I have a friend who’s a journalist. She’s ridiculously awesome and I really want to name her because everyone should know just how awesome she is, but this isn’t a time where it feels wise to reveal the political thoughts expressed by a journalist in private, at least not without her permission.
The day before I saw her last week, I’d locked myself out of Facebook and Twitter. I’d been forced to realise the psychological harm they were doing me outweighed any political good my frantic clicktivism could possibly be accomplishing. My brother had called, on my sister-in-law’s instructions. “R. says you’re tweeting and facebooking constantly about politics,” he said. “She said ‘call your sister, I don’t think she’s doing well.’”
“I’m okay, probably,” I’d told him.
“I don’t think you are,” he said.
I felt a little better, though not by much, by the time I met my friend for lunch. She was shaken, she said. Democracy was falling apart. I muttered weakly that perhaps it wasn’t quite that bad. She said she’d rather act now than hope for the best.
I agreed. But act how?
She said she was getting onto the board of various charities. She was writing about the best way to report on extremism, avoiding the terrible false equivalencies of the “he said/she said” approach which has blighted our discourse with such ghastly effect.
I said I was supporting the Stop Funding Hate campaign. Giving to Planned Parenthood and ACLU over there, refugee charities over here. Writing letters. Trying to think of useful ways to get involved in local politics.
“You know what you should do,” she said.
No, I really didn’t.
“Write novels,” she said.
I told her that in the days after the election I felt as if art had been revealed as an empty joke. An indulgence we could no longer afford. As if I would never be able to justify doing it again. What we were even going to write now? Flimsy, tinselly distractions from ghastly reality? Or sharp-eyed, unflinching commentary that no one except the already-convinced would ever read? What was the point of art?
“No, no!” she said. “Art is what will save us.”
“But it hasn’t,” I wanted to scream. We tried and tried. We’ve filled the world with our stories, our songs – we’ve tried so hard to make our stories better - with diverse casts and empathy and hope – and it’s not enough; no one’s saying it was perfect, or that the attempt was anywhere close to finished. But we were trying. And now look.
It is so important, she told me, that there is art already made and due to come out in the coming year that embodies the opposite of this. Diverse, progressive stories, that are not going to go untold whatever happens.
I’d had in my mind two quotes. Peter Cook, on Germany’s satirical clubs of the thirties “that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler.”
And Kurt Vonnegut:
“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we’ve ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.“
But if they hadn’t been there? I thought, looking at my friend. Who was fierce and bright-eyed and smiling. Those useless satirists and artists and musicians pouring their spirits into their art and watching it land on the floor of history like that dropped custard pie? What if there was nothing to look back on in those times but a culture in militaristic lockstep, or perhaps worse, slumped in dead-eyed indifference? After those years-long nightmares, what would there have been to wake up to? Maybe it was absurd to find the thought more chilling than the reality of what had happened, to feel that it would have been an international death of the soul, but .. still …
If artists couldn’t prevent disaster, could they at least preserve something precious from being lost while it endured? If they hadn’t stopped a single war, had they at least kept the rot from penetrating the human culture unchallenged?
It’s not enough. It’s not enough.
“Write novels,” said my friend stubbornly. “Write novels.”
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