This is from Naomi Wolf’s recent essay, “The Death of Culture: How Lies Killed Books.” :
I recently came home from a visit to Hipster Brooklyn…
The staffers at the Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson Bookstore, an independent bookstore which had for years been a stalwart outpost of free-thinking publishing, were still masked, against all reason. I walked in with some trepidation.
Peacefully, faces covered, three years on, they stacked books on the shelves.
…Independent bookstores usually reflect the burning issues in a culture at that given time.
But — now — nothing.
It takes about two years to write a book, and about six months to publish one. It was surely time for the new important books from public intellectuals, about the world-historical years through which we had just lived, to appear.
But — no.
In the center of an altar to literate culture, it was as if the years 2020-2023 simply did not exist and had never existed.
…Surely the wonderful novelists of my generation, astute observers of the contemporary scene…would have written their Great American Novels about the mania that swept over the globe from 2020-2023 — one which provided once-in-a-century fodder for fiction writers?
No—or at least, not yet.
The bizarre thing about this moment in culture, is that the really important journalism, and the really important nonfiction books about the history, the racial and gender injustice, the economics, the public policy, of the “pandemic” years — are being written by — non-writers; by people who are trained as doctors, medical researchers, lawyers, politicians, and activists.
And their books are not displayed or even stocked in bookstores such as McNally Jackson.
So there is a massive hole in the central thought process of our culture.
The courageous non-writers have stepped in to tell the truth, because the famous writers, for the most part, can’t.
Or won’t. Or, for whatever reason, didn’t.
Read the whole thing. I don’t keep up with contemporary novelists, and have little but contempt for the particular set of left-leaning “public intellectuals” whom, to Wolf’s lament elsewhere in the essay, are avoiding discussion of the Covid/Vax Disaster. In her comments section, though, I noted that I’ve noticed the same thing with respect to popular music. As Van Morrison has sung, rock’s “rebels” went AWOL in 2020-22; the last link goes to what I wrote about his comment-in-song, and here’s another post of mine that links to several of my pieces on popular music and the Disaster.
For much of my life I aimed to be a public intellectual myself, one of the writers you’d find in that bookstore. I haven’t had that success, mostly due to my own flaws and quirks, but partly, of course, due to the pesky “conservative” tag. And lately, I’ve been entirely out of official academia, making ends meet with substitute teaching, even though I’m quite aware that as far as the word “scholar” goes, I am the real deal, and could teach rings around four-fifths of the current humanities and social science professors. Wolf titled her first book on the Covid/Vax Disaster The Bodies of Others, a reference to one of the greatest films of the last two decades, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others. (2006, org. Das Leben der Anderen) With my friend Flagg Taylor, who did land and hold job in academia, I put together the book on that film, the more-relevant-than-ever collection of essays Totalitarianism on Screen.
The essay I wrote for the volume explores several distinct modes of moral corruption, and two which apply especially to artists, which were characteristic of communist totalitarian societies. The most interesting of these was the one I labelled the communist corruption of the ‘apolitical’ artist, illustrated by Donnersmarck through his character Georg Dreyman, a playwright able to still get his works performed in the East Germany of the 80s. He is one of “the last of our writers still read in the West,” the Minister of Culture says. At the heart of the film is the story of how a Stasi officer spying on Dreyman becomes transformed by witnessing the artist’s life, but also, of how he helps him escape both the literal clutches of the Stasi, and the more insidious grasp of the regime’s attempt to corrupt all of its artists.
If Wolf and her readers want to understand the widening “hole” she describes at the center of our culture, one of the best tools, I say, will be Donnersmarck’s unforgettable portrait of Georg Dreyman. I argued that the regime holds Dreyman’s cherished ability to create and share his humanistic art hostage to his appearing to endorse its ideology—he is permitted some degree of subtle dissent to opaquely bubble up in his plays, but is never permitted to bring his poetic powers against the regime’s official stance on any sensitive topics—in this case, East Germany’s suicide rate especially. On such topics, there is an official Line, or even an agreement to Not Discuss It At All.
Sound familiar?
The difference between Dreyman and our artists today is essentially this: he grew up under a totalitarian regime, and its ideology shaped his understanding of the Good; our artists and writers saw a totalitarian ideology, which does not yet have full power over the regime but does over most sectors of official artistry, academia, and journalism, grow up around them, usually with their partial consent or at least with their refusal to openly resist it, and within liberal-democratic regimes dedicated, in their official documents like our Declaration of Independence, to stand against despotism. They are being cajoled and nudged, by what Morrison labels “Diabolic Pressure,” into going along with a great betrayal of modern democracy. Even if the despotism of Canada or USA circa 2023 does not approach that of the GDR circa 1983, Dreyman had one excuse our artists and writers do not: he was not raised in a free society.
If they don’t start rethinking everything, if they don’t start getting in the commissars’ faces the way artists like Morrison and Morrisey do, they’re going to wind up as so many “Benedict Arnolds on a Chain,” or to put it less crudely, as so many versions of a George Dreyman who was never taught the hard lessons he needed to learn by the characters and story of the Lives of Others.
Perhaps a few of them might benefit from the following, especially if they have seen the film. I’ve next to no training as a poet, but our times increasingly seem to call for fewer of the essays and editorials I’m usually inclined to write, and for more songs, films, artworks, novels, and poems.1 So, here goes:
Georg Dreyman in the Bookstore
***
Georg Dreyman’s in the bookstore:
at least I think it was him, didn’t interrupt or ask.
Must be Georg Dreyman in New Fiction,
eyeballs rolling off the page, above a just-right mask.
***
Saw Georg Dreyman on the avenue,
Some kinda sneakers with Armani and a “friend.”
Georg Dreyman, in Bo-hem-i-a,
fussed about her purse, had lost some pen.
***
Georg Dreyman’s in a punk-band!
Categorically, never no rust.
Sticking it to, nineteen-sixty-two:
“Du bist kein Mensch, wenn du nichts tust!”
***
Georg Dreyman in the theater,
follow him stumbling back to lobby.
Will we ever see him shaken,
“Isn’t there something you want to ask me?”
***
Georg Dreyman before the cameras:
“I’ve no inquiries to pose.”
Knows to not wonder about “our Christa,”
if un-ex-pec-tant-ly, she goes.
***
Georg Dreyman in the bedroom,
nearly how it was,
paintings back in place,
tonight’s girl asleep,
a distant-sounding buzz…buzz…
yet no sign of recognition
on his screen-lit face.
“Editorializing” and “debate” assume the existence of a public discussion or a common public that is no longer really there, and of a capacity for outrage among our elites and our “leftists” that no longer is either.
"...our artists and writers saw a totalitarian ideology, which does not yet have full power over the regime but does over most sectors of official artistry, academia, and journalism, _grow up around them_, usually with their partial consent or at least with their refusal to openly resist it..."
Perfectly put.
The 1950s are PISSED!