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Forty seven percent of Americans read literature (Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America /National Endowment for the Arts). Though book sales have increased, the number of Americans experiencing literature is on a steady decline. A possible reason for this trend is that the new way of thinking is that thinking is bad. The absolute worst thing you can do in modern America is think. Thinking is weak. Thinking leads to questions, and questions lead to secularism, and secularism leads to the rule of law, and the rule of law leads to democracies, and thinking secular democracies based on the rule of law are a triple threat to decaying but still powerful religious mythologies and unregulated global corporate oligarchies. “Thinking” has been replaced by “resolve,” which is a code word for the hyper aggressive indiscriminate application of extreme violence. Yes, “resolve” is the bomb.
What, then, are the other 53% of Americans reading if not literature? What is going on in the depths of the inner life? According to the New York Times best sellers list for the first week of February 2005 the top five fiction and non-fiction works for 2004 are as follows:
FICTION
1. THE BROKER, by John Grisham
2. THE DA VINCI CODE, by Dan Brown
3. THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN, by Mitch Albom
4. CONVICTION, by Richard North Patterson
5. STATE OF FEAR, by Michael Crichton
NON-FICTION
1. BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell
2. COLLAPSE, by Jared Diamond
3. WITNESS, by Amber Frey
4. GOD'S POLITICS, by Jim Wallis
5. AMERICA (THE BOOK), by Jon Stewart, Ben Karlin & David Javerbaum
Amber Frey. Scary. While literary giants like Orwell and Kafka are enjoying an unforeseen resurgence now that we live in an officially unapologetic police state, the facts as listed above reveal that our culture, especially our literary culture, is suffering from a much more sinister fate than mere totalitarian torture chambers could ever hope to attain. The once jarring concepts of “1984,” or the absurd complexities of “The Trial,” have become, to use a word championed by the new Attorney General of the United States, “quaint.” The idea that a citizen would have to be tortured into agreeing to the state’s version of reality is almost comical in the age of political echo chambers and corporate media. The nightmare of a man vanishing in a labyrinth of legal ambiguity is no longer the frightful imaginings of a writer like Kafka, but is official and proud U.S. policy. Quite simply, we do not care.This penetrating fact, and depressing figures like 47% of Americans read literature, or that more than 1 in 3 American high school students think that the First Amendment goes “too far” (CNN, 01/31/05), conjures up a much different place than Winston’s fascist society, or Joseph K’s confusing legal bureaucracy. This place is commonly called HELL, and though we may find passing reference to it in the works on the current NYT best sellers list, I am forced to go back over 700 years to find an appropriate place in literature that accurately describes the modern neo-conservative/corporate/fundamentalist devolution which is a at the center of the aforementioned concept that thinking is bad. To this end, Dante Alighieri's THE INFERNO might as well have been written yesterday on a Powerbook G4.
Instead of a divided United States, Dante lived in the divided city-state of Florence. Instead of Republicans and Democrats, there were Whites and Blacks (he was a White). Instead of privatized elections, there was supreme Papal authority. Instead of character assassination and smear campaigns, there was exile. And what better place than HELL, in all its sulfuric glory, for Dante to play out the tragicomic burlesque of his Italian political landscape? Our very different infernos at very different eras in history are very much the same. Dante's HELL was an underground cone formed when Dis (Lucifer) and his rebellious angels crashed to Earth during the Fall. It is divided into nine narrowing circles that end in a pit at the center of the world where Dis, encased in a frozen lake, eternally weeps as he eats the shades of Judas and the men who murdered Julius Caesar. Think of it this way -- Circle One is where the first person who broke your heart roasts in a river of fire and Circle Nine is where Leo Strauss hangs his hat. Circle Eight is the Malebolge -- an amphitheater like structure with ten concentric circles each with it's own eerie group of tortured souls. These concentric circles are called bolgias. The last bolgia, number ten, holds the falsifiers who are ravaged by hideous diseases. Can you think of any examples of falsifiers from our own time? I sure can. Beyond, Circle Nine. It is the empty space between bolgia ten and Circle Nine that I wish to plant my Crackpot flag -- Bolgia Eleven -- where I hope to carve out a happy new place for the tortured souls of the 21st Century -- the thinkers -- and where we, Crackpot's proud readership of 6, will think about "what is emanating from the depths of the Western soul." Amber Frey would want it that way.
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