Where is all the political art?

Where is the political art for our times -- art that engages the public and tries to ignite some kind of indignation about our plight? The question disturbs me and seems to grow more urgent. Our age does not lack for horrors. The family separation policy. The "Muslim Ban." The U.S. government's tactical and financial support for a war that is tearing apart a desperately impoverished country -- Yemen -- generating the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, the fastest-growing outbreak of cholera, famine, desperation, violent death from bombs and white phosphorus dropped from above. One would think that such atrocities would birth from themselves some kind of creative response -- that so much unjust suffering can't just pass over the human spirit without producing a ripple of pain that demands sublimation. Yet we are silent.

Cold Reading

William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley (1946) is a book not easily forgotten. Like the horoscope-writer or the cold reader, it leaves you convinced that its words could have been intended for you and you alone. Yes! you think. I too am the sort of obsessive atheist and skeptic for whom the supernatural is always a live and terrifying possibility, and therefore has to be refuted afresh each day -- preferably with instances of spiritualist chicanery, of which this novel is full. I too have peered into pits of nihilism ("the mind has mountains, cliffs of fall" as Hopkins wrote). I also love dogs. Maybe I've never worked in a carnival or suffered from alcoholism, but -- as with the horoscope -- the mind finds it easy to brush aside those parts that don't apply and fasten onto those that do.

And so the book is mesmerizing, but it's more than that. It's a pulp art masterpiece, a handbook for the aspiring mentalist, and one of the best studies of the mind of the con artist ever penned -- a real Ten-in-One, folks.

Cross-postings

Check out my two recent book reviews on the American Academy of Religion's Reading Religion website. You will note that both books furnished me with an opportunity to harp on long-standing obsessions:

Review of Race Mathews' Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria, 1891-1966

Review of Hugh Urban's Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement

Industrial Democracy

One of the mighty few -- oh, so very few... -- encouraging things to emerge from American politics this past year was surely the introduction of Elizabeth Warren's "Accountable Capitalism Act." Not because it is a flawless proposal. Still less because it is likely to go anywhere as legislation any time soon -- as we all realize it won't. But simply because it is the first flickering I've seen -- maybe in my whole lifetime -- to indicate that some U.S. politicians of any stripe have recognized that the moral problem with capitalism goes deeper than anything that can be fixed purely with more social spending -- but is fundamentally one of a deficit of democracy.

It is one of the first signs that someone in office realizes that the end goal of human justice is not for people to receive a variety of means-tested public benefits that could always be defunded after the next election, but to exercise some real and meaningful control over their own lives and destinies.

This makes it far more interesting than the Sanders campaign ever was. Warren's proposal is simply an inching, an inkling, a nudging toward democracy as a norm of economic -- as well as political -- life.

Various poems, some unfinished, some not really poems

i.

Think not for an instant, child
I ever gave anything up

Two times at least
I told them I’d say yes
If they ever offered me
A seat among
humanity

Do you imagine I’d have said no
If they had ever
Ever pulled out a chair for me?

Restlessness

I sat there poised over the keyboard -- even after writing that Biswas post. Even after proclaiming to myself all that sound, reasonable advice -- there I still sat, contemplating the revocable (but still difficult to undo) plunge.

Spite of everything, that is to say, my finger was still inches away from registering for courses in, yes, the premed post-bacc program.

Why on Earth would I do so? What strange new moral malady was this, to want suddenly -- in my twenty-eighth year -- to take another crack at all the labs and problem sets and stoichiometry that I had only just narrowly escaped in the course of my formal education? No sooner -- hardly -- had I emerged spluttering from the burning lake of such sulphuric acids in my high school years, than I was preparing to plunge into them again?