired since by means of oppressive class-legislation. The rank and file have elected Congressmen and Presidents who passed at once under the control of the rich – the millionaires of the land – and they have shaped all financial legislation to gorge their pockets, already full…. Who have reaped the fruits – the people as a mass? No – the few, very few, have increased their wealth to a degree, and in sums without parallel in history, and these few are the men who were interested in the legislations I have named. And hence, I say, they have been and are masters and rulers of this country, and they are the ones against whom the poor make complaint, or will make it when they come to understand the situation.”
Such pointed politically conscious dialogue makes much of the socio-political fiction written today seem woefully indirect, evasive, and vacuous along such lines, with effects upon an ostensibly democratic nation and public that can be neither healthy generally nor politically or socially invigorating, nor often even, to me, much interesting. With Plutocracy and similar imaginative works pushed out of history, frequently no doubt before they have a chance to appear, how much that is lost cannot be overstated.
In the valuable volume, The Idea of an American Novel, Editors Rubin and Moore include a 1949 piece by Philip Rahv in which he observes of the state of fiction:
“The creative power of the cult of experience is almost spent, but what lies beyond it is still unclear. One thing, however, is certain: whereas in the past, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the nature of American literary life was largely determined by national forces, now it is international forces that have begun to exert a dominant influence. And in the long run it is in the terms of this historic change that the future course of American writing will define itself” (164).
The international effect Rahv notes may or may not be seen in much of the cultural diversification of literature in subsequent decades, including the infusion and global spread of Latin American magical realism and so-called identity politics and culture more than economic politics. That said, the American publishing establishment has always seemed to prefer its literature to be either parochial or identity based, whether national or international, rather than epic and fundamentally macropolitical and economic.
Still today, one area that contemporary fiction fails to explore in much explicit depth is that of dominant international or even national economic and political figures and forces, in contrast to the forgotten example of Plutocracy. The fate of Plutocracy may reveal in part how very much American fiction has shied from this direction. William Van O’Connor in the introduction to The Idea of an American Novel (1961) shines further light:
Young America was carrying a terrible burden [and apparently still is] – the need to be a perfect society, or as near perfect as possible. Crevecoeur, who wrote Letters from an American Farmer, a utopian vision of the new society, also wrote Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, a disillusioned and bitter account of “patriots” he had known. Significantly, the former was published and widely acclaimed. The latter was put in a trunk and rediscovered, with no great fanfare, only in the twentieth century. There may be a clue here to the American imagination.
Noam Chomsky spells out the meaning of such a “clue” to “the American imagination” regarding certain political types of novels in his typical straightforward manner:
If Orwell, instead of writing 1984 – which was actually, in my opinion, his worst book, a kind of trivial caricature of the most totalitarian society in the world, which made him famous and everybody loved him, because it was the official enemy – if instead of doing that easy and relatively unimportant thing, he had done the hard and important thing, namely talk about Orwell’s Problem – [How is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to] “instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” ] – he would not have been famous and honored: he would have been hated and reviled and marginalized
and if at all possible cut from history — sent down the memory hole, in the language of Orwell’s 1984, a novel derived largely from Orwell’s first-hand observations of the — yes, Orwellian — manipulations and workings of the British Broadcasting Corporation where he was employed during World War II. Though Orwell’s novel 1984 was seen as a critique of the official enemy of western capitalism, the Soviet Union (even as the Soviets ran their own kind of state-capitalism), all of the Orwellian newspeak that Orwell coined, documented, and dramatized in 1984 was based on the standard propaganda techniques of the BBC and all state-capitalist media during World War Two — continuing through today — techniques and practices that Orwell necessarily participated in and saw directly as a BBC employee during that time and that led to his resignation in the middle of the war to write for a left-wing magazine.
Orwell noted in a decades-long suppressed introduction to Animal Farm:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
In the words of historian and playwright Howard Zinn in Artists in Times of War, we may find too “a clue to the American imagination” and what types of imaginative works are happily accepted into history and what types are in one way or another filtered out, rejected — works and authors that might try to fulfill Zinn’s suggestion:
that the role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media…. It is the job of the artist to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say…. It is absolutely patriotic to point a finger at the government to say that it is not doing what it should be doing to safeguard the right of citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…. We must be able to look at ourselves, to look at our country honestly and clearly. And just as we can examine the awful things that people do elsewhere, we have to be willing to examine the awful things that are done here by our government.
For as Nigerian and Nobel Prize winning Playwright Wole Soyinka notes:
Criticism, like charity, starts at home.
As for the role of epic imaginative satire, whether in the form of the novel or otherwise, even the mid-century Columbia University classicist Gilbert Highet, very far from an anti-establishment figure, made powerful note in “The Pleasures of Satire” (1953):
In order to write satire of any kind, one has to have a number of special talents, and also a special attitude to the public…. The public usually does not believe that anything is deeply wrong with society, and it often thinks that a satirist is a sorehead. It has grown up and found a job and got married and brought up its children in the existing social framework. Why should it believe that the whole thing is tunneled through by gangsters, and bought and sold by crooked politicians, and redesigned to give the biggest profits to the ruthless and the corrupt? No, surely not. Therefore the satirist, who believes these things, usually strains his voice shouting, to making the public hear; and then the public is even less inclined to listen…. They are very amusing and penetrating, these contemporary satires. The only trouble is this: they don’t seem to matter much…. This, I regret to say, is the mid-twentieth century. What we need is a satirist bold enough to attack the crooks who run national politics in many countries; the parasites who make vast fortunes by buying something on Monday and selling it on Tuesday, usually to the government; the idealists who ship five million families off to labor camps in order to make their theories come right; the soreheads whose pride was hurt once and who are determined to start a war to take care of the bruise: the rats in the basement, the baboons playing with dynamite. Satire will not kill these animals; but it will make clear the difference between them and human beings, and perhaps inspire a human being to destroy them.
In certain important ways “the novel’s next step” may likely need to be taken in accordance with the most apt parts of an outraged work like Plutocracy, though it was published the century before last. In Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (1991), edited by Philomena Mariani, “The Novel’s Next Step,” is the title Maxine Hong Kingston gives to her reflections on a type of novel needed for current times. She writes:
I’m going to give you a head start on the book that somebody ought to be working on. The hands of the clock are minutes away from nuclear midnight. And I am slow, each book taking me longer to write… So let me set down what has to be done, and maybe hurry creation, which is about two steps ahead of destruction…. All the writer has to do is make Wittman [hero of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey] grow up, and Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield will grow up. We need a sequel to adolescence – an idea of the humane beings that we may become. And the world will have a sequel…. The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the Global novel.
Kingston further suggests:
The danger is that the Global novel has to imitate chaos: loaded guns, bombs, leaking boats, broken-down civilizations, a hole in the sky, broken English, people who refuse connections with others.
And she worries:
How to stretch the novel to comprehend our times – no guarantees of inherent or eventual order – without having it fall apart? How to integrate the surreal, society, our psyches?
It seems to me that Kingston’s concerns should be taken very seriously but that writers have exhausted trying to do something along the lines of what she suggests, “imitate chaos.” The result in part has been what critic James Wood aptly dissects and excoriates as “hysterical realism.” Rebecca West is perceptive writing in The Strange Necessity (1928) when she notes that regarding reality, when it comes to art, “one of the damn thing is ample,” that an inclination to imitation, excessive imitation at least, is ill-advised. Herein lies one of the strengths of Plutocracy; by use of different stratagems of fancy — caricature, exaggeration and so on — the writing cuts through many of the irrelevant distractions of reality, no matter how graphic or tantalizing, and gets quickly to some of the most meaningful pith of life, the social and public especially but also the private — the inhumane, the absurd, the ideal, and the possible — rather than rendering glossy and entrancing the too often dull, by comparison, and diffuse and relatively trivial layers of existence.
That Plutocracy is at least as much propaganda as art5 ought to be no deterring factor to a readership or literary study, given that, as Bernard Smith noted in his important book Forces in American Criticism (1939):
It is possible that conventional critics have learned by now that to call a literary work “propaganda” is to say nothing about its quality as literature. By now enough critics have pointed out that some of the world’s classics were originally “propaganda” for something.
Plutocracy is an unknown American classic, even as it is badly flawed by the racist views of its post Civil War US Senator from Georgia author. It is art, it is propaganda, it is political, it is a rare and vital work of imaginative literature that despite its flaws and because of its populist strengths — both of which are ricocheting increasingly around the country and world at the moment — renders itself engaging — marvelously so in occasional and key moments — and rewarding of serious reflection and study for casual readers, concerned citizens, and writers, especially those of a strong populist and partisan social or political bent, that is, especially for anyone interested in liberatory literature — a socially engaged literature — imaginative, critical, and otherwise.
It’s worth thinking about what is greatly needed and what might be fruitful today in literature. The burial or relative neglect of key works of what might be called “liberatory criticism,” perhaps even moreso than the burial or neglect of certain works of the imagination, have hindered critical and imaginative thought. From the early part of last century, Upton Sinclair’s Mammonart (1924) stands out in this regard. Also, V.F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature (1932), and Bernard Smith’s Forces in American Criticism (1939). And the most progressive elements of Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, later revised) don’t seem to me to have received nearly the attention warranted. So much could be explored and explained about how and why the so-called New Left largely dismissed the so-called Old Left out of hand, after the shock and trauma of World War Two. Most scholars, as if bewitched by the cultural fixations of the “New Left,” are far from having come to grips with it yet.
The Philosophy of Literary Form in many ways consummates the literary criticism of the first four decades (and perhaps beyond) of the twentieth century — both the so-called sociological and formal veins.
In regard to liberatory literature, explicit political art (and literary criticism) not only has a long distinguished history, it has never been more needed than today, an art with strong “social, political, and economic aspects” as Edmund Wilson describes in his important essay “The Historical Interpretation of Literature” (1940) — art that “plays a political role” and “exerts a subversive” and other constructive “influence,” and “makes life more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them…” since
the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered….
As progressive critic Edward Said showed in detail, authors have to be willing to cross certain perhaps difficult borders to attain great insight — national, informational, cultural, political borders put up by a variety of dominant corporate, academic, governmental, social and cultural ideologies, structures, and powers. While exploring “the urgent conjunction of art and politics” in Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said notes:
It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual [including artistic] mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed “counter, original, spare, strange” [Gerard Manley Hopkins]. From this perspective also, one can see “the complete consort dancing together” contrapuntally…
Said adds:
Much of what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its aftermath-in, say, the elaborate interpretative strategies of critical theory or the self-consciousness of literary and musical forms-seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric today. More reliable now are the reports from the front line where struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic and archeological descriptions, explorations in mixed forms (essay, video or film, photograph, memoir, story, aphorism) of unhoused exilic experiences. The major task, then, is to match the new economic and socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale…. The fact is, we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment…[not least in] the urgent conjunction of art and politics….
VI. Epic Racism and Other Flaws
Though Plutocracy demonstrates strong liberatory and populist tendencies, it fails greatly when touching on race. Thomas Manson Norwood was racist to a degree unusual even by the standards of his time and place, it might be said, however contemporary to the deeply racist and supremacist official Trumpian moment he can seem to be today.6 And though he chose, fortuitously, not to focus much on race in Plutocracy, considerable amounts of racism come through. The alternate novel title itself, American White Slavery, contains reference to the most common racial indicator of the novel, which works both for and against a main purpose of the book, to show the inhumanity of elite exploitation of the working class. Because Norwood’s epic dramatically and analytically rails against this exploitation throughout the novel, he indicates, fortunately, the extremely low regard in which he holds the concept of slavery — American, white or otherwise, even as at least at one point he recasts and defends elements of chattel slavery much as many people attempt to soften and excuse barbarous elements of today’s prison system and other deadly and oppressive capitalist institutions.
Apparently Norwood was not so bold intellectually or viscerally to use an alternate title like American Capitalist Slavery. Instead the the racial indicator of Norwood’s alternate title limits focus to exploitation of whites, and Norwood uses the title to direct the wrath of his story against the North, and the wage-enslaving practices of northern industrialists on northern white workers. But of course, such exploitative practices applied to workers of all races, North and South, then as now. Therefore, a more appropriate and accurate title, a racism free title, would be something like: American Capitalist Slavery, or American Wage-Slavery, or The New American Slavery, or even Third-Stage Global Slavery (following feudal slavery and chattel slavery), etc. Norwood was hardly alone in his use of the phrase “American white slavery,” which was and would be employed by many radicals and reformers protesting general capitalist abuses for decades to come, but the fact that even the novel’s alternate title is inappropriate indicates some of the difficulty Norwood had in simply attempting to make an unprejudiced remark about race.
Several chapters are pointedly interracial given the presence of a single African American doorman who greets all the attending members of (white) society at a ball. Unfortunately, especially in these three chapters (of fifty-one), a number of narrative remarks put forth racist stereotypes, though it is possible, even likely, that Norwood believed he was using these chapters to attempt to show racial even-handedness, since virtually all of the elite attendees are placed in a farcically poor light by way of the doorman Scipio’s malapropisms. (Probably not worth here going down the perilous racial and militant rabbit hole of Roman General and statesman “Scipio Africanus” — “conqueror of Africa.”) There are a couple such extended scenes that might reasonably have charges of minstrelsy leveled against them, regardless of Norwood’s intentions (whatever those might be). If these scenes withstand the charge of minstrelsy to a partial degree it is due to the fact that the wealthy white guests suffer more the bite and brunt of Norwood’s comic and satiric pen than does the malapropian doorman.
Additionally, Norwood’s glaring racism stands out in appalling fashion early on in the novel when a comparison is made between white wage slavery and black chattel slavery. While the condemnatory critique of wage slavery is reasonably keen, and though the critique would have been improved by a non-racist comparison to chattel slavery, the relatively favorable description of chattel slavery comes across substantially as a grotesque whitewash of the horror and inhumanity of chattel slavery, despite Norwood’s clumsy efforts to claim otherwise. Norwood voices these racist thoughts through Miss Smiling of New York, one of the novel’s designated reformers (and clearly one of the representatives of Norwood’s views throughout the work). Speaking to her industrialist father Mr. Smiling, a designated (and dedicated) reactionary, Miss Smiling says:
The North, for fifty years, denounced slavery in the South, but we have slavery here worse, in some respects, than that was. Bad as that was, and I have no apology to offer for it, it had some features milder and more humane than our slavery. The Negro was cared for in health to keep him well, and when sick he was kindly nursed and had medical help. When, from age, he could not work, he was still fed, clothed, housed and provided for in every way that humanity and philanthropy required. The law of the State compelled humane treatment, under heavy penalty. Besides all this, as a rule, the relation of master and slave begot mutual kindness. This is proved by the kindness and fidelity of the slaves to mistresses and children, when the masters were absent during the war. There was not then one-tenth the crime committed by the slaves, as they, as freemen, have committed in any four years since the war…. I am not justifying Negro slavery; I am condemning white slavery! (32-33)
Wow, what a great system is utter tyranny — racialized tyranny! The Trumpists certainly think so today as they increasingly act on it and legally codify it. In this extended comparison, Norwood is obviously trying, in part, to make provocative reformist sociological points about the horrors of wage slavery, but by making chattel slavery sound like a paradise of sorts — no less — all protestations aside, the effect is far more racist than reformist. Such racism crops up elsewhere, including in a passing remark of the narrator’s about Miss Smiling at a ball:
She was wholly indifferent to, if she had not a contempt for, “barbaric pearls and gold;” admiration for which she regarded as a long retrogression towards barbarism – towards man’s savage condition, in which the Indian’s pride is in his painted skin and feathers, and the African’s in brilliant beads (240).
Of note is that Norwood is quoting an apparently similarly racist passage in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost:
The gorgeous East with richest hand, Showers on her kings barbaric pearls and gold; but all is barbarism still; and we gladly permit the pageant to disappear like a dream that is dreamed.
Such racism cannot and should not account for the disappearance of Plutocracy from history, anymore than Paradise Lost should be or could be thus expunged. In fact, confronting the racism of the cultural past and the exploitation of the financial past can help better show and explain the virulent racism and exploitation of the present day — the culture and the economy and the politics extending into seeming infinitely bigoted and plutocratic extremes. The empire essentially is genocidal, typically against peoples of color and those who are impoverished or have been made so.
Driven by apparent bitterness and anger at the post civil war North, which was in no small degree thwarting the South economically (especially by means of “the tariff” that the novel often decries — a core Trumpian issue turned in on itself), and likely also angry at the great financial interests that had cost him his seat in the US Senate a decade earlier, Norwood in Plutocracy has dramatized a largely populist and partly progressive viewpoint in regard to wealth and power; unfortunately, this important aspect is sometimes overshadowed by the racism, which, it is noted by historians, became ever more pronounced in Norwood’s writing as he aged. Thus, given the progressive drama of the novel and the sometimes racist politics of the author, there are obvious political reasons, that is, excuses, for intellectuals across the entire political spectrum to exclude Plutocracy from history rather than include Plutocracy in studies and other endeavors as an important and accomplished work of American imaginative writing — an epic work of art that is perhaps even unusually insightful into both great and abhorrent consciousness and society, sometimes wittingly so, sometimes entirely not.
Unfortunately more than a few celebrated literary works express racism (as have their authors personally), not to mention plenty of other forms of bigotry and chauvinism, classism not least. Yet, these very regrettable facts should not prevent important works from being read and discussed — not least if the works otherwise confront oppressive social and cultural realities, which Plutocracy does, to its credit, in vital, powerful, unique ways. Using Plutocracy to expose racism, ironically, and to show how tightly racism is so often intertwined with formally educated or “respectable” and “civilized” and plutocratic and other social circles is also important. Studies show that Christianity correlates with racism. Well, here you go — here’s Plutocracy. It’s not just Trumpism that makes it obvious. As Trumpists act forcefully to outlaw the truth, literature should push back forcefully as well, that is, with even greater force of insight, drama, and outrage.
If we can’t study offensive texts, what’s left to study in Western culture? One can even ask that without being flippant. Take the US Constitution. It’s one of the most blatant and wildly racist, dehumanized and dehumanizing documents in the world. It should have been long ago abolished and replaced with something far more humane and liberatory. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) would be a good place to start. But should we not study the US Constitution and its making? The US Constitution also has great liberatory elements, especially in its amended Bill of Rights. Similarly, many well-known scholars, writers, and public intellectuals — believers and non-believers alike — have argued that certain parts of the Bible depict or endorse genocidal violence. It’s a mere Google away, let alone a ChatGPT. Should we not study the Bible?
Beyond racism, other flaws in Plutocracy seem obvious. Some of these flaws are well-noted, though I think too somewhat unfairly judged, at the end of my copy of the novel by an unknown “‘Reviewer’,” a former owner of the book apparently contemporaneous to its publication:7
Viewed as a work of art, this novel is a failure. Not that it does not contain great truths, not that it does not contain a very good reposition of the great iniquities of the tariff system. The fault lies in the clumsy, ill constructed plot, the want of proper dramatic incident, as well as the careless and slipshod style of the author. Had he paid more attention, etc, he would have better succeeded in his undertaking. The subject is one of the best the times afford for a grand, magnificent novel, such as Charles Reade could have elaborated and gloried in. The “time” has come, why not the “man”? It looks like a commentary on America that no real novelist will take hold of this subject and write a book that would live as long as the language.
Mr. Senator should have taken more time, should have revised and rewritten his work. Nevertheless, it contains much food for thought and will be perused with interest by all students of sociology. The author of a didactic novel should have two purposes in view. While its pages should teach an important truth, at the same time the woofing of this truth, should be held together by a warp of incidents pleasing in themselves, in which dramatic propriety is not violated. That the author has signally failed in the latter, it takes no Macaulay to observe. – “Reviewer.”
Further elaborations could be made here upon the distinctions between the aesthetic features of an artwork and its non-aesthetic features — the normative, social, or historical, etc — but that’s for another time. I’ve tried here to indicate and show why Plutocracy cannot be considered an overall “failure” whether “viewed as a work of art” or otherwise — quite the opposite — though some large part of the criticisms of the unknown “‘Reviewer’” are well taken. As with Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and other major American novels, Plutocracy contains serious flaws in each of its satiric, epic, and novelistic modes — in both their aesthetic and normative non-aesthetic elements. In addition to the racism, Plutocracy contains other obvious failings and flaws, including Norwood’s Trump-like obsession with tariff “iniquities,” a rushed and formulaic ending, and “careless and slipshod” attention to details and development. Some very similar types of charges have been leveled against both Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, with no little justification in my view, and yet both novels undoubtedly retain by and large and deserve to retain their reputations as major works of American literature. Plutocracy, being more and less accomplished than these two novels, deserves similar consideration.
In Norwood’s zeal to show what he viewed as the injustice of national tariffs on imported goods, he belabors the issue throughout the novel so much that individual members and various workings of the plutocracy can scarcely be mentioned or dramatized without references to “the tariff.”8 The references are so pervasive that readers may well discount references to “the tariff” as they might a heavy-handed motif that the author cannot resist frequently inserting, just as they do well to discount some of the infelicities of style, theme, and structure so much criticized in the two great novels of Stowe and Twain.
Occasionally, Norwood attempts to explain exactly what he sees as the injustices of the tariff, but the explanations cannot be convincing, whatever their merit, because Norwood never allows himself to write the detailed essay (however concise) that would be minimally required to make the argument persuasive. Thus the reader is left with the worst of both worlds — numerous intrusive, dramatically meaningless references to “the tariff” and no wholly convincing explanation of the claimed injustice. Aesthetically and educationally both, it would have been far better for Norwood to reduce the number of such references and simply amend the essay or speech of an anti-tariff character to the end of the novel, or insert an extensive talk somewhere in the middle — just as Nadine Gordimer skillfully does with the fictive but reality-based political speech of Lionel Burger, a leading left, anti-Apartheid, South African activist in one of her great novels. Gordimer simply and appropriately drops the fictive speech into the middle of Burger’s Daughter — her most accomplished and readable novel in my opinion, as well as in that of her Nobel prize winning countryman J. M. Coetzee — a work that is wonderfully buttressed and enhanced, as novel and as direct political experience and knowledge, by such an insertion. Comparatively, Norwood’s handling of the issue of the tariff is both a distraction and a disappointment, regardless of the real nature of the issue.
Plutocracy takes its satiric and novelistic enterprise to full epic levels in all ways except perhaps one. While there are a handful of characters upon whom, it might be said, the fate of their people depends — or in fact the welfare of all people, all humanity — there is no developed central character, or perhaps better yet a well established array of characters, who are themselves shown to be of epic proportion in relation to more common mortals. Several characters intriguingly approximate this ideal without fulfilling it. And it’s curious to consider how Norwood’s personal ideological limitations may have consciously or unconsciously prevented him from fully creating such characters. Thus, apart from the racism, the novel’s greatest weakness is not its most obvious one, the obsession of the tariff, but the lack of a sympathetic dominant central character, or characters, who might ease and facilitate readers’ interest throughout the story.
Back to Mary McCarthy in Ideas and the Novel (1980):
As I was saying, if you are going to voice ideas in a novel, plainly you will need a spokesman. In the traditional novel such semi-official figures are familiar to us and, on the whole, welcome. We quickly learn to recognize which of the character will be a stand-in for the author, that is, which one we can trust as appointed representative with full powers to comment on what is happening and draw the necessary conclusions. There is nothing wrong with this; events in life seldom speak for themselves. Whether it is world events that confront us or local skullduggery—an ecological scandal or somebody running off with a friend’s wife—we frequently want somebody to explain them to us, sketch in the background, suggest where our sympathies should lie. There is no reason we should be worse off in a novel, as long as the novel is assumed to have some reasonably close connection with our immediate life or a life we are acquainted with through reading and report.
The novel in its classic period—the nineteenth century—took on that burden without protest. Protest only began to be heard toward the end of the century, when the novel, aggrieved by how much it had been expected to carry on its increasingly slender shoulders, made the first motions toward emancipation. Up until James, the novelist had been a quite willing authority figure, a parent, aunt, in Tolstoy’s case a Dutch uncle. The popular novelist (and there was no other kind, the art novel not having been discovered) was looked up to as an authority on all sorts of matters: medicine, religion, capital punishment, the right relation between the sexes. If the role was uncongenial or momentarily wearisome, he had the resort of the short story or the tale to turn to, neither of which carried such heavy responsibilities to the common life (30-31).
Such “spokesman” type characters exist in the Plutocracy — Miss Euclid, Miss Smiling, Mr. Playfair, George Otis — but seem underplayed in the face of Norwood’s fixation on corruption. Plutocracy is neither a satiric epic of evil nor a great tale of heroism but an unsettled swirl of competing thematic foci and genres. Still, the novel often works well, and like any strong work of art suggests much beyond itself.
Major flaws exist in many important works. The entire last third, not least, of Mark Twain’s epic masterwork Huckleberry Finn is seriously marred by a range of aesthetic and thematic problems, as scholars have explored in detail. The last third of Huckleberry Finn is a crude novella that would work better on its own, if it were a separate novella/story, than it does as an aesthetic and thematic part of the whole. Plus, the novel has other serious problems throughout, widely noted. Racial stereotyping is yet another concern scholars find regarding Twain’s otherwise often socially and culturally critical work. Yet Twain’s work remains great and valuable, given its many extraordinary qualities. Just as serious flaws and concerns did not and should not disappear a largely wonderful and important work like Huckleberry Finn from history, so does Thomas Norwood’s Plutocracy, published a scant three years after Huckleberry Finn, also deserve a noted and accessible place in history, including long overdue study and consideration as an important major work of American imaginative literature.
In considering the work and fate of Plutocracy, there may be a cautionary tale, or point, for imaginative writers intent upon creating their own epic novels and other artworks. Imaginative writers might spend less time looking for literary heroes and models of the past and spend more time working and reworking the fundamentals of storytelling in creating their own imaginative works, and let their own imaginative expression be their greatest criticisms of literature. Imaginative writers should look back and read through history readily and at will, while working most intensely in their imaginations and the present day for a better literature, a better consciousness, a better understanding of the times and the future than has been realized, in full, in part, or even at all, in some cases.
On the other hand, there is a real threat and vitality in a good example, even in a very flawed but partly good and vibrant example, a real danger to the unjustifiable plutocracy in every field and walk of life where a rebellious or revolutionary or merely illuminating example might arise or be compelled to. Plutocrats and social and cultural oppressors everywhere know this. Book banners and censors and gatekeepers know this and constantly act on it. They must be countered. It can be striking and encouraging to find and consider robust examples of liberatory imaginative work, even and especially if you would do it differently — going all the way back through history and all around the present day — despite great flaws, despite that which must not be done again, despite that which must be improved upon, transformed, remodeled, and grown to a greater possible potential. Vital examples can bring a lot of energy to help strike the blows that must be struck for art, society, and social change against the plutocracy and any oppressive force or retrograde ways of thinking, perceiving, and being that threaten to kill everyone and all, little by little or all at once.
The financial forerunning of the United States of America all but began with the Dutch West India Company’s fake 1626 plutocrat “purchase” of Manahatta from the Lenape people — ten years after “William Shakespeare” supposedly died (another myth, but then, we live in an empire of seemingly endless lies that can infinitely warp reality and consciousness). An erasure myth stone monument and placard still stands amid the glacier-gouged caves, valleys, ridges, and forest, and near the last natural salt marsh on Manahatta in Inwood Hill Park on the northern tip of Manhattan — not far from the meeting of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers. The remaining sprawling wild forest there seems to reject both the fake sale of Manahatta — the plutocrats’ manipulative, illusory, and otherwise illegitimate transaction — and the monument in the woods that is emblematic of the plutocracy’s ongoing attempt to propagandize and legalize the supremacist notion that it rightfully owns the world and the debt slaves it creates, orders about, and destroys. The recent organized return of the Lenape by way of the Lenape Center to Manahatta is part of the inspiring and illuminating and ever-intensifying rise of the People against the plutocracy.
And do we see this in literature as well? What is the real nature of literary America? Is it a myth too? Full of myths? Politically, financially, the plutocrat Empire of Lies has found its most recent bloody and modern culmination in President Biden and now especially in President Trump. Sometimes there are literary attempts to consciously depict and expose empire, or at least to express elements of it. The epic and pointed novel Plutocracy — created about midway between the present day and America’s official founding by a kind of revolution between competing financial interests — is both Trumpist and anti-Trumpist more than a century ahead of the fact. What is Trumpism if not a profiteering and kleptocratic delusion disorder embedded in a class war, a militant financial tyranny, that is prosecuted and persecuting from the top down — from the plutocracy and the rule of capital against the will and the heart, the principles and the would-be and actually existing good sense of the people? Plutocracy as a novel that is racist and religious — the two correlate — populist and rebellious — these also correlate — literary and sociological — these should correlate — remains an incarnation of America. Not wholly but in substantial part. These are the facts — the often ironic fact-struck essence of novels and lands, peoples and empire. Time to know it, own it, and grow from it.
Appendix
Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903):
[The novel] may be a great force…fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak….
Morris Edmund Speare, The Political Novel: Its Development in England and in America (1924):
The political novel…is the most embracing in its material of all other novel types…[and] must be dominated, more often than not, by ideas rather than by emotions…
Upton Sinclair, Mammonart (1924):
Lie Number Six: the lie of Vested Interest; the notion that art excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. Meeting that issue without equivocation, we assert:
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics make the assertion that art excludes propaganda, what they are saying is that their kind of propaganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are not art. Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other fellow’s doxy.
…whether a certain propaganda is really vital and important is a question to be decided by the practical experience of mankind. The artist may be overwhelmingly convinced that his particular propaganda is of supreme importance, whereas the experience of the race may prove that it is of slight importance; therefore, what was supposed to be, and was for centuries taken to be a sublime work of art, turns out to be a piece of trumpery and rubbish. But let the artist in the labor of his spirit and by the stern discipline of hard thinking, find a real path of progress for the race; let him reveal new impulses for men to thrill to, new perils for them to overcome, new sacrifices for them to make, new joys for them to experience; let him make himself master of the technique of any one of the arts, and put that propaganda adequately and vitally before his fellows – and so, and so alone, he may produce real and enduring works of art.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926):
…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.
V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature (1932):
Most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another…. In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.
That the attempt to be above the battle is evidence of a defense mechanism can scarcely be doubted. Only those who belong to the ruling class, in other words, only those who had already won the battle and acquired the spoils, could afford to be above the battle. Fiction which was propagandistic, that is, fiction which continued to participate in the battle, it naturally cultivated a distaste for, and eschewed. Fiction which was above the battle, that is fiction which concerned only the so-called absolutes and eternals, with the ultimate emotions and the perennial tragedies, but which offered no solutions, no panaceas – it was such fiction that won its adoration.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934):
A particular work of art may have a definite effect upon a particular person or upon a number of persons. The social effect of the novels of Dickens or of Sinclair Lewis is far from negligible….
Joseph Freeman, Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935):
To characterize an essay or a book as a political pamphlet is neither to praise nor to condemn it…. In the case of the liberal critic, however, we have a political pamphlet which pretends to be something else. We have an attack on the theory of art as a political weapon which turns out to be itself a political weapon….
James T. Farrell, A Note on Literary Criticism (1936):
Literature must be viewed both as a branch of the fine arts and as an instrument of social influence…. I suggest that…the formula ‘All art is propaganda’ be replaced by another: ‘Literature is an instrument of social influence….’. [Literature] can be propaganda…and it can sometimes perform an objective social function that approaches agitation.
Roger Dataller, The Plain Man and the Novel (1940):
That Charles Dickens assisted the reform of the Poor Law, and Charles Reade that of the Victorian prison system, is undeniable…. Such novels influence.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941):
The contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable.
Roland Barthes:
Then comes the modern question: why is there not today (or at least so it seems to me), why is there no longer an art of intellectual persuasion, or imagination? Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion?
Also highly valuable, with roots in the same era, the work of America’s greatest liberatory critic of the mid-twentieth century, Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns — From Rebellion to Conformity (1958):
The present volume began as a collection of articles and reviews writing in the Nineteen-Forties and Fifties for a more or less popular audience [e.g., The Nation]… Some of these articles are in the polemical vein which a critic uses with reluctance when his second nature, or his first, is to inquire, to balance, and to evaluate. The central focus of the volume is on the transitional decade from the Second World War to the middle of the twentieth century-from McCarthy to Sputnik. The historical setting is that of the uneasy ‘peace,’ the tensions of the Cold War, the return to ‘normalcy,’ and the epoch of conformity.
Or was it euphoria? In literature the period marked the decline of the classic modern American writers at the peak of their popular reputation. In criticism there was the movement towards higher and higher levels of aesthetic, or scholastic, absolutes….
There was indeed a state of general inertia in the arts, as the familiar sequel to an age of anxiety: of problems urgent and not resolved, while the surface of the globe, and outer space too, vibrated in the throes of change. The American literary scene of the Forties and Fifties must have presented to the rest of the world an odd and ironic spectacle at times; and perhaps the polemical note was indicated; and meanwhile I trust that this spectacle may also be instructive… (ix-x).
James Petras, “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited” (1999):
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.
Finally, a note by playwright Tony Kushner, writing in Theater:
I do not believe that a steadfast refusal to be partisan is, finally, a particularly brave or a moral or even interesting choice. Les Murray, an Australian poet, wrote a short poem called “Politics and Art.” In its entirety: “Brutal policy / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.” This is as invaluable an admonishment as it is ultimately untrue.
I came across the title, Plutocracy, in an online used bookstore while searching for records of American novels that included some variant of America or United States in their titles. The earliest such novel appears to be The Female American, 1767, another work of American imaginative writing disregarded or overlooked, if not necessarily for economic or political reasons, a work that has been reprinted and studied in detail in recent years, at least.
Because Plutocracy is badly marred by authorial racism, a sense of racial decency might be thought to account for the novel’s exclusion from history, but this seems not likely to be the full story since more than a few major works of literature have racist components or ties. Though racism likely contributed to the novel’s disappearance, it may not be the main cause for a number of reasons further discussed in part VI of this essay. That said, the authors of many works with racist or other problematic elements often had closer ties to less-bigoted and more progressive or liberal, and more establishment circles than did the reactionary Senator from Georgia, no small factor itself.
A partial list of Norwood’s published works, not including his congressional speeches and Junius letters: “Mother Goose Carved By a Commentator” (1900); The Story of Culloden: A Famous Village in Middle Georgia (1909); John Brown: A Brief Essay on a Small Subject (1913); Daniel Webster and the South (1913); Secession: A Concrete Right (1913); The Treachery of Abraham Lincoln (1913); How Did Yankees Come To Be That Way? or On Puritans and Cavaliers: In Two Parts Part I: The Puritans and the South (1913); A True Vindication of the South, in a Review of American History. Savannah: Braid & Hutton (1917)
I – An American Epic Disappeared; II – Epic Aesthetics; III – Epic Range; IV – Epic Satire; V – Epic Political Statement; VI – Epic Racism and Other Flaws
According to William Harris Bragg in “The Junius of Georgia Redemption: Thomas M. Norwood and the ‘Nemesis’ Letters.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77 (Spring 1993): 86-122.
I am indebted additionally to this unknown figure for the identification of a number of literary and historical allusions, helpfully annotated in the text margins, including the Milton quotation.
Northern industrialists profited enormously from the effect of imposing tariffs on European manufactured goods, which caused European countries to retaliate by imposing high tariffs on US exports, primarily agricultural goods, which in turn created great difficulties for the economies of southern states especially, Norwood’s Georgia not least. Norwood scarcely loses an opportunity to berate the dominant financial interests of the country for profiting enormously off the tariff while the working class reaps little of the profit and is forced to buy more expensive and sometimes inferior goods as a result.
A Practical Policy 