ARTICLES and NOTES on SOCIAL and POLITICAL ART  list view

Alessandra Stanley  Engrossed in a World of Political Idealism [so-called, or rather "Political Distortion" to a far greater extent than this author is remotely conscious of]
"Most television dramas play with the question "what if?" NBC's "West Wing" revels in "if only...." Sunday's live presidential debate was the quintessence of wishful writing. Two intelligent, principled candidates tossed aside debate rules and went at each other full throttle on live television, debating everything from immigration and energy policy to foreign debt relief. They didn't discuss abortion, however, because in "West Wing" World, even the Republican nominee is pro-choice. Now in its seventh season, "The West Wing" lost much of its original magic when its creator, Aaron Sorkin, left and took the series' screwball comedy wit and intellectual sophistication with him. The show still has banter and worldly references, but at its height in its first few seasons, even tiny bits of dialogue were three-dimensional, providing a joke, a subplot and a policy point all at once. Mr. Sorkin's successors do not think and talk as fast as he did, and neither do the series' characters. "West Wing" aides retain their idealism, however, a sense of civic purpose and honor that is made palatable with wisecracks and personal pratfalls. The world hates us, and even Americans deplore the sorry state of political discourse in their country. But only the uninformed or disingenuous complain about the quality of American television. It has a variety and breadth that no other nation can match. For every offensive reality series or inane daytime talk show, there are comedies and dramas that reach far higher in a single episode than most movies or Broadway shows."  [That sets the bar quite low, in many ways, politically not least - it ought to be noted. -T.C.] 

Agence France Press  Ten Years On, Nigeria's Ogoni Minority Community Mark Ken Saro-Wiwa's Death
"Hundreds of members of Nigeria's Ogoni minority have marched in the oil city of Port Harcourt to mark the tenth anniversary of the execution of rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa after he protested against the energy giant Shell. Following an overnight candlelit vigil in Bori Thursday, the would-be "capital" of Ogoni, more than 1,000 of Saro-Wiwa's supporters marched through the centre of the southern city to protest what they allege is their people's continued persecution and economic marginalisation by the Nigerian state. "Once our people is united around a just cause we must win, we shall win," declared Ledum Mitee, a lawyer who took on Saro-Wiwa's mantle as leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), a non-violent group pushing for Ogoni autonomy.... Saro-Wiwa and eight of his comrades in MOSOP were hanged on November 10, 1995, by Nigeria's then military regime after a controversial trial in which the writer and politician was accused of ordering the murder of four prominent Ogonis. The executions sparked international condemnation -- Nigeria was kicked out of the Commonwealth -- and most Ogonis still believe that Saro-Wiwa was framed because he opposed the government and Anglo-Dutch oil firm Royal Dutch Shell."

Bibliofile at Outlook India
"So what accounts for Pakistan's curious ban on fiction from India, but no such restrictions on non-fiction books? That fiction is more subversive...?" [Also see Barthes quote on the power of fiction, here]

Alessandra Stanley  Two Fictional Families, Neither Colorblind, but Only One Really Sees Black America
"Cartoons are sarcastic and seditious about almost everything except black America. Corporate malfeasance is lampooned on "SpongeBob SquarePants," and "Jimmy Neutron" mocks American democracy. (All candidates for the school election are corrupt or stupid.) Even death is fair game: on "Billy and Mandy," a children's series on Cartoon Network, the real star is the Grim Reaper. It's race that takes the holiday. Cultural clashes are airbrushed out, and neighborhoods are integrated and harmonious. Almost every clique on Disney, Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network includes one nice, smart African-American friend who blends in with the others and doesn't stand out too much. Angelica, the demonically spoiled brat of "Rugrats," has a classmate named Susie who is black, sweet and well brought up. Jimmy Neutron's pal Libby is calm and brainy. Gerald is the best friend on "Hey Arnold!" and a well-intentioned voice of reason. Even sophisticated animated series aimed at older viewers are more careful about race than almost any other hot-button issue, and that includes "South Park." That Comedy Central cartoon uses the character Token Black to make fun of political correctness on the rest of American television, but reserves its full apostasy for the safer topics of sex, religion and pedophilia. "The Boondocks," a new nighttime animated series on Cartoon Network, is based on Aaron McGruder's comic strip and takes over where "The Simpsons" and "South Park" leave off. "The Boondocks" is all about race, an African-American version of "Doonesbury" that is, if anything, more politically charged. Especially in the conscientiously colorblind world of television, the animated version of "The Boondocks" is a jolt of shock therapy."

Noah Cicero  Interviewed by Tao Lin 
"Bret Easton Ellis, who I love, even though he writes about rich people, he shows them to be what they a lot are, morally bankrupt, sadistic and drug addicts. That is what Easton Ellis knows, so it makes sense that is what writes about it. Which is what most authors do. They look around themselves and analyze their world with a microscope and write about it. That brings us to Foer who writes about the same characters as Ellis does and makes them heroes and grand old people, there you have a contradiction. But I noticed in reviews of Easton Ellis' new book a lot of people are saying, "Why does he keep writing about these people he hates." So Foer in the last year have turned many against Ellis. They have to make a choice, "Do we choose Foer who makes upper class people look like heroes and moral or choose Easton Ellis who makes upper class people look morally bankrupt and drug addicted maniacs who live empty lives." Foer's book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and people's acceptance of it is a direct result of liberals sliding to the right, not totally on Bush's side, but to a more moderate political stance. Foer's book is conservative in values, it has family values, and people are phony and nice in it, just like Bush wants them to be. There is no real emotion or sadness or truth in Foer's book, the people have false emotions, a false emotion would be an emotion based off the belief in a bourgeois notion, or a notion that exists only because the media tells you it exists. His book works like our movies do nowadays, it is push button bad faith. The author says, "I need emotion, here is a scene with a baby or child, here is a scene with a mother and child, the child is in distress, here is a scene with a black and white person, the white person is being racist, mention 9-11, play tragic piano music in the background, play tragic piano music in the background." Those are dirty tricks by authors, those events at one point made sense and deserved to be in the movie, but now all there is these simple candy emotion triggers. Writers have turned very serious human events into candy emotions. Racism is very serious, children getting shot is very serious, 9-11 was very serious, but today's writers have turned these serious events into simple thoughtless experiences only brought up in their writing to cause phony emotions.... I would like to say also that a person cannot like Foer and Easton Ellis at the same time. They contradict each other philosophically too much. So I understand there being a split, and hope that the literary world chooses Easton Ellis."

Jonah Raskin  Howl at Fifty
"Fifty years ago, on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, an avant-garde art gallery located at 3119 Fillmore St. in San Francisco, he performed Howl for the first time in public and brought American poetry back to life. Jack Kerouac -- then his oldest, closest friend -- predicted that Howl would make him famous all over the Bay Area and that a poetry Renaissance would shake San Francisco. Beyond the walls of "The Six," and all across America, poets -- with few exceptions -- languished and despaired. At most colleges, English departments turned up their noses at living poets -- and some dead ones, too. Even Walt Whitman went largely unread and, as the poet and critic Muriel Rukeyser observed in The Life of Poetry, men who wrote poems ran the risk of finding themselves branded homosexuals. Fifty years ago, America was still in the throes of McCarthyism and the Cold War's big cultural chill. The conformist Man in the Gray Flannel Suit epitomized American manhood. Even in San Francisco, Howl's birthplace, the district attorney would prosecute the poem -- for obscenity.... All of them wrote poems that borrowed from contemporary idioms, celebrated both life and death, and expressed a sense of kinship with the earth and a compassion for the poor, the outcast and exiled. Poetry, they believed, should communicate with an audience and convey intensely personal experiences. They were all craftsmen who cared about language."

Julia Stein  Death of a Poet: Carol Tarlen (1943-2004)
"Carol, like Whitman, was a poet for democracy. During the Gilded Age of the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s, she wrote about the working people who were increasingly smashed and pushed aside and who have fought back with verve and passion. She was writing a poetry necessary for America just as Whitman's poetry had been necessary for the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. To write such poetry, she adapted the poetics of the international avant-garde of Breton, Vallejo, and Neruda just as Whitman had adapted an international avant-garde poetics in an earlier generation. She knew the people she was writing about: her people, knew them in her bones."

Alessandra Stanley  Bringing Out the Absurdity of the News
"Humor has moved away from long, one-joke skits and wacky impersonations to jujitsu satire: using the glib complacency of television news against itself. And some of the best material on Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert's shows lies in their sadistic use of snippets from real newscasts and political speeches. On Thursday, Mr. Colbert showed a montage of alarmed reports about the avian flu epidemic on CNN, C-Span and MSNBC, then showed a more upbeat Fox News headline: "Bird is the word on the street. Why the avian flu could send stocks soaring." Mr. Colbert praised Fox News for always finding something positive in bad news, be it about the Bush administration or the nation. "Every global pandemic has a silver lining," he said approvingly. "Remember, the Medici made their money investing in the bubonic plague. A lot of people did. Until the boil burst." Even though Mr. Colbert stays in character - a smug, bombastic and ultrapatriotic cable news commentator - he packs more wit and acid commentary in 22 minutes of his one-man show than multiple skits by the entire cast of "SNL." ... On his regular feature "The Word," Mr. Colbert routinely mocks the kind of anti-intellectual populism perfected by Fox News. "Trustiness" was his word of the day, he told viewers with a poker face, sneering at the "wordanistas over at Webster's" who might refute its existence. "I don't trust books," he explained. "They're all fact and no heart." ... On Tuesday night, he asked "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl about the Valerie Plame scandal and listened blankly as she likened the White House leak of a C.I.A. agent's identity to Watergate. "What is the big deal about this particular case?" he asked Ms. Stahl with mock indignation. "I mean, all that they are saying is that somebody in the White House had to do what they had to do to get the war they wanted." Some of the wordless jokes are just as dead-on, from the show's graphics to Mr. Colbert's way of greeting his daily guest. Instead of having the visitor sashay onto the set before an applauding studio audience, Mr. Colbert rises from his desk and does his own victory lap over to a corner table where the guest is kept waiting in the dark."

Alessandra Stanley  Selling Sex, That Renewable Resource [TV review - Human Trafficking]
"It's hard to argue that sex slavery does not get enough attention in the media. Somehow child pornography and Asian sex tours seem to be more compelling topics for "Dateline" exposés than intellectual property theft or river blindness. But "Human Trafficking," the two-part mini-series that begins on Lifetime tonight, avoids the seedy sensationalism that cheapens so many television depictions of the crime. And it is unusually good: a harsh public-service message built into a clever, suspenseful thriller.One reason it stands out is that there is no double-dealing behind the camera. It does not try to titillate on the way to high moral dudgeon. Sex in "Human Trafficking" is depicted as torture and rape, and prostitution as the growth industry of international organized crime. "An ounce of cocaine, wholesale: $1,200, but you can only sell it once," an immigration and customs official, Bill Meehan (Donald Sutherland), says. "A woman or a child, $50 to $1,000, but you can sell them each day, every day, over and over and over again. The markup is immeasurable." ... "Human Trafficking" is compelling, but it is very much a movie with a message. In real life, Ms. Sorvino is an ambassador for Amnesty International's Stop Violence Against Women program, and the film is N.G.O.-rated. The criminals and their clients are uniformly sadistic and brutal, and the women they exploit are all unwilling, unknowing victims. Life, unfortunately, can be murkier. Sometimes criminals are themselves victims of a larger syndicate or bankrupt social system, as the New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof discovered last year when he bought two teenage sex slaves their freedom. "Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to 'Mother,' the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus - yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill," Mr. Kristof wrote. "It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness." Lifetime's mini-series offers less moral complexity, but it does an effective job of dramatizing a scourge that is too often packaged for prurience."

Anthony Breznican  Movies Sound A Call To Action  
"A number of new films want you to stand up for a cause - though not necessarily in the movie theater. Following Michael Moore, who tried to galvanize voters by highlighting President Bush's perceived follies in his blockbuster Fahrenheit 9/11, activism movies have proven their clout at the box office, if not the voting booth. This fall, Hollywood is combining issues movies with campaigns designed to get people active.... The direct effort to organize fans sets these movies apart from issue films such as Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich. The tie-ins for North Country and Good Night come courtesy of Participant Productions, which also helped pay for the films. CEO Jeff Skoll, the eBay billionaire and philanthropist, founded and finances the company, whose goal is to push viewers to stop being bystanders. "Storytelling has an enormous effect on people's lives," says Ricky Strauss, president of Participant. "You're sitting in a theater and having this collective consciousness as a group. Movies make you emotionally more charged." Participate.net has posted only a few dozen submissions since going live Oct. 7. But organizers are hoping traffic will pick up when the movies reach a wider audience. If people walk out feeling emotional about the movie, "that would be enough for me," says North Country director Niki Caro. "But for people who have experienced (abuse), in an ideal world, it would give them courage to stand up."

Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe  Poetry as Resistance
"Despite the White House’s predictable rejection of poetry as anything more than decoration or 'art appreciation,' poetry as a vital part of resistance is alive all over the world."

Rajiv Rawat  The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Paday
"A strange North American silence seems to have descended over the Bollywood film, The Rising: The Ballad of Mandel Pandey, an historical epic depicting the Indian uprising against the British in 1857. The year’s most anticipated Indian film, with an unprecedented number of UK and North American screenings in mainstream movie theaters, seems to have been completely bypassed by North American film critics."

David Barsamian interviewed by Kasim Tirmizey  Media and Propaganda
"So we need to develop independent media, we need to develop our own documentary films, which I am happy to say is happening, we do have poets in opposition but they don’t have big audiences in the US. I want to give you an example of a very courageous act in the United States, Sharon Olds was recently honoured, she is a New York University professor and poet, she was honoured with the National Book Critics Award, she was invited to Washington DC by Laura Bush to attend a dinner and some ceremonies. She wrote a very eloquent letter saying that 'I would be honoured, I wished I could attend, but the idea of breaking bread with you and sitting at a table with linens and candles and being served by waiters was just too disgusting and appalling, because of what shame you have brought to the United States with the blood on your hands and your husbands hands because of the criminal actions of the regime.' Poets and artists have always been the first line of resistance, that has historically been more true in the East where the oral tradition is very strong, in Arab Middle Eastern countries, in Turkey, in Iran, in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, there has been a tradition of poets who speak out against power, who speak truth to power, who interrogate the popular wisdom, conventional thinking, and hegemonic ideas. To develop a culture of resistance requires quite a bit of internal development and societal maturation, which you don't see a lot of unfortunately in the United States, not across the board, there are pockets of resistance in the US, in Berkley, in Madison, where I live in Boulder, in Albuquerque, in different cities around the US. But because of the role of propaganda, the influence of television and mass media, and an educational system that does not really educate, that inculcates rather than educates, that doesn't train students to deconstruct, doesn't train students to develop critical thinking; we have a lot of work to do inside the US in developing a consciousness where we can change the situation there otherwise this is just going to keep repeating itself."

John Pilger  The Silence of Writers: On Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter
"In 1988, the English literary critic and novelist, D.J. Taylor wrote a seminal piece entitled 'When the Pen Sleeps'. He expanded this into a book 'A Vain Conceit', in which he wondered why the English novel so often denigrated into 'drawing room twitter' and why the great issues of the day were shunned by writers, unlike their counterparts in, say, Latin America, who felt a responsibility to take on politics: the great themes of justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, war and peace. The notion of the writer working in splendid isolation was absurd. Where, he asked, were the George Orwells, the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks of the modern age?"

Katrina vanden Heuvel  Innocent Voices
"When Oscar Torres saw a Venezuelan band perform the song "Casas de carton" ("cardboard houses") in 2001, he knew that he wanted to "write something about the song" that he remembered so well from his childhood days growing up in war-torn and impoverished El Salvador. Soon after, Torres started working on a screenplay that ultimately served as the basis for the film Innocent Voices which will begin playing in 11 US cities on October 14. The film has received critical acclaim after being released in Latin America and shown at this year's Amnesty International Film Festival. It deserves a wide audience in the United States. Directed by the talented Mexican filmmaker Luis Mandoki, Innocent Voices tells the story of Torres' embattled youth. The narrative is exquisitely told through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy named Chava whose character is based on Torres' boyhood. (Chava, appropriately, is a nickname for "Salvador.") Innocent Voices depicts the horror of war and its impact on children caught in the middle of El Salvador's civil strife in the 1980s."

Salman Rushdie  Europe, Turkey, the EU, Orhan Pamuk
"An unprincipled Europe, which turns its back on great artists and fighters for freedom, will continue to alienate its citizens, whose disenchantment has already been widely demonstrated by the votes against the proposed new constitution."

Tony Christini  Write a Political Novel?
The time is ripe to write a political novel says Christopher Lehmann in his recent article “Why Americans Can’t Write Political Fiction.” On the other hand it seems that you would have to be a fool or a masochist to write a political novel in the US, because to write one that bears anything like a close relation to reality, given the US political climate, would be like someone in a fundamentalist church congregation standing up in the middle of a religious service and suggesting that everyone discuss the merits of being a good atheist. You would be lucky if you were merely ignored rather than vilified or worse. Doubtless though, writing a political novel in the US that actually bears serious relation to reality is a hard and important thing to do.

[And for a couple recent political novels that overcome official ideology, that are the sort of books that any free and open society should want to read and discuss widely, see a novel with a partly paranoid and largely politically incisive protagonist, Looking for Bigfoot by Mike Palecek, and see also Andre Vltchek's forthcoming Point of No Return.]

Harold Pinter  Torture and Misery in the Name of Freedom
"The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has.... What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves) - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people."

Stephen Brown  Playwright Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Literature Prize
"British playwright Harold Pinter, a master of sparse dialogue and menacing silences who has been an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq was the surprise winner of the Nobel literature prize on Thursday.... An active human rights campaigner, Pinter has likened U.S. President George W. Bush's administration to the Nazis and called British Prime Minister Tony Blair a 'mass murderer' for invading Iraq. The world of theater hailed the new Nobel laureate. 'It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years,' said Tom Stoppard, another of Britain's greatest post-war dramatists. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn called it 'a most fitting award'."

Timothy Williams  British Playwright - Harold Pinter - Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
"In the 1970's, Mr. Pinter became outspoken on political issues, especially about human rights violations. In 1985, he and the American playwright Arthur Miller traveled to Turkey. During remarks at a party at the American embassy, Mr. Pinter said he had spoken to Turks who had been the victims of torture by the Turkish government, including having their genitals electrically shocked. Although the party was held in his honor, he was asked to leave the embassy. In recent years, Mr. Pinter criticized the NATO bombing of Kosovo and the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan."

Margaret Atwood  On Flogging Poets and Catching Fish - Freedom of Expression
"Why are repressive governments so afraid of writers? Why do they arrest and imprison and torture and kill them, all around the world? It's for much the same thing -- for saying what everyone knows, but nobody dares voice, and for saying it well. Imposed silence is a favoured weapon of tyrants. To own up to the real history of one's country is an act of courage, because real histories are never spotless; they are also seldom popular with the authorities of the day." [see also an excerpt of George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” - or Orwell's full essay here]

Lee Siegel  Rock in a Hard Place
"The novel was the way middle-class authors and readers used the accumulation of experience to compete with the accumulation of wealth, the downside and the upside of capitalism being the crazy multiplication of experiences. But in the last decade or so, serious and popular art more and more has been overtaken by uncritical images of wealth and privilege. Ours must be the only civilization that has ever existed whose art yokes together material riches and spiritual success. Think of the film Indecent Proposal, in which the shallow, crass millionaire who offers a husband and wife a million dollars if the latter will sleep with him is presented, in the end, as a person of more character and integrity than the couple who says yes. And a recent "hot" novel has as its hero a trust-funder whose unsatirized problem in life is ... not being able to make up his mind! Reviewers rushed to proclaim this dilemma a Representative Conflict, as if the main problem facing our terrified, confused, post-Katrina, Iraq-quagmired country were what to do about its spoiled rich kids. At least the author of this emotionally sterile tale had the politic, if not the artistic sense, to abruptly transform his adorable young plutocrat into a socialist at the end of the book."

Stuart Jeffries  "I do give a damn"  (David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré)
"[David Cornwell/Le Carré] argues that The Constant Gardener is also a useful movie because it indicts western pharmaceutical companies for their greed in trying to make profits by using the world's most poor and vulnerable people as expendable. 'The multinational pharmaceutical world, once I entered it, got me by the throat and wouldn't let go. Big Pharma, as it is known, offered everything: the hopes and dreams we have of it; its vast, partly realised potential for good; and its pitch-dark underside, sustained by huge wealth, pathological secrecy, corruption and greed.' In The Constant Gardener we see poor Africans being given a drug called Dypraxa that tests for HIV. But its recipients are unwittingly taking part in dubious clinical trials to find out whether the pills could also serve as a hugely profitable anti-tubercular wonder drug for rich westerners. And all with the connivance of a British government seeking to boost domestic employment, and an African government bribed to accept trials on their people. 'Our story is about human guinea pigs and the faking of clinical trials,' he says. But why would a pharmaceutical company fake trials? Cornwell snorts at my naivety. 'Money. Most of them have bigger marketing than R&D budgets,' he says. 'This happens a lot with big pharmas.' 'Nothing that has happened in the years since I wrote that book has changed. Some things have got worse. The posture, particularly of the American administration, is shameful. Pharamaceuticals are priced for the American industry'."

Laila Lalami (Moorish Girl)  Fiction in the Age of Poverty
"Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, there's been much talk in the literary community about the state of the novel.... There can be no doubt that terrorism is a threat to Americans as well as to millions around the world. But, as Hurricane Katrina has shown, poverty is as much, if not a greater threat. And yet, despite the increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots that affects the entire world, where is the talk of the state of fiction in the age of poverty? Where are the novels that address class divides? Why aren't people wondering whether fiction can truly reflect a reality where the richest monopolize media attention while the poorest are seen only in times of crises? Poverty has receded from the list of popular themes of the American novel.... This isn't to say that one can't find contemporary American novels that openly dramatize the lives of the poor. Writers of color, in particular, have created enduring characters who also happen to live in poverty. (The works of Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, and others are some examples.) But, despite these successes, poverty has curiously disappeared from the literary conversation. Now, after Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the time has come to engage it again."

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