A Practical Policy

Film, history and socialism

Part One

By David Walsh 

In the postwar period, America became the dominant capitalist power, taking into itself all the contradictions of the world system, and proved unable to coexist with an honest and critical cinema. Thus, the McCarthyite witch-hunts, the blacklist, the illegalization of anti-capitalist views or serious criticism in the cinema. Criticism to the bone, criticism of private property and American global ambitions, and the criminality of the ruling elite, became impermissible. But even then, in the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s, films that obviously opposed McCarthyism appeared—High Noon, Kiss Me Deadly, Johnny Guitar, perhaps Allan Dwan’s Silver Lode and others. It’s an intensely complex process.

Why has there been such a terrible falling off in American cinema? I’ve suggested some elements of the explanation, but I would like to make that more specific, if only briefly. Again, the present cinema is not simply a nightmare, nor is television or popular music. We’re not beginning from zero; the events of the past century have not occurred for nothing.

I don’t believe, however, that any objective comparison of films from the period 1930-1955, let’s say, and the past 15 years or so would work to the advantage of the latter, in terms of texture, depth, seriousness, even social insight.

This is clearly not a technical problem. Cinema has made great strides. No doubt the freshness of the medium made a difference in those earlier years, but color film, video, digital technologies, the Internet, are relatively recent innovations. Why has the content of films, that living complex of moods and ideas, deteriorated and become so unenlightening, so uninspiring, so generally trivial?

Goethe writes that “Literature deteriorates only to the extent that people deteriorate.” How do we explain the deterioration in those making American cinema?

Jean Mitry says, “It is indisputable that the photographic image is always the consequence of a certain interpretation.” If this is so, and undoubtedly it is, then the question becomes: why have the interpretations weakened? What has become of those doing the interpretations? Why are they seeing the world less deeply, less richly, less evocatively?

Another approach might be: under what historical and intellectual conditions do images become more dense, more complicated, more textured, more highly charged with meaning? Is this something that can happen by accident? Does the filmmaker simply stumble on important images and truths? Does the result of his or her efforts have something to do with the general social situation?

To examine this fully in the context of Hollywood would require a lengthy investigation of what gave rise to the film industry, which is far beyond this discussion.

I will argue for this: that what was best in the American film industry emerged in large measure out of world culture and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, culture and politics in which the socialist labor movement was a prominent element.

In an overview of the San Francisco film festival in 1996, I wrote the following: “The critical-minded culture built up from the last third of the nineteenth century…was the crucible in which were formed the artistic geniuses of the first decades of this century.

“The artists may not have agreed with the Marxists about the contradictions of capitalism, but there was a general, instinctive acknowledgment by the most insightful intellectuals in Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna, Budapest and, of course, Moscow, that the existing society was on its way out and thought had to be given to the cultural problems of the future human organization. Anyone who doubts that this has relevance to the American film industry need only consider the following list of filmmakers—all of whom worked in Hollywood—who were born or raised in Germany, Austria or Hungary between 1885 and 1907: Erich von Stroheim, Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, William Dieterle, Josef von Sternberg, Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Fred Zinnemann.” Not an insignificant group.

This is by no means simply a question of left-wing filmmakers or writers, but since that history has been so buried in the official version of Hollywood’s history, it’s probably best to make some reference to their existence. Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in Radical Hollywood and Brian Neve in Film and Politics in America, among others, have documented some of this usefully.

The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression had a shattering impact on the American population, as elsewhere, including artists and intellectuals. All the myths and claims about the free enterprise system were called into question virtually overnight.

…

From:

The American

The Economist

Marginal Revolution

Washington Monthly, Christopher Lehmann

Another View

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‘G.I. Jesus’ soldier wanders in psychic desert after Iraq

By Glenn Whipp, Film Critic

Joining the burgeoning number of Iraq-related documentaries this week is “G.I. Jesus,” a trippy free-wheeling fictional feature that looks at the war from the vantage point of a young Mexican Marine who has been promised citizenship in return for military service.

The film is a sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, sometimes sloppy (befitting its budget) look at a very real issue. Latinos, most of them from California, comprise (in some estimates) more than a third of the United States’ deployed force in Iraq, and many of them are “Green Card” troops, immigrants who join the military in exchange for the promise of citizenship.

“G.I. Jesus” doesn’t spend much time wondering why a war fought in the name of the United States is being waged by so many foreigners. The movie, written and directed by first-timer Carl Colpaert, is more interested in satire and “Manchurian Candidate”-style surrealism than proselytizing.

But by the end, you can’t help add the questions the film raises to the laundry list of doubts currently circulating about the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Marine Cpl. Jesus Feliciano (Joe Arquette) returns from Iraq to LAX and gets a hearty greeting from his beautiful Dominican wife Claudia (Patricia Mota) and loving

daughter (Telana Lynum). But the good vibrations are short-lived as Jesus gets sucked into a post-traumatic sinkhole that has him seeing people he killed and believing his sexy wife is sleeping with a Brentwood scuzzball.

Colpaert mixes in actual wartime footage, gleaned from a “Frontline” special, to add to the movie’s trippy blend of fact and fiction. Things really get strange during a dinner at the home of Jesus’ commanding officer, where the young man is offered bundles of cash if he joins a covert operations team.

Then Jesus starts hearing the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’ ” everywhere he goes, which would push anyone past their breaking point on the 101st spin.

An hour into things, “G.I. Jesus” takes a dramatic left turn, extending a middle finger to materialism and extolling the virtues of cheap beer and good Mexican food over the killing of innocents. It’s a message that cuts across borders and politics — or at least it should.

“Literary Star is Reborn” by Celia McGee

The renewed attention to Harold Humes is no doubt aided by the growing interest in American writing of the 1940s and ’50s…. But also intriguing to many is the documentary’s revelation of a CIA connection to the history of The Paris Review. In the film, Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young CIA recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.

“Immy cajoled me into talking about it,” Matthiessen said.

Humes, who tussled with Matthiessen and Plimpton about this secret after Matthiessen confided in him in the mid-’60s, died in 1992 in St. Rose’s Home, the New York City cancer hospice founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter. Immy Humes found correspondence between the three co-founders about Matthiessen’s clandestine affiliation in a suitcase of papers…

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

by James Petras

“Abstract Art and the Cultural Cold War” by Mark Vallen

For those who still regard art as being above politics consider the following. The Central Intelligence Agency financed, organized, and assured the success of the American abstract expressionist movement, using artists like Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, as weapons in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Frances Stonor Saunders has presented this matter of public record in her well documented book, The Cultural Cold War – The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.

Saunders informs us that during the height of the Cold War in the 1950’s, the CIA secretly promoted abstract expressionism as a means of discrediting the socialist realism of the Soviet Union….

“The Real Agenda” by Richard Cummings

Robie Macauley, a top literary editor at Harcourt, Brace, was, while he functioned in his literary capacity, the head of the CIA Africa desk. I know he was, because he told me so not long before he died. He explicitly said to me that his literary career was his cover. When his obituary appeared in the New York Times, it listed his accomplishments in the literary field, but failed to mention in his real career with the CIA. I rang up the author of the obituary and said, “You left out Robie’s career with the CIA.” There was a long pause. Then he said, “We can’t put everything into an obituary.”

“The Empire Strikes Back,” by Karl Wenclas, and “A Crazy Tale“:

Yale poet WWII vet Cord Meyer won an O. Henry Prize in 1946 for best first-published story. He became President of the United World Federalists, “which envisioned a globe under the calm and rational dominion of one government.” In 1951 he joined the CIA. “He would rise to become the number two man in the agency’s clandestine operations. . . .” “Along the way, he secretly financed labor unions, youth groups, writers’ organizations, and literary journals.”

This info is from a 2007 bio of the Kennedys, Brothers by David Talbot, former editor of Salon. Elsewhere in the book, Talbot mentions that by 1977 there were over 400 U.S. journalists considered “assets” by the CIA. Do any remain? (We know that CNN’s Anderson Cooper worked for the CIA after Yale.)

“The Fiction of the State” by Richard Cummings

War Stars — by H. Bruce Franklin

…explores over two hundred movies, novels, and stories, from obscure pre-World War I fiction that influenced Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan to such modern classics as Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, and Dr. Strangelove. He demonstrates how the American imagination continually shapes ingenious new superweapons while engendering their antitheses in art and action.

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters — by Frances Stonor Saunders

A spectacular history of the ways the CIA’s cold war operation included the creation of a safe Western Culture. They channeled money for conferences, founded magazines, mounted art exhibitions, arranged concerts and flew orchestras around the world.

“Cold War Duplicity” in Reluctant Radical — by Maxwell Geismar

Irving Kristol and William van den Heuvel combine on a TV literature program to “defend Henry James as a primary Cold War literary figure” and to attack Geismar’s book of criticism on James. William van den Heuvel “ran an agency for African affairs and, according to Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts, was a rich, cultivated, charming, and liberal member of the upper echelons of the CIA and had a large hand in embroiling us in Vietnam.” Irving Kristol “as it later turned out was almost always affiliated with many State Department or CIA literary projects in editing, pubilshing, and the academic world…a hired hand of the establishment.”

(William vanden Heuvel? – father of the current editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Irving Kristol? – has come to be known as the “father of American neoconservatism” – also father of current regular Fox TV political pundit Bill Kristol.)

“The CIA calls the tune…” iMomus

On November 29th Arte television aired When the CIA Infiltrated Culture, a documentary based on three years of research into a secret, highly ambitious “Marshall Plan of culture”: the CIA’s efforts to promote “the freedom of individual choice” in postwar Europe by… subsidizing the arts.Using front organizations like the Farfield Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA channelled millions of dollars into the European cultural scene during the 1950s and 60s in an attempt to alter the intellectual DNA of the continent. If you wanted the CIA on your side, paradoxes abounded: “no ideology” had to become your ideology. You had to banish politics from your work for entirely political reasons. You were free to be anything except critical of “freedom”, and you could pick any individual stance except a pro-collective individual stance. What’s more, your anti-government, pro-market position had to be bankrolled by the government and protected from the market.

Since the aesthetic favoured by pro-Soviets in Europe tended to include stuff like political commitment, realism, melody, and representation — the communists deplored “decadent formalism” above all — the CIA (somewhat incredibly, to our eyes) threw its weight behind atonal music and Abstract Expressionism. Concerts and exhibitions of the most inaccessible, anti-populist, non-commercial avant garde artists flourished. “The ideology of the CIA was that the West had to be the most modern of the modern,” says Gunter Grass, interviewed for the documentary.

“Introduction,” New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (Ed. Joseph North) — by Maxwell Geismar

“I welcome this anthology for several reasons, but mainly because it is part of something which I have begun to think of as our ‘buried history’ in the Cold War period. Recently a group of American historians have been digging into, one might say, ‘excavating,’ the true facts of this Cold War Culture – the curious period from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties – and the results are very interesting. We have had almost a quarter of a century of conformity, comfort, complacency and mediocrity in American literature – this epoch of ‘instant masterpieces’ – and only now can we begin to put the pieces together and find a consistent pattern…” (1).

“…it was the Cold War that brought about the downfall, in 1949, of one of the most brilliant journalistic enterprises in our literary history. At the war’s end, a new epoch of repression was about to start. Another great achievement of the Depression years was the WPA Federal Theater Project; and Halle Flanagan’s history of this, in her book Arena, ends with the congressional investigation and foreclosure of the Federal Theater by political figures who are, by Divine Grace or special dispensation, still active in Washington today… What was the real truth, the true historical dimension, of the Cold War? As I said in opening this Introduction, a new group of Cold War historians have been giving us a whole new set of impressions, which, alas, most of those who lived through the period, and are so certain of their convictions, will not even bother to read and to think about.

“For if they did…the Schlesingers, the Galbraiths, the Kristols, the Max Lerners, the Trillings, the Bells, the Rahvs, the Kazins, the Irving Howes: all these outstanding, upstanding figures of our political-cultural scene today…they would have to admit both their own illusions for the last twenty years, and the fact that they have deliberately deluded their readers about the historical facts of our period. Since it was they who fastened the Cold War noose around all our necks, how can we expect them to remove it? – even though, as in the cases of Mary McCarthy and Dwight MacDonald, and the estimable New York Review of Books, they have bowed a little to the changing winds of fashion today. Due to student protests at base, and student confrontations on Cold War issues, Professors Bell and Trilling have indeed moved on from Columbia to Harvard University – but after Harvard what?

“Mr. Trilling has even ‘resigned’ from contemporary literature, saying at long last that he does not understand it – but only after he led the attack for twenty years on such figures as the historian Vernon Parrington, the novelist Dreiser, the short-story writer Sherwood Anderson, and other such figures of our literary history. And only after the Columbia University English Department had taken the lead in setting up Henry James as ‘Receiver’ in what amounted to the bankruptcy of our national literature. The Cold War Liberals, historians, critics and so-called sociologists, also clustered around a set of prestigious literary magazines like Partisan Review, The New Leader, Encounter of London, Der Monat of Berlin, which had in effect set the tone and the values of the ‘Free World’ culture. When it was revealed, about two years ago, that these leading cultural publications and organizations (the various Congresses and Committees for ‘Cultural Freedom’), as well as some student organizations and big unions of the AFL-CIO, were in fact being financed and controlled by Central Intelligence Agency – the game was up…” (10-12).

See also Fiction Gutted – The Establishment and the Novel – part 3 – TC:

When the highly accomplished and leading progressive literary critic, Maxwell Geismar, challenged the very quality and reigning adoration of Henry James’ fiction, he was silenced, and rather prominently in one instance, on national TV by two high level functionaries of the CIA, representing the interests of the corporate state rather than the populace. The two men who played a key role: William vanden Heuval and Irving Kristol – the former a “protégé” of the “father” of the CIA and the latter the CIA flack and “father” of neoconservatism who several years earlier had passed on his position as editor of Commentary magazine to Normon Podhoretz (a student of leading establishment lit critic Lionel Trilling, who [as an establishment liberal] was a sort of forerunner of James Wood). When William vanden Heuvel (father of the current editor/publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel) tag-teamed with Irving Kristol (the father of current prominent Fox TV political pundit and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol, also editor of the Washington DC based political magazine, The Weekly Standard) – when these central figures of the political establishment hastened to appear on national TV over four decades ago to attack directly to the face of the silenced progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar, on the occasion of the publication of Geismar’s book of criticism about Henry James (“a primary Cold War literary figure”), Kristol and vanden Heuvel, two exemplars of the status quo, serving retrograde state interests, executed a prominent role in destroying Geismar’s accomplished literary career and ending his run on a national literary television show, Books on Trial (“or something similar,” in Geismar’s recollection). Geismar posits William vanden Heuvel as “a rich, cultivated, charming, and liberal member of the upper echelons of the CIA [who] had a large hand in embroiling [the US] in Vietnam,” while Irving Kristol “as it later turned out was almost always affiliated with many State Department or CIA literary projects in editing, publishing, and the academic world…a hired hand of the establishment.”

 

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See also:

by  Tony Christini

 

 

The Good Shepherd at the Bay of Pigs

by Jane Franklin 

Before the opening credits, “The Good Shepherd” shows us glimpses of a murky and mysterious audiovisual tape. As the movie unreels, layers keep unfolding, like a brilliant combination of Antonioni’s fictional photographs in “Blow-Up” and Zapruder’s real-life tape of the Kennedy assassination. But embedded in the audiotape is an historical fiction about the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos) that the filmmakers themselves fail to comprehend. Yet the audiotape of lovers whispering secrets about “Bahía de Cochinos” is a fascinating invitation to penetrate the core of the Central Intelligence Agency, and “The Good Shepherd” delivers.

Viewers at 2,250 screens all over the United States get to see the CIA as a toxic swamp of moral corruption and psychological depravity. After it leaves the multiplex nearest you, the film will be seen again or for the first time by more people on DVD. It will travel abroad to foreign audiences, many of them in countries victimized by the CIA.

To portray the cult of secrecy of our secret government, “The Good Shepherd” makes the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion the fulcrum for its revelations. In the first scene we find a man meticulously placing a model of a ship into a jug while listening to a radio broadcast of President John F. Kennedy at a press conference before the invasion.

The man is CIA official Edward Wilson, based loosely on James Jesus Angleton, CIA director of counterintelligence at the time of the invasion, and on Richard Bissell, Jr., the CIA head of the Bay of Pigs operation. He hears Kennedy promise what both he and the president know is a lie: no Americans will be involved in any action against Cuba. Already the supposed super secret invasion had become an open secret. The whole world was waking up to the reality that the CIA had planned an invasion of Cuba and trained the Cuban expatriates as their proxy army.

With their invasion imminent, Wilson and other CIA agents head from Washington to a beachfront location closer to Cuba to be ready for rapid, victorious transit to Havana. From their headquarters, we experience the invasion and the quick defeat.

Instead of having a celebratory lunch on the turf of “El Comandante” as they had anticipated, the agents are faced with the reality of Cuba’s defenses. On the morning of the invasion, April 17, U.S. B-26 planes (painted to look like Cuba’s B-26s) are shot down in a “surprise attack” by real Cuban planes. We see documentary footage of a ship burning, Prime Minister Fidel Castro arriving at the invasion site, invaders surrendering, and Castro announcing victory. It’s over, less than 72 hours after it began. The huge audience for this movie has just watched actual scenes of what is arguably the first great defeat of U.S. imperialism.

Wilson stands on the beach staring across the water toward Cuba in stunned disbelief. We hear, “They knew where to find us.” This becomes the central mystery of the movie: Who told the Cubans that the invasion would take place at the Bahía de Cochinos? These intelligence agents, arrogant even in defeat, believe that a leak about the landing site led to Cuba’s victory.

On cue, a package containing the audiotape arrives from an unknown source (later we learn it came from Soviet intelligence). The CIA Technical Service begins deciphering. Their expertise is standard espionage-movie fare–007 territory.

But the filmmakers’ expertise in the use of this fictional leak as the nexus of intrigue is impressive. The movie revolves around the Bay of Pigs invasion, diving into the past, surfacing, diving again, demonstrating over and over why the CIA must be secretive. Transparency would reveal its delusions, duplicity, arrogance, cruelty, murderousness, corruption, incompetence, and just plain stupidity, all of which are on exhibit in “The Good Shepherd.”

Back in 1925 when Wilson was six as his father committed suicide and next in 1939 as a student at Yale, Wilson is somebody who could have taken a different path. But he falls in with the wrong crowd. In woman-deprived Yale, we find Wilson in drag singing “I’m Called Little Buttercup” in a performance of H.M.S. Pinafore. Backstage as he’s taking off his makeup, a recruiter for Skull & Bones whispers over his shoulder (seductively, like the whispers in the audiotape), “Skull & Bones: Accept or Reject?” “Accept.”

Wilson almost backs out of the Bonesmen when one casually urinates on him from a balcony while he’s mud-wrestling naked during an initiation rite, but these are his friends now, his “brothers for life,” one says to him. So he’s in, a member of an elite secret society of fraternity boys who go on to become an ever-growing network of influential men, including presidents like William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush who was director of the CIA before he was president, and his son George W. Bush as well as would-be presidents like Senator John Kerry and CIA officials like Richard Bissell.

We watch how Skull & Bones incubates a ruling-class brotherhood of secrecy and how powerful this cult becomes in post-World War II America. From the network of the Bonesmen, Wilson is recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), another elite secret society but fighting The Good War against fascism. In London Wilson learns from British Intelligence the art of “black propaganda.” He smiles as he signs off on spreading a rumor that Hitler has syphilis. How easily lies about a Hitler can become a life of lies.

“The Good Shepherd” is not an action movie. We experience the CIA from inside. How secrecy breeds more secrecy, lies more lies, betrayals more betrayals. How being determines consciousness. Told repeatedly that in his work he can never trust anyone, Wilson is unable to bond securely with any other human being-his wife, his son, the deaf woman with whom he could have had a different life. In post-war Berlin, he trusts someone once–the secretary whom he takes to bed only to figure out the next morning before breakfast that her hearing aid is a microphone. Wilson is free to bond only with his clandestine deceptions. Consequently, he is more than ready to join the Central Intelligence Agency when Bill Sullivan (based on William “Wild Bill” Donovan, chosen by President Roosevelt to found the OSS) comes to his home and tells him the Soviets will be in our backyard–unless we have a new intelligence agency. Wilson will be head of counterintelligence for the CIA in a war against communism.

The CIA easily overthrows a Latin American government too friendly with the Soviet Union and perceived as a threat to U.S. coffee interests (read United Fruit in Guatemala). At a Christmas party afterward, Sullivan tells Wilson and the other assembled agents that they “can all be proud” of what they’ve done. Although not precisely based on the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemala’s elected government, this victory, like the actual one in Guatemala, contributes to the CIA’s illusion that an overthrow of the Cuban government will be easy, too.

“The Good Shepherd” is uncompromising in depicting this constant ignorance and arrogance. Wilson sits behind his desk, seemingly in charge. But the two people in the office with him are both Soviet double agents who exchange pleasantries and secrets without Wilson’s having a clue. Wilson smiles amiably as the British double agent (modeled loosely on Kim Philby) presents the recent Soviet “defector” with a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which contains in its binding secret papers for the “defector,” who is an impostor.

It’s one of the many scenes in this movie which, in retrospect, becomes brilliant. Wilson is so duped that when the real Valentin Mironov turns up, Wilson watches alongside the fake Mironov while the real Mironov is tortured in the same way we’ve now seen prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib. He is beaten bloody and stripped naked while his covered head is doused with water–waterboarding. But he continues to insist that he is Valentin Mironov. Wilson is asked for approval of using a new drug, LSD. A man of few words, Wilson nods his assent. Tripping on LSD, the defector leaps out a window to his death.

This is reminiscent of U.S. Army scientist Frank Olson, who was dosed with LSD without his knowledge in one of the CIA’s MKULTRA experiments in mind control in 1953. A few days later Olson either fell, leaped, or was thrown from a window to his death. In addition, it echoes the notorious misidentification of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who was imprisoned and interrogated by the CIA for more than three years.

“The Good Shepherd” keeps exposing its huge audience to the CIA’s depths, always returning to that April 1961 audiotape and the search for the leak. Ultimately Wilson figures out, without telling anyone else, the identity of the Caucasian man whispering “Bahía de Cochinos” to his African lover, who it turns out was working for the KGB. Because he believes that the leak enabled the Soviet Union to stop the CIA “from taking back Cuba” and perhaps partly because of his racism, Wilson kills his son’s bride and his own unborn grandchild.

The leak by Edward Wilson, Jr., is a fiction. But what if there had been such a real-life leak? If a source, even a trusted source, had reported that the invaders would land at the Bay of Pigs, Cubans would not have based the defense of their island on something that could so easily be a trick. Students of World War II know how Hitler was fooled into believing that the Allied D-Day landing would be at Pas de Calais rather than at Normandy. In fact, as would be assumed, the CIA had a plan for a diversionary attack in Oriente province to the east and a fake attack in Pinar del Río to the west.

Fidel Castro was not relying on intelligence reports from Soviet agents or anybody else in preparing for the invasion that, by the time it happened, was expected not only by Cuba but by the whole thinking world. No sooner had President Dwight Eisenhower in March 1960 secretly ordered CIA Director Allen Dulles to organize and train Cuban expatriates for an invasion than Cuba learned about the plan and knew that Guatemala would be used for a training camp. Cuba had a whole year to mobilize and organize to repel the invasion and defend the independence they had finally achieved.

Before, during and after that year, sabotage, infiltration, assassination and disinformation were constantly employed against the island. In May 1960, the CIA’s Radio Swan began broadcasting to Cuba. Skull & Bonesman Richard Bissell, Yale professor turned CIA chief of covert operations, asked for help to assassinate Prime Minister Castro, leading in September to the recruitment of organized crime bosses John Roselli, Momo Salvatore (Sam) Giancana, and Santo Trafficante Jr.

The crime bosses enlisted the aid of “very active” Cuban expatriates in Miami. But Cuba has always had excellent sources inside the right-wing circles of Cuban expatriates and excellent security on the island itself; so the assassination attempts (like hundreds of attempts since the invasion) failed. On September 28 when four bombs exploded as Castro was speaking to a mass rally in Revolution Plaza, he proposed creating the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), which quickly became a mainstay of defense.

On October 7, Foreign Minister Raúl Roa García stated that the CIA was training expatriates and mercenaries in Guatemala for aggression against Cuba. On October 18, Cuba filed a formal complaint with the United Nations accusing the U.S. government of aerial aggression. On October 20, The New York Times reported that weapons had been dropped from a U.S. plane on September 29 by an aircraft of U.S. registration coming from the United States and piloted by U.S. “airmen.” On October 8-10, those weapons were seized in the Escambray and over a hundred counterrevolutionaries were arrested.

On November 1, the UN General Assembly rejected 45 to 29 with 18 abstentions Cuban and Soviet bloc demands for a debate of Cuba’s charge that the United States was planning to invade. Washington’s UN Ambassador James Wadsworth called Cuba’s charges “monstrous distortions and downright falsehoods.” A representative from Guatemala said Cuba was the one guilty of aggression, citing as an example of “aggression” Cuba’s grant of asylum in 1960 to former Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, who had been overthrown by the CIA. This lopsided vote took place at a time when Washington had virtual control of the General Assembly, prior to the various anticolonial victories that changed the nature of the General Assembly and led to U.S. efforts to downgrade the Assembly’s importance and upgrade the Security Council where Washington has a veto.

Since it was clear that Washington planned to invade, Cuba began receiving arms, including antiaircraft weapons, from the Soviet Union. In a sign of what Washington might expect, especially in Latin America, if its role in the invasion became common knowledge, about half of the Guatemalan Army, led by some 120 officers, rebelled against the regime of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. One of their motives was opposition to the use of their country as a base for invasion of Cuba. To put down that rebellion, the CIA used its B-26 bombers piloted by Cuban expatriates whom the CIA was training to attack Cuba.

In the midst of preparing the island for defense, Cubans on January 1, 1961, the second anniversary of the victory of the Revolution, launched a National Literacy Campaign which in one year reduced illiteracy from 25 percent to 3.9 percent, becoming a model for other countries. Evidently CIA analysts were unable to figure out that this kind of improvement in the lives of the Cuban population would obviously be leading to support for the government rather than to the uprising of support for the invaders that the CIA tried to organize and counted on.

On January 2 at the UN Security Council, Foreign Minister García formally charged that the U.S. government was preparing an invasion and denounced the U.S. Embassy in Havana for espionage. The next day Washington broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. Two days later the Security Council rejected without a vote Cuba’s charge that an invasion was being planned. On January 7-9 more weapons dropped from U.S. planes were seized in Pinar del Río and the Escambray. On January 19 seven U.S. mercenaries were captured while trying to land in Pinar del Río.

When Kennedy was inaugurated on January 20, he urged U.S. adversaries to “begin anew the quest for peace.” Castro responded that Cuba is ready to “begin anew” in relations with Washington and would await the next move by the Kennedy Administration. Cuba began demobilization of the militia who had been put on 24-hour alert 18 days earlier. But Kennedy knew about invasion plans even before he won the presidential election in November. He was briefed about the invasion as soon as he defeated Nixon and received intensive briefings once in office. On January 25 at his first news conference, Kennedy said there were no plans to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba. In his State of the Union address on January 30, Kennedy declared that “communist agents” have “established a base in Cuba.” Cuba reactivated the militia.

In February the CIA introduced into Cuba major infiltrators like Félix Rodríguez, who later had to hide in the Venezuelan Embassy for five months until he could get out of Cuba. He went on to be the CIA agent on the scene in Bolivia when Che Guevara was executed in October 1967. Later, he was a CIA agent in Vietnam and in El Salvador where he provided support to the “contras” fighting against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He brags about showing a photo of himself with Guevara to Vice-President George Bush and remains “very active” in Miami.

On February 28 Cuban media warned that invasion plans were continuing. The CIA reportedly interfered with publication of articles in U.S. media about those plans, including a major article by David Kraslow of The Miami Herald that was not printed.

In March the Kennedy Administration rejected an offer by Brazil to mediate between Havana and Washington. On March 20, two organizations of Cuban expatriates formed a Revolutionary Council with the aim of establishing a Cuban provisional government on Cuban territory to be recognized by foreign nations. On March 22 The New York Times reported that those organizations had been carrying out sabotage inside Cuba.

At a mobilization of the Cuban people for imminent invasion, Che Guevara called the recent assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo “an example of what the empire is capable of doing when the struggle against it is carried on in a firm and sustained way.” Cubans prepared for invasion. Prime Minister Castro ordered platoon-sized militia posts set up at every conceivable invasion point. The Isle of Pines (later the Isle of Youth) had been made impregnable. Knowing that the CIA would plan to destroy the Cuban Air Force, Cuba placed planes that were not useable in plain sight. Active planes were based in scattered locations, camouflaged, and protected by antiaircraft weapons.

On April 7, The New York Times ran an article about the invasion plan. Cut from four columns to one column after pressure from the White House, it omitted the original’s mention of the role of the CIA. But it did say that “experts” are training “anti-Castro forces” in Guatemala, Florida, and Louisiana. It reported that the training is “an open secret” in Miami and that couriers’ boats “run a virtual shuttle between the Florida coast and Cuba carrying instructions, weapons, and explosives.” On April 11, the Times reported the Kennedy Administration is divided over “how far to go in helping” Cubans overthrow the Cuban government, pointing out that U.S. military aid would violate both the UN Charter and the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS).

On April 13, an explosion destroyed a Havana department store, El Encanto, killing Fe del Valle, one of many people killed in acts of sabotage. Seventeen years later at a tribunal held in Havana, Philip Agee, who by then had left the CIA, told how CIA agents put dynamite in dolls shelved in the stockroom.

On Saturday, April 15, the CIA’s B-26 bombers began “softening-up” bombing of Cuba. After the day’s attacks, the CIA believed that it had wiped out Cuba’s Air Force. Evidently none of the CIA’s supposedly clever infiltrators, like Félix Rodríguez and José Basulto, had the ability to inform the CIA that the air raids had failed. In fact, the air raids served the purpose of informing Cuba and the rest of the world that the invasion was imminent.

The CIA’s fiasco was underway. On that first day, April 15, when the CIA-paid pilots flew to Cuba from Nicaragua, one pilot, Mario Zuñiga, flew his B-26 to Miami and posed as a defector bringing his Cuban plan to Florida. At an emergency session of the UN General Assembly’s Political Committee, Foreign Minister García was charging that the air attacks were the “prologue to a large-scale invasion” while U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson denied U.S. involvement and showed a wire photo of the “defector’s” B-26 to bolster his case. Meanwhile, journalists in Florida had figured out that Zuñiga’s story was as full of holes as his B-26, which had been shot up by the CIA before it left Nicaragua. Stevenson later called that UN session the most “humiliating experience” of his public life, saying he felt “deliberately tricked” by his own government. Pro-Cuban, anti-Washington demonstrations began all over the world, especially in Latin America.

The next day, Sunday, at a massive funeral for seven Cubans killed in Saturday’s bombings, Castro for the first time defined the Cuban Revolution as socialist. He said the invasion force was on its way.

In the wee hours of Monday, April 17, Brigade 2506 managed to get some men onto the beach at Playa Girón. Supposed to be all-Cuban, the Brigade was led by CIA agent Grayston (Gray) Lynch. He was the first man on the beach and the first to fire his gun. Nothing was going according to plan. The smaller invasion that was supposed to provide a distraction in Oriente was aborted when the leaders of that expedition sighted Cuban defenders.

In the early dawn, the Cuban Air Force went into action-the “surprise attack” we see in the documentary footage shown in “The Good Shepherd.” Cuban planes shot down two of the CIA’s B-26s. The Cuban Air Force was ordered to attack the ships facing Playa Larga and Playa Girón, two beaches on the Bay of Pigs. In the movie we see one ship burning. Actually that morning of April 17 two ships, the Houston and the Río Escondido, bearing invaders with their supplies, were put out of action.

At first, Fidel Castro could not be sure that the main invasion was at the Bay of Pigs. But once he knew that the landing there was no distraction, he committed his main forces, including himself, to that battle. Later, there was a false report that the invasion at the Bay of Pigs was only a feint and that the main landing was taking place in Pinar del Río, but the distraction was temporary.

By Wednesday, April 18, the invasion was going so badly that Richard Bissell authorized six U.S. pilots to attack with three bombers armed with napalm and high explosives. Four of the pilots were killed. Cubans recovered one body and used it on the following day as proof of the U.S. role.

As in the documentary footage shown in “The Good Shepherd,” Prime Minister Castro on Thursday, April 19, announced victory. Among more than 1,000 prisoners were men who had previously owned in Cuba 914,859 acres of land, 9,666 houses, 70 factories, 5 mines, 2 banks and 10 sugar mills. On April 20, President Kennedy said Washington would not allow communists to take over Cuba.

On April 21, Cuban expatriates criticized the CIA for inadequate consultation with their groups and for proceeding with an invasion even though the Agency had been warned in recent weeks that the time was not ripe. Despite many consultations and constant attempts since April 1961, the time for “taking back Cuba” has never been ripe. Too bad “The Good Shepherd” could not show this history. But of course if it did, it would never play at the multiplexes. And its huge audience would never get to see its marvelous dramatization of the inner sanctums of the empire.

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This is a ZNet Commentary. Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet. To learn more consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org

Zora Neale Hurston Festival 

BY KEILANI BEST

In its 18th year, the Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville still is a popular, national event. Thousands of people descend on the mile-long township to celebrate the famous author, who grew up there.

This year, the eight-day event features the standard street festival from Friday through Jan. 28, concerts and receptions, but differs when it comes to its theme, “Food, Fashion and Decor: Celebrating the African Diaspora in Everyday Life.”

The food is represented by a Haitian writer who considers Hurston her inspiration and who also was a National Book Award finalist. The free event Wednesday will include a sampling of Haitian cuisine and a speech by Edwidge Danticat, whose works include “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” an empowering novel about four Haitian women who overcome poverty and powerlessness.

“We want to embrace our audience in the Haitian experience (at this event),” says N.Y. Nathiri, chairwoman of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival.

by lao hong han

Upton Sinclair has been catching a little ink lately—I should say a few pixels—behind the 100th anniversary last year of his most influential work, The Jungle. I was just forcefully reminded of another work of his with even greater resonance for folks on dKos — Jimmie Higgins.

by Jane Smiley

“The longer Bush is in office, the more his psychology becomes clear. He’s not a well-meaning doofus; he’s a madman.”

Literature Rides Economic Boom

by Namita Bhandare 

India Everywhere was the theme at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year. It has now found a resonance in the literary world — as was evident at the ongoing second Jaipur Literature Festival.

“Economically, India is flabbergasting,” says Marc Parent, editor of Buchet Chastel, that will publish French translations of Sadat Hasan Manto’s short stories and a collection of essays by Mahatma Gandhi to commemorate 60 years of Indian independence. Parent last year published French translations of Tarun Tejpal and Rana Dasgupta.

“Economic power brings literary power and there is a major movement in Indian fiction and non-fiction,” he points out.

David Godwin, literary agent for Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, agrees that India is becoming a literary powerhouse, pointing to the growth in publishing infrastructure from quality imprints to quality bookshops. “It’s part of the new affluence.”  Godwin says he is considering opening an office in New Delhi.

The Original Heretic Returns

by Peter Goddard

“People marching has been a theme of mine,” she says. “I’ve been fascinated by groups of people walking across the terrain. I’ve been painting that image off and on and for different reasons for 30 years. Usually they’ve been refugees or just ordinary people. But this is the first time I’ve painted politicians. This is about invasion and sovereignty.”

Vibrant as the Paint on the Walls

by John Ross

The walls of this city of painters have been freshly whitewashed on orders from a much-lampooned governor, the whiteout financed by transnational tourist moguls to promote the illusion that peace has returned to Oaxaca.  Neat squares of blankness cancel out the visual rebellion that exploded on the streets of this colonial city, once declared the patrimony of humanity by the United Nations. There were seven months of dramatic confrontations between striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO) and security forces backing the despotic governor Ulisis Ruiz whose removal from office the insurgents demand. Over 200 prisoners were taken during the skirmishing and another 60 are listed as disappeared. 19 dissidents have been gunned down by Ruiz’s death squads.

But despite the savage repression, if one keeps an ear to the ground and an eye to the whitewashed walls once plastered with revolutionary slogans, tags, full-length murals, throw-ups, and ingenious stencils, it doesn’t much sound or look like the Oaxaca Intifada is done with yet….

Oaxaca is a city of painters, the cradle of the late master colorist Rufino Tamayo and the very much-alive Francisco Toledo who stands with the resistance movement, and during the long struggle the walls of the city were transformed into a dizzying open-air gallery of popular art.  Despite the thousands of gallons that have been expended to blot out the rebellion in a doomed campaign to assure tourists that “no pasa nada aqui”, that nothing is happening here and it is safe to return, the images, like the anger, endure just beneath the surface.  “The white paint cannot erase the blood of our comrades” defiantly advertises a spray-painted wall scrawl.  A remarkable archive of over a thousand images of the struggle for the walls of Oaxaca offers poignant witness to the ongoing resistance.

Some of the works were spray painted freehand, others stenciled onto every available space, still others printed out on paper and fastened to the walls with a wheat glue tough as steel so that to remove the offending art requires dismantling the buildings to which they were affixed brick by brick.  Although Ulisis’s obliteration teams stalk the streets, new art goes up every day right under the noses of the police.

Indeed, Ulisis is everywhere on these walls – as a burro, as a rat, a raccoon, a chimpanzee, a skull and crossbones, with shit on his head.  A mammoth Mayan head was painted to scale by an apparently well-coordinated team of throw-up artists, a Playboy nude appeared curled up on the wall of the Cathedral rectory and tagged as “The Pope’s Girlfriend” – the Church played an equivocal role in the Oaxaca uprising. 

Some murals are left unfinished, the work of the artists disrupted when Ulisis’s goons – mostly off-duty police – swung around the corner in the deep of the night spraying automatic weapon fire at the barricades.  Some, in fact, were painted from the ashes of the tire fires the protestors burned all night on the thousand or so barricades piled up in and around the city. 

Novel Delights

 by Marina Krakovsky

Fiction readers score higher on empathy and social acumen tests than do readers of nonfiction.

Two articles below with great flaws but nevertheless of some interest, regarding the vitality of fiction. As answer to the valid concerns and antidote to the analytic weaknesses of both articles — see Victor Hugo’s great novel Les Miserables, and this excerpt from his biography; see Mammonart by Upton Sinclair, his astute book of economic literary criticism, and see this powerful contemporary novel of love and geopolitics by my colleague Andre Vltchek, Point of No Return.

Has Fiction Lost Its Power? by Rod Liddle

The Spirit of Hugo by Mark Derian

From Imagination To Action

Can fiction be a vehicle for social change?

by Valerie Weaver-Zercher

Gus Traynor never wanted to be an interior decorator. But this financially strapped Alaskan newspaper publisher, the lead character in Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s new novel Correcting the Landscape, was worried that an interior decorator is what he had become—what with needing to write stories that made his town “look good to itself.” “I suddenly saw the danger that all my words over these years amounted to nothing more than, say, a tablecloth,” he says.

If this kind of journalism is akin to pulling a tablecloth over a town (or a country) so that it looks pretty, then writing socially conscious fiction is something like cleaning out an old barn and sifting through the trash and treasures one finds there.

Novelists in the United States who dare to sweep the barn rather than spread the tablecloth—who examine social and political problems rather than conceal them—often find their work viewed with suspicion, says Barbara Kingsolver, author of acclaimed novels such as The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees. Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which is awarded biennially to a first novel that emphasizes issues of social justice, as a way to counteract what she calls a “phobic feeling about socially conscious literature from the literary gatekeepers” in the United States. “Trade publishing has become more commercial and money-driven than ever,” Kingsolver told Sojourners in a recent interview. “In some ways, commercial publishing has become like the movie industry—no one wants to take chances, and everyone wants to do what was popular last year.”

Even if it’s not popular, sorting through the unresolved issues that history hands new generations should be central to writing fiction, says Cole. Her Correcting the Landscape, which won the 2004 Bellwether Prize,is set three years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and hundreds of years after the onset of erosion of Native cultures, yet both disasters play out in the lives of Traynor and his fellow characters. “American literature contains our goodness and our grief, as a people,” says Cole. “I’d rather not get away from these realities by narrowing my scope and writing tight, tiny, safe stories or keeping my fiction on a leash.”

The Bellwether Prize, which consists of $25,000 and guaranteed publication through a prominent publishing house, is the only major North American literary prize that endorses the category of literature of social change. Internationally, the Nobel Prize for Literature often celebrates authors who write in this vein of social critique: Think Nadine Gordimer, Miguel Angel Asturias, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Readers the world over look to writers as cultural bellwethers,” says Kingsolver. “They look for leadership from writers in terms of forming the questions and putting a face on social justice.”

The American literary scene, on the other hand, has a “very strong bias against the literature of ideas,” explains Peter Kerry Powers, chair of the English department at Pennsylvania’s Messiah College. Russian novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka have been “much more willing to write fictionally about ideas,” Powers says, adding that societies in which war and material impoverishment have exacted a greater toll tend to produce writers who emphasize such issues in their fiction. “Art becomes a way to mediate the terror,” is how Nigerian novelist and poet Chris Abani has described the process of writing under an oppressive regime.

THE ROOTS OF U.S. publishers’ reticence to print overtly political fiction are deeply embedded in the history of the 20th century. Kingsolver dates the literati’s jitters about writing and publishing such books back to the 1950s, when McCarthyism dictated that “art and politics had to get a divorce.” Modern fiction’s anxiety about wedding art and politics can be traced back even further, according to Powers, who has written widely about multiethnic American literature. Up until the 1920s and 1930s, when writers such as John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell began describing the lives and oppressions of the working class, “most people thought of art as a completely separate realm from the everyday,” says Powers. Even as white writers such as Steinbeck and African-American writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison addressed social and racial injustice through their fiction, the dominant literary mode remained the domestic novel, which “looks at the complications of individual lives in relation to other individuals,” Powers says.

Literature that overtly connected individuals’ lives with political and social realities gained momentum only in the 1960s and 1970s, when the black arts movement and second-wave feminist movement exploded. Best-seller lists were front-loaded with romances and Westerns, and most literary novels managed to remain apolitical, but books such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room were connecting character and plot with larger social and political forces. While not constituting a dominant literary movement, writing about social issues and the academic criticism of such writing became an “extremely important strain in literature and talking about literature in the last 40 years,” says Powers.

So whose fault is it that the décolletage-baring and code-cracking crowd still hogs the top slots on best-seller lists, rather than the writers of literature of social change? Some blame politically engaged writers themselves, who—even in a world ravaged by war, hunger, and disease—make writing about such issues inaccessible or elitist. Others blame major publishing conglomerates—what Kingsolver dubs the “literary-industrial complex”—which assume Americans don’t want to clutter their beach bags and bookshelves with tales of social injustice, ecological decline, or political corruption. Then again, perhaps the fault lies with North American readers, who—like the toddler who requires a two-inch trench between her mashed potatoes and her peas—want our politics forked into newspapers and our pleasure spooned into fiction.

Blame and glory can never be neatly assigned, of course. And lest we fall into a two-kingdom notion that frothy pulp fiction sells and serious novels of social change don’t, it’s important to note contemporary titles in this vein of social critique that have gained both critical acclaim and wide readership: Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, and The Bean Trees, by Kingsolver, to name a few. In addition, even commercially popular books that lack overt political critiques often speak profoundly to issues of social conscience. Still, the Bellwether Prize’s claim is hard to dispute: “Social commentary in our art is frequently viewed with suspicion.”

That suspicion, according to Kingsolver, is largely due to the curse of the P-word: propaganda. Some writers gladly accept the label and rename it a blessing; W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1926 that “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.” Others, like Kingsolver, prefer a little more nuance. “Propaganda tells you what to think. Art invites you to come and visit a place and see what it means to you,” she says. The presumption that “if you address matters of social justice and imbalances of power, then automatically your work becomes propaganda” is a false one, says Kingsolver.

SO, DO WRITERS need to be careful that the aesthetics of their fiction don’t buckle under the weight of some larger agenda? Most people remember novels that read like one part story, three parts sermon (Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind, as does a contemporary apocalyptic series that shall remain nameless). Gayle Brandeis, winner of the 2002 Bellwether Prize for The Book of Dead Birds, says that if a writer allows political issues to arise naturally from the narrative itself, such fiction won’t be didactic. “In fiction, I want [social] issues to emerge from the characters and setting rather than impose them in an unnatural way. I think such issues are much more resonant if they’re woven into the fabric of the story,” she said from her home in Southern California.

Only the most egotistical—or naive—writer harbors any grand delusion that his or her work is going to alleviate poverty or end a war. Every so often a novel such as Émile Zola’s Germinal, which described the horrific working conditions in the French coal mines in the late 1800s and is often attributed with increased sympathy toward workers’ rights, contributes to direct social change. But change usually occurs at a sluggish pace, and being clear-eyed about that fact is important, according to Cole. “I don’t have any reason to suspect that facing these things in our literature helps us actually solve social or political problems,” she says. “I think it makes for better literature—that’s all.”

Yet it’s hard to argue that fiction doesn’t carry the power to change minds and engage hearts, even if it does so one reader at a time. “Fiction takes a person on the other side of the world, someone who is the potential enemy, and brings that person into your home and your emotional life,” says Kingsolver. “You see the details of her life, and that makes her your intimate.” In so doing, she says, fiction “creates empathy for the stranger, which is the opposite of war.”

If fiction fosters the imagination, and a good imagination leads us toward empathy, and empathy steers us to action, then perhaps fiction and social change are only second or third cousins, rather than distant relatives. “Empathy begins with a fictive act,” is how David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why, put it in an Orion magazine essay just before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. “Christ’s words ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ to cite a famously ignored example, demand an arduous imaginative act. … Christ orders anyone who’s serious about him to commit this ‘Neighbor=Me’ fiction” until Christ’s words are turned into reality.

This “Neighbor=Me” fiction can be a threatening read even to those who claim to be peacemakers, but it’s especially unnerving to those who build wars on the equations “We=Righteous” and “Neighbor= Terrorist.” It’s out of fear of this fiction that the United States, through its policies and invasions after Sept. 11, “forces literature into a dissident position,” writes Duncan.

If his claim is correct—that writing socially conscious literature is now a subversive activity in the United States—then perhaps writers are becoming increasingly emboldened by their marginalization and attentive to the exemplars of great protest writing around the world. In fact, Kingsolver predicts that readers will soon have no trouble finding U.S. novels that hinge on the invasion of Iraq. “It takes a while to process something as big as war,” she says. “Art takes time, and novels take a lot of time. But I believe that they [anti-war novels] are coming.”

Such novels may not ever muscle a place for themselves beside the thrillers and romances in big-box bookstores. Yet good books don’t need to be blockbusters to work their slow, quiet art of creating empathy for the stranger and even inspiring action on the stranger’s behalf. In this way, literature of social change echoes the great narrative of the Christian faith: a Word softly, humbly, becoming flesh.         

Valerie Weaver-Zercher, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is a writer, editor,  and mother of three young children.

By Amanda Hopkinson  

This New Year makes 13 since the Zapatistas declared the vast tropical forests of Chiapas in south-eastern Mexico an autonomous region. There, among the Lacandon Indians, a rebel movement – which took its name from the indigenous leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and its strategy from a purported young academic – declared its opposition to governmental corruption, economic globalisation and ecological destruction. Little was known about its leader, although an industry soon arose to manufacture a reputation.

by Davey D 

This week a few thousand people will come to Memphis, Ten, between Jan 12-14 for what is being billed as the largest Media Reform Conference in the nation’s history. Everyone from Jesse Jackson to actors Danny Glover, Jane Fonda and Geena Davis to activists and industry insiders like Rosa Clemente and Paul Porter will be on hand as folks will be discussing ways to deal with the impact of corporate media.

 “After Laughter, Action” by Courtney E. Martin

Satire, of course, has a long and proven history as the source of bona fide social change. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, George Orwell’s Animal Farm – all of these led to new public awareness that then led to protest, even some pragmatic reforms. But does the one-millionth joke about President Bush’s preschool perception of global geography really regain the trust of the international community?

It seems that the difference between a satire such as Animal Farm and The Daily Show is that the latter too often makes us comfortable, satiated, even happy, as opposed to the very motivating and sometimes terrifying disequilibrium caused by Orwell. Rebels distributed copies of Animal Farm, a novella satirizing totalitarianism, to displaced Soviets in Ukraine right after World War II. The occupying American military discovered them and confiscated 1,500 copies that would later be handed over to the Russian authorities whom the Americans were, at least temporarily, trying to aid. The vicious and powerful humor contained within that small book sure scared the corrupt leaders of that time.

Clearly, the huge audience for sarcastic, sophisticated slapstick means an increase in public awareness of current events. This is an undeniable benefit, beyond the salutary giggle, of consuming this kind of news. The National Annenberg Election Survey released in September 2004 reported that The Daily Show ‘s viewers knew more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watched news.

But what are we doing with this knowledge, besides rehashing it at the water cooler the next morning?