High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [93]
This is not to say we only get to tune in to happy news—there are wrecks and murders galore. But it’s information that corroborates a certain narrow view of the world and our place in it. Exhaustive reports of rare, bizarre behaviors among the wealthy support the myth that violent crime is a random, unpreventable disaster, and obscure the blunt truth that most crime is caused by poverty. There’s not much in the news to remind us, either, that poverty is a problem we could decently address, as all other industrialized countries have done. The safest marketing technique is to dispense with historical analysis, accountability, and even—apparently—critical thought.
When the Smithsonian deferred to what it called “public pressure” and canceled an exhibit on the historical use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman explained, “Veterans and their families were expecting, and rightly so, that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice. They were not looking for analysis, and, frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feeling that such analysis would evoke.” Analysis in that case meant the most elementary connection between cause and effect: what happens when the Ordnance gets Delivered.
As a member of that all-important public, I’d like to state for the record that I’m offended. Give me the chance and I’ll spend my consumer dollar on the story that relates to what kind of shape the world will be in fifty years from now. I’ll choose analysis, every time, over placebo news and empty salve for my patriotic ego. I’m offended by the presumption that my honor as a citizen will crumple unless I’m protected from knowledge of my country’s mistakes. I’m made of sturdier stuff than that, and I imagine, if he really thought about it, so is that guy who leaned out of a truck to give me the finger. What kind of love is patriotism, if it evaporates in the face of uncomfortable truths? What kind of honor sits quietly by while a nation’s conscience flies south for a long, long winter?
Artists are as guilty as anyone in the conspiracy of self-censorship, if they succumb to the lure of producing only what’s sure to sell. The good ones don’t, and might still sell anyway, for humans have long accepted subconsciously that good art won’t always, so to speak, match the sofa. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the race,” Percy Shelley said. They are also its margin of safety, like the canaries that used to be carried into mines because of their sensitivity to toxic gases; their silence can be taken as a sign of imminent danger.
The artist’s maverick responsibility is sometimes to sugarcoat the bitter pill and slip it down our gullet, telling us what we didn’t think we wanted to know. But in the U.S. we’re establishing a modern tradition of tarpapering our messengers. The one who delivers the bitter pill, whether the vehicle is a war-crime documentary or a love story, is apt to be dismissed as a “political artist.”
It’s a Jabberwockish sort of label, both dreaded and perplexing. Technically the term “political” refers to campaigns, governments, and public institutions. But Police Academy was not called political. Barry Lopez is called political, and he writes about dying ecosystems and great blue herons