The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Fiction

As I note in The Reactionary Ayn Rand, she favored a dictatorship of wealth in her life and work, not least in her two main novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (originally, ironically, titled The Strike):

Rand’s [ostensibly] irreproachable characters take their principled stands against adult corruptions of various sorts…but also ultimately on behalf of the anti-democratic rule of wealth – entirely reminiscent of the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay: “Those who own the country, ought to govern it.”

So Rand’s false either-or choice is this: choose life or death; righteousness or immorality: an ideal benevolent dictatorship of wealth or an inevitably fatally corrupt democracy. She attacks an indefensibly corrupt elite on behalf of a nonexistent elite whose closest manifestation in reality is another version of an indefensibly corrupt elite. Totalitarian ostensibly benevolent corporate elite rule versus totalitarian malign governmental elite rule. The choice is as false as could be, of course, but Rand presents the former as freedom and goodness, and the latter as slavery and rot by way of psychological comparisons that often resonate strongly with youth sick of being governed by often highly imperfect, and in fact highly unprincipled, school and family and religious structures, and who also may see big corporate money as a key to freedom.

Rand is symptomatic and emblematic of the current diseased socio-political structure – an understanding that totally eludes everyone involved with the article below.

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism

By Harriet Rubin

New York Times

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. (“Winning,” by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

One of Rand’s most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

Rand’s free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father’s pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, “King of Kings.”

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of “The Fountainhead” began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”

Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr. Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Rand called “Atlas” a mystery, “not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder — and rebirth — of man’s spirit.” It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world without them.”

The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of “greed is good.” Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”

Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore’s honor. “As a woman and a Southerner,” she said, “I thrived on Rand’s message that only quality work counted, not who you are.”

Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas” at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.” He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he said, “that excellence should be your goal.”

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand’s ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.

Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Mr. Stack says, he took action like a hero out of “Atlas.” He created an “open book” company in which employees were transparently working in their own interest.

 Mr. Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Mr. Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Mr. Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in “Atlas”: people guided by reason and self-interest.

“There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out,” Mr. Stack said. “You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity.” He said he defied them. “ ‘Atlas’ helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC.”

Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. “It’s the best business book I ever read,” he said. “I didn’t do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that’s an eye opener.”

Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.”

Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.

In Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software for supply chain companies like Tastykake. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

“We were reading the book,” she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. “For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people. John Galt took all the great minds and started a new society.

“Some of our customers don’t know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book,” she went on. “Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: ‘Hey, where is John Galt? How come I’m not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?’ ” 

K-Ville

Jordan Flaherty: 

Next Monday the Fox network presents a new television show called K-Ville.  Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the show promises to highlight the heroism of New Orleans cops.  Unfortunately, the true story of policing in New Orleans is unlikely to be told by Fox, or by anyone in the corporate media.

…

Tommy Lee Jones – Citizen

 From “When the War Comes to the Home Front“:

…on Hollywood’s ability to sway public opinion and its right to ask provocative questions, he is resolute.

“Cinema has as much reason to deal with politics as literature does. Or theater. Or the editorial page of your local newspaper,” the gravelly voiced actor says on the phone from a Beverly Hills hotel.

Interview with Anthony Breznican: 

In an unusually blunt conversation, Jones is at once defiant, passionate and eloquent, although his legendary status as one of Hollywood’s hardest interviews is deserved. He is not quick to open up.

Could In the Valley of Elah be set against the backdrop of any war?

“In part, but not entirely,” Jones says without elaboration.

What is it, then, about Iraq that makes it specific to this story?

Jones takes a breath. And then, it finally happens. He makes a long, slow series of statements that few politicians of either major party would speak so directly.

“There are many questions raised by the movie, but they all boil down to one big question, and that’s the big question in front of everybody in the country,” he says, his eyes hard. “It’s inescapable. It makes no sense to talk around it or avoid talking about it …

“That question is: To what extent are you engaged in a fraudulent war, you as an American citizen?”

The thought hangs there, daring for an attempted answer. Jones forges even further: “The other questions fall right behind it. To what extent was al-Qaeda embedded in Saddam Hussein’s government before we invaded? To what extent did the Hussein government’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction pose a threat to your freedoms? … How prepared was our army for that invasion? … Was there a good plan of what to do once we inevitably defeated them militarily? … Were our soldiers sufficiently equipped? …Was that a wise choice, to wage that war?”

His statements are punctuated with heavy pauses. He is tempting vilification by those still in lock-step with the White House, and he knows it. But he doesn’t stop.

“And coming around full circle, to the original question: To what extent was it a fraudulent enterprise?” he says.

There is no blame, no vitriol against President Bush or other politicians. He speaks of respect for the troops, who were sent on orders, and says we all have to evaluate our personal responsibility for why.

“You have to ask yourself that. There are good reasons to ask yourself that. And if you can’t ask yourself that, in the face of these children coming home in various states of disrepair — young women with one of her legs blown off, young men with their faces burned off — in the face of who-knows-how-many dead Iraqi schoolchildren and wives and old people … if you can’t ask yourself those questions, you’re not paying attention.”

Jones doesn’t offer his own answers. “In the political world, the only position I have is voter. I’m not a spokesman for anything,” he says. “If you want to know about my politics, the only way to do that is to look at my work.”

From his Oscar-winning role in The Fugitive to the military men he has played in Rolling Thunder and Rules of Engagement, and even the cowboys in Lonesome Dove and his own 2005 feature directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Jones has explored men who are both devoted to authority but wrestling with doubts.

He continues that in Elah as well as the upcoming Coen brothers film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men, playing a world-weary sheriff chasing a killer.

A movie such as Elah doesn’t pay anything close to a Men in Black salary, but shining a light on the unseen grief of military families is why Jones took the risk.

“I liked the movie for having a realistic outlook on matters of the heart,” he says.

Asked if patriotism is a matter of the heart, he narrows his eyes. “Yeah,” he growls.

“But often it would be better suited as a matter of the mind.”

Plutocracy

Reprinted for the first time after 117 years, a couple years after this review drafted.

The Fate of Plutocracy
And the Future of Epic Imaginative Writing

I. An American Epic Disappeared

Over a century before former U.S. president Jimmy Carter tried his hand at a (historical) novel, another national political figure from Georgia, Thomas Manson Norwood wrote a “politico-social” novel titled Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery, a lost work of literature, which, despite egregious flaws, should be considered an important epic of American imaginative writing.[1] Part classic Victorian novel, part satiric epic, this literary hybrid has long since been forgotten1 even though both the literary reach and cultural relevance of Plutocracy is comparable to other major American (U.S.) imaginative works of any era, including major works of its own time, such as Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Scarlet Letter.

It seems likely that Plutocracy has disappeared from history largely due to cultural and political factors that are neither necessarily surprising nor difficult to understand, which may in part be indicated by the novel’s full title: Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery. The complete disappearance of a major American work of the imagination by a U.S. statesman from not only literature and literary history but also from nearly all historical record likely indicates that there are considerably deeper social and cultural forces and prejudices than, for example, the entrenched racism and sexism operating in the United States. Though racism and sexism are of course powerful forms of chauvinism, institutionalized and otherwise, that have contributed to the burial of highly accomplished African-American literary works – such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God – and works by women generally – including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening – it seems that even more fundamental forces such as economic chauvinism, or some combination of economic and class prejudice, along with American (U.S.) nationalism have acted to essentially blank Plutocracy from history.[2]

Continue reading Plutocracy

The Petraeus Report

Or is it The Petraeus Plan to Abolish America and Iraq? 

As I view it, this satire re-post gets to the heart of the report to Congress that General Petraeus is presenting today.

General David Petraeus, current commander of the US occupation of Iraq, reported today, in what he terms a “nuanced” account, that exactly one half of Iraq is “shot to hell” but that the other half is “just fine and dandy” — give or take a few disagreeable conditions which Iraqis will just have to get used to, like massive truck bombs, car bombs, Air Force assaults, general firefights, and other slaughter.

Apparently given the “no go” is the remarkably popular suggestion of US troops that members of Congress and the Bush Administration (who have caused, allowed, or funded even a single day of the war) be required during every government recess and half of all other work days to drive bright yellow Volkswagen Bugs around the most dangerous roads in Iraq to find and defuse Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Reportedly General Petraeus initially considered the plan, then shelved it, for now, as being too dependent on government employees for work that could otherwise, PR considerations aside, be outsourced to the tens of thousands of lucky corporate hires currently overruning Iraq. Petraeus again characterized his decision as “nuanced.” He foolly believes he is doing the right thing. Thus far, it must be said, there has been no independent confirmation of the “nuance” that Petraeus is executing in Iraq — but the real situation seems clear. As Petraeus noted, “Iraq is going to have to learn…to live with…sensational attacks.” To the General, “living” is apparently a rather unsensational, “nuanced” thing.

The Pentagon and major media confirm the much desired “nuance” of the Petraeus account and efforts, and say Petraeus would know how to win Iraq if anyone does (which, off the record, sources deep in the Pentagon are said to doubt, utterly, actually), and that Petraeus is just the man for the job, having survived full frontal live-fire gunshot during training in 1991, before being operated on by former surgeon and current warhawk Senator Bill Frist. “Petraeus is the man” the Pentagon says — after all, here is a guy who survived a parachute malfunction a mere few years ago, suffering only a broken pelvis. If this guy doesn’t know how to survive disaster, who does? (Well, of course, there’s that plucky 78 year-old Texas lawyer who the (full of) Vice President Dick Cheney shot in the heart and face while drinking beer and hunting little fowl in Texas last year — but that’s another story.)

Former embedded reporters confirm, Petraeus is the man who repeatedly asked them before and after the 2003 thunder run into Baghdad, “Tell me where this ends.” At the moment, it seems clear, it ends where it all began with President Bush, Congress, the Military Industrial Complex, and now General Petraeus – all of whom claim to be directed by “the troops” who, it is said, keep asking for more funds than the current half a trillion US tax dollars so they can keep going on “Living the Dream!” — slaughtering and being slaughtered in balmy Iraq.

Meanwhile, reportedly, chants of “General Betraeus, General Betraeus” have been heard echoing from all across Iraq and the US, apparently by US soldiers and citizens alike who have yet to see the wisdom in the General’s “nuance.”

Military Families Against The War and other dissident groups, it is reported, have drawn a line in the sand. They claim, “Rearranging Generalships in Iraq is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic – after it sunk.” Anti-militancy groups have been heard to wonder, even while marching forth, “When in the hell is everyone going to get a grip and do what ought to be done? Out now. Reparations. Slash the military budget. Praise the sane and take a pass on the ‘nuance’.”

“‘Resign’ is not in my vocabulary,” General Petraeus has been heard to remark, categorically. Though in the future, ”book deal” may be. Whatever the future. If.

At last word, General Petraeus has not recently been shot in the chest, nor broken his hip, nor been blown into bloody little pieces by an IED, and, by all nuanced accounts, is still alive – as is the United States’ little ”Forever War” in Iraq, and elsewhere.

Jason Bourne and James Bond – How Different is Mr. Amnesia from 007?

From Counterpunch: Two Very Different Kinds of Spy Movies???

May well be as Allen and D’Amato claim, but do the Bourne movies go only so far as exchanging rather toxic calories for mainly empty calories, however thrilling?

Continue reading Jason Bourne and James Bond – How Different is Mr. Amnesia from 007?

Will the US Attack Iran?

Noam Chomsky, from Counterpunch:

I was quite sceptical. Less so over the years. [The Bush Administration is] desperate. Everything they touch is in ruins. They’re even in danger of losing control over Middle Eastern oil — to China, the topic that’s rarely discussed but is on every planner or corporation exec’s mind, if they’re sane. Iran already has observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — from which the US was pointedly excluded. Chinese trade with Saudi Arabia, even military sales, is growing fast. With the Bush administration in danger of losing Shiite Iraq, where most of the oil is (and most Saudi oil in regions with a harshly oppressed Shiite population), they may be in real trouble.

Under these circumstances, they’re unpredictable. They might go for broke, and hope they can salvage something from the wreckage. If they do bomb, I suspect it will be accompanied by a ground assault in Khuzestan, near the Gulf, where the oil is (and an Arab population — there already is an Ahwazi liberation front, probably organized by the CIA, which the US can “defend” from the evil Persians), and then they can bomb the rest of the country to rubble. And show who’s boss.

The Osama bin Laden Plan to Abolish America

First, Found al-Qaeda. Second, Bomb America. Third, Use the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to recruit new members. Fourth, Trust the US invaders to guard the oil ministry but not the ammunition dumps during the invasion of Iraq. Fifth, Loot the ammunition dumps at will. Sixth, Trust the US invaders to destroy the security and civilian infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan. Seventh, Attack US forces “over there.” Eighth, In the meantime, train the many new recruits to attack the US “over here.” Ninth, Silently applaud the DemReps as their occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan provides a steady stream of new recruits to “the cause.” Tenth, Marvel at the recruiters paradise provided by the DemReps.

 In the meantime, people all across America ask, Who is the US Administration and Congress actually working for – bin Laden or us? That laughter – it’s bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

___________________________________________________

[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish America and Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

Governmental Fiction

 From a couple years back at the National Review, but worth noting today:

In the novel Chain of Command, Caspar Weinberger and his co-author Peter Schweizer spin their message into the twisting tale of an attempted coup d’état executed by right-wing hardliners at the highest levels of the American government. The conspirators are motivated by the urge to wage what they see as an appropriately aggressive war on terrorism at home and abroad — a goal they believe they can achieve only by deploying military “security forces” into American cities and refashioning the government into a quasi-dictatorship.

Such a plot raises questions that, in today’s political climate, might seem surprising coming from a conservative author. But historically, conservatives have always been concerned with the power of the federal government and its potential for abuse. In an interview, Weinberger suggested that Americans would do well not to lose sight of this concern.

Also: On “conservative fiction” at the Literary Saloon.

Impact of Literary Criticism and Reviews

Book reviewer John Freeman writes in “Our Work, In Perspective“:

“…disappeared [are] the names of so many of the critics who described and depicted Kerouac’s literary journey into the world (and into bookstores). It’s a sobering lesson for a book critic. In the end, no matter how much we write about a book today, it — and usually it alone — will be creating the imaginary landscape we live in tomorrow.” 

On the contrary, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of literary criticism and reviews. The reactionary and status quo forces in the US and elsewhere surely don’t think that way. And for good reason. Criticism and reviews can make and break imaginative writing. Look at the history of the critical reception and its importance to the fate of the writing of, say, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston, and even William Faulkner, and many others. 

 

Both fiction and criticism can seriously affect culture and society. Pakistan has banned all fiction from India, apparently because it fears its private and public transformative power. Pakistan allows some forms of nonfiction but literary criticism and reviews are not among those. 

 

As Michael Hanne notes in his careful study, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change: 

 

“Storytelling, it must be recognized from the start, is always associated with the exercise, in one sense or another, of power, of control. This is true of even the commonest and apparently most innocent form of storytelling in which we engage: that almost continuous internal narrative monologue which everyone maintains, sliding from memory, to imaginative reworking of past events, to fantasizing about the future, to daydreaming…. It is a curious thing that, in the liberal democracies, the word ‘power’ is used more frequently than any other by publishers and reviewers to indicate, and invite, approval of a work of narrative fiction…. This flooding of popular critical discourse with the term ‘power’ does not, of course, indicate a widespread belief in the capacity of narrative fiction to ‘change the world.’ The use of ‘power’…indicates little more than approval of the novel’s capacity to involve and move the individual reader emotionally. Indeed the term is so devalued as to imply a denial that narrative fiction can exercise power in a wider social and political sense…. Power, as is usual in a liberal democracy, is treated as individual and unproblematic, rather than collective, structural, and problematic. 

 

“Two important corollaries follow from this: a) there is no public acknowledgement that literature plays a role in the maintenance of existing power structures and b) literature is seen as incapable of playing a seriously disruptive role within such a society…. If, in a liberal democracy, a piece of imaginative writing seeks or achieves social or political influence that goes beyond such a limited conception of its proper power, it must either be nonliterature masquerading as literature or a literary work being manipulated and misused for nonliterary, propagandistic purposes…. In overtly authoritarian states whose form of government does not rely on liberal bourgeois conceptions of constitutionality, such as Russia under the Tsars or the Soviet Union under Stalin, these assumptions are entirely reversed. Literature is required, by a combination of censorship and patronage, to contribute to the maintenance of power as constituted at the time. The government’s insistence on retaining tight control over what is written and published reflects the belief, which is most often shared by the regime’s opponents, that fictional writing possesses an extreme potential for disruption.” 

 

“…narrative fiction, in certain circumstances, plays a central role in the lives and political thinking of ordinary people…”

 

The same surely holds both directly and indirectly for criticism and reviews. 

 

It’s also evident that to great though varying degrees in both types of society, “Literature is required, by a combination of censorship and patronage, to contribute to the maintenance of power as constituted at the time.” 

It’s often done unconsciously in the more democratic societies, though far from always, as a number of progressive-minded literary critics and imaginative writers – and reviewers, no doubt – over these many years can attest.

The Bush Plan to Abolish America

President Bush announced today that he expects to find a congressional sponsor for a bill that would abolish Congress as it is currently known. The Old Congress would be replaced by the New Congress which would consist of two and only two Senators, one from the North and one from the South, and three and only three Representatives — one from the North and one from the South and one from the Middle of the country, to break ties. In the Senate, per tradition, the (full of) Vice President would continue to break any tie between the two new Senators.

The President feels sure that such a duly elected and duly simplified Congress will be able to vastly reduce unseemly partisanship while greatly increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. “The people are tired of PR,” the President said. “They are sick and tired of political races and Congressional bickering. Let’s end this failed experiment in democracy now. Let’s give them what is good for the country.”

The Administration’s Press Secretary denied that the Bush Plan, as the proposal has come to be known, has anything to do with the persistent rock bottom approval ratings of either the President or Congress. “No matter how popular the President may be or may not be he still wants to get rid of Congress,” said the Press Secretary, in what is widely seen as a rare moment of candor.

Republican legislators, in the name of cutting government spending, seem to be generally for the plan. In any event, there are rumors that each Congressional seat will be privatized, transformed into independent lobbying corporations. Democrats have said they are inclined to go along with the plan so as not to appear partisan. “Plus,” one leading congressional Democrat concluded, “if the plan fails and the country turns into a total right-wing fascist dictatorship, we will all know who is to blame.”

There have been some murmurs in corporate circles that such a plan may be seen as unconstitutional by some, but there is every expectation that the newest Supreme Court justices Alito and Roberts will decide in the President’s favor. “Besides,” one of the old Supreme Court justices has been overheard to say, “we brought the Good Ol’ Boy King into power, and we can damn well keep him there.”

At this point, the rest of the country has not been heard from.

Stocks are way up on word of the potential congressional realignment, and President Bush was photographed at his ranch in Texas, giving his by now customary thumbs up to visitors Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cheney — and all the regular Cabinet gang. Meanwhile, a few miles down the road Cindy Sheehan was being told where to go by a Presidential security detail as Sheehan and supporters were setting up camp again to protest the President’s war and to honor her son Casey, killed in action in Iraq. At last word, Sheehan and the camp appeared to be driving in tent poles and otherwise digging in for the night.

___________________________

[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish America and Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

Reviewing Scott’s Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes

By Seth Sandronsky 

[Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes By Jonathan Scott ( Columbia , University of Missouri Press, 2006), 272 pp. Hardcover, $39.95.]

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a great American poet. But he did not stop there. Jonathan Scott’s new Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes helps us to take pleasure in his originality and productivity.

“I’ve been obsessed by the relation between the individual and the collective,” writes Scott, a Detroit native who teaches English in Jerusalem. To this end, he illuminates Hughes’ patterns of poetry and prose as organic ingredients of social actions in the United States and abroad at that time in history. Our repressive era lacks a similar writer or politics.

Scott’s book has four parts. Part one looks at Hughes and his work on African-American culture that sees society from a unique point of view informed by a daily struggle for justice. This vision, Scott writes, also is open to unity with others who labor for a living.

For instance, in the body of literature that Hughes produced, the blues constituted a culture that was more than art by, of and for blacks. Rather, the blues were a canvas for the lives of oppressed working people of all hues, voicing a socialist joy of potential human liberation.

“I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you,” wrote Hughes as a 20-something, “for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife and cut the world in two and see what worms are eating at the rind.”

Hughes’ essays and poems placed daughters and sons of former slaves within a mass of wage earners bridled by the time clock and the workplace. Both restricted their full abilities. Readers here and abroad responded to Hughes’ emancipatory writing, but mainstream critics were cold to his literary flair. In part two, Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban national poet, had a different reaction. He and Hughes met in 1930. Their union helped Guillén create new forms of popular poetry for Cubans who were struggling to free themselves from Western colonialism.

In part three, Scott turns to Hughes’ journalism from the 1940s to the 1960s, “his most popular literary innovation since his blues poems of the 1920s and 1930s.” In the Chicago Defender, a black-owned paper, Hughes penned “Here to Yonder,” a column with a main character named Jesse B. Simple. He spoke with Hughes and other blacks about current events, including class conflict among and between them, while rejecting their shared second-rate citizenship. Readers loved this column, a community talking book. In it, Hughes seeded a transformative dialogue about the living and working conditions of regular women and men. As a columnist, Hughes urged social equality “through the popular language of the African-American laborer,” Scott notes. This message was loud and clear in the Civil Rights movement.

In part four, we read about Hughes, a pioneering author of children’s literature. This, like his journalistic efforts, attracted new readers. The First Book of Rhythms flowed from his time as a writing teacher for Chicago students in the eighth grade. Hughes emphasized their use of drawing to describe movement, a process which has animated the natural world from the days of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

“Hughes’ method is an ingenious way of getting students to think in terms of the rhythms of prose writing; of lyrical flow; of word sequences, transitions, cadences and caesuras,” Scott writes.

“Already there is the room to start and stop as suits the writer, but in a disciplined, rhythmized way.” The connections between listening, seeing and writing blossomed in Hughes’s able hands. Parents and classroom teachers of middle and high-school students, take note!

Currently, Hughes has a larger stature outside the United States than inside of it. Here, he is largely a writer studied during Black History Month and otherwise ignored. That is a shame and a trend to end. Scott’s book may be a move in that direction.

This is a ZNet Commentary, a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet. To learn more consult ZNet.

The New York Times Plan to Abolish America

The national “newspaper of record,” The New York Times – trailing in circulation only USA Today and The Wall Street Journal among US dailies – has today announced a change for the first time in 110 years to its official slogan, which will no longer be “All The News That’s Fit To Print” but instead the more fitting “All The News That’s Unfit To Print.” Does it matter that they are using invisible ink? Oh, well.

Of course they don’t mean it, except in how they do.

The Times has at last recognized the reality that media watch groups and others have been pointing out for years:

“…by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict – in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society.”

In other words, The Times lies. They falsify. They spin.

But now, either in long overdue recognition of its own sordid reality, or to protect themselves from being tried for constant contributions to countless Crimes Against Humanity, The Times has decided to change their venerable slogan by the addition of a single pronoun to use the glorious word: Unfit.

By this brilliant stratagem, to the best we are able to determine, The Times hopes to be able to claim that any deceitful accounts it may be brought to trial for can be recontextualized in the eyes of a criminal tribunal as being ironic. Or nuanced. The Times hopes to argue that not only are they the national paper of record but that they are also the national paper of irony, and satiric artifice – and thus truthful by way of literal inversion, and other ironic forms of play.

Iraq wasn’t really armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq wasn’t really any great threat to the US, as the paper reported in relentless detail, thus helping lead the US into its criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Times was only joking – or so it hopes to be able to argue should the legal need arise. The Times was only poking fun at the ludicrous claims coming from the US administration and Congress and every major corporate media outlet. The Times was being satiric, or simply ironic at least – printing all the news that’s unfit to print – which the Times is now helpfully clarifying by changing its slogan for the first time in over a century.  

Some observers have suggested that the Times would do better to keep the old slogan and, instead, change the bulk of its news reporting. The Times dismissed this notion out of hand as “Unthinkable. We are in no way set up for that.”

Which is in fact accurate. As with other corporate media, the majority of the New York Times funding comes not from subscribers or viewers but from corporate advertisers, who would flee in an instant if the Times changed anything but their slogan.

Thus, all in all, the Times’ decision to change its slogan to “All The News That’s Unfit To Print” is irreproachable. The Times’ decision is being hailed in numerous circles of wealth and power as “the latest indicator of what a highly advanced society we are.”

Good thing then that we invaded Iraq, after all. Soon – if those incredibly stubborn Iraqis would just stop setting off those pesky car bombs – they will come to think and act in an ever more civil manner, like us. 

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

Brother, I’m Dying – by Edwidge Danticat

reviewed by Michiko Kakutani

In “Brother, I’m Dying,” Ms. Danticat brings the lyric language and emotional clarity of her remarkable 2004 novel “The Dew Breaker” to bear on the story of her own family, a story which, like so much of her fiction, embodies the painful legacy of Haiti’s violent history, demonstrating the myriad ways in which the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect in the lives of that country’s citizens and exiles.

Radical Novel in the US: 1900-1954

Comprehensive overview by Paul Garon of the Radical Novel in the first half of the twentieth century, based on Walter B. Rideout’s book, The Radical Novel in the United States:

[Rideout] defined the radical novel as “one which demonstrates, either explicitly or implicitly, that its author objects to the human suffering imposed by some socioeconomic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed.” The final clause is the most important, for many novelists sympathized with the victims of the system without advocating fundamental changes to the system itself.

The US Senate Plan to Abolish America

First, Lie through gold-plated teeth that US policy in Iraq is derived by the needs of “the troops,” which, if true, means that the Senate has abdicated its power to foot soldiers. Thus the US has technically overthrown itself – an auto coup d’état – totally phony, in fact criminal. Second, Abdicate whatever power has not been abdicated to the mythical notion of “the troops” to the new War Czar. He will rule with a Czar-like fist. Third, Continue to insulate the American Green Zone, that is the US Senate, et al, from the rest of the country. Fourth, Continue to seek cover in platitudes to Patriotism and Religion, Family and Nationalism that have long since become the first and last refuge of the scoundrels. Fifth, Just lie.

In his great novel of the people, Les Misérables, Victor Hugo may as well have been speaking of the US Administration and Congress during the invasion and occupation of Iraq: 

“To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition…to refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force the past on the present – this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists, who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about shouting, ‘Look! take this, honest people.’ This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers practice it. They rubbed a black heifer over with chalk, and said, ‘She is white, Bos Cretatus‘.” [Chalked white cow.]  Hugo added that the “persistence” of these “institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like…the tenderness of corpses which return to embrace the living.”

The US Senate itself is a chalked white cow: giving equal weight to the votes of a few hundred thousand people in Wyoming as it gives to tens of millions of people in California. Thus, in its very structure, and in many other ways, the US Senate is an anti-democracy institution. While claiming the exact opposite. The US Senate is a club of mainly rich white men who are primarily the hand puppets of wealth, and wealth themselves. They are very much in the spirit of the Senate’s very structure. Chalk white that cow – the US Senate.    

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness

Festival Info: 

You are invited to our nation’s capital for a festival that celebrates our great tradition of poetry of witness and resistance.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, walking tours, and activism—a unique opportunity to hone our activist skills while we assess and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in this time of crisis.

As citizens and artists, our obligation has never been greater. We call on poets of conscience to move to the center of public life as we forge a visionary new arts movement for peace and justice.

Featured poets: Chris August, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Melissa Best (aka Princess of Controversy), Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri, Lucille Clifton, Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade), Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Brian Gilmore, Sam Hamill, Joy Harjo, Galway Kinnell, Stephen Kuusisto, Semezhdin Mehmedinovic, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alix Olson, Alicia Ostriker, Ishle Yi Park, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy, Pamela Uschuk, and Belle Waring.

Interview with Danny Glover

by John Esther

Do you think Shooter goes far enough in how sinister some plans are executed in and from this country? 

It goes far enough within the framework of the film. It’s not a documentary. If we just focus on the sensationalism for a moment and the action, which is determined by the sensationalism, then it’s a good roller coaster movie. But it’s much more than that. It’s not that simple. We shy away from understanding the complexities that happen. This happens on several levels at the same time. If you think, “One moment registered with me” or “I feel something inside of me other than just a movie and maybe I better go and look up and read other material.” The movie is relevant in some parts because there are a lot of issues right now around the Horn of Africa. 

Over the years how have roles changed for actors of color? 

Movies have changed over the years. That affects roles that are offered to actors of color. In terms of roles available, black women are still at the bottom when comparing men and women. It also seems that when we talk of an actor of color, we’re describing him or her as a “crossover actor.” One of the problems with the whole process is that we’re 300 million people in the world yet we export our culture across the planet. Often what it does is undermine the development of other cultures and other national identities. 

Potentially there are more people of color in audiences than there are of people who are not of color. They’re not demeaning roles for the most part, but if we’re still asking the question, then we’re still dealing with the other problems. We still have to deal with racism; certainly anytime it manifests itself within the industry. What happens in the industry is not inseparable from what happens in the general society. What stories are being told? Who decides what stories are being told, should be told, and are acceptable to be told? In some sense, that dictates our careers.  

Is that something your company, Louverture Films, is  addressing? 

We’re trying to realize a vision of storytelling. How do we now envision ourselves? Where is the balance shift? Where is the paradigm shift? What is the story about? Who are the primary characters? For the most part that is what we attempt to do. Another part is that we try to see ourselves as a part of world cinema. 

What do you think about interviews where you talk about your work? Do you think it serves the film? Or do think the work should speak for itself? 

It depends on how you want to look at the film. How you want to look at the work itself. If you ask what is my process, my work methodology, then it’s all right. If you’re going to ask me what’s the relevance of the film in today’s world, that is fine, too. I would love to believe that a great deal of the work that we need to do is relevant to what’s happening in the world. It can’t simply be just entertainment. If you look at the great work, the great writers of the past like Shakespeare. His work is not just entertainment. He was commenting on society. Shakespeare was deconstructing power and human frailty. He was making some sort of analysis of his world. If we look at art from the vantage point of that, there’s always a place to comment.

… 

The CNN Plan to Abolish America

Maybe we should just run through the America and world conquering slogans on this one:

CNN:

from “The Most Trusted Name in News” to “The Most Busted Name in News”

from “The CNN effect” to “The CNN defect”

from “The Situation Room” to “The Capitulation Room” (capitulation to big money, that is)

from “This is CNN” to “We’ve got ADD”

Updated CNN Slogans and Program Titles:

“We Outfox Fox!”

“Half the Size of the BBC But an Empire Just the Same”

“If Our Advertisers Can’t Live with It, Neither Can We”

“Wolf Blitzer! Even the Name is Absurd”

“Anderson Cooper – I Owe My Job to My Oft Endeering Dear in the Headlights Views of News”

“Nobody Stomps Immigrants Like Lou Dobbs Tonight” (Maybe Not Even the Fox News corporation’s “O’Thuggery Factor”)

“‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ – That Foul-Mouthed Imus Has Nothing on Me”

“‘This Week at War’ – What We Are Programmed For”

“‘American Morning’ – Corporate Dawn”

“‘Paula Zahn Now’ – Eviscerating Vacuity”

“‘The Capitol Gang’ – We Satirize Ourselves”

“‘Crossfire’ – Caught in Our Own”

“CNN – Corporate America at Its Brightest Best”

“CNN – The Triumph of PR”

“CNN – Crucifying the News 24/7″

“CNN – Willful Ignorance Incorporated”

“CNN – Willful Distortion and Deceit Daily”

“CNN – Carefully Neutered News”

“CNN – Craven News Network”

“CNN – Crap Nicely Nuanced”

“CNN – Crucified News Network”

“This Is CNN”

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]