The Comandante at a public reading - at the KGB Bar in New York City, 2019
On the first page of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera tells an anecdote about the Communist leader Klement Gottwald addressing a huge crowd in Prague in 1948. Standing beside him was his friend and comrade, Clementis, who took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald’s head. It’s a historic moment, because Czechoslovakia became a Communist country that day, and thus photographs were taken which everyone saw. However, four years later Clementis ‘was charged with treason and hanged.’ At once, he was airbrushed out of the photo, out of history, and ever since, according to Kundera, ‘Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone.’
We all know such histories about the former Communist bloc, and find them bizarre, or horrifying—at least I hope we do—but for most of my life I would have laughed if anyone had suggested that such a thing could happen here in the West. And yet, just the other day I found that I too had been airbrushed out of a bit of history. I happened to see the Facebook page of the MFA Program in the United States which I taught on for thirteen years, ten of those years as a tenured professor. I hadn’t looked at it for some years, but as I went through the posts, starting at the most recent, I began to notice something odd: I didn’t seem to be mentioned in any, or to be in any of the photographs. Not in the thesis defenses, nor the faculty readings, not in the social events or visits from artists in residence—even of the writers I had invited and introduced. My publications were not mentioned, although those of other faculty were. The only photos in which I appeared were from way back in 2011, when you may see me playing the guitar in a bar. Presumably that was considered irrelevant enough to survive, though I’m surprised it did, anyway. Probably there were other people in those couple of shots they wanted to keep. Or perhaps it was sheer negligence. But I had been deliberately expunged from the record, excised, airbrushed—cancelled, in fact. Maybe that will seem insignificant compared with the fate of the communist Clementis—after all, I was not charged with treason and executed, and my academic career can hardly be considered as having historic importance. Nevertheless, the sheer banality of it seems to me a matter of concern. If academics are airbrushing out former colleagues from their public pages—in spite of the fact, by the way, that I left the university in 2017 after resigning, in good standing officially—doesn’t that suggest that these self-proclaimed ‘liberals’ have in fact become very illiberal, and are doing their best to behave like authoritarians and dictators? To me it does.
My point here is not to bleat about the injustice done to me: frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn whether I’m in their dopey photos. But it is symptomatic. I don’t know who’s responsible for the blog, but I assume it’s vetted by the director of the program, who I imagine was deeply offended by Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, my satirical campus novel, which is set in a very bad Creative Writing Program at Oxbow State University, in the southern United States. Doubtless she supposes that it’s a thinly-veiled portrait of the program she’s running. And possibly she believes that Dr Frida Shamburger, the antagonist of the novel, who is a stupid, narrow-minded, megalomaniac who pretends to be the opposite of all that, is based on her. If the cap fits, wear it, as the saying goes. One shouldn’t care about such people, and one wouldn’t, of course, if they hadn’t managed to get themselves into positions of power.
Ay, but there’s the rub. Everywhere you look, these halfwits have shoehorned themselves into authority. The universities have been captured, as have virtually all cultural organisations, and most of the media. These petty dictators and autocrats make no apology for their actions. As one of them said to me once, when I objected that free speech was under threat: ‘That doesn’t matter, because we’re in the right.’ So out goes more than 2,000 years of our tradition of free discourse. They don’t lament the obfuscation of the truth, because of course as good Postmodernists, they don’t even believe in such a thing. Truths are subjective, according to them, a matter of producing a narrative that serves whoever is in power. And now they are in power, they are determined to eliminate all other narratives, all other opinions, all criticism.
I think most people don’t realise how dire the situation is. I’ve been sounding warnings for nearly a decade, but for most of that time my friends have laughed and told me I was exaggerating, that it wasn’t that bad, it was just a few cranks, and anyway most of them were well-meaning. But they’re not well-meaning: they want to silence anyone who disagrees with them. They believe in censorship. And they are no longer a few isolated cranks: they have become the mainstream of the so-called ‘progressive’ left. Every day, we are losing our freedoms. You may not care that a Creative Writing professor was removed from the blog of a second-rate program, and indeed, in itself it has no importance. But just think of the wider implications: if they are happy to airbrush me out of their history, they’ll be just as happy to airbrush you out, or anyone who isn’t part of their deluded Long March. So be alert, my fellow free spirits. If you don’t stand up for your freedom of expression, it will be taken from you.
If we don’t live dangerously, and speak and write dangerously, we become slaves, which doesn’t mean that we become safe. It means that we lose all self-determination, all freedom, all ability to control our own lives. Live free or die, as they say in New Hampshire. We have to start meaning that.
I’ll end with another Kundera quote, also from the first page of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. ‘It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ That’s so if you believe there is such a thing as the truth. If you don’t, it’s just a matter of whose narrative dominates. That’s why the authoritarian left are rewriting history, suppressing those parts that don’t suit the neo-Marxist narrative; that’s why literature is now taught mainly along cultural Marxist lines. That’s why once-conservative institutions like the Church of England now encourage their congregation to ‘interrogate whiteness’ and ‘crush the patriarchy’. They are creating a monolithic ideology. We can only resist by remembering, uncovering the truth, telling the truth, which is always complicated, and very seldom simply a matter or oppressors and victims. And we must keep laughing. They don’t want us to, for they fear being ridiculed—quite rightly, because they are ridiculous.
Well said, Garry. One tries to hope that sense will prevail in the end and these petty, vindictive, illiberal, stone throwing woke lefties will have no option but scurry back under the rocks from where they came. But they way things are going it looks like not for a while, alas.
I thought that we have reached rock bottom with wokeness, but when I read something like this... Jesus! It's as if there is no bottom. I really wish we could live nearby so we can have a beer together and commiserate.