Denunciations and Survival

Grossman's Life and Fate often refers to them: wives denouncing husbands, husbands wives, friends friends, colleagues colleagues, and so forth. Once you disappear into the prison system--the Gulag--it didn't matter how you got there: the system was designed to produce a large number of prisoners, who were then slowly starved to death. Sometimes spouses were jailed for not denouncing each other.

Here is the U.S. we have a different system designed to produce prisoners--poverty. We don't need denunciations, just desperation. We already imprison more people here than in any other country in the world.

It may not be fate that determines where you end up in human society--more likely chance.

Yet on occasion human kindness actually manifests itself. Only the most ruthless system can completely eradicate that. Pity, compassion, concern--it's not always easy to obliterate them. It can be done: lock some people into a room and feed them inadequately and eventually everyone will be turned into selfish monsters.

Perhaps the best you can hope for is to try to avoid, if possible, someone else's brutality, something that usually finds its victims close by, convenient.

Books: Life and Fate

I've been reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, his massive, sprawling novel of the Soviet Union in late 1942, when the battle of Stalingrad was raging. Of course, individuality in character is almost nonexistent, what with the cast of hundreds. But the real interest is life under an insane dictatorship: naturally people say, in response to someone being arrested, that "they never arrest innocent people." The same thing could be said today, here in the U.S. I can't help but recall the insane conversation I had with a friend from graduate school, undoubtedly a Communist of some sort, about the Soviet Union. When I asked her if there was anything wrong with the Soviet Union--remember: this is in the 1980s, the desultory Brehznev Era--she, with great difficulty, said that maybe they had some problems with women's equality. I said that, were the Communists miraculously to assume power in the U.S., we would be the first people to be arrested--no question about it. Anyone who questions the prevailing wisdom is seen as a malcontent. And, yeah, apparently we have denunciations at the place where I am privileged to teach. And naturally the novel includes instances of arbitrary arrest. And science is dictated by commisars who have no knowledge of science. A new theory in physics may not conform to the Leninist notion of material reality. On a less brutal scale, to be sure, we do the same thing here: certain axioms are given, never to be challenged or questioned. And, yeah, we tend to place mediocrities in position of authority, so that idiocy is made to seem like wisdom, incompetence achievement. Fortunately, we can depend on their laziness--it's too much trouble to make a great effort to dominate others--to completely eradicate the life of the mind. In the novel, a moronic notion of ideology--and a moronic ideology--rule. Here, money is the sole value. Whoever has the gold makes the rules.

At any rate, Grossman's novel, while not great, is probably better than the previous novel I read, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle, which, while amusing at times, ultimately fell flat on its face. Hip hop novels, of which I've read two, need to have certain basic characteristics: a nerd-like main character and a hip patter. "Negro, please" is the basic joke.

True freedom is a fragile thing--not to be scoffed at or trifled with.

Creativity and Imagination

So I'm driving and listening to some idiotic discussion on NPR on creativity and imagination in which some fool is discussing how to encourage creativity and imagination in your child.

The reality is this: there are a few people who seem to have been born with an aptitude for creativity and imagination, and occasionally they get the chance to make use of that ability. Most people simply are not creative--or their idea of creativity is essentially banal or mundane or cliched. It's even possible that those people who are born with creativity can improve their ability at school--although, in many ways, the best thing that could be done for someone creative is to make his or her childhood miserable, alienating, isolated, awful. Then he or she will have something to write about. And it may be that, within the ranks of the truly creative, there is a hierarchy--some with creativity to burn and others with an occasional moment of the authentically creative.

And what about someone like me? Does it take creativity to recognize creativity? Or is that some lower order of the creative?

Most students can barely understand the idea of metaphor--and even if they do understand it, most of those can't seem to figure out why it's so important.

So when we have literature classes in school, we essentially teach them in the worst circumstances: we grade the students, when, for the most part, their inability to understand literature is simply a reflection of the fact that few people are truly creative. Even a monkey can be fascinated by bright lights. Little wonder our literature classes are stupifyingly boring.

Discourse in the Nazi Academy

Heinz Hoeppner, head of the Central Resettlement Office in Nazi-occupied Poland, sent a memo to Eichmann in which he writes the following:

"It would be sheer fantasy to discuss further organization in these intake areas, since fundamental decisions must first be made. . . . [I]t is essential that we be totally clear from the outset as to what is to be done with these displaced populations that are undesirable for the Greater German settlement areas. Is the goal to permanently secure them some sort of subsistence, or should they be totally-eradicated?" (quoted in Mazower, p. 208)

The question: how similar are the bureaucratic memos written today in some obscure office in Washington?