Let's make it a bright beginning for Howard at the DNC and show that the netroots run deep.
Good Question
From Steve Gilliard:
Funny, while Bush is dismantling social security, where have the Greens and Nader been? Holding their dicks? Feeding vegan dog chow to their starving pups? Exactly why haven't they been eager to join the fight? They talk a good game, but when a real fight is here, one which can't be lost, they have nothing to say.
Indeed, I'd almost forgotten about them, myself. Any answers, any tweets out there?
The Dreamers
Matt asks a question - to which I reply:
I would it were so. All that liberally redemptive power of, "..shades and gradations and all the complexities of humanity...," in art can work miracles on a student - specifically, a young student, like the one in Reading Lolita in Teheran - whose knowledge of the
world is still being formed. The flip side is the 15-year-old who never gets over The Fountainhead (let's go to The Corner, shall we?), or all those good little boys and girls who have had moral fiction drummed into their heads - Nabokov would scare the shit out of them, and they'd run screaming in disgust, casting stones as they fled.
By Garcia-Marquez's own account, Castro is very well-read, but I don't think he's takenThe Autumn of the Patriarch much to heart. And, please, Matt - Adolf's taste in ainting and architecture was monumental kitsch at its most deadening - crushing classicism. While artists must make their art, and may make extraordinary claims for its efficacy, they have no proof that it works the way they want it to work. The older they are, the less they insist on changing hearts and minds - the work and the witness speak for themselves, but by that time dictators and thugs are not, I think, assumed to be listening.
A teacher of mine held that Socrates was hostile to poets because they were, at bottom, philosophers in competition with him, by different means. I rather liked that, but it's agonizing to try to persuade people who believe fiction to be lies that it has any conceptual integrity. Music they can, sometimes, still get; pictures that don't resemble something they know, they don't. It's the warm bath notion of aesthetic pleasure. The moralists would probably object to candles around the tub, or bubbles (the least and most passing of entertainments) - more on this later, but what a bunch of fucking killjoys!
This Is Not a Test...As Digby says, "It's not like they didn't warn us."
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