Author: TC

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie

By Ruth Rosen

When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning.

I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone’s movie reinforces the Big Lie — endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media — that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein….

Political Poetry, Political Novel — US, Middle East, Mexico

Politics in Art by Hank Kalet — the Middle East and political poetry:

“We live in an age when it’s hard / to write about basic things / like a kiss or eating cheese,” Mr. Weiseltier writes in “Cheese.”

The accumulation of small details in his poems is set against the larger world of violence, one that perpetuates itself, violence begetting violence, a cycle that he refuses to fall into – “don’t dare say / that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs.”

 In 2020, Politics as Unusual  — review by Yvonne Zipp

Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s greatest living writer, has created a corrosive satire [the novel, The Eagle’s Throne] set in 2020. The Mexican president has angered the United States by denouncing its invasion of Colombia. In retaliation, US President Condoleezza Rice has wiped out Mexico’s communication systems, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. (Even the carrier pigeons have been poisoned.)

Social Issues in Fiction

Otto Penzler with some thoughts on popular fiction: 

Charles Dickens, most of whose books involve murder, kidnapping, blackmail, robbery, and other crimes, wanted to change society; his novels were more instrumental in shining light on the wretched state of the poor in Victorian England than all the pamphleteers, speech-makers, and journalists of the era combined. Irritated with anti-Asian racism, Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan, a wise and likable Chinese-Hawaiian policeman. John le Carré has in recent work attempted to show that Western democracies were as morally depraved as Eastern Communist regimes. Carl Hiaasen, for all the humor in his novels, has been on a mission to identify the catastrophic damage being done to Florida’s environment.

Impact of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

“Blood, Sweat and Fears”

Gary Younge

It is difficult to think of a book, let alone a novel, that has forced the state to respond in such a comprehensive manner. And yet, while Sinclair was delighted with both sales and fame, it was not quite the response that he intended. He had dedicated the book to the “Workingmen of America” and had set out to make an emotional appeal to the nation over the plight of the working poor and the prospects of a socialist alternative. Instead he had generated a public panic about food quality. “I aimed for the public’s heart,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

The Jungle was very much a novel of its time – an era of mass migration, US military expansion and rapid economic and technological transformation. It earned its place in the US literary hall of fame not for its aesthetic qualities but for its practical effects. Thanks to its polemical style, formulaic narrative and, at times, propagandistic language, it has more currency as a work of literary journalism than of great fiction.

Those publishers who discarded the manuscript had underestimated not only the potential breadth of its appeal, but the political and journalistic context that made that breadth possible. Middle-class Americans, concerned that the concentration of capitalism in a few hands would leave them at the mercy of trusts and monopolies, began to revolt.

The social commentator Randolph Bourne described it as a period when “a whole people” woke up “into a modern day which they had overslept . . . they had become acutely aware of the evils of the society in which they had slumbered and they snatched at one after the other idea, programme, movement, ideal, to uplift them out of the slough in which they had slept”.

These concerns gave birth to the Progressive movement, which found its literary expression in a more aggressive and socially responsive style of journalism.

___________________

See also:

Cover for 'Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel'

by  Tony Christini

Stand-Up Comedy and Social Change — Robert Newman Reviews his Reviews

From “Two Thumbs Down“

by Robert Newman 

 

What significance that Tony Blair confessed to Jon Snow that he had never heard of Mossadegh, the elected Iranian prime minister we overthrew? If things have disappeared down the memory hole then it must be with good reason.

But I think that, rather than do gags about 1066, Nelson, Napoleon – virgin territory though that is for the comedian – it’s more exciting to talk about the Black Panthers. Not only am I interested in history from below, but I was also flukey enough when researching the show to have direct access to unpublished first-hand oral accounts of the Black Panthers from which I quoted directly. Also, the Black Panthers just happen to be the most important social movement of the 1960s; FBI chief J Edgar Hoover described them as “the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States”. That’s pretty amazing, I think.

In No Planet B – The History of the World Backwards, I wanted to explore what the Panthers might have achieved were it not for the FBI’s murderous campaign against them. And I wanted to explore that because I believe such grassroots revolutionary movements are the only political force that can stop climate change, because capitalism has no Plan B. Again, abstruse stuff of purely academic interest, as happily all such urgent imperatives only exist way over yonder on Planet B.

The Cultural Front — Alan Wald interview — Radical Novel Reconsidered

The Legacy of the Cultural Front: An Interview with Alan Wald

“Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan and is the author of seven books including, Writing from the Left and Exiles from a Future Time. He is a member of the editorial boards of Science & Society and Against the Current. He also edited The Radical Novel Reconsidered series published by the University of Illinois Press, which includes Burning Valley by Philip Bonosky.”

Percy Bysse Shelley — “The Angel of Revolt” — by Upton Sinclair

Chapter 58 from Mammonart, by Upton Sinclair:

The Angel of Revolt

Percy Bysse Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, a great landlord and a ferocious Tory, who typified the spirit of the age and drove his son almost to madness.

The boy was sent to school at Eton, a dreadful place inhabited by gnomes who wear all day the clothes which our little rich boys wear to evening parties, and the hats which our grown-up rich boys wear to the opera. They had a system of child slavery known as “fagging,” and Shelley revolted against it and was tortured. He was a swift, proud spirit, made frantic by the sight or even the thought of tyranny; so sensitive that he swooned at the scent of the flowers in Alpine valleys. He was gifted with a marvelous mind, ravenous for knowledge, and absorbing it at incredible speed.

Continue reading Percy Bysse Shelley — “The Angel of Revolt” — by Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair – Mattson, Arthur, Bachelder — biographies and novel

The Sunkist Utopian

Brenda Wineapple

One hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his gut-churning exposé of the meatpacking industry that schoolchildren still read today in their history classes. A well-merchandized sensation, it sold 100,000 copies in the first year, millions after that, was almost immediately translated into seventeen languages, spurred an uptick in vegetarianism, greased the way for the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug acts, and transformed its 27-year-old Socialist author into a celebrity. Teddy Roosevelt called Sinclair a crackpot but invited him to the White House, and meatpacking magnate J. Ogden Armour offered Frank Doubleday, The Jungle‘s publisher, a huge advertising contract if he would suppress the book….

“Chavez Recruits Chaplin for a Lesson in Revolution”

From the article by Andrew Buncombe: 

Charlie Chaplin’s classic black-and-white movie Modern Times highlighted the exploitation and horrendous conditions faced by US factory workers during the Depression. Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chavez believes it is as relevant today as it ever was.


Charlie Chaplain in ‘Modern Times’

At factories and meeting halls across Caracas, Mr Chavez’s government has been showing the film to workers to expose what he believes are the evils of capitalism, and cement support for his socialist administration.

“I definitely think that what he is doing is to show the workers there what capitalism is about,” said Gregory Wilpert, editor of venezuelanalys.com. “It is to reinforce the socialist ideas that his government has recently been proclaiming.”

Officials said the 1936 silent film starring Chaplin, Paulette Goddard and Henry Bergman, has been shown about 1,000 times since January in 14 different states to educate workers who have little knowledge about their health and safety rights in the workplace. One Venezuelan official said that 1,500 workers died and thousands more were injured annually in factory accidents. One scene in the movie shows Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, being pulled through a huge machine as he seeks to tighten a bolt.

“Once inside the factory, workers had no meaningful rights,” Richard Shickel, a film critic, told The Los Angeles Times. “It was very relevant in the moment it was released, a time of social unrest and the emerging US labour movement.”

In Venezuela, business owners are outraged….

Percy Bysse Shelley – “The Angel of Revolt”

From the conclusion of “The Angel of Revolt” – Chapter 58 in Mammonart by Upton Sinclair:

Shelley died at the age of thirty, drowned in a storm while sailing a boat; and with him perished the finest mind the English race had produced. I make this statement deliberately, knowing the ridicule it will excite; but I ask you, before you decide: take the men of genius of England one by one, wipe out their lives after the age of thirty, and see what you have left. Will you take Shakespeare? You will know him as the author of “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Love’s Labor Lost” and “The Comedy of Errors,” and possibly “Richard III” and some sonnets. Will you take Milton, with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and “Comus” and “Lycidas,” and nothing else? Will you go to the Continent, and take Goethe, who outlived Shelley? What would you think of Goethe if you had only “Goetz” and “Werther” and a few lyric poems?

Shelley was one among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn back to feudalism, Catholicism, or mysticism of any sort. He fixed his eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment. He attacked class privilege, not merely political, but industrial; and so he is the coming poet of labor. Some day, and that not so far off, the strongholds of class greed in Britain will be stormed, and when the liberated workers take up the task of making a new culture, they will learn that there was one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave up everything in life to bring it nearer. They will honor Shelley by making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of English letters.

[Upton Sinclair’s complete Chapter 58 on Shelley.]

Social Activist Photographer, Milton Rogovin

Famed Photographer Leaves Social-Activist Legacy for Son

by Jim Rankin

“Milton Rogovin told his audience at the Met, six years ago, “In the 1950s, when the federal government tried to silence those of us from organizing for the rights of working people, I refused to be silenced. I turned to social-documentary photography as my way of speaking out.”

“He was consciously following in the path of Jacob Riis, a muckraker, pioneering photojournalist and reformer who hoped his photographs would draw attention to deplorable conditions in the tenements of the early 20th century, and Walker Evans, who recorded rural poverty in Appalachia 30 years later.”

 …

“Mark Rogovin inherited his father’s artistic bent and political orientation, if not in all the details. As a young man, he studied with the great Mexican muralist David Siqueiros, in whose homeland it is generally assumed an artist doubles as a social activist.”

Upton Sinclair — Mammonart — Ch. II cont. b. — Who Owns the Artists?

What is art? We shall give a definition, and take the rest of the book to prove it. We hope to prove it both psychologically, by watching the art process at work, and historically, by analyzing the art works of the ages. We assert:

Art is a representation of life, modified by the personality of the artist, for the purpose of modifying other personalities, inciting them to changes of feeling, belief and action.

Continue reading Upton Sinclair — Mammonart — Ch. II cont. b. — Who Owns the Artists?

Upton Sinclair — Mammonart — Ch. II cont. — Who Owns the Artists?

The book purposes to investigate the whole process of art creation, and to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress of mankind. It will attempt to set up new canons in the arts, overturning many of the standards now accepted. A large part of the world’s art treasures will be taken out to the scrap-heap, and a still larger part transferred from the literature shelves to the history shelves of the world’s library.

Since childhood the writer has lived most of his life in the world’s art. For thirty years he has been studying it consciously, and for twenty-five years he has been shaping in his mind the opinions here recorded; testing and revising them by the art-works which he has produced, and by the stream of other men’s work which has flowed through his mind. His decisions are those of a working artist, one who has been willing to experiment and blunder for himself, but who has also made it his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements.

The conclusion to which he has come is that mankind is today under the spell of utterly false conceptions of what art is and should be; of utterly vicious and perverted standards of beauty and dignity. We list six great art lies now prevailing in the world, which this book will discuss:

Continue reading Upton Sinclair — Mammonart — Ch. II cont. — Who Owns the Artists?

Upton Sinclair — Mammonart — Ch. II — Who Owns the Artists?

Many and various are the art-forms which the sons and grandsons of Ogi [first artist] have invented; but of all these forms, the one which bores us most quickly is the parable–a little story made up for the purpose of illustrating a special lesson. Therefore, I hasten to drop Ogi and his sons and grandsons, and to say in plain English that this book is as study of the artist in his relation to the propertied classes. Its thesis is that from the dawn of human history, the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes; entertaining them, making them pleasant to themselves, and teaching their subjects and slaves to stand in awe of them.

Throughout this book the word artist is used, not in the narrow sense popular in America, as  man who paints pictures and illustrates magazines; but in its broad sense, as one who represents life imaginatively by any device, whether picture or statue or poem or song or symphony or opera or drama or novel. It is my intention to study these artists from a point of view so far as I know entirely new; to ask how they get their living, and what they do for it; to turn their pockets inside out, and see what is in them and where it came from; to put to them the question already put to priest and preachers, editors and journalists, college presidents and professors, school superintendents and teachers: WHO OWNS YOU, AND WHY?

The book will present an interpretation of the arts from the point of view of the class struggle. It will study art works as instruments of propaganda and repression, employed by the ruling classes of the community; or as weapons of attack, employed by new classes rising into power. It will study the artists who are recognized and honored by critical authority, and ask to what extent they have been servants of ruling class prestige and instruments of ruling class safety. It will consider also the rebel artists, who have failed to serve their masters, and ask what penalties they have paid for their rebellion.

…

The Establishment Goes To Hell

Or, actually, simply remains there — as guided by Dante and Robert Freeman:

In his book, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante describes successive circles of Hell intended for successively villainous sinners. The higher circles punish only minor sins: gluttony; lust; avarice. The deeper circles are reserved for those who have committed more egregious sins: adultery; usury; betrayal. It is the archetypal rendering of the Medieval taxonomy of Punishment.

Our modern world has its own circles of hell. But, as befits a secular society, our schema is tailored to our modern, secular obsession: money. It is just as surely progressive as Dante’s Inferno in the depths to which the sinner must descend, but, without the moral freighting that only religion can provide, its punishments are clinical, mundane. They bespeak not shades of Eternal Damnation but, rather, the stages of National Decline….

Problems of the North — Learn from the South?

We hear a steady stream of progressives say that progressives need to “learn from the South” where they are having more success at social change — Venezuela, in particular — but much less frequently do we hear what exactly there is to learn; except it is sometimes noted that people are less isolated, and therefore talk to one another more, and therefore are able to facilitate change more — it has become a cliche, however valid.

What often goes unsaid is that a big part of what allows more unity and motivation for change in the South is poverty, also sometimes the church, also sometimes race. One point of fact is that much (though not all) of this does not so much apply to the U.S. where the overarching oppressive structure is managed mainly by people of the majority race, where the church, etc, is often more culturally marginalized than in the South (and anyway faith is dangerous, in my view), and a far smaller percentage of the population is outright poor.

Or take an opposite case in the U.S.: Starr County, Texas — where I lived and worked for 5 years — it’s one of the most impoverished counties in the U.S., some years _the_ most impoverished county, as a measure of per capita income — it’s also almost 98 percent Hispanic (and the Valley in Texas is majority Hispanic) the highest percentage of any U.S. county. Well, a few years ago there was an almost 100 percent vote “yes” in Starr County to approve a 99 million dollar bond issue to expand a small community college branch there and the much larger community college facilities in the neighboring county. About 10 percent of the bond issue went to Starr County, but if not for the Starr vote the entire bond would have failed, because it did fail in the other much larger county that could vote, Hidalgo, where it was/would have been defeated by a push from wealthier sectors. So in Starr County, the scourge of extreme poverty and unemployment apparently motivated the difference in the vote.

And church based efforts in Hidalgo County — notably by Valley Interfaith — have successfully gained living wage laws in the area. Whereas I believe all such efforts have failed in, say, Houston, where New Party and ACORN have made attempts. And so in Hidalgo County, primarily the involvement of Catholic church members in labor politics makes the difference, perhaps along with some other racial/cultural cohesiveness.

With church, and poverty, and racial/cultural unity, you’ve got some effective solidarity and motivation. And that’s a big part of what has facilitated change in this sector of the South in the U.S, and it seems in the larger Latin American South as well.

So what can the bulk of the U.S. learn from this? Sure, _something_ can be learned, and it’s useful to make the effort, but it may be too that progressives in most of the U.S. need to learn most from where they already are, and realize that a lot of what they are doing is what they in fact ought to be doing.

What can progressives learn from the South? Well, probably not that they should seek to increase poverty, increase religion, and increase majority race identification in the North — probably not that they should or could act in the North on what exists moreso in the South.

Sure, progressives have plenty to learn from the South — the importance of effective communication and real economic and political understanding and action, not least — but there are others — e.g., the majority of the people who make up the military and the churches in the U.S. — who have more to both learn and act on in regard to the successes of the South and the reality of the world and their country. First they have to see the state of things for what it is, and then change the repressive and oppressive roles of the powerful institutions that they put much time and energy into.

Unless the military and the church grow out of many of their status quo enforcing and repressive ways – and for that matter unless the schools and universities and the labor force generally do so as well (not to mention the rest of the “liberal” and “conservative” establishment, who, I suppose, along with the police, will be among the last to change, by force) — it’s not clear that any amount of learning by progressives about the South will have widespread decisive effect. The greater poverty of the South gives it more motivation to change, and probably more economic and political consciousness — to an extent.

That seemed to me at least to be the case in Starr County — due to its stark impoverishment, extreme unemployment. But the North at large will have to find other means of motivation for transforming its social and cultural institutions, I think — the threat to the environment, the threat of nuclear war, the “blowback” threat of U.S. militancy….

Sound familiar? In fact, progressives ought to continue a lot of what they are already doing in this regard: pressuring the military, pressuring the churches, challenging their colleagues and the various bureaucracies in the schools and universities and the workplace generally, and working with the electorate and others to create change.