Vystosky

[joanna bujes]

At 12:53 PM 01/31/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>The US is without doubt the emost heavily indoctrinated society in the
>world - I am not talking here about simple unavailability of
>information, but a very deliberate and very sophisticated effort to
>distort the available information and drown or subvert any information
>deemed harmful to the interest of the US ruling class.  In comparison,
>Polish censorship was child's play - its only effect was to sanitize
>government owned publications, but they did next to nothing to stop the
>spread of information published elsewhere.  So let's keept the sense of
>proportion here.

I was intimately familiar with the extraordinarily privileged life of the 
intelligentsia in Romania having had some for parents. I mentioned some of 
the details before... Just want to back up Woj in noting that there was no 
book, none, that my parents wanted to read that they could not get their 
hands on. It is true that some material had to circulate informally.

It is true that artists and writers did not get the full backing of the 
state for any project of their fancy. Nor do they here. I happen to have a 
lot of artists, particularly dancers and musicians for friends; these are 
people who work 60-hour weeks and have committed their entire lives to 
their art ...and they survive just on this side of immiseration. That's a 
form of censorship too.

The second-to-last time I was in Romania, in 1985, I saw some theater 
(Rameau's Nephew) and some dance the likes of which I could not have hoped 
to see in the USA. That quality came both from the fact that the arts 
received some very serious state support and also from the fact that the 
notion of art had not been completely poisoned by commercialism.

Joanna