I am watching a pretty good Riz Khan panel of writers, one Egyptian, one Libyan, and one Chilian. The topic is Literature and Revolution with Ahdaf Souief, Hisham Matar, and Ariel Dorfman.
It will show up later in a panel somewhere on the main AJE page.
Ahadf Souief noted the great creative urge in Tahrir with humor, street theater, songs, music, sayings, signs, all of which I could see and hear. Ariel Dorfman on the other hand talked about moments of transition from the great freedom under Allende, to the transition into Pinoche, then his escape to the US. Hisham Matar was more circumspect about the importance of writers, maybe they were serving a role like the baker. There was mention of a form of truth, something I wish they had explored further, because obviously the entire political establishments of the world try their best to obscure, spin, interpret and generally fog into oblivion, if not outright crush. Nobody came to any conclusions. It was an open discussion that was all too brief.
There is a form that I think needs to evolve and that is a mode of social consciousness of a people of itself through the writer-journalist perhaps. Dorfman addressed this briefly by saying there was not one voice, but many.
I think this mode is especially important now, because obviously all the money flows to the spin doctored news, obfuscating think tank papers, various academic re-write historians, and the rest of this US garbage cultural output. This junk food culture creats a great hunger, at least in me. What I think I want has already been done in a different era and different time, in Andre Malraux's La Condition Humane. The novel has its problems, but the general composition and outline of its forces are still very relevant. Trotsky trashed it as bourgeois fiction, but what alternative did he hold up?
Along these lines, it's what I eat up in The Wire that dramatizes the corruption of everyside up the social class strada. Like an upside down pyramid the corruption builds wider and further the higher you go.
This system of corruption where the higher you go, the more you find is captured in this from a post of Ferenic Molnar:
``The top lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission and his two brothers inherited more than $1.5 million in phony profits from their mother's investment in Bernard Madoff's epic Ponzi scheme, according to a startling suit filed by bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard. David Becker -- who was named SEC general counsel and senior policy director less than two months after Madoff's arrest in December 2008 -- was served with legal papers demanding return of the dirty money earlier this month, court records show.
Picard's `clawback' suit claims that Becker's mother's estate -- of which he and his brothers are co-executors -- received more than $2 million from Madoff's crooked investment firm. .......''
While these beyond wild blue yonder schemes are going in New York and Washington, we get Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and in about a week California entangled in the elected official system to crush and economically exterminate everybody but the rich.
CG