Imaginative Writers Must Intervene Directly and Explicitly in the Day

A Call for Revolutionary Art and Culture

Imaginative writers must intervene directly and explicitly in the crises of the day. The day demands revolutionary art. The alternative is complicity.

Not all art need be revolutionary, for that would be a reactionary gutting of life, full life, but much art must radically — basically and clearly — engage the crises of the day.

One can draw upon explicit liberatory examples of art of the past or look at the world as it exists and might exist to create anew. Lack of revolutionary art is an utter loss of consciousness — let alone conscience.

The American literary novel today may not be genocidal, but is it anti-genocidal the way it might be if it were to intervene explicitly and directly in the day — as Uncle Tom’s Cabin intervened directly and explicitly and effectively in its day against the abhorrent institution of slavery?

This novel that catalyzed the abolitionist movement was serialized in an activist newspaper — because the establishment would not publish it. Much the same as today.

Likewise, today’s explicit and direct abolition and revolutionary novels in the form of movies and TV series go unproduced — gutting culture and consciousness and a better chance at any future at all.

And what of literary criticism, which has pervasively radically and falsely devalued and dismissed both the artistic and societal achievements of literary activist publishing and activist authors — like The National Era abolition newspaper that first published the mighty novel of the accomplished literary author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher-Stowe?

Literary criticism too can and must engage explicitly in the day and not disparage the most liberatory art of the day.

Failure to intervene explicitly and directly in the day by way of literature produces a brainwashed, gutless, and debased literature and culture that is complicit in society’s most horrific depredations.

Never more true than today, not least given the gruesome US-Israeli starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. This is humanity at its worst, broadcast live and in exhaustive detail online onscreen around the clock. Literature and all art must create urgently against genocide, against Empire, in real time.

Resistance and revolution should be televised and narrated, canonized and celebrated — not the stories of those who look and write and record the other way and away. The official world is mad, upside-down. Literature and all art should fight this insane reality head-on. It must.

Today the slaughter in Palestine is even worse than the Nakba, the catastrophe. This new terroristic and torturous genocide is pointedly sadistic and wholly deranged. The genocide is ordered, funded, and armed by the leading officials of the plutocracy in America and Israel. No secret gas chambers for the Palestinians. They are to be exterminated in plain sight. And the lesson is to be broadcast globally. Palestinians are to be made a hellacious example to the entire planet — Don’t you dare resist your brutal oppression.

And so Palestinians are slaughtered in open air on dead-eye screens world-wide, like a real reality horror show and endless movie — the people starved, bombed, and bulleted out of existence.

Behind the gunpowder and explosions and fires, which are already unspeakable and unthinkable yet existing, the root weapons of Empire are the psychological mass terror, economic and cultural conquest, and the psychotic deprivations and threats that create genocide. It’s this social and personal battlefield where revolutionary literature and art must engage explicitly and directly.

The open air genocide of the Palestinians is a purposeful show of power and insanity, depravity and brutality by design, by the militant capitalist Empire that terrorizes the world into submission.

No getting around it. The plutarchy and the oligarchs want there to be no getting around it. So we get the US-Israeli forced-march slaughter on endless repeat — drones, missiles, guns, tanks, and bulldozers — Made in the USA! — chasing after homeless Palestinians who flee on foot from the psychotic and sadistic US-Israeli aggression.

It’s a Genocide Show from the bottomless pits of the perpetrators’ own idea of Hell — a Hell for others, a Heaven for themselves. Truly a Biblical genocide, ripped from the pages of one of the most genocidal books in the canon. In this way, this Hell is the officials own homemade spiritual and martial invention. It’s a Wild West genocide of Palestinians that can make the trains-to-death-camps industrial slaughter of Jews and others by the German Nazis look civilized by comparison.

But it’s all the same project now for the militaries and the weaponized economies of the US-led capitalist empire and its conquest of the world. And literature ought to have something to say about it. Literature ought to have a lot to say. Explicitly and directly. One must fight politically, analytically, and culturally.

By now, long since, literature and art and its criticism ought to be obsessed with ending genocide and ending the pillaging predatory empires wherever and whenever they assault the human species. Or what is the exploration of the full human condition for?

A fully sane human species would find a way to abolish bombs and bullets and starvation and economic conquest. It would imagine the many ways forward. And literature ought to make it all explicit and direct — in visceral relation to the carnage and the possibilities of the day.

Revolutionary poets can lacerate the reality of the worst of official society. They can demand better, demand the human in urgent particulars.

Liberatory novelists can create imaginative figures who make radical and necessary demands and acts. They can even depict revolutionary leaders of a People’s America.

Radical short fiction writers can fillet official depravity, and they can illuminate ways forward from barbarous insanity to a sanity that is humane, convivial, hospitable.

Engaged literary critics can hold all literature to account, and they can urge revolutionary new ways forward in this mad and Orwellian era of vast calamity.

Film, video, graphics, song, and other forms of art can proceed likewise, explicitly and directly against Empire and toward a liberatory revolution in the way people conceive of themselves and the world and act within it.

To the revolutionary question, What is to be done — in literature and other art? — we might well answer that we should reveal the truth to people explicitly and directly — the bad and the good, the existing and the potential.

First, don’t be grotesque, inhuman. Second, be revolutionary, fully human. And third, do whatever else it takes. Delight and instruct, inspire and move — an ancient task never more urgent.

People think and remember, know and act often in aesthetic ways, artful ways, which are complementary to the analytic. So our resistance and revolutions in analysis, expression, and communication should look to partner with the aesthetic, with art, and the art of culture. Culture is deeply aesthetic, and full of art.

To gut literature, art, and culture of the liberatory revolutionary is to shatter consciousness, and to deceive and condition people to accept the intolerable, including the genocidal, and by now the wholesale ecocide of Earth.

Probably the greatest living literary activist author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o notes in Decolonising The Mind: “…the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism … is the cultural bomb.” Former revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez echoes: “The Empire sows death with its weapons. In contrast, these are our guns: books, ideas, culture.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o states elsewhere that revolutionary literature is crushed or disappeared by authoritarian societies “to suppress the capacity of people to imagine different futures, because imagination gives our first picture of different worlds. The capacity to picture different possibilities is very, very important for humans, and literature is very, very important in that respect. Authoritarian regimes want to limit the capacity of people to imagine different futures… Literature is important because of its capacity to fire the imagination — and to say we cannot just accept the present conditions. So we need other energies that come and imagine a different world.”

Here in America, authoritarian regime or not, we do much suppression in literature and other art voluntarily — convinced and clueless, or fearful — lobotomizing literature and art of the badly needed revolutionary, stripping ourselves of our ability to think and conceive, feel and imagine, even sometimes despite any thorough analysis of reality or other expression.

The establishment too knows that “books, ideas, culture” have the power of guns and can in and of themselves be genocidal — destroying people’s minds if not their bodies — and then their bodies, along with the minds and bodies of others. Thus the battles for and against Empire, for and against Revolution are waged on many fronts. Imaginative story and art, its criticism and its production and distribution, are vital fronts with powerful impact where important battles are won or lost.

We should both create and distribute explicit and direct engaged imaginings much more frequently and far more widely than we currently do. Popular activist newsletters and journals should step up to meet that challenge. Otherwise they will remain a shell of what they could be and should be and, in some cases in previous times, once were.

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Callbacks below to a few posts of explicitly engaged lit of the past year — a revolutionary poem, followed by excerpts from a liberatory novel, radical short fiction, and resistance criticism.

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The Candidates Are Evil

Their Policies Insane

I.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they send are lethal. It’s genocide in their name.

Palestine bombed to rubble and Lebanon burned the same. Gaza blown to ash — cremated. The West Bank slaughtered too.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they fuse are deadly. And genocide is their game.

At home the war is social — people robbed of brains and blood. No health care say the Liberals. Conservatives deny it too.

The immigrants are to blame — always immigrants to defame — people of color — who knew? Liberals say a shame.

Money would solve the nightmares. The ways are crystal clear — but banks take all the credit — to force the world indebted.

Capitalism thieves and bleeds — the plutocracy of the day. It bursts so many needs — flinging people off to pray.

II.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they send are lethal. It’s genocide in their name.

Palestine bombed to rubble and Lebanon burned the same. Gaza blown to ash — cremated. The West Bank slaughtered too.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they fuse are deadly. And genocide is their game.

The Army gets the money — the Navy — Air Force too. Marines kill folks of color — as old as it is true.

The One Percent is winning — drenched red in tooth and claw. Social services go spinning. Wealth buys all hope and law.

Education for the monied — prisons for the poor. The demons profiteering can only be deplored.

III.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they send are lethal. It’s genocide in their name.

Palestine bombed to rubble and Lebanon burned the same. Gaza blown to ash — cremated. The West Bank slaughtered too.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they fuse are deadly. And genocide is their game.

No safety — the climate implodes — flood fire killer heat — like officials who explode — and arrest you if you meet.

Poverty rages obscene — imprisons tortures and demeans. No housing and no money — no way to get the rent.

Sheriffs do evictions. Who dares to make a stand? Basic incomes — cruel fictions. Who will lend a hand?

In the red and white and blue — bashing you and you and you — crashing you and you and you — for the red and white and blue.

IV.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they send are lethal. It’s genocide in their name.

Palestine bombed to rubble and Lebanon burned the same. Gaza blown to ash — cremated. The West Bank slaughtered too.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they fuse are deadly. And genocide is their game.

The Police State unleashed — kills vast across the land. Military marauding — invading where it can.

Live humans are the target — blood dollars burning cash. Rich missiles maim and smash — pulping bodies no regret.

Pillaging all the way — that’s the noble USA. Not much of it is new — in the red and white and blue.

V.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they send are lethal. It’s genocide in their name.

Palestine bombed to rubble and Lebanon burned the same. Gaza blown to ash — cremated. The West Bank slaughtered too.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they fuse are deadly. And genocide is their game.

Human needs should be well-funded — not bought and sold like mad. People need what people need. What they’re owed. It’s not their bad.

Human rights are due to all — lives free equal and just. Great human rights or bust — a revolutionary call.

Congress should simply credit — with the power of the dollar. Liars claim forget it — then cash out while you holler.

So rise and fight — there is no choice. Lift your voice with all your might — against the red and white and blue — stalking you and me and you.

VI.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they send are lethal. It’s genocide in their name.

Palestine bombed to rubble and Lebanon burned the same. Gaza blown to ash — cremated. The West Bank slaughtered too.

The candidates are Evil. Their policies insane. The bombs they use are deadly. It’s genocide in their name.

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From Most Revolutionary

“The Revolution Unleashed”:

Standing strong behind the lectern in the Press Room, Acting President Alecta O’Roura-Chavez raises both arms in a V-shaped sign of victory. She makes a power fist with her left hand — her right palm upturned to the ceiling, as if to meet the invisible indivisible sky above.

Then she points with alternating index fingers of first one hand then the other to emphasize each policy and order that she announces:

“All of my progressive populist Executive Orders must be implemented, effective immediately. The money-grabbing profiteers will no longer call the shots. We the People call the shots — now. And to this end, I, Alecta O’Roura-Chavez as Acting President and Commander in Chief of the United States military, including the National Guard — I hereby order the timely closure of 750 US military bases in 80 countries. Each and every soldier and staff person will return and be retrained as necessary and be redeployed on home ground as a Civilian Community Corps that will help rebuild and restore the country and the world to a green and thriving future. The vast bulk of our weapons and weapon systems will be decommissioned in simultaneous accord with those of the other powers of the world. We will exchange the bloody lunacy of our menacing and lethal swords for the cooperative acts of survival, prosperity, and peace. We will nationalize the banks. We will nationalize the energy and agriculture industries. We will nationalize the health care system. We will double the payment of Social Security and lower the retirement age. And we will provide monthly universal basic income. Or we will fail utterly in our potential. It’s time to get your money back — from the robber barons, from the lethal industrial giants, from the plutocrats and technocrats, from the plutarchy, from the weapons dealers, and from the billionaires who don’t give a damn! We will make our lives and planet and society new. Anew! Anew! We will make society civil for the first time ever. There will be real care now. Our torturing and slave-driving prisons will be vastly shrunk from their ghastly bloat — and those few that remain will be transformed into health centers and universities — lively campuses of human change and possibility. Our bomb-raining, genocidal, and profiteering military conquests will be ended permanently. Unlike all the American bomb-throwing Presidents before me, I will not be one who could be hanged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, post-World War Two, when the top Nazis were prosecuted and convicted of the ultimate crimes. No more genocidalists — no more genocides. The bloody plutocracy will be replaced in all sectors of society with a progressive, friendly democracy. America and the world will be a place where the Good Samaritan would be proud to call home. We will be a nation and a world of universal care and prosperity or we will be nothing.”

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From A Practical Policy

For Preventing the Children of Palestine and the World from being a Burden to Their Parents and Lands, and for Making Them Beneficial to Empire

It is a melancholy object to observe the plight of children in the ancient land of Palestine during this dynamic era of American-led economic conquests and military invasions. By now, it can only be agreed by all sane observers that the grotesque mortality and mass suffering of Palestinians and their children cannot be considered worth even the most high-minded motives behind the US-Israeli invasion and occupation, obliteration and mass-slaughter in Palestine; and, therefore whatever might be discovered to be a just, affordable, and compassionate solution to this dreadful situation should be implemented immediately — a Practical Policy for the betterment of Palestinian children and for youth everywhere.

After many years of earnest and devout work as an American international policy advisor, after serving on countless transnational corporate boards and investment councils, and after unusually intense introspection, I have at last arrived at a solution that I trust will be found in respectable circles to be quite laudable, if not altogether surprising. So let me judiciously advance “A Practical Policy,” which I expect will not be liable to the least objection, for easing the troubled situation of children in Palestine and Lebanon and beyond.

It is my well-reasoned suggestion that there be implemented a carefully regulated expansion of commercial trafficking in children worldwide — that is, the compassionate cannibalism of children — closely monitored to ensure the dignity of all.

The time has long since come to officially support and expand the body parts trade, with its great potential of many corporate byproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore unimagined. I have recently been advised by virtually every corporate and financial executive I’ve encountered throughout the American Empire that children of impoverished nations principally, though not solely, are to be understood in explicit terms as the next great global growth industry — children as a prolific cash crop.

Palestinian children and countless other youths of the world, having little to no use or prospect, would be harvested for their own sake, and be mercifully removed from hopeless predicaments of hunger, disease, danger, and massacre. In many cases, the children might be sold abroad, their cut-rate labor placed in service of others in more profitable situations. Or the children might simply be released from their degraded, agonized state of being — that is, they would be terminated, offered as edibles for those fortunate enough to live in more bountiful circumstances.

Regrettably, in Palestine nowadays medicines and food are so expensive, scarce, or non-existent that Palestinian children might best be sold, traded, and shipped abroad at the first onset of illness or thirst or hunger, or even at birth, given their likely grim future. Alternatively, for any children who survive well into their spirited youth, these spunky, gutsy, heroic, valiant, and courageous young creatures should be allowed every opportunity to market themselves piecemeal or in whole, for sale and distribution at home or overseas.

It only makes smart business sense that Palestinian children — and their unfortunate like — be bought and sold under international regulation — as opposed to the chaotic, unauthorized, and inefficient current illicit manner — perhaps as defined and invoked by a new round of global trade agreements, or by some minor modification of the preeminent institutions for global economic development, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. By auctioning off their children, the peoples of hopeless poverty and smashed lands — and, indeed, the poor in the aggrieved areas of any nation — may raise much badly needed capital for paying off debts to creditors of every type, American banks above all.

As one might expect, the nature of the vending process for Palestinian youths and others at risk would be multifaceted. Mature children might market themselves via body part sales — a kidney here, a lung there. I am informed by numerous industry specialists that discreet patches and strips of tender young skin can be Swiftly peeled off and sold as raw material for the manufacture of leather car seats or even for unique handbags and exceptionally fine wallets.

Let no one speak of nefarious and impossible solutions for vastly reducing child and youth mortality and misery in Palestine or anywhere like it, such as foregoing sanctions and invasions, occupations and bombings against a disobedient people. There’s no moral, practical, nor civilized way to stop the showering of 2,000 pound bombs on their razed cities and countryside, on their family houses and orchards, hospitals and schools blown to smithereens. These things happen in Empire. Fiends? Barbarians? Devils? Seriously — who would the anti-interventionists take us authorities and modulators of Empire to be? Our work of Empire is sacred and we shall not contaminate it. Our orders derive from the Whitest of Houses. Our Church is the Pentagon. We owe our lives to Empire, to all its martial and monetary Laws and Commandments. Anyone who opposes us is sick, indeed.

Let no one speak of a free and secure independent state for the Palestinians, as everyone in the world except the Americans and the Israelis demand.

Let no one speak of enforcing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, though both agreements have been signed and adopted into international law by every nation — however grudgingly, conditionally, and belatedly by America, we may note with no small pride.

Let no one speak of protecting and building local economies at the expense of the corporate and military will of Empire, or allowing subsidies and services for the public to address basic needs of any kind — least of all food, education, housing, sanitation, clean water, clean air, vital medicines, vaccines and other commodities whose domain rightfully and naturally belongs to the private and lucrative aspirations of Empire.

And precisely because so many rebels, guerrillas, insurgents, rioters, secessionists, separatists, agitators, anarchists, antagonists, apostates, demagogues, deserters, heretics, iconoclasts, malcontents, mutineers, nihilists, nonconformists, renegades, revolutionaries, subverters, seditionists, traitors, turncoats, and other enemies and opponents of Empire in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and beyond refuse to bend the knee and pay homage to the illustrious Euro-American order of things, let no one consider for a treasonous moment using any fraction of the behemoth military budget of Empire to improve standards of health and conditions of life anywhere for anyone on Earth, ever.

And let no one mention — as they hardly do anyway, in responsible, respectable society — any public solution at all for improving the welfare of children in Palestine or anywhere in the world until there is some significant hope that there might be a hearty and sincere attempt to put it into practice.

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From Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel:

Misrepresentation 26 — the reactionary and status quo as preeminent literary political fiction: "What I am writing now is a tendentious thing," famously wrote Dostoevsky about his accomplished novel The Possessed. "I feel like saying everything as passionately as possible. (Let the nihilists and the Westerners scream that I am a reactionary!) To hell with them. I shall say everything to the last word." Far from deploring this novel (and its kind) today the establishment loves such work. It's not threatening; on the contrary. The establishment has long embraced this sort of work because of its focus on retail pathology rather than direct overt focus on wholesale state pathology. It has long valued such works for their limited efforts to clarify much beyond marginal geopolitical realities or for their success in distorting reality — as in prominent literary critic James Wood's misrepresentation of terrorism in relation to the problems of the West. The new lords of the land in Iraq (US policy planners) are eating Iraqi babies for breakfast, as Jonathan Swift once discoursed in ripe literary fashion of the English devouring the offspring of the Irish. This is a far more relevant understanding — actually, central — to the problems of the West in regard to terrorism and much else. If Homeland Security wants to know the situation and the anger contained in many Iraqis and many others across the lands as concerns the West, then they should read with all intended irony, "A Modest Proposal" by Swift, and also take a look at the ongoing polls of the people.

Which brings up another problem in reality: to know and to not act appropriately is to not care, enough, basically. Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, leading US intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote satirically about the at best farcical consequences of a US invasion, and he wrote prophetically, as it turned out (given the catastrophe and what else the US is on track to accomplish in the Middle East, unintentionally shifting regional power to Iran, at the least). Chomsky wrote that the US might as well as urge Iran to invade Iraq. The US invaded and today we see Iranian power has grown, and Iraqis continue to want the US out [writing circa 2008]. Should anyone not now expect Bush or his successor (Barack "Half Withdrawal" O'Bomba or John "100 Years" McPain) to announce a globally implemented and Western regulated policy of commercial trafficking of children for pacifying the Middle East and the world. Has not the time long since come to officially sanction the body parts trade — with its many corporate biproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore untapped? the up-and-coming global growth industry — children as prolific cash crop? Would not such a move be as rational and ethical as the US invasion and occupation on whole? Need one wonder how the literary establishment would view such "A Practical Policy" as literary text? Too voicy? A nondescript style? Lacking much substance or any point of view of interest? Too weak or suspect in character? So goes the politics, the ever politicized aesthetics of establishment fiction. Progressive and revolutionary work is marginally tolerated or buried, in actuality if not in rhetoric. Status quo and reactionary work is enabled, advanced, glorified, contrary flourishes aside.

Not for Wood and the establishment are certain movements of progressive or revolutionary writing that touch too close to home, progressive and revolutionary writing and writers who, "As a group," as VF Calverton notes:

are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive…. More than that, [these writers] believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes…toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one.

Such liberatory fiction contains "ideology" for which the establishment is too pure to engage in. Such liberatory lit is too "reductive" since we all know that literature deals in no particulars whatsoever. Such liberatory movements are impossible, for it must be that the poor will always be among us. And in any case "poetry makes nothing happen" nor fiction too — countless concrete and well documented examples to the contrary, which we must see as mere mere illusions, entirely unpredictable, forever uncertain, uncontrolled accidents, stemming from badly flawed and shallow literature. In reality, the great works of Victor Hugo and Jonathan Swift, for example, thoroughly disprove every aspect of this establishment line, this orthodoxy, this belief, this creed, so we soon run into sweeping problems of credibility, which are then ignored, rendered "studiedly irrelevant," exactly as the establishment knows very well how to do.

It has long since gotten to the point where even Victorian type work that is particularly socially engaged is far too threatening to the establishment, which has exerted pressure to kill such work for over a century now (let alone more revolutionary works). Why did Tolstoy not win a Nobel Prize? Likely because he had become far too much an activist, dissenter, too progressive in face of the status quo, as shown somewhat in his posthumous great short novel Hadji Murad (1904/1912), about a Chechen rebel leader in relation to Empire. It's a novel that should be front and center today, and of a sort we should be reading and writing, especially given the particulars of today's long-standing freshly-explosive crises, especially given the cultural and institutional bigotry of the US (and West) in this regard. Wood cites Hadji Murad in his How Fiction Works merely for a stylistic brilliance. It's a novel Homeland Security and others should better read, along with contemporary liberatory novels.

Instead, both bizarre and predictable, as we've seen, is this recurring underlying theme in the criticism of James Wood — and liberal criticism in general, let alone conservative criticism — only slightly exaggerated: Don't bother to create great highly useful fiction of the world, dear contemporary novelists, the masters have done all your work for you. Go shuck peas, or do anything, but please don't presume to work at your art in relation to society. History ended more-or-less, at least in the novel — Dostoevsky and Conrad took it all down. Forget Hugo and Beecher-Stowe. There is no future direction or tendency we can remotely point to. Liberatory revolutionary — balderdash! Back to sleep with you now, dear writers. Or do run along and practice your style (whether "free indirect" or whatnot) on something less threatening or less difficult than sociopolitical, engaged fiction for an establishment critic to speak meaningfully about. The thought of which, after all, is "slightly depressing." The loafing about of fly-eyed young men has long represented "the classic novelistic activity" — the flaneur, you know. They are "traumatized" and "numb" so let us partake of their great visions.

Flaneuring — what else is there for those "who belong to the ruling class…those who [have] already won the battle and acquired the spoils…[who can] afford to be above the battle"? More typically, establishment critics intone the ostensible "extreme difficulty" of writing novels about ongoing events, especially in such supposedly "confusing" times. In any event, not for nothing today are Dostoevsky's novels Notes from the Underground and The Possessed and Conrad's novel The Secret Agent safe for the establishment, because they are studies more in retail pathology and retail violence, demonizing of easy targets, novels that fail to offer liberatory explorations of wholesale Western establishment oppressions and aggressions, blind to much progress and possibilities.

Misrepresentation 27 — 9-11 rallying cry for a turn inward, and worse: Less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01, Wood speculated and hoped that the aftermath of the attack would "allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not 'how the world works' but 'how somebody felt about something' — indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings)." He then declared, "Who would dare to be knowledgeable [in a novel] about politics and society now?" One hardly needs socialist David Walsh to point out "Who would dare not to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Wood's counterposing of 'human' versus 'social' novels is deeply false." Crucially, who should not have "dared" ever? Myriad people in general "dared" and have long proven to be sociopolitically discerning both within the US and without. Not the establishment though. Not its literary stars, or scarcely any of its stars, for that matter. Not then and not now. They can't dare, marginal exceptions aside. It would be dysfunctional to the ruling status quo. Thus, had they ever been publicly acute in this regard, they would not have been granted their positions of prominence. Get wise of a sudden, or even accidentally step out of line – they are quickly disciplined, sometimes by a pointed status quo critique, put "on notice," or, especially if they persist, simply "let go." Case studies abound (via reports in independent media and analyses by independent scholars).

Not only star critics, but leading liberal "political" novelists are atrocious in this regard (let alone conservative or reactionary writers). For example, in 2008,The Nation magazine published EL Doctorow's 2007 keynote address to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, in Washington DC, in which Doctorow states near its beginning that the leaders of "a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East…[have] mentally transport[ed] their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking, life-contemptuous jihad. [This]…declared enemy with the mind-set of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts." In other words, until the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the primitive impulses of the US were sleeping soundly, only to be terrorized awake by those "criminal" and "tribal" and "shrieking" war-mongers from the lands of the richest oil fields. That's quite a story. It leaves something out. Reality. The reality of decades-long US hopes, plans and efforts to control those oil fields, including support for the state tyrants of those rich kingdoms, not least Saudi Arabia, from where nearly all the 9-11 terrorists originated, which was considered to be an occupied country by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, due to the US military presence there, subsequently withdrawn. Doctorow sends down the memory hole the reality of the murderous US-UN imposed economic sanctions against Iraq[6] that helped destroy that country and other inconvenient facts, such as decisive US support for the state of Israel and many of its militant endeavors against its regional neighbors, including longstanding invasions and occupations.

After carefully inverting cause and effect of the current ongoing crisis, Doctorow pronounces to his intellectual audience about "knowledge deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification." Shortly thereafter he goes on with brazen (and ludicrous) hypocrisy to both romanticize and all but deify the "sacred text" of the US Constitution and its history:

The ratification parades were sacramental — symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society. And with good reason: the ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.

Meanwhile, some of the founders and states viewed the Constitution as likely inherently tyrannical, and so several states barely ratified it, and did so only by attaching lists of amendments and rights. Doctorow refers to the "sacred text" of the US Constitution at a time when it contained none of its amendments, thus, no Bill of Rights protecting many of the most important freedoms of the people. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are far greater texts of liberty than the original and still highly flawed US Constitution. Doctorow eventually levels some fairly strong criticism of US policy and acts generally but mostly confines his critique to Bush and the Bush regime. Along the way, he neglects to mention "oil" or "occupation" and rather haplessly refers to two iconic establishment novelists, Herman Melville and Henry James (see misrepresentation next). Near closing, Doctorow calls the US a "democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, [in which] we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest…" The US surely is in many ways a very free society. All the greater then is the delinquency, however predictable, of an establishment literature that cannot be troubled to create and produce topical anti invasion-and-conquest novels of oil rich lands in the spirit of what liberatory scholar Edward Said calls "the urgent conjunction of art and politics." Nothing might stop the established authors and publishers in this "democracy" of the free but their investments and ideologies, their false realities and illusions, their misrepresentations of others and themselves. And how ever much they care.