Published in the July 2001 issue of The Progressive magazine
Artists of Resistanceby Howard Zinn
<snip>
Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.
The billionaire mandarins of our culture can show us the horrors of war on a movie screen and pretend they are making an important statement ("War is hell," says the general as he orders his troops forward into no man's land). But the artists go beyond that, to resistance, defiance.
Eugene O'Neill, six months after Pearl Harbor, wrote to his son:
"It is like acid always burning in my brain that the stupid butchering of the last war taught men nothing at all, that they sank back listlessly on the warm manure pile of the dead and went to sleep, indifferently bestowing custody of their future, their fate, into the hands of state departments, whose members are trained to be conspirators, card sharks, double-crossers, and secret betrayers of their own people; into the hands of greedy capitalist ruling classes so stupid they could not even see when their own greed began devouring itself; into the hands of that most debased type of pimp, the politician, and that most craven of all lice and job-worshippers, the bureaucrats."
The great writers could see through the fog of what was called "patriotism," what was considered "loyalty."
Mark Twain, in his brilliant satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, put it this way:
"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a loyalty of unreason."
George Bernard Shaw, unsure, perhaps, if the message of his plays was clear, stated his philosophy boldly in his prefaces, as in this one from Major Barbara:
"I am, and have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make laws impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy . . . our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order."
<snip>
Full piece:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0708-04.htm:patriot:
:kick:
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
