And Catalysts to Change
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
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.
4 months ago · 57 likes · 13 comments · Luke McGowan-Arnold and The Metropolitan Review
(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.
“The Chicago Rubicon and What Comes Next:
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.
From Empire All In (2017):
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.
Thomas Paul Anderson, director of the problematic recent hit movie One Battle After Another:
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:
One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution
*Spoilers for the plot of One Battle After Another…
4 months ago · 1126 likes · 11 comments · Brooke Obie
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.
Jae Rose discusses the uses and abuses of political nuance in a way that can apply equally to art in “The Politics of Nuance: Moral Clarity in a World of Complexity”:
“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 major human rights organizations 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.
4 months ago · 10 likes · 6 comments · Jae Rose
As in politics as in art and culture, literary fiction not least, as I explored in great detail in Fiction Gutted — The Establishment and the Novel:
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.
Ask Billie Holiday. Great post by Khalil Greene at History Can’t Hide, “How the FBI Killed Billie Holiday for Singing About Lynching.”
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 