Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [56]
I will maintain till the bitter end that preventing a big war in Central America in the 1980s was the crowning achievement of the Peace Movement begun twenty-five years earlier.
Meanwhile, back at the AWP, Marybeth Holleman, Linda McCarriston, and Richard Hoffman are giving a panel on what motivates writers, and issuing a basketful of encouragements for would-be authors to add heart and substance, to give three dimensions to their students’ prosaic musings.
Holleman spoke about the Renaissance person being someone who prided himself or herself on being an “intellectual generalist,” and how in our age of specialization, it is nigh-on impossible, even for academics, to break through the categorization mentality of corporate marketing theory when crafting a piece for publication. British philospher John Ralston Saul has even gone so far as to call the contemporary specialist “illiterate” once he or she steps outside his or her respective field, and he has a valid point.
Linda McCarriston continued in this vein, expressing a fear that in our current intellectual void capitalism has nothing left to dialogue with. She said that capitalism’s other half is socialism, and the two concepts need each other to balance out society. But now, she lamented, capitalism ignores its spouse, socialism, and without its better half, talks down to its children—us.
By the time Richard Hoffman took the podium, we were softened up pretty good. Hoffman teaches memoir writing, and he starts his students out with the simplest question: “What is the conversation you were born into?”
Ask that question of the person sitting next to you, or of the author of the book laying in your lap. I was born smack dab in the middle of the Twentieth Century in the Capital of the Empire. Eisenhower, the McCarthy era, Beatniks, Marilyn Monroe, the Cold War, the Bomb. I was a patrol boy one Friday afternoon; we had been let out of school early without being told why. A voice from a passing car called out to me, “President Kennedy is dead!” I was eleven years old.
Three months later, The Beatles hit town.
Of course, one could ask Hoffman’s question of a culture or a country. What was the conversation America was born into? Poet Rose Solari says that “If we (in the United States) are to have a literary tradition that can stand alongside older cultures, then we have got to claim our founding geniuses.” I would add that those ideas, left behind by the great thinkers, are the very ideas that can save a culture when it flounders or suffers crises of spirit. Because the military draft was a genuine plague upon the youth of the nation, plucking young people from their classrooms, homes, and jobs, students wanted and needed the eloquence of the Founders, the Transcendentalists, the Reformers, to use as weapons of defiance. We turned to Walden Pond, a hundred and thirty years previous, and found, among others, a scruffy man who lived in a wood.
These days, freethinkers and intellectuals are on the run, besieged by what I would call the illiterati. America is a nation of merchants, and our culture has been defined by the merchant’s aesthetic for so long, even members of the nonmerchant classes have learned to think in terms of extolling the virtues of an idea’s earning power as part of its validation.
John Adams, America’s first conservative president, once famously remarked that “I study war, so that my son will study business, so that his son will study art.” And although businesspeople play a key role in the health of society, their cultural, intellectual, and philosophical contributions are by definition always narrow and limited—too narrow and limited to be allowed to take a leadership role in the culture of our society. They have usurped from academics and the philosophers around us, who, quite simply, have been shouted down and locked out of our governing and cultural processes by these same moneyed interests. It’s as though Adams’s son, the businessman, kept Adams’s grandson, the artist, locked up and hidden somewhere on the estate, but every once