Literary dictatorship

I’ve always wanted to live under a dictatorship, haven’t you? Living under a dictatorship gives everyone so much to write about; living in a dictatorship, we are suddenly living lives with endless subject matter. It is our job as writers to hold this subject matter up to the light of a longstanding and persistent belief in the perfect-ability of mankind, where everything is raised to an art, the highest art achievable, in fulfillment of a narcissistic mission.

The past exists now as both a hot and cold war, led by those who once rolled their own cigarettes with one hand before switching to cigars, as well as by those who warned us against the dangers of smoking after reaping record profits from the tobacco industry.

And so the leader of what was once known as ‘the free world” can paraphrase Joseph Stalin, without necessarily knowing it’s Stalin he’s paraphrasing: It’s not enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

The political writer and thinker, such as Renata Adler once was, is having a field day! Issues can now once again be examined in depth. Does Iran have a better understanding of the fundamentals of US foreign policy than the US itself has? Why is the German predilection for social self-destruction rearing its head again in the form of para-military underground right-wing factions featured on the front pages of international newspapers? Can a political movement be underground and obvious at the same time? Self-government, in the form cooked up by rabid patriots who demand that their muskets be granted equal rights protected by an ancient amendment, stages a comeback in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. The collective too gains strength, and holds semi-peaceful demonstrations in public parks and on public streets, We are all puzzled by official responses, both the honest among us and the dishonest, as one so often contradicts the other

Political writers scroll down to bedrock and isolate a few tendencies. Nothing new really, only the same old political problems that have faced writers from Plato to Tolstoy to Artaud. And so we must once again return to literature and re-read the greatest book ever written—not War and Peace but Life or Death, in which the poet is miraculously born and is granted witness to both his own birth and his own death. Then, in the everlasting final scene, the poet makes a posthumous final gesture, witnessing his own resurrection; but not before making arrangements for a sumptuous 3-day feast and festival in honor of those literary critics who brought him back to life.