A Practical Policy

What the Pols Should Read – Ken Emerson 

When asked by the Associated Press to name the last novel they had read, many of our umpteen presidential candidates responded predictably with thrillers by the likes of Grisham or Patterson (James or Richard North). Sen. John McCain’s choice of bedside reading was the most intriguing. Did Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” give him second thoughts about the war in Iraq?

If it were up to me to assign the pols summer reading, I’d put “Phineas Finn” at the head of the list. The second of Anthony Trollope’s six “Palliser” novels chronicling political life in Victorian England, “Phineas Finn” is the outstanding volume in an outstanding series and can be enjoyed independently of its companions. Weighing in at more than 700 pages, it can’t be polished off during a quick flight from D.C. to Des Moines, but England’s greatest 19th-century political novel is instructive and illuminating to this day.

…

excerpted review by John Freeman:

…in Turkey…according to 35-year-old writer Elif Shafak, a new generation of writers is using the novel – a form that came to them from the West – to reimagine their society from within.

“Novelists have played a very, very critical role as the engineers of social and cultural transformation in Turkey,” says Shafak, when we meet in a New York hotel. “Maybe in that regard we are closer to the Russian tradition than the Western tradition.”

The debate over what these novels say about Turkish society, and how they say it, lurched to the forefront of life in Istanbul in recent years, as the Turkish Government began prosecuting writers for “offending Turkishness”.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and several dozen other writers were tried under this code of Turkish law. Shafak, too, was put on trial because of passages from her new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, which referenced the long fallout of what many call the Armenian Genocide, when up to one million Armenians were forcibly removed from Turkey and killed.

The book has become a best-seller in Turkey, selling more than 60,000 copies, but not without fallout for Shafak. Writing in the Washington Post, Shafak explained how critics within Turkey claimed she “had taken the Armenians’ side by having an Armenian character call the Turks ‘butchers’ in a reference to the Ottoman Empires deportation and massacre of Armenians during World War I.”

While Shafak was acquitted, others were not so lucky. In January, her “dear friend”, journalist Hrant Dink, the Armenian editor-in-chief of a Turkish newspaper, was murdered on a street in Istanbul, allegedly by an ultra-nationalist teenager.

“The debate on literature and art is very much politicised,” she says, her voice revealing palpable anguish, “sometimes very much polarised. I think my work attracted it because I combined elements people like to see separate.”

[satire]

There is nothing like apocalyptic chaos in Iraq now.

The US presence if peaceful. The US presence sustains the peace.

The US presence is warmly embraced by Iraqis, as proven by the fact that a mere 80 percent of attacks by Iraqis are directed against US forces, and by the fact that at least a small percentage of the population wish for the US to have not left years ago.

The current 4 million Iraqi refugees caused by the US invasion and occupation, a million per year, are people who actually enjoy travel in the dead of night a step ahead of death and destruction.

The US bombings, patrols, and presence otherwise provide an unspeakable degree of security.

US forces do not exactly carry out the unprecedented level of ethnic cleansing; they merely oversee it.

Who would remain to control the oil? Surely the Iraqis have no responsible idea what to do with it.

The hundreds of thousands of US soldiers and private contractors upon threat of joblessness would riot in the streets. Best to let them go on bombing and shooting in orderly fashion.

Oil control is “stability”. Massive violence is a mere inconvenience. Loss of oil control is increased chaos. But we repeat.

A couple hours of electricity per day and a few ounces of water on occasion during the week is enough for a person to get by on during this current, years-long, unprecedented and worsening social collapse. The US is on the right track. It’s on the right track all right.

Something for which we are collectively responsible, in literary realms not least.

John Pilger:

“These days, you see Good Ol’ Bill [Clinton], or the Comeback Kid, as he is variously known, wiggling his head on the TV news, campaigning for his wife, Hillary, among Americans who, terminally naive, still believe the Democratic Party is theirs and that “it’s time to vote a woman into the White House”. Together, the Clintons are known as “Billary” and rightly so. Like Good Ol’ Bill, his wife has no plans to address the divisions of a society that allows 130,000 Americans to claim the wealth of millions of their fellow citizens. Like GOB, she wants to continue Iraq’s torment for perhaps a decade. And she has “not ruled out” attacking Iran.”

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/08pilger.cfm

from John Pilger’s ZNet Commentary “Good Ol’ Bill, The Liberal Hero” – Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet – to learn more consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org.

books linked here

Key books by V. F. Calverton, Upton Sinclair and Bernard Smith explore the tendency (or tradition and lack thereof) of liberation literature far better – more thoroughly, incisively and in greater context despite flaws – than any other group of texts of their time period (add a number of essays from Kenneth Burke’s book below), and they remain unusually valuable, and buried.  

Continue reading Liberation Lit Criticism: The Buried US History

I couldn’t wait to get to Iraq – after all, that’s where all the action is (not to mention the oil). So much to write about. (And yes, deep down, I did harbor vainglorious notions of returning with enough material to write a Great American Novel, should I survive, but I don’t know what it is about writing novels – they seem so damn hard to put together, I can’t quite figure out why, can’t figure out what makes it work. Is it my style? Maybe my mode, or linguistic orientation or something. I start writing about the novel bravery of our troops and the interminable perfidy of the enemy and everything starts sounding like cardboard, even to my own tin ear. All I can say is there must be some extra sense to writing a novel that I have as not yet developed. I don’t mind really since I know being a reporter and pamphleteer is a noble and great thing when performed in service to the mighty state – of, to, by and for the state. Besides, who’s not to say our work is not more powerful, more important, more moving, and – dare dream it – even more artistic in its own bare bones and muscular way than any novel can hope to be? And so I continue to write reports with conviction and daring-do, if I must say so myself. I continue to spread the good word about the great US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the US conquest of the oil-endowed bulk of western Asia in general, that is, the Middle East.

No I am no novelist, for it is far too difficult for me to get away from facts – and facts galore you shall have! facts we all need, and the world too. I feel that the vital facts of the world are far too crucial, far too staggering for me to much care if I have any difficulty mustering a novel or much of any novelistic psychological insight – nice but essentially superfluous – or special profundity of atmosphere, or virtuosity of setting, or mastery of plot details and events, or any extraordinary capacity for arranging the panorama and thrust of the world in any compelling narrative sweep, in any arc of explosive insight and delight. The overrated overblown novel! And so we shall have none of that fancy business here but instead engage in something equally momentous – the crucial facts of the main matters at hand facing all the world as expressed in sheer actual telling detail. And so I gladly rise to the occasion of settling for reporting as best I can about the world it is my great privilege to know and encounter by way of the most relevant and matter-of-fact details of our day, as borne out in the myriad crises and happy challenges of our time. The novel has nothing on me but what I lack, which, in any case, is of no real concern to anyone but myself. And possibly my employer.

So off to Iraq I went to embed as deep as I possibly could into everything Iraq related. I took off in that great and honorable tradition of an independent journalist embedding with an invading and occupying military force of unparalleled power blasting through an impoverished and stricken land. We blew up the country and thus conquered it, subdued it, destroyed it – no matter that they started blowing us up right back. We can handle it. We’re survivors – most of us.

Iraq may not make it, frankly, but we will. Most of us. Probably. There’s a real possibility.

I am the Official US Pamphleteer – Stan D. Garde. 

In effect, due to the global reach of our most powerful country, the one and only US of A, the functional stature of my office means I am pamphleteer to far more than solely the US itself, but also to the whole world.

While affiliated with the office of the US Poet Laureate and others such national offices, I am formally housed in the office of the official national US Historian, Dr. Hiredgunne, the recent successor, for the foreseeable future, to the generation-long stint of his immediate predecessor, the forever-great historian, Dr. Totalie.

I am proud beyond words to have been selected for the office of US Pamphleteer following the runaway success of Youthtopia, my humble Parents’ Handbook for Rockview Terminal School District. I am indeed a typical product of the traditionally great schooling enterprise of this mighty land, though the schools of course are now more commonly known as Terminals, as I document in Youthtopia.

In any event, the nature and purpose of this current book, Tropetopia, is to present the newstopian news of our times, with flair where useful, and with some private or otherwise personal touch where topical.

In other words, I have been encouraged by my superiors to put together a hefty selection of my greatest pamphlets. Thus – Tropetopia; or, The Life and Times of Stan D. Garde – In Defense of the Right to PR.

 

 

On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals

Noam Chomsky:

Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But, is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice — they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because, our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But, is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice — they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because, our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.

Thus, no use of an investigative anti Iraq War novel like Homefront in the universitites and schools – or even such novels being conceived and written in the first place – let alone reviews in the media, or publication by the literary establishment – let alone the proliferation of many such works. [-TC]

 Teach them to buy and be sold.

from ZNet

“There is no such thing as a value neutral educational process.”
 – Richard Shaull, Foreword to Pedagogy of the Oppressed

After the initial attempts by a section of Christian-bourgeois souls (Dickens, Carlyle, Chadwick, Mayhew, Mrs.Gaskell, even the honourable, although not Christian, Benjamin Disraeli who first enunciated the thesis that England was infact not one nation but two—the rich and the poor), to seek reformative state interventions on behalf of the new urban poor  who now swamped the industrial towns, towards the middle of the nineteenth century the inevitable exhaustion of goodwill followed

Where a Dickens had made visits to Yorkshire schools ( captured unforgettably in Nicholas Nickleby) in the thirtees and returned to raise a cry for amelioration, such  sentiment expressed from outside the lived experience of the suffering classes, was to wear thin in a growing fright  at the spread of what was to be christened “mass culture.” 

Dickens of course had repudiated the Chartists who had erroneously hoped he would go over to their side  (a story rather less often recited about him). Some flavour of that history may be savoured in what G.M.Reynolds was to write in the Weekly Newspaper of june 8, 1851:

This wretched sycophant of Aristocracy—this vulgar flatterer of the precious hereditary peerage—is impudent enough to consider himself the people’s friend!  A precious friend indeed when he ridicules universal suffrage (the elementary principle of Chartism) and proclaims himself a thick and thin supporter of Lord John Russell’s reform bill, even before he has seen it!”(1) 

Suddenly, as industrial England entered the fraught social contentions of the sixties, a whole falange of opinion-makers closed ranks to argue that writers, poets, “creative” individuals of all description had best wash their hands off this fruitless business of meddling with social matters.  It was best that they devoted themselves to their precious private visions of abiding truths above and beyond the piss and mire of this thing called history.

The ringing thesis here was to come from Matthew Arnold, who, in his perniciously influential Culture and Anarchy(1865)  drew the first distinctions between “high culture”  and the culture of the “populace”—the latter in his view constituting “anarchy.”  Pleading for an intellectual aristocracy, a return to the classics was advocated.  The aesthetics of Liberalism was thus inaugurated; and specially endowed individuals were henceforth to seek for eternal verities and universal truths outside the concrete processes of social and political  contention.(2)  

A great discomfort with the equalizing philosophies (chiefly of Marx and Engles) had of course been steadily growing.  Siezing the moment that Arnold articulated, Pareto, Mosca, Burckhardt were to float the new concepts of an “elite” and a “political class” that comprised individuals endowed by nature to be rulers of men.  Elements of Darwin, and Carlyle’s notion of the “hero” were thus drawn into the stipulation that not equality but inequality was the true order of “nature”.  Needless to remind ourselves that Nietzsche was to put all that together famously to tell us how the chief business of history—and women– was to give us the “superman.” (3)
 
Thus educational processes had to be those that absorbed and disseminated the ideas of the ruling class.  England’s first Education Act of 1870 was to be the first pusillanimous policy decision towards consolidating inequality eventhough, don’t you know, it was all about furnishing a sound education on the best principles of  English “humanism.”

As the manufacturers and the colonizers busied themselves in profit-making, education came formally to be regarded not as a rational aid to understanding how society came to be thus constituted, but in a forked programme to equip, on the one hand, the labouring classes with the minimal skills that industry needed from time to time (more profoundly, as Marx was to point out and Althusser in our time was to nail, inorder to keep in place the “reserve army of labour” or inorder to ensure the “reproduction of the relations of production”), and, on the other, to make available to the leisured classes the delectable riches of speculation.

Not for nothing was Arnold to argue that poetry would be the religion of the future. That injunction  was devotedly to be pursued by “modernists” like T.S.Eliot for whom, beginning with the twenties of the last century, the world was indubitably a “wasteland”. As you would expect,   the cure for the unvarying “human condition” was to be found in the Church. All that just when a revolution had happened in the  then czarist Russia, and when Gandhi, the Congress, and the revolutionaries in India were making big strides to alter the “human condition” in the colony—and, as a fallout, in some two-thirds of the colonized world.

(It is another matter that when “free” India came to establish its first Education Commission, its recommendations duly reflected the same ruling dichotomy: skills for the masses and the Humanities at tertiary levels inorder to keep ruling  spirits within the bounds of  “sensitivity.”)

Thus, when the American, John Dewey, wrote in 1920 that the true aim and purpose of education is education, he was articulating a seeming abstraction (what education?) that had behind it a whole  concrete history of class  interests.

III

International Corporate Capital has since made killing strides.   It no longer needs the pretence about poetry (read “poetry” as a metaphor for the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Arts, and for critical thought generally). The more it gobbles up the globe, the greedier it gets. In education also, therefore,  it is to be push-pin all the way.  The least monies spent on “poetry” seem unconscionably unwarranted according to  the  most advanced principles of that despicable thing called Commerce.  What used to be commerce between human beings—remember those “pointless” hours spent in the coffee house?—is thus superceded by commerce between computers which make the world a “global village”  even as they draw oceans between human being and human being.  Since you can email, where is the need to meet face to face? 

The captains of “utility” who move the levers of “knowledge” at the WTO, think that there is no more need to think.  Since all the thinking that the world needs is done in the board room, educational processes ipso facto invite to be geared to proliferate armies of the new conformism who in turn may be trusted to function as untroublesome engines of profit-maximisation.  When the GDP grows, the stock market booms, the middle class expands and fattens and comes into possession of commodities which advertising can then fetishise as the newage gods, pray where then is there any more need to think and speculate?

How many of us know that education (it must still be called that, per necessity) is today, globally, the third most lucrative trade worldwide, after drugs and armaments?  That being the case, teaching shops that come from far-off lands come necessarily inorder to set up franchises at zero levels of investment that the “market” may lap-up at hundred percent profit.  And those comprise utility items, not “poetry.”

IV

Alas, whatever is picked-up at school/college/university/institute had better equip young people to earn a keep.  But would it not be nice if we should also have learnt (and not picked-up) that which makes of those of us destined to become appendages of the ruling hippopotamus “warm and tender as can be”? And if that seems like a hopeless reversion to the class-based “humanist” argument, so it is.  Paulo Freire was to write, after Satre, that education must rid us of the “fear of freedom.”  Alas, only in Latin America do we now seem to have regimes that may encourage the “populace” to do so through their systems of schooling.  For the rest, it is still Cuba. Where are the movements elsewhere that have the least object or likelihood of making   education coterminous with that recovery of our humanness which the world craves?

Again I reflect how the Bard, as always, knew a great deal about such matters.  Recall that when Macbeth’s masculine nerve rather wobbles at the last minute, his neocon consort dares him: “thou wouldst be a man if thou durst do it” (that is, kill the king, inter alia, invade iraq, kill Saddam and so on).  And how telling, although pathetic, a riposte Macbeth delivers unto her: “I dare do all that may become a man;/ who dares do more is none.”

How that thought nails the monetary economist, the corporates he spawns, and the Neanderthal neocons (and they are not just in the United States of America) piercingly in the belly button.  But of course, as Henry Fielding would have said, shame is the first meal these kinds eat before they go for breakfast! They leave the business of being human to the rampaging Evangelist/Mullah/Mahant, who in turn teach  that being human means being victorious in battles of various kinds.  God has no room for “losers” they say. Blessed no longer are the meek but the mighty, for their’s is the oil and the uranium.  It is a weak prophet who says turn the other cheek.

V

Indeed, what does it mean to be human (and no ontological debate is intended here)?Recall the days not too long ago when walking down the pavement and noticing a self-contained person some distance away, you remarked to your companion “such a good man; she/he thinks of everybody.”

But as the world advances, Capital has taught us the truth about that  person—a “waster, shun him.”  Good is the human being who minds his own business at all costs.  He does not stop to look at the fellow just come under the wheels of the latest Chrysler; he does not let his mind waver from the shady deal to be signed at the golf club.  He if anything formulates the most efficient plan yet not for the alleviation of suffering but for the eradication of those who are no- good sufferers.  Ah, the fruits of education!  The least mongrel on the hobo street has lessons we could learn inorder to become human.  But we are on the road to progress and have ears only for the next announcement at the stock market, eyes only for the next piece of lucrative real-estate, and dreams only about the next career promotion or marvel of household technology. Where we once counted children, we count remotes to sundry gadgets.  And when a gadget goes Hawai, we curse the service fellow whose dying wife keeps him from attending our need!

And the evangelists and the godmen, they teach us to mind our own salvation through greater physical fitness so that we tire less in attending to profit-making.  Health services for all, community education, shared labour, shared partaking—these are the things that must be avoided like the plague. When you hear such sounds, say “the reds are coming.” And education that teaches respect for the other, for difference, or, god forbid, begins to examine the roots of our own rottenness, that indeed is the devil’s work.  That is when you forget the priest and call out the troops.

Thus, if Plato threw the poets out of his republic, we must add to those the humanists, the social scientists, the philosophers, the political activists, the  artists, the rebels without “cause”, the “wasters” who strangely do not value profit-making, the disabled, the old, the needlessly sick, the children who only make demands but add nothing to GDP. And we must make education available only to those who can pay.  To the rest we say, god prepares a heaven for you, so why need you the earth.

And WTO will say endorse only those authors, those academies, those entrepreneurs, those middle-men, those commission agents, those publishers, and those governments,  who can conjointly make of education not the third-most but the most lucrative global “service.” In Brahminical parlance, dethrone Saraswati, install Laxmi as the reigning goddess of learning– which she already is, de facto.

Make of your education a billion-pound note; and then go ask for the Presidential vote.  With that note in one hand and the evangelist/godman in the other, you cannot go wrong.  You may only end up destroying the world, a small price to pay for success.

As to the world,  may be the time for it to end  has come anyway.
________________________________________________________

1. See my Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth, univ., of Wisconsin Press, 1986, p.145

2. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, for a penetrating analysis of these ideological conjunctions.

3. See T.B.Bottomore, Elites and Society, Penguin, 1964 for a lucid account of these histories.

____________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com

from ZNet 

Transformers – a film about robots from space that can change into cars and trucks – was released just prior to the July 4^th.  The storyline is that evil robots have come to destroy earth.  Good robots team up with the U.S. military to defeat the evil robots.

On the face of it, Transformers would appear to be a film directed at the pre-teen male audience, but I’d like to examine some of its underlying assumptions.  The story starts with American military forces in Qatar under attack from an unknown enemy – which is, as it turns out, an evil robot.  Indeed, in real life, Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar serves as the forward headquarters for Central Command – from which the U.S. military conducts its current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We see a platoon survive the initial attack to defend Arab villagers from another evil robot.  So, the first assumption is that the U.S. has an unquestioned right to project its military in other people’s lands – and that it is there for the benefit of those other people…. 

In the end, it turn out that both the good and bad robots are aliens from outer space – but powerful weapons are manufactured by “our side” aren’t labeled WMDs. Perhaps it is useful to view Transformers as a parable about the role of militarism and the weapons industry in our present-day mythology.  The evil robots are akin to WMDs in the hands of rogue (Axis of Evil) nations.  The good robots are akin to “our” high-tech weaponry.  Transfomers serves as a morality play for the next generation to be taught the lies of our times. 

…

Contrary to the Andrew Gumbel’s recent article “Hollywood Goes to War,” Hollywood essentially plays one side of the political fence, that of the status quo, as John Pilger makes clear in “Hollywood Hurrah” excerpted below. Are the coming films likely to break the mold? Probably not; we’ll see.

Pilger:

Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese were killed during the American invasion, and their land was destroyed and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood came to the rescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that invited the audience to pity the invader. These films provided a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to mount other Vietnams – in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current “war on terrorism” is underpinned by the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version of America’s killing spree in Somalia, act as cultural “softeners” before the bombing starts again for real.

Even in finely crafted films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon that look as if they might break ranks, there is an implicit oath of loyalty to imperial culture. This was true of Three Kings, a movie that seemed to take issue with the Gulf war, but instead produced a familiar “bad apple” tale, exonerating the militarism that is now rampant. So dominant is Hollywood in our lives, and so collusive are its camp-following critics, that the films that ought to have been made are unmentionable. Name the mainstream movies that have shone light on to the vast shadow thrown by the American secret state, and the mayhem for which it is responsible. I can think of only a few: Costa-Gavras’s Missing, which was about the destruction of the elected government in Chile by General Pinochet’s puppet masters in Washington, and Oliver Stone’s Salvador, which made the connection between Reagan’s Washington and El Salvador’s death squads. Both these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty and, in the case of Missing, dogged by vengeful court actions.

The slaughter of up to 8,000 urban poor in George Bush Sr’s attack on Panama in 1990 would make a fine action movie. And why not a sequel to Black Hawk Down, this time with the 8,000-10,000 Somali dead (a CIA estimate) who were airbrushed from the original? Or how about a David and Goliath epic set in modern Palestine, with young Palestinians facing down American tanks and warplanes operated by Israelis?

How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole

by John Pilger 

Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” The lone, honourable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.

He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, “What have you been up to today?” “I’ve been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask.”

For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious. What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.

In The Serpent, Marc Karlin’s dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry’s liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. “This is the silence of the democrats,” says the voice-over, “and the Dark Prince could bath in their silence.”

This excerpt from a ZNet Commentary, which are a premium sent to  Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet. To learn more consult ZNet.

an excerpt from “Thinking About Roque”

by Margaret Randall

from her Introduction to Roque Dalton’s Clandestine Poems

I first met Roque in Mexico, in 1964. Poets from some of the Latin American countries and the United States were gathered in Chapultepec Park, engaged in marathon readings where we reveled in and applauded each other’s work…. Roque arrived on the scene fresh from a jail break. He later often laughingly told us he thought he was the only Latin American poet who escaped a CIA firing squad because an earthquake had tumbled the walls of the prison they were holding him in, an episode that is reflected in his (tragically) posthumous Pobrecito poeta que era yo (Poor Little Poet, I Was)…an extraordinary novel about his generation’s grappling with the search for inner and outer liberation.

Roque was reality to us then, in our Mexico City of the mid-sixties. Many of us still thought that “politics was outside the realm of art.” Roque made us see that wasn’t so. He taught us, among many other things, that a simplistic sense of “socialist realism”, in terms of creative expression, was nothing more nor less than a  lack of respect for the work we were doing. That art was life, and that political commitment (not in the narrow sense we had been taught to view it, but in the fullest sense) was simply that: a commitment to life. That art, to be revolutionary in the first place, had to be good.

cross-posted from The Valve: 

Something positive about what is called the academic “new left” is that in some ways it is a multicultural continuation and advance from the best left/progressive work of the 20s and 30s, the time of strongest progressive advance in the past century. In other fundamental ways, it’s no advance at all. Especially with a prestige fixation on “theory” rather than an intellectual and normative commitment to socio-literary analysis of literature, English and other departments largely remove themselves from actual left/popular struggles and needed thought today. World Social Forum thinking certainly isn’t pervasive or “triumphantly” engaged within the academy. To the extent it does appear it is typically marginalized in myriad ways. In fact, neither the recent US Social Forum event in Atlanta nor much of its essential thought has even been broached here or in lit sites generally. Some “radical” “triumph”.

Michael Albert’s general overview and take on the event, “USSF – 2007 and After…”: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=13271

Key works in the liberation lit tradition aren’t even included in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (And it’s true I believe that there never even was a Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism? So we can see here quite clearly where the emphasis of the establishment is: on “theory” – which is far more tolerable, far less threatening to the interests of the status quo than more normative and directly engaged literary analysis.) V.F. Calverton isn’t exactly a marginal literary historical figure; his best work isn’t exactly a peripheral achievement. That is, shouldn’t be. Not in reality. Though he surely is in the reality of the academic lit establishment today (and previous days). What percentage of the lit establishment has even heard of The Liberation of American Literature, let alone read it? 1 percent? Let alone Bernard Smith and Forces in American Criticism. Who has even heard of V.F. Calverton himself, editor of the Modern Quarterly for 17 years, from 1923 until his death in 1940. Just as Calverton was eventually marginalized in his own time, for ideological reasons as well, so have many central progressive literary concerns been marginalized by the academy. The pillars and defenders and enforcers of the status quo who largely control the academies (the boards of trustees and their minions, and the corporate-state governments) would be smart to proclaim as loudly as possible, and often do, that there is an irresponsible Sixties Triumphalism of a would be, if not already, socialist faculty. The notion is comically false in its fully intended sense (despite any extraordinarily limited and/or trivial accuracy to such proclamations). As for English departments being different: Leftward Ho! V.F. Calverton and American Radicalism, by Philip Abbott, was published in 1993 as part of Greenwood Press’s series Contributions in Political Science. This seems to be how a limited amount of work of some “radical” substance gets done in the academies. It can be easier to get it published in someone else’s field other than your own. Less threatening that way, I suppose. It’s a way to both marginalize yet produce valuable work. It’s a way for the university to breath a little, sometimes very little, yet still keep the lid on.

A Soldier Once 

by John Irving 

As a college student, I chose to take my junior year abroad in a German-speaking country — because, in 1961 and ’62, I read “The Tin Drum” twice. At the ages of 14 and 15, I had read “Great Expectations” twice — Dickens made me want to be a writer — but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos — all with an unforgiving conscience.

In the fall of 1963, I went to Vienna and became a student at the Institute of European Studies, learning German and reading German literature; I wanted to read “Die Blechtrommel” as Grass had written it, in German. I was 21. (I would never learn German well enough to read Grass — even today, when he writes to me in German, I write him back in English — but it was as a student in Vienna that I began to see myself as a writer of novels.) I had marked certain passages in “Die Blechtrommel”; I’d memorized the English translations of these passages. It turned out to be a way to meet girls.

“Poland’s lost, but not forever, all’s lost, but not forever, Poland’s not lost forever.”

The novel’s hero, Oskar Matzerath, refuses to grow; because he remains childlike, small and seemingly innocent, he is spared the political events of the Nazi years while others die. As Bebra the dwarf warns Oskar, “Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it.”

…