Uncategorized – Page 26 – A Practical Policy

About Tony Kushner as a playwright, debate continues. About Kushner as a human being, the matter is settled. A new documentary, called Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, presents the Jacob who wrestled with angels in America, now doing most of his wrestling with devils. The essence of the film is that this man, with not a touch of evangelistic pomp, cannot conceive of life as anything other than a campaign to improve life.

Freida Lee Mock, an admirably skilled documentarian, followed Kushner from just after 9/11 until the 2004 presidential election. Much of this time was of course spent in or around the theater, but it becomes clear that Kushner believes in his theater work as a source of strength and possibility for other aspects of his life.

Like Bernard Shaw in just this one respect, Kushner takes his playwriting as an enabler. Because of his fame, he is invited to universities and conferences and other public occasions where he speaks. He talks about current politics and its stench, but mostly about ways to live and choose….

Upton Sinclair and The Jungle

Random links to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle on the 100 year anniversary of the book publication of the novel. Links not screened for political quality:

The Ripple Effect
Huffington Post – New York,NY,USA
… Upton Sinclair, who moved to LA and ran for governor (what kind of crazy writer does that?), for showing the power of the pen to change governments. …

Popeye had it right
Boston Globe – United States
… To be sure, the vegetables and fruits and meat we consume today are, overall, vastly safer than the putrid mess that the author Upton Sinclair exposed a …

‘An Inconvenient Truth’
Rockbridge Weekly – Lexington,VA,USA
… There is a great quote by Upton Sinclair on the film’s official web site: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it … “

E. coli hunt exposes gaps in safety system
Miami Herald – FL,USA
… oversight of the rest of the food supply, has changed little since its creation a century ago following publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s expose of …
Best to let bin Laden fade away
Akron Beacon Journal – Akron,OH,USA
… My favorite book so far this year is a novel by Chris Bachelder called US The initials stand for Upton Sinclair, the American socialist writer best known for …
Three influential Americans put heart above brain
Town Hall – Washington,DC,USA
… Henry Ward Beecher, Upton Sinclair, Herbert Matthews: One a late 19th century pastor and orator, the second an early 20th century best-selling novelist, the … Eating Safely in the Jungle
Truth about Trade & Technology – Des Moine,IA,USA
… This year happens to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Jungle, the book by Upton Sinclair that is one of the best-known and most influential …
Don’t Panic Over Spinach
Reason Online – Los Angeles,CA,USA
… In 1900, six years before Upton Sinclair wrote his great muckraking book, The Jungle, about the filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry, the death rate …

Cruel slaughter, JAMES ANDERSON, Concord – Letter
Concord Monitor – Concord,NH,USA
ne hundred years ago, social critic Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece The Jungle exposed the filthy conditions and cruel treatment of animals and workers in Chicago …

Making news on Martha’s Vineyard
Washington Times – Washington,DC,USA
… apologias for the American Institute of Meat Packers, which had been trying for over a decade to recover from the revelations in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

Review: The Jungle A searing indictment of capitalism
Socialist Party – UK
IT IS 100 years ago since the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. His devastating exposé of the meat packing industry …

Hog Hell
Yahoo! News – USA
The Nation — This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. Its depiction of unchecked greed and …

Los Angeles Times
The Register-Guard – Eugene,Oregon,USA
… injustice. Consider the fiction of writers such as John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, what might be called social realism. Today …

Amy Goodman Dinner-Lecture In Los Angeles
PCH Press – Malibu,CA,USA
… carrying the great muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and IF Stone into the electronic age. Goodman …

New war and new judgments
Ottawa Sun – Ontario, Canada
… Noam Chomsky, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, Susan Sontag, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Jean-Paul Sartre: The story of how many intellectuals got it …

Cross River Traffic by Chris Roberts (GRANTA Â£7.99)
Independent – London,England,UK
… shoes wear out. Upton Sinclair was a prolific American author whose work usually advanced a socialist point of view. His most powerful …

Wanted: One hero for the Left
Toronto Star – Ontario, Canada
by Chris Bachelder. What if Upton Sinclair was brought back to life? No, not the author of Babbitt and Main Street that was Sinclair Lewis. …
See all stories on this topic

UPPIE REDUX?
New Yorker – United States
A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out “The Jungle,” a sensationally grim expose of the noisome squalors and …

Faith in spades
Guardian Unlimited – UK
by Chris Bachelder. I’ve never been able to eat a sausage since, at the age of 15, I read Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. …

Freetrade consequences
Diamondback Online – College Park,MD,USA
… if any, breaks. These foreign Third World workers could literally be characters out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Many of these …

Eco-Prisoner Chris McIntosh Interviews Derrick Jensen
Infoshop News – USA
… There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair when he says, “It’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it”…

N. Spencer, After Utopia. The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth …
Fabula – France
… Nicholas Spencer argues that the radical American fiction of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Josephine Herbst reimagines the spatial concerns …

Social and Political Art Article Archives Links

Lee Ballinger What Backlash Against the Dixie Chicks?
Arthur Asiimwe Rwandan president scoffs at “Hotel Rwanda”
Kennedy Johnson How Radio Continues to ‘Dumb Down’ Blacks in Los Angeles [And, one might add, everyone virtually everyplace else.]
Orhan Pamuk Freedom to Write
Tim Harper Hollywood Star Tim Robbins Blasts US Media Ignorance of ‘High Crimes’ in Iraq
Terry Eagleton What Are We? A review of Nation and Novel by Patrick Parrinder
Stephanie Merritt Still a street-fighting man
Kari Lyderson Support Builds for Immigration Protests, Boycott
CONTRATIEMPO Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: 100 Years Later
Ron Jacobs A Review of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun
The Nation Songs of Protest
David Krieger The Courage of Sophie Scholl — Resisting Hitler
Amadou Deme Setting the Record Straight — Hotel Rwanda
Charles Isherwood Is Lefty Finally Showing Up?
Defying Poverty’s Everyday Despair in Odets’s ‘Awake and Sing!’
Dresses Are Fine, but Pajamas Are Divine
Richard Ouzounian Play Pushed Underground: Cancelled in New York, the first Toronto reading of My Name Is Corrie is being held at a secret location
Manohla Dargis ‘Sir! No Sir!’ Salutes Vietnam’s Dissenters in Uniform
Jeff Leeds On His New Album, Neil Young Calls for Bush’s Impeachment
Billy Bragg The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie
download (MP3): The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie
Arthur Asiimwe Rwanda Survivors Say Hollywood Has Got It Wrong
South Park’ aims at censors, hits Bush, Jesus
Claudia Parsons “Stuff Happens” play sears Rumsfeld in New York
Mark Scaramella The Timeless Sarcasm of Mark Twain: When Even God Can’t Keep His Own Commandments [Anderson Valley Advertiser]
Maggie Morgan All Strings Attached
Dave Chappell Talks About His TV Exodus
Billie Cohen Beat Nix
Bob Hoover What Happened Here / Bush Chronicles by Eliot Weinberger — War Critic Uses Administrations Own Words Against It
Tony Christini Orwell’s Problem, and Partisan Fiction [with links]
Thom Hartmann Democracy Be Damned – Republicans Need Another War
Noam Chomsky On Hegemony And Disarmament
Terrence Rafferty Every Nonvote Counts: Seeing, by José Saramago [If link fails, see here]
Gary Levin ‘24′ prez pivots from weasel to evil
Tony Christini The Bush Plan to Abolish America
Alan Maass Week of the Walkouts: Immigration Rights Battle Comes to US Schools [HBO movie called Walkout]
Alexander Cockburn Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?
Jill Lawless ‘Corrie’ Opens in London Instead of N.Y.
Danny Schechter The Fear is in the Room: Inside Our Unbrave Media World
Dave Zirin “Death Row” Talks Back to Etan Thomas
Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer Crash
Dave Saldana A Political Parable With Swordfights [V for Vendetta — film]
Tom Engelhardt An Interview with Chalmers Johnson: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land
Molly Ivins The ‘Long War’? Oh, Goodie
Noam Chomsky Latin America And Asia Are At Last Breaking Free Of Washington’s Grip
Chris Bachelder A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign
Ed Rampell Fear Brings McCarthy, Orwell Back Into Spotlight
Danny Schechter Tony Soprano and Iraq: The Mafia, the Military and the Media
Lila Rajiva Getting to the Point of No Return: A Conversation with Andre Vltchek
Vanessa Redgrave The Second Death of Rachel Corrie: Censorship of the Worst Kind [Also see: Walter A. Davis Theater, Ideology and the Censorship of “My Name is Rachel Corrie”: The Play’s the Thing]
John Scagliotti Why Are There No Real Gays in “Brokeback Mountain”? [Also see: Brokeback Mountain: Pain is Not Enough]
Israelis ask Oscars to drop suicide bomb film
Only politics in Oscar race is films’ topics
Middle East tragedies vie for Oscars
Katherine Viner A Message Crushed Again
Ramzy Baroud Cartoon Awakening: Towards a Positive Media Strategy
UnDantéd Homerica The Criminaliad — Foreword: “An Enlightened Endeavor” by Jo Swift
Julian Borger Rickman slams ‘censorship’ of play about US Gaza activist
Michael Janofsky Bush’s Chat with Novelist Alarms Environmentalists
Corey Kilgannon Street Lit with Publishing Cred
Eleanor Bader Female Muralists Dip Brushes in Women’s History
Garrison Keillor On the Road Avec M. Lévy [If link fails, see here]
John Nichols Cheney’s Crimes
Dave Zirin The Xs and O’s of Social Change
Chris Bachelder The Jungle at 100
National Archives A New Deal for the Arts
The New Deal arts projects
Mark Vallen Abstract Art & The Cultural Cold War [December 29, 2005 entry] For more on this topic see Maxwell Geismar’s comments here at the 1958 and 1977 entries.
One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat Bestselling Indian author paints grim view of outsourcing jobs
Scott McLemee Impure Literature
John Doe Dimslow The Power and The Authority [12.20.05]
David Cromwell and David Edwards Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media
Joe Keohane Public Enemy: Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ envisioned an America in thrall to a homespun facist dictator.
Mark Steel Has An Anti-war Campaign Ever Been So Mainstream?
Larry Beinhart Abdication of the Artists
Lee Siegel Dead Heat: A Horror Movie That Is Also Explicit Political Satire
Davey D The Richard Pryor Tribute Mix
Charlotte Higgins Anti-war Cry of a Peace Mom [Nobel Laureate Dario Fo has written a new play titled Peace Mom.]
Amnesty International Make Some Noise
Sean Wilentz The Rise of Illiterate Democracy
Peter Graff Gallery Traces Anti-Semitism in Political Cartoons
Alexander Cockburn Pinter, Robeson, CIA [below the Miller piece]
Matthew Rothschild Pinter Lays It All Out: Indict Bush, Blair
John Patterson Awakenings [This article obviously greatly overstates any shift in the media, etc.]
John Patterson What’s the Plot
John Patterson Phoney War Movie
Sarah Lyall Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S.
Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn “You Can’t Take Power Without a Struggle” The Lost John Lennon Interview (1971)
Harold Pinter Art, Truth & Politics – Nobel Lecture
The American Prospect Some Political Art Articles:
Richard Byrne The Good Book: The America portrayed by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry…
Scott McLemee The Honorable Menace: The Literary Life – James T. Farrell…
Alex P. Kellogg Tupac Against the World [Tupak Shakur]
Julie Ardery Art and Fellowship
Tony Christini Partisan Fiction
Grady Hendrix Zombies Attack George Bush – Joe Dante’s Brilliant Anti-war Horror Show
Michael Bérubé “Die Hard” Diehard Catching Flak for Epic Iraq Flick [note the date]
The Masses – cover – June 1916 Covers from The Masses – 1913 -1917
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman All Things Bright and Beautiful
Chomsky/Herman/DiMaggio Q/A on the Iraq War
Bob Hoover NEA Urges Bee Season For Poetry
John Freeman ‘Beasts With No Nation’ by Uzodinma Iweala
Nathan Lee Two Young Radicals and Their Dovetailing Destinies — Exist: Not a Protest Film
Gary Hart “Terrorism Expert….” – The Scorpion’s Gate
Michiku Kakutani The Scorpion’s Gate
Paul Street Antonio Gramsci on Sesame Street
Lee Siegel “Better Than Fiction” – The Boondocks
Alan Riding In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years
Lakshmi Choudry When Boys Will Be Jarheads
Reporters Without Borders Editor of Literary Review Gets Three Years in Prison
Henry Chu Home Is Also a Public Library: Illiterate Man Seeks Books So Poor Can Read
David Twiddy Doonesbury Still Feisty After 35 Years [Garry Trudeau]
Cate McQuaid Art Gets Angry
Alessandra Stanley Engrossed in a World of Political Idealism [so-called]
Agence France Press Ten Years On, Nigeria’s Ogoni Minority Community Mark Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Death
Bibliofile at Outlook India Fiction Too Subversive [Also see Barthes quote on the power of fiction, here]
Alessandra Stanley Two Fictional Families, Neither Colorblind, but Only One Really Sees Black America
Noah Cicero Interviewed by Tao Lin
Jonah Raskin Howl at FiftyJulia Stein Death of a Poet: Carol Tarlen (1943-2004)
Alessandra Stanley Bringing Out the Absurdity of the News
Alessandra Stanley Selling Sex, That Renewable Resource [TV review – Human Traficking]
Anthony Breznican Movies Sound A Call To Action
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe Poetry as Resistance
Rajiv Rawat The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Paday
David Barsamian interviewed by Kasim Tirmizey Media and Propaganda
John Pilger The Silence of Writers: On Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter
Katrina vanden Heuvel Innocent Voices
Salman Rushdie Europe, Turkey, the EU, Orhan Pamuk
Tony Christini Write a Political Novel?
Harold Pinter Torture and Misery in the Name of Freedom
Stephen Brown Playwright Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Literature Prize
Timothy Williams British Playwright – Harold Pinter – Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
Margaret Atwood On Flogging Poets and Catching Fish – Freedom of Expression
[see also an excerpt of George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” – or Orwell’s full essay here]
Lee Siegel Rock in a Hard Place
Stuart Jeffries “I do give a damn” (David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré)
Laila Lalami (Moorish Girl) Fiction in the Age of Poverty
Mark Vallen What’s Left? Who’s Left? [9-23-2005 entry]
Caryn James Turning African Danger Into Safe Entertainment
Sharon Olds No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame
Les Payne Our Modern-Day Grapes of Wrath
Bob Hoover Upton Sinclair – The Jungle
Bury the Dead – Artists and Theater Against the War in Iraq
Adam Graham-Silverman “Drug Abuse: The Constant Gardner and Drug Companies”
A. O. Scott Digging Up the Truth in a Heart of Darkness
Brendan Coyne Political Art Removed from California Display
Dan Halpern Lone Star: Kinky Friedman on the Campaign Trail
Dudley Cocke Art in a Democracy
Vijay Prashad Every Generation Does Not Get Its 1968

___________________

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

A recent “political novel” making the news, and sales — sounds somewhat reminiscent of, among other apocalyptic novels, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and James Morrow’s This is the Way the World Ends. Review excerpted below — “The Master of Entropy Shows What Could Happen If We Go On” by Joan Mellen:

The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

Nuclear holocaust has reduced the world to ash and rubble. A man and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” trek without purpose down a road to nowhere in death-defying starvation. Along the way, they pass renegades barbecuing their infants. There is no plot to Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing, brilliant new novel, a worthy successor to his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, because human history has drawn to a close.

The Road at times resembles Robinson Crusoe. The man reveals a profusion of ingenuity, siphoning drops of gasoline, digging deep into the burrows of an abandoned survival shelter for precious stores of food, even suturing his own deep, bloody wound inflicted by a sniper….

In The Road, McCarthy has produced the first major post-9/11 novel. He has revealed himself not to be writing an allegory, an abstract story about the consequences of human evil, but a political novel. Ignoring how this holocaust happened – it doesn’t matter – he reveals the likely result of the history we are living, and the politics of accepting passively the premises of a warrior government out of control.

The horrific images of suffering for which McCarthy has long been known have now been enlisted in the service of defiance….

In this Swiftian nightmare, horror proposes its reverse, protecting the soon-to-be “vanished world” as the father cares tenderly for his son….

National Book Festival

Mainstay Press wasn’t invited either.

Elmo Will Not Absolve You

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman:

Party tents are going up.

Getting ready for the National Book Festival on Saturday.

Hosted by the Library of Congress.

Buzzflash Review of John Le Carre

Buzzflash reviews a John Le Carre spy novel:

“John Le Carre is the master spy novelist with a social conscience. Few popular writers have the ability to convey the complex scenarios and nuanced morality of the world that the protagonists Le Carre creates populate.”

Arundhati Roy, Literature, Social Change

A great editorial on the power of fiction, including great literature, to contribute to social change:

Watch out for poetic justice

Hindustan Times Editorial

Is good literature just a story well told or verse set in perfect meter? Forget what critics may opine, the French police of the 19th century seem to have been possessed of more valuable judgment regarding the ‘real’ influence of literary writers. Nineteenth-century Paris police files, recently published in the form of a book, The Writers’ Police, reveal that many of the greatest writers living in the city at that time of turmoil and change in European history were kept under surveillance. Obviously, their vigilance did not stem out of fear of Arthur Rimbaud influencing a new Paris fashion of unkempt hair or of the unconventionality of Paul Verlaine’s love life.

The works of writers like Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac and Charles Dickens tended to be more in the line of a social commentary. From raging at the shallowness of the aristocracy to focusing attention on poverty and discrimination, fiction for the masses turned out to be a sharp political blade that hit the right places and became catalysts of change.

The influence they could sometimes exert can be gauged by US President Abraham Lincoln’s statement to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great [American civil] war.” Campaigner-for-changing-this-big-bad-world Arundhati Roy might now consider writing her second novel.

John Pilger on the Impact of Documentaries and Other Films — and John Pilger film festival

The great John Pilger, “Truth shall set us free” —

“There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Alan Francovich achieved this. Francovitch, who died in 1997 , made The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie. THIS destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting “mule”, with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot’s parallel investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion). The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the United States. In this country, the threat of legal action from a US Government official prevented showings at the 1994 London Film Festival and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.”

Fiction, Art, and Change — Impact and Effect, and Aesthetic

Great article on the impact and effect of fiction and other arts — a view of aesthetics and social change: “How We Deal with Disease” by Iman Kurdi —

“We learnt much more from seeing Mark Fowler on our screens every week than from reading hundreds of leaflets or seeing a public information film. Partly this is because when we are entertained, we are stimulated and this makes us more open to respond to what we are shown. Good fiction leads us to respond both emotionally and intellectually; there is a sense of intimacy. Particularly in long-running fiction like a soap opera, we feel involved, we don’t feel informed: We understand.

“Fiction is undoubtedly powerful in conveying a message to its audience.”

Ken Loach and Boycott

Standout British filmmaker joins boycott of Israel

(Daily Star staff)

Ken Loach, the critically acclaimed British filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has lent his support to the cultural boycott of Israel, according to a personal statement issued late last week….

Loach won the Palme d’Or for “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” set in the Irish War for Independence. He is one of the UK’s most controversial directors, in no small part because he is a die-hard leftist. Previous films include “My Name is Joe,” “Bread and Roses,” “Hidden Agenda” (which examined the British government’s “shoot to kill” policy during its troubles with the IRA) and “Land and Freedom” (which explored the political rhetoric at play during the Spanish Civil War and offers probably as complex and critical an insight into notions of resistance as Jean-Luc Godards’ “Ici et Ailleurs,” about Palestinian fighters in the early 1970s) “Hidden Agenda” and “Land and Freedom” won smaller awards at Cannes.

fiction and social justice

Nouvo Noir: Mystery and detective fiction is increasingly concerned not just with solving the crime, but with digging into the injustices of society

By Anne-Marie O’Connor

Once upon a time, American popular fiction was full of stories of social inequality and great injustice. Consider the fiction of writers such as John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, what might be called social realism.

Today, such themes may be less common in mainstream best-sellers, but they are alive in well in popular genre fiction – especially in the areas of crime fiction and mystery….

Making It Real — Lessons for Art

Dahr Jamail interviews Ray McGovern:

I like to refer to what my four-year-old granddaughter said when she saw me on TV. When it was all over she went to my daughter and said, “Mommy, that was grandpa. That means the other people are real too.” Now, that’s sort of cute on the surface, but think about what that means. If you don’t know someone in the picture, the other people aren’t real too. And we’re deprived even of the pictures of the carnage that’s going on in Iraq, and now in Lebanon. And we have to fess up to that and realize that unless we get our hearts involved in this, as well as our minds, we’re not going to be able to stand up and do our duty as American patriots and face down this situation and say to our government, “Enough. Enough. No more carnage. Bring our troops home from Iraq. And reign in this Israeli government that is using your helicopter gun ships, your fighter-bombers, your tanks, etc.”

Upton Sinclair and Chris Bachelder

Brief overview of Upton Sinclair’s life and work.

Ryan Bigge reviews US!

Jay Parini reviews US! — “a lark of a novel” by Chris Bachelder:

“Sinclair was the ultimate muckraker, the scourge of capitalists and greedy politicians, and a vibrant man of the left, when there was a left. Now he’s at the centre of a larky novel by Chris Bachelder. With his first novel, the inimitable Bear v Shark, Bachelder stepped unabashedly into the limelight, full of postmodern pizzazz. He has put his cleverness, and his unusual narrative skills, to good use in US! – a romp of a book (the word “novel” almost doesn’t stretch to include such a work) in which the great muckraker comes alive, again and again, dug up by his admirers, who need him desperately. Alas, he is assassinated again, too – over and over.”

“Indian” Mascots

“In Renewed Fight, ‘Redskins’ Refuse to Change Offensive Name” — by Catherine Komp

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.

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.”

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….

Category: Uncategorized

Documentary on Tony Kushner — Wrestling with Angels — Art to Improve Life