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DAVID BARSAMIAN: You often bring up the role of artists in a time of war. Why?
The reason I do is because artists play a very special role in relation to social change. This came to me when I was a teenager and becoming politically interested for the first time. It was people in the arts who perhaps had the greatest emotional effect on me. Singers such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Paul Robeson. Writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London. I was reading the newspapers and Karl Marx. I was reading all sorts of subversive matter. But there was something special about the effect of what artists did.
And by artists I mean not only singers and musicians but poets, novelists, people in the theater. It always seemed to me that there was a special power that artists had when they commented, either in their own work or outside their work, on what was going on in the world. There was a kind of force that they brought into the discussion that mere prose could not match. Part of it had to do with a passion and an emotion which comes with poetry, which comes with music, that comes with drama, which is rarely equaled in prose, even if it is beautiful prose. I was struck by that at an early age.
Later, I came to think about the relative power of people in charge of society and the powerlessness of most people who become the victims of the decision makers. I thought about the possibility of people without the ordinary attributes of power, that is, money and military equipment, resisting those who have a monopoly on that power, and I thought how can they possibly resist it? I thought art gave them a special impetus through its inspiration and through its emotional effect that couldn’t be calculated. Social movements all through history have needed art in order to enhance what they do, in order to inspire people, in order to give them a vision, in order to bring them together, make them feel that they are part of a vibrant movement.
DB: You quote the poet Shelley in A People’s History. There’s an interesting intersection with the American labor movement, where workers at the turn of the twentieth century were organizing, but they were also reading to other workers to inform them, to impart literature to them.
It’s interesting how very often people who are not acquainted with the workplace, people who have not worked in factories or mills, think that working people are not interested in literature, that they don’t read, that they are not part of the reading public. But it has always been true that working people had a life outside of their workplace. And outside of their workplace they would read, and they would become self-educated. Sometimes in their workplace they would take whatever opportunity they had to talk to one another, to read to one another. They would take whatever opportunity they had to draw upon the great voices in literature. And that’s what I was referring to in A People’s History, when I was talking about the struggles of garment workers in the early part of the twentieth century. I was referring to the fact that they would read poetry to one another. One worker in her memoir talked about how they would read Shelley’s poem “The Mask of Anarchy” and quote those inspiring lines:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many; they are few!
What a remarkable affirmation of the power of people who seem to have no power. Ye are many, they are few. It has always seemed to me that poetry, music, literature, contribute very special power.
DB: Shelley wrote “The Mask of Anarchy” after a massacre in Manchester, England, in 1819 when eleven peaceful demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded. They were protesting against the deplorable economic conditions at the time. He also wrote one about hubris and the arrogance of great emperors in “Ozymandias” which is Greek for Ramses, the ancient pharaoh of Egypt. “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I remember in school reading that poem, but a lot of its meaning was lost to us. I don’t think the teacher drew the full meaning of that poem, the transient nature of power. Power is temporary; it comes into being and it goes out. Great monuments and great works that look as if they will stand forever decay and they fall. Shelley was certainly a very politically aware person and had a connection to some of the anarchists of that time, including William Godwin, whose daughter he was involved with. Shelley had a certain connection with the anarchist idea, and the anarchist idea is based on, for one thing, the ephemeral nature of power and the fact that if enough people assemble their meager resources, they can together overcome the most powerful force.
DB: You like the work of Langston Hughes. He wrote a poem entitled “Columbia.” What draws you to him?
Langston Hughes is one of my favorite poets, and I suppose that’s why he got into trouble. Not because he was one of my favorite poets but because he wrote the kind of poetry that would get him in trouble with the establishment. I remember he wrote a very short poem once called “Good Morning Revolution.” But this particular poem you are referring to I chose because I see it as a forerunner, decades earlier, of Martin Luther King’s speaking out against the Vietnam War. Hughes is speaking out here against the hubris of the United States as a new imperial power in the world. He’s very skeptical of the claims of the United States to innocence in its forays in the world. He addresses the United States in this poem, saying, “My dear girl, / You haven’t been a virgin so long.” And goes on to say that the United States is “one of the world’s big vampires.” So, he asks:
Why don’t you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power. . . .
Langston Hughes also leads me to think of Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston was a magnificent African American writer. Very southern and unclassifiable. Nobody could put her in any kind of slot and categorize her. Very often she offended other black people by the things she would say. She was a totally honest person; she just spoke her mind. She wasn’t afraid of going against the conventional so-called wisdom of the day. So when World War II broke out and everyone was supposed to jump on the bandwagon and support the war, Zora Neale Hurston would not go along with that. She saw the war as not simply a war between democratic, liberty-loving nations against fascist nations; she saw it as a war of one set of empires against another set of empires. She wrote her autobiography in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. In Dust Tracks on a Road she said that she could not get teary-eyed, as everyone was doing, over what the Japanese and Germans were doing to their subject peoples. It’s not that she was supporting what they were doing or that she approved of what they were doing. But she said they’re doing what the Western powers, now supposedly on the good side of the war, are doing. They’re doing what the Dutch have done in Indonesia, what the English have done in India, what the Americans have done in the Philippines. They are doing the same thing. Her publisher cut that out of her autobiography. It wasn’t put back until many, many years after World War II when a new edition of Dust Tracks on a Road came out. When the United States bombed Hiroshima and destroyed several hundred thousand human beings, Zora Neale Hurston wrote about Truman as the Butcher of Asia. Nobody else was speaking that way about Harry Truman.
But I bring her up because of this tradition of black writers, poets, intellectuals going beyond the issue of race. Of course, not totally beyond because they are watching people of color around the world being brutalized by the white imperial nations of the world, but going beyond the racial question in the United States to talk about what happens to people in other parts of the world.
DB: Let’s jump a little chronologically to Bob Dylan and his “Masters of War.”
Dylan is the great folksinger of the sixties, of the civil rights movement, of the movement against the war in Vietnam. There is probably no voice, no music more powerful than his in expressing the indignation of that generation against racism and against war. He was a genius with words and with music, speaking with such power that his words echo today. Not only do they echo today in relation to what happened then, but they echo because they are so relevant to today.
I chose to quote “Masters of War” because I thought, well, of course, he was talking about that time, and about the Vietnam War, but he could just as well be talking about the wars we have fought since Vietnam, and particularly the war of today, of the United States against Iraq. “Masters of War” is still being sung, not just by Dylan but by many other singers. I was at a concert not long ago here in Boston and heard Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam sing “Masters of War.” The huge and appreciative audience consisted mostly of young people. Pearl Jam is one of the most popular musical groups in the country. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam are bringing the Dylan sensibility to a whole new generation. Dylan’s song must be heard to convey the full measure of its power, but I will spare you by not singing it. All I can do is faintly suggest its impact. He addresses himself to “You that build big guns, / You that build the death planes. . . .” He says to them that they play with the world as if it’s their little toy. And he asks the “Masters of War”: “Is your money that good? / Will it buy you forgivness, do you think that it could?”
DB: Another artist who has achieved widespread popularity is filmmaker and writer Michael Moore. He’s had several bestselling books. At the Seventy-fifth Academy Awards ceremony in March 2003, he received the Oscar for his documentary Bowling for Columbine, and with a global audience of perhaps a billion people watching he said “Shame on you, Mr. Bush,” and he denounced the war. A bit later the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar also made a very strong antiwar statement, albeit a little low-key.
I think it’s admirable when artists use an occasion to do what they’re not supposed to do, that is, speak out on what’s going on in the world. They are just supposed to immerse themselves in the spectacle of the moment, of the Oscars, of this Hollywood extravaganza. They are supposed to shut out the world and just feast on the glitter of what people are wearing and what trophies people are taking away. It is impolite and unprofessional to say that people are dying in other parts of the world while we are sitting here in our resplendent dress and giving out and receiving prizes. I admire the people who break out of the rule that you must be silent and be what they call a professional.
This rule of not going outside the boundaries is a rule that is welcomed very strongly by people in power. They want all of us to stay within the boundaries set by our professions. I have faced this myself as a historian. As a historian, I am supposed to just do history, and if I show up at the meeting of the American Historical Association in 1969 and propose a resolution that the historians should speak out against the war in Vietnam, well there’s shock. We’re historians; we’re supposed to be here to talk about history and present our papers and leave matters of life and death to politicians. Rousseau had something to say about that. Back in the late eighteenth century, Rousseau said we have all sorts of specialties—we have engineers, we have scientists, we have ministers—but we no longer have a citizen among us. Somebody who will go beyond our professional prison and take part in the combat for social justice.
The people who break out of that, like Michael Moore, I think deserve an enormous amount of credit. You talk about Michael Moore being able to reach a huge number of people. People in the entertainment world have a possibility of reaching larger numbers of people than we do, and if they miss out on an opportunity to reach huge numbers of people, then they are depriving all of us of the very special opportunity.
So the Dixie Chicks speak out, as they did, using words similar to Michael Moore. One of the Dixie Chicks said I am ashamed that I come from Texas, which is George Bush’s state. This was a wonderful thing to do.
One of the valuable things about big stars speaking out is that they may be condemned for speaking out on social issues, but their talents are powerful enough to overcome that. People don’t stop going to their concerts. People didn’t stop going to hear the Dixie Chicks. And people didn’t stop reading Michael Moore’s books; in fact, they sold even more after that event. And people aren’t going to stop seeing Jessica Lange’s movies. I think all these opportunities should be seized.
A friend of mine who was in Spain wrote to me. He pointed out that in the American Academy Awards, it was only a rare person like Michael Moore who would speak out and declare his political views. But in Europe that’s accepted. The Spanish equivalent of the Oscars are called Goyas. That is interesting in itself, since Goya is the great antiwar painter, depicting the horrors of the Napoleonic wars. This friend was telling me that the recipients of the Goyas in Spain, almost every single one of them that year at the beginning of Bush’s war on terrorism, almost every single one of them who got up to the microphone wore an antiwar button or banner on their clothes.
DB: Molly Ivins, the syndicated columnist and author of the bestseller Bushwhacked, reports on citizens who say they are not interested in politics and have this sense of resignation and hopelessness. What do you say to people who feel there is no use in getting involved?
Well, like Molly Ivins, I hear those cynical comments a lot. It’s interesting because I may be speaking to a college audience or an audience of community people, fifteen hundred people, and someone gets up from the audience and says, What can I do? We’re really helpless. And I say, Look around. There are fifteen hundred people sitting here. These fifteen hundred people have just applauded me very enthusiastically for speaking out against the war or for speaking out against the monopolization of power and wealth. That’s just in this small community. There are fifteen hundred people or two thousand people everywhere in the United States who feel the way you do, who feel the way I do, and in fact not only are they feeling that way but more and more of them are acting on behalf of their feelings. Very often you don’t know what they are doing because in the United States we are so fragmented. It is a very big country. The media do not report what is happening in other parts of the country. You may not even know what’s happening in your part of the country. Maybe you may know what’s happening in your neighborhood but not even in another part of your city, the newspapers, the media, do not report the activities of ordinary people. They will report what the president ate yesterday, but they will not report the gathering of a thousand or two thousand people on behalf of some important issue. So keep in mind that all over this country there are many, many people who add up to the millions of people who care about the same things you do.
Now whether their caring can have an effect is something you can’t judge immediately. Here is where history comes in handy. If you look back at the development of social movements in history, what do you find? You find that they start with hopelessness. They start with small groups of people meeting, acting in their local communities and looking at the enormous power of the government or the enormous power of corporations and thinking, we don’t have a chance—there is nothing we can do. And then what you find at certain points of history is that these small movements become larger ones, they grow, they grow. There’s a kind of electronic vibration that moves across from one to the other. This is what happened in the sit-in movements in the sixties. This is how the civil rights movement developed. It developed out of the smallest of actions taken in little communities—in Greensboro, North Carolina, or Albany, Georgia—and moved and moved and grew until it became a force that the national government had to recognize. And we’ve seen this again and again. So at any early point in the development of a movement, things look hopeless, and if you are so intimidated by this hopelessness that you don’t act, then those small groups will never become large ones.
DB: John Lewis on the fortieth anniversary of the March on Washington reminded people that they were able to do that without the Internet, without cell phones, without faxes, just simply going door-to-door and phones calls. And there were no answering machines in those days. If you didn’t get someone, there was no way to leave a message. But they were able to organize an enormous event.
That’s an interesting point that John Lewis made because we tend to think now that what we have now is indispensable. My God, what did people do? I mean, how could Tolstoy write without a computer? But human beings have enormous capabilities. It’s the nature of human beings to be ingenious and inventive. To figure out means of communication. To learn how to take whatever advantage they have, whatever small openings there are in a controlled system, and reach out to one another and communicate with one another. And so, yes, the civil rights movement grew as a result of people doing the most elemental things, of going into little towns and going door-to-door and holding meetings in churches and talking to people. During the Vietnam War people set up community newspapers and underground newspapers and organized teach-ins and rallies and GI coffeehouses. GIs could come and meet with one another and share antiwar views and be encouraged by learning that there were other GIs who felt the same way. So social movements have always been able to overcome the limits of communication. Now that we have the Internet, we have more tools at our command.
DB: In a recent column in The Progressive, you write that “We are at a turning point in the history of the nation . . . and the choice will come in the ballot box.”
I’m a little embarrassed that I said it, since it is always said. Everyone thinks they are at a turning point in history. But I actually believe that today, in the United States, we are at a special turning point. We have an administration in power that is more ruthless, more tied to corporate power, more militaristic, more ambitious in its desire to seize control and influence in all parts of the world, even in space, to militarize space. We have an administration that I believe is more dangerous than any administration we’ve ever had in American history. It has the capacity to send its armed forces all over the world, to kill large numbers of people; it has the capacity to use nuclear weapons. And these are people who seem unconstrained by the democratic idea that they should listen to other voices. It’s an administration that won 47 percent of the popular vote in the last election, was put into office by a 5-10-4 vote of the Supreme Court in a very shady and tainted election. It immediately seized 100 percent of the power and began to use that power to control the wealth of the country and to assert military power abroad. We have a government that has so far been unrestrained in its use of power. It feels that there are no countervailing forces, that the United States, with ten thousand nuclear weapons, with more than a hundred military bases all over the world, is in a position to do whatever it wants. This makes this a very special time. And the reason I said so much hinges on the next election—and this is an unusual statement for me because I rarely think that that much hinges on elections—is that I believe we need to defeat George Bush in the next election because this is an especially cruel and ruthless administration. To beat George Bush should be a very high priority, an indispensable priority for anybody who wants to see a different kind of country. I don’t think that electing another person other than George Bush is going to really solve the fundamental problems that we have because our experience has been that both Democratic and Republican administrations have been aggressive in foreign policy and have been tied to corporate power and corporate interests. But I think that another president coming into power after George Bush, a president who necessarily comes into power distinguishing himself from the policies of George Bush and criticizing the policies of George Bush, will be in a position where he has to in some sense answer to his constituency. And the constituency that will elect the next president, other than George Bush, will be a constituency that is antiwar and wants to change the priorities of the country from using the enormous wealth of the country for a military budget and tax breaks for corporations to using the great wealth for the needs of ordinary people.
DB: We live in a country where in some places it is easier to buy a gun than to vote. Why are elections on Tuesday, a workday? Why not have them on the weekend? And why do we have a winner-take-all electoral college system rather than one-person-one-vote majority rule?
Those are very good questions. Why do we have the election on Tuesday when working people are at work? Executives of corporations and big business people can take time out any time they want. It’s no surprise then that 50 percent of Americans don’t vote in a presidential election. And many of them are working people. Many of them probably do find it hard to get away from their jobs on a Tuesday and go to vote.
Why don’t we have one person one vote? Why do we have this absurd system of the electoral college? It was something that was set up in the eighteenth century, and we are still using it in the twenty-first century. One reason we have the system is that it is easily manipulated by powerful political groups, and it creates the possibility that very small manipulation of votes can win all of the electoral votes in a state. By doing enough chicanery to move your vote from 49.9 percent to 50.1 percent, you then get 100 percent of the state’s electoral votes. It is a system that lends itself to corruption.
We saw this most blatantly in the 2000 presidential election. By giving Bush, in a very shady way, a 500-vote plurality, he got all of the electoral votes of Florida, enough to give him, in the eyes of the Supreme Court, the presidency. So we do not have a very democratic system. We have a democratic system when you compare it to totalitarian systems. We have a democratic system when you compare it to dictatorships, where you don’t have elections. But we would be deceiving ourselves if we thought that because we don’t have a totalitarian system and because we don’t have a military dictatorship that therefore we have a democracy, that we have free elections. It’s hypocritical of the United States to demand very haughtily that other countries should have free elections and then we will declare them democracies, when we ourselves have elections that are not free.
They are not free in the sense that money is involved. Money dominates our election process. Huge sums of money are expended for one candidate or another. Both candidates, Democrats and Republicans, need to amass enormous sums of money in order to win. Those sums of money do not come from ordinary people. They come from the big business interests. So it’s not a free election in that sense.
And it’s not a free election in the sense that people have the freedom to choose whatever candidate they want because the Democratic and Republican parties dominate the entire system. Third parties don’t have an opportunity. If you have a presidential debate on television, third party candidates are not allowed to appear. All the people see are the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s hardly a free choice. It is a very limited choice that people have.
DB: Another aspect is that citizens who commit crimes and serve the time come out and then are denied the right to vote for the rest of their lives.
One of the really scandalous things that happened in the 2000 election in Florida is that they went through the rolls, and where they found people who had criminal records, they removed them from the voting rolls. Many thousands were removed. Since the people in the prisons in the United States are disproportionately people of color, it was people of color who were denied to right to vote.
DB: Going back to literature, talk about Graham Greene’s Quiet American, which was also made into a film. Why do you like Greene’s novel?
It’s refreshing to find a novelist who doesn’t simply concentrate, as so many contemporary novelists do today, on the relationship of two people, three people, or four people. It’s refreshing to find a novelist who looks outside of them and sees what the larger society is doing and gives the reader a kind of social consciousness, who does something more than say something about the romantic involvement of these two or three or four people. We have so many novels these days that simply deal in a very microscopic way with what is called relationships. You wouldn’t know that there is anything else going on in the world.
I think the really important novels deal with personal stories, but they also put these personal stories in a social context, like The Grapes of Wrath and Native Son. The Quiet American is a very personal story. It has the anguish of a love story, a triangle of people are involved, an American, a British, a Vietnamese woman, but it is a story that goes beyond that. The setting is Vietnam, and it is the time when the United States is getting involved in Vietnam in a very insidious way. The Quiet American refers to an American who appears innocent but who really is working secretly for the American government. In the guise of stopping communism, he is engaging in atrocious acts that kill men, women, and children in Saigon. This is the social setting for this personal story of love.
It’s interesting that when this film was recently released, Miramax, a giant in the film industry, held it back and was afraid to release it because it would be considered unpatriotic. It’s unpatriotic to suggest that the United States in its policy in Vietnam was doing something immoral. Commentary and criticism on the morality of government policy is considered outside the pale, this in a supposedly democratic country. So they held the film for a while. It took the influence and power of its star, Michael Caine, brought to bear on Miramax, that finally caused the film’s release. However, I noticed that it has not been given an enormous amount of attention or advertising as other films have. It’s been consigned to a certain small number of theaters in the country. They’ve tried to limit the audience for a film that would dare to make a statement about the United States.
DB: Dalton Trumbo wrote Johnny Got His Gun. He was blacklisted and went to jail in the McCarthy era. He couldn’t find work under his own name for years. Why did you assign this book to students?
I chose the book because I’ve always believed that a work of art can bring a point home better than any prosaic exposition. I could give ten lectures about war and give them in such a way as to express my passionate feelings against war, and they would not have the impact that a student reading Johnny Got His Gun for one evening would feel.
Dalton Trumbo took the cruelty of war to the most extreme point: to take a soldier who is found on the battlefield barely alive but without arms, without legs, blind, deaf, the senses gone, really just a torso with the heart beating and a brain. This thing, this strange human being is picked up from the battlefield and brought into a hospital and put on a cot. The book consists of this person’s brain operating and thinking.
There are two stories going on simultaneously. One is the thinking of this human being. All he can do is think: think about his past, his life, his small town, his girlfriend, the mayor of the town sending him off with great ceremony, going off to fight for democracy and liberty. He brings this all back and thinks about all of this.
At the same time, in the hospital ward he is trying to figure out how to communicate with the outside world. He can’t speak. He can’t hear. He can only sense vibrations. He can sense sunlight. He can feel the warmth of the sun and the cool of the evening. That’s a way he can build up a calendar in his mind. He figures out a way of communicating with a nurse who is empathetic and ingenious enough to figure out what he is trying to do by using his head to tap against a piece of furniture. He taps out messages in code and the nurse deciphers them, and they communicate that way.
The climax comes when the big brass comes in to give him a medal. Through this nurse, they ask him, what do you want? And he thinks, what do I want? He taps out his response. The response, in the language of this generation, blows you away. He tells them what he wants. What he wants they cannot give him, of course. They cannot give him his arms, his legs, his sight. He asks them to take him into the school houses, classrooms, churches, wherever there are people, where there are young kids. He says, point to me and say, this is war. Their response is, this is beyond regulations. That’s their answer. They want him to be forgotten.
This is a metaphor for our time. They want us to forget about the GIs. They want to forget about the guys who come back from war with legs gone, with arms gone, or blinded. No one may be as total a catastrophe as the character in Johnny Got His Gun, but there are people who in one way or another represent what he represents: the horrors of war.
But the government—we see this with the Bush administration—does not want people to be conscious of the fact that there are thousands and thousands of veterans of this war in Iraq who have come back blinded or without limbs. They’ve completely hidden that fact from the public. Only occasionally does a glimpse of that come through. There was a story in the New York Times not long ago about a GI who was blinded in Iraq. He was a young guy who was hit by shell fragments. His mother visits him in the hospital. When she visits him, she passes the cots of other young people without arms, without legs. She sees a young woman soldier who is back from Iraq without legs, crawling on the floor with her little child crawling behind her. This is the picture that the present administration wants to hide from the American people. A novel like Johnny Got His Gun can awaken its readers to an understanding of what war is like and how the government wants to hide the reality of war, the reality of what happens to our people, and certainly of what happens to people on the other side.