How can [the writer] denounce something with the tools that are used by the enemy, that is … a language already used by the masters and their disciples?
I fear the ‘privilege’ approach has now become ingrained in how we consume art and entertainment...It may have simply gotten to the point that all other possible responses to a work have been rendered incomprehensible.
...offensiveness and offendability have emerged as our distinctive form of cultural literacy. Never has the taking of offence (and the performance of offended-ness) enjoyed more widespread cultural legitimacy.
Tyrants always want language and literature that is easily understood.
Culture war usually consists of conservatives expressing some bizarre belief related to lifestyle or the arts — that liberals are trying to wipe out Christmas, for example, or that Prince was right-wing and Law & Order left-wing, or that you can fight homosexuality by eating fast food — and then, when people give them the Springtime for Hitler stare, insisting that they're not the freaks, you’re the freaks.
To recap the week, a bunch of adulterers and unmarried liberals are all upset that Mike Pence and his wife are happily married.
By itself, hypocrisy does not test for goodness, badness, efficacy, or even purity of intention—it can only test for and demand consistency. We require a vocabulary for moral failings that is more exacting than hypocrisy or authenticity, one for which the goal is not to be true to ourselves, but to be better.
I had spent a lot of time watching the campaign process and I was really interested in the idea that it was dysfunctional and that people were turned off by it. The people who did campaigning for a living, both politicians and the press, all the people who traveled “on the bus,” were wrapped up in their own little world, unable to see how disconnected they’d become from the public.
So I watched that phenomenon for a long time and saw that the campaign was just increasingly a television show and not really rooted in any political reality. Policy was increasingly irrelevant, and anybody who was smart enough to run against this process and villainize the politicians and the media and the major political parties and the donor class was going to have a really good chance of succeeding. That was one of the reasons I thought Trump had such a good chance early, because it was pretty clear that’s what he was doing.
Feith was giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in real time, running his mouth about strategic footprints and the tactical qualities of the projection of power thereof, when one of the dusty unshaven soldiers turned to me and asked, "Sir, do you have any idea who that stupid fucker is?" I explained that was Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the war. The soldier picked up a piece of toast with butter and jam and threw it against the TV screen. "Shut the fuck up, you stupid-ass piece of shit," he yelled. Soon the others were throwing toast and eggs and little plastic jam containers at the screen and yelling at Feith. Finally one of the KBR civilians came over and turned off the TV. It apparently wasn't a very good idea for one of the architects of the war to be explaining to these soldiers why, exactly, they were over there projecting tactical power with their strategic footprints in Sinjar.
For the kind of scientists that Kelekian and his team of eager young researchers represent, the unique and unrepeatable human being can only be seen as a collection of mathematized parts — measurable creatinine levels, calculable lymphocyte cells, quantifiable bilirubin secretions. Seeing universally and deeply, but still only narrowly, such scientists fail to see the forest for the trees; they remain methodologically unaware of the particular named human being who is the particular human patient whom they study and treat. Efforts to inculcate in young research doctors a sense of their patients as human beings, even if only to help them “converse intelligently with the clinicians” and to improve their bedside manner, are considered by the researchers to be a waste of time.
Fiction might still perish as a medium, even if it doesn’t deserve to, brought down by any number of causes. It could be made unappealing from without by minds warped by the supernormal stimuli of television, video games, virtual reality, and the constant stream of entertainment from the Internet. Or it could be finished off by an attack from within, by those who want literature dismantled for the greater good so that it can be rebuilt as a small subsidiary arm of the political left, preaching to the choir. Or the novel may die the boring death of being swallowed up by the metastasizing bureaucracies of creative writing programs, joining contemporary poetry in a twilight that lingers only because professors of writing teach students to become professors of writing. And so it goes.
But at least, if the novel falls, it won’t be because of its artistic essence. It won’t be replaced in its effects by equivalent television or video games or any other extrinsic medium. If the novel goes, it will be because we as a culture drifted away from the intrinsic world. Left without the novel our universe will be partitioned up, leaving us stranded within the unbreachable walls of our skulls. And inside, projected on the bone, the flicker of a screen.
Julio Cortazar, in refrain:
How can [the writer] denounce something with the tools that are used by the enemy, that is … a language already used by the masters and their disciples?
