Picketing the Zeitgeist: Croesus and Crisis

Xnrica PICKETING THE ZEITGEIST Croesucs ???,?? Crisis ba f. t>. R¿eve The more monolithic our commerce becomes, the more our genuine artists stubbornly resist. When we look over the dissident data, however, we see that relatively little calls for, or even points to, thorough social change. Seventy years ago, Sinclair Lewis published his acerbic It Can 't Happen Here ( 1 935), and fifty years ago Milton Mayerpublished They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1938-45 (1955). a book documenting the way the Nazis, step by gradual step, imposed rigid control on Germany. Eerily similar is the series of repressive steps imposed by our current government. It's not even surprising that the sort of cultural uniformity prevailing in Russia fifty years ago now prevails here. Despite differences in degree and kind of censorship, the socioeconomic pressures on Russian culture then and on American now are ironically similar: individual artists grouped in unions, guilds, or academic faculties deliver their work to a centralized production and distribution apparatus ofpublishing houses and galleries, which sell it to a homogeneous, middlebrow market. Most ofthe production and distribution facilities are owned by holding companies in which neither the artist/writers nor viewer/readers has a share. In Soviet Russia, as in Nazi Germany, physical censorship selected what was funded for publication , exhibition, or performance. Few works slipped through. In imperial America, physical censorship is increasing, but virtually all the repression for the last quarter century has been economic. As Bill Moyers put it in "A Culture ofCorruption" in 77?»? Washington Spectator for April 1 this year, "Money is choking our democracy to death.... So powerful is the hold of wealth on politics that we cannot say America is working for all Americans." In America, money has become as effective a means of thought control as the courts, the police, the old Boston Watch and Ward Society, or, in Shakespeare's day, the Master of the Revels. Few controversial — never mind "subversive "— works slip through. People are afraid to stand up for what they believe. Part of the history of our Anglo-American culture , like that of Western culture through the ages, is its democratization. In part, that story is connected to opportunities offered by technological change—especially by such dramatic inventions as the steam press, the linotype, and the digital computer—but mainly it's a story ofhow technological change came to dominate and to shape culture. Two hundred years ago, the Luddites were frame-breakers; Byron was no Luddite, but his maiden speech in Parliament supported them, for he foresaw the consequences to art of a society motivated by mechanical efficiency and profit. The profitable manufacture of guns and military equipment that had been rolling along well before seventeenth-century millionaire Jacob Trip hired Rembrandt to do his portrait still crushes the poor the most, but every year the collateral damage to culture becomes greater. The commodification of art, which the profit motive bowdlerizes and commercializes , leads to words themselves being bought and sold like any discounted thing. This isn't news. But to hope to get around it or to reform it or simply to avoid it is a contemporary fallacy. It's a vast, dark wood—selva oscura—that we live in the middle of. Any mode ofcontemporary escape such as "confessional" poetry or "language" poetry is delusory. It's entertainment for poets among their peers but wholly irrelevant to the linguistic issues confronting a culture with a debased vocabulary and to the moral problems facing a spiritually imprisoned intelligentsia. "Telling It Like It Isn't," wrote Robert Fisk in The Los Angeles Times two days after Christmas last year: Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography " ofdeath (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed. Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war. Poetry criticism has become as parochial as the warfare—all good guys vs. bad guys, evidenced by...