The Inheritance of Ephemerality

The shelves in my apartment are overly stuffed with books, most of which were purchased over the past two decades. But interspersed among these many hundreds of texts are a precious few that have trailed after me throughout my life, following me as I traversed both time and space, decades and oceans. One of the most precious of these old friends is American Murder Ballads, a study by Olive Woolley Burt of the category of traditional folksongs that I must have purchased at a second hand bookstore sometime in the late 1980s when I was deeply involved with a local folk music society.

My paperback copy of Burt’s book was printed in 1964, just a few years after I was born. Basically, the book and I are both of the late-Boomer Generation: released into a society on the verge of tremendous cultural upheaval.

Burt’s book, which I have sitting before me as I write this, became important to me as the only printed work I have come across that deals with a topic which has intrigued me since early childhood. (Note: American Murder Ballads is not the “only” book on the subject of Murder Ballads, but it is so far the only physical copy that I own.)

You see, I was not even 10 years old when I became aware that the pop music scene — normally the territory of boundless cheerfulness — could also create somber and melancholic songs about Death — and still get airplay and attention! That revelation came to me through the radio and the turntable.

Interspersed with the majority of songs focused on romance — the endless variations of the eternal “I Love Her but She Doesn’t Love Me!” theme — the local New York City radio stations also gave us melodramatic songs about loved ones who have died. It’s very likely that anyone of my generation will automatically recall those tragic songs of lovers lost to motor vehicle crashes, with “Teen Angel,” “Tell Laura I Love Her,” and of course “Leader of the Pack.” 

But there were also more subtle melancholic compositions about death brought about by illness, with titles like “Honey” (Bobby Goldsboro), “Seasons in the Sun” (Terry Jacks), and “Memories of Love” (Chicago) remaining most prominent in my memory alongside the more lighthearted contemplation of the afterlife “And When I Die” as performed most successfully by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears (written by Laura Nyro and first recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary).

As an adult I would two contemporary folk songs that focus entirely on the end of life: “Long Ride Home” by Patty Griffin, and “Fancy Funeral” by Lucinda Williams. Both songs are worth checking out. I also highly recommend “My Death” from the classic Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Alongside these emotional works were songs that addressed the violence of the times, from the American war against Vietnam to the assassinations of Civil Rights leaders and the deaths brought about by overall inequality.

American aggression in Vietnam spawned songs on both side of the controversial war, with the nationalistic “Ballad of the Green Berets” memorializing veterans who lost their lives in war. But as hostilities intensified along with the number of young American soldiers killed during the presidency of Richard Nixon, a much larger body of works were recorded that referenced battlefield casualties in order to create powerful anti-war songs. This category included the ironic songs “Sky Pilot” (Eric Burdon and the Animals) and “Lucky Man” (Emerson, Lake & Palmer). Other lyric works referred more directly to the death of American soldiers but failed to gain much airplay, such as “The Unknown Soldier” (The Doors), “The Grave” (Don McLean), and much later “Goodnight Saigon” (Billy Joel).

There were also songs that addressed the victims of social inequality and those who died in the Civil Rights Movement, such as “Abraham, Martin, and John” (especially the combination “sound montage” of “What the World Needs Now/Abraham, Martin, and John” by radio host Tom Clay), “Ohio” (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), “Alabama” (Neil Young), and “In the Ghetto” (Elvis Presley).

And then there were songs that continued the folk music tradition of songs about historical accidents or incidents, such as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (Gordon Lightfoot), “The Night Chicago Died” about a fictional gangland shooting that was inspired by the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre (Paper Lace), “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” (Harry Chapin) about an actual trailer truck crash in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the obviously titled “Dance Band on the Titanic” (also by Harry Chapin). It would be remiss not to include mention of songs about apocalyptic crises: “Miami 2017” (Billy Joel), “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” (R.E.M.), and the dueling versions of dystopia and utopia from The Talking Heads in “Life During Wartime” and “Nothing but Flowers.”

As a child, however, a handful of the most impressionable songs came to me via the turntable, and it was these that first introduced me to the category of “the murder ballad.” For this I can thank the folk music trio Peter, Paul, and Mary. They gave me “accessible” versions of murder ballads such as “Pretty Polly,” “Polly Vaughn,” and “Lily of the West.”

Hearing and being drawn to these songs as an adolescent made me more aware of and open to the appeal of musical works that highlighted the presence of death and frailty as part of the human experience. But this fascination still flummoxes me because, you see, I had no personal reason to be taken aback or surprised by the reality of our mortality. Death was always part of my understanding of Life, the prize at the bottom of the box. It still is.

Perhaps the big shock and draw (pardon the pun) was the realization that music could be the medium through which this message is told. The airwaves of my childhood were dominated by cheerful songs, even when those same songs were moaning about a broken heart and the impossibility of mending it. The pleasure must have been in the contrast, the dark splotches on the otherwise brightly colored canvas.

Gimme Shelter?

As an adolescent I had never been sheltered from the presence and possibility of death being visited upon our loved ones or ourselves. You see, the grandparents who raised me and my siblings never tried to shield us from the reality of death.

Their generation had known the world differently. They knew Death as a cosmic force, a divinity with its own presence and will. They respected it, even as they dreaded it.

They were Eastern European immigrants in America who had been born in the late 1800s and experienced firsthand the anguish of being a colonized people caught between the martial ambitions of powerful nation states. They had survived wars.

They were also, as devout Catholics, inheritors of a spiritual system still deeply infused with traditions that were far older than the Roman Church. The Christian prayers they whispered and the rites they performed were unconsciously palimpsestic and attended to more than one metaphysical perspective.

It was their “traditional” worldview that cradled my psyche’s development from infancy to early adulthood. They had been my primary guardians, having taken my elder siblings and me into their home after my parents divorced and my mother was forced into a furious struggle of survival at a time when there were practically no structures to support a single mother.

The reflection I am engaging in here allows me to see that there was very little in my adolescent experience that would encourage me to look through rose-tinted glasses and pretend that death was not always a part of life. It was there in my family. It was there in the society.

It was there.

We were what today would be called the “working class poor.” This meant we were capable of getting through each season thanks to the financial cleverness of my grandparents. (It helped that we had a large vegetable garden, my grandmother knew how to budget, and my grandfather was a carpenter capable of repairing anything — an innate talent passed on to my older brother who could perform the miracle of resurrection upon dead motor vehicles). My mother labored seven days a week at her full-time and two part-time jobs, while we children hustled however we could to bring in spare change until we turned 16 and were legally allowed part-time employment in retail and service jobs.  

But I’m traversing well-trodden territory, rehashing memories rich with the gripes and regrets that I’ve so often sprinkled into my blog posts. Sorry about that. My thoughts tended in this direction because I cannot separate the spiritual (and cultural) experiences from the larger socioeconomic ones. You see, while my guardian grandparents never tried to protect me from the awareness of death as an ever-present potentiality, neither did the local community we grew up within.

Ours was a wonderfully diverse neighborhood just a short bus ride from Manhattan. We were a neighborhood in constant change and undergoing great economic and demographic turbulences — even as the stormy Sixties reigned all around us at a national-cultural level. The streets we roamed and roared through as children did nothing to shelter us from the reality of death or the awareness that larger histories were unfolding far above our lowly streets.

In my Roman Catholic household (and this was probably true for all of those families headed by European immigrants from other Catholic-majority states such as Italy, Ireland, Hungary, and Poland) children were expected to accompany their elders to wakes and funerals. We had to be there, and we had to “pay our respects” to whoever was in the open casket, even when we had no idea who the “dearly departed” were.

Sometimes in our teenaged years we actually did know the departed.  They were childhood friends who died of drug overdoses or automobile accidents.

And then there were the ones who went somewhere and never came back.

My earliest recollection of someone disappearing is the high school classmate of one of my much-older brothers, a young man who went overseas to serve in Vietnam and never returned. I was constantly fascinated by the chest of personal belongings he had stored in our garage, his private cache of items that he didn’t even want his parents to have access to. For as long as it remained in our garage that box would stay locked. I never knew what had become of that secret trove of a disappeared man’s treasure.

Another box was part of my childhood: the large cedar “hope chest” that belonged to my mother.  

This coffin-shaped box stays in my memory not because it held the naphthalene-scented blankets that would keep us warm through cold winter months, but because beneath the quilts and comforters was another kind of comfort, something my mother simply called “the 22.”

To this day I have no idea who was the actual owner of the .22-caliber hunting rifle, or how it had come to be secreted beneath the linens. But I somehow always remember my mother’s urgent mid-afternoon phone call from work when she asked me to tell my grandmother to disinter the gun from beneath the blankets. That was the day the frighteningly violent ’67 Newark riots turned once-quiet city streets into a warzone, and it was all happening just a few blocks from our home. Slightly more than a decade later I would pass those burnt-out buildings on my way to college and shudder at the violence that unfurled wings of fire that day and left behind crumbling, empty husks where once had been apartment homes filled with life.

Not long after the riots and their overflow of rage had burned out — leaving 26 dead and over 700 people injured — I remember accompanying my grandmother to the final mass held in an old church building situated at the edge of this battleground between despair and oppression. The once-impressive stained glass windows of the sacred place had been shattered, and the walls outside were latticed with graffiti. The church building was scheduled to be deconsecrated. That was another kind of death.

My grandmother was one of a handful of seniors from “the old country” who had come to join the gray-haired priest in bidding farewell to the only place where these transplanted souls had worshipped in the language of their motherland. She would never attend a Sunday mass again.

My brothers and I, the American born, would spend our Sunday mornings at prayer in a much newer church building that served a different parish, one untouched by the furies of impoverishment and inequality. We spoke to the angels, the saints, and the tripartite deity in English.

We were just children.

And though we were unaware of it at this, the age of our ignorance, we were certainly not growing up within an age of innocence. The world was shifting around us, and we were — all of us — caught up in the turmoil. The instability had begun long before my generation was born.

I was too young to understand why the adults whispered about the Jewish mother in the corner apartment whose husband paid me to walk their family dog when their only son went away to college. I knew firsthand that the woman was “crazy.” She was barely able to overcome her terror when she had to crack open the door to let her son’s large dog slip free so I could catch and leash him. On occasions I heard her screaming in terror though she was alone in her rooms.

And then I told my friends. We’d chortle, too young to understand the meanness behind our laughter. Our merriment was the manifestation of the barbarism all children betray when burning ants with magnifying glasses or pouring salt on slugs. We didn’t quite know why the adults scolded us for our private mockery and told us that “the poor woman” still bore on her forearm the tattooed numbers of her nightmare. But the adults never explained the meaning of those numbers. Perhaps the memory of the Second World War was still too fresh and painful for them, with the revelations that accompanied post-war “liberation” being too cold, too personally terrifying, for them to speak of to their children.

Only decades later would I remember this important detail, how the grownups spoke in hushed words about the woman’s tattoos and the numbers that signified a history so unimaginably horrible that even those who had actually come through the flames of war still couldn’t speak forthrightly about it.

We were only children, but ancient death was always among us. And despite our ignorance and immaturity, surely our unconscious minds must have sensed upon our shoulders the inherited burden of modern human history, a garland of skulls and warfare.

So, again, why was it such a surprise to me as a child when death showed up in the music we listened to?

The commercial media that catered to the late-Boomer generation born in the late Fifties and early Sixties fed us a steady diet of cultural sugar. Perhaps that is why the infrequent dollops of bitterness within this recipe of sweet amusement seemed all the more noticeable, their darkness more starkly visible against the backdrop of bright candied treats that commercial radio and television upon our plates for daily consumption.

My childhood in the late Fifties/Sixties was awash in “entertainment.” For a closer look at the “ear candy” that we consumed so much of, check out the “Bubble Gum Bereavements: Part One” post at the Grandfather Hu blog. That post and this one are part of a larger project looking at Murder Ballads that is slowly unfolding as part of the Wyrd Words column at the online magazine The Antonym, starting with a look at the darkness woven into childhood lullabies. This post is designed to accompany an earlier writing titled "Sugary Sweet Entertainments" posted at Grandfather Hu's "Hu Reads Horror" blog.

Graphic: Painting by Edmund Dulac illustrating "Stories from Hans Christian Anderson," available within the Public Domain at Gutenberg.org.

Language as Resistance in Literature

Today my mind wanders back to the topic of “resistance” in literature. Indeed, I’ve just finished a look at the subject as I summarized the ideas that spoke most strongly to me after my reading of Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature, an academic study of “a body of writing largely ignored in the West.”

 Harlow's 1987 book looks at the role of literature — especially poetry and the prison memoir — in “Third World” liberation movements during the late days of European colonialism. What I have shaved off that summary post at the Grandfather Hu blog is shared here, in this Voce Della Volpe blog. It is a brief look at the topic of “language” as a weapon in the hands of the oppressor.

What are the “representative aspects” of resistance literature?

At the top of the list is “language.” Harlow argues that the writer’s choice of the language is itself “a political statement.” In this Voce Della Volpe post, I’ll focus on the idea of “language” as a strategy for oppression. 

This is actually a topic close to my heart, as I recall stories told by my grandmother who grew up as a minority subject of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. My grandmother could speak and read Hungarian, which was the language of her schooling. But she also spoke of the punishment she and her classmates received when the teachers caught them their native tongue. They were forced to kneel on the point of a triangular piece of wood until their knees bled. Whippings for repeat violators were not unusual.

This memory of my grandmother’s stories remained with me as I heard stories from Taiwanese friends who shared their own memories of being chastised, often with corporal punishment, for speaking their mother tongue in the classroom.

Language loss and linguistic repression are powerful implements in the colonial toolbox. The history of colonization in Taiwan offers a fascinating and frightening example of how conquerors understand the power of language as both a force of oppression and resistance. 

In the early years of imperial Japan’s occupation of the island (1894 to 1945) the local “Taiwanese” dialect and aboriginal languages were allowed as the languages of the non-official realm, while Mandarin was strictly forbidden. That situation was completely, albeit gradually, flipped when the island was ceded to the control of the Nationalist Party from China. With the Nationalists in full power, the many indigenous languages, the Chinese Hakka language, and the majority Taiwanese language were prohibited in classrooms, the media, and trade. 

Mandarin came to be associated with “loyalty,” and Taiwanese was shunted aside as a signifier of lower social and cultural status until the late 1980s when the full authority of the authoritarian regime started to fade. Even so, the result of the decades-long oppression of linguistic expression was a highly successful endeavor of the colonizing regimes, resulting in the endangerment of some tribal languages and the reduction in the number of Taiwanese-language speakers, even in those regions where the majority population once was dominated by non-“mainlander” communities.

Linguistic colonization continues today in many nations, in part through language and educational policies, as is suggested by what some see as a decrease in the number of Cantonese speakers throughout Guangdong Province, the regional birthplace of this beautiful and complex language. Though the cause of this oppression may just as likely be the flattening effects of the electronic media. It may even be the demands of a capitalist economy that play a role in cutting the hard crust of regional accents from the bread of a national language, a concern expressed by some in the United Kingdom. In the United States the dominance of the media has inarguably affected the way English is, like, you know, like, you know, spoken? Oh Valley Girl, what have you done to English?

In terms of literary production, polyphony is an important aspect of resistance writing. I cannot help but think of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of “heteroglossia” as a quality of resistance writing, with different speech patterns standing as challenges to the “historical record” of officialdom while representing the continuing presence of the marginalized. Polyphony in the resistance text reveals social and political dimensions, as well as the psychological depths of the protagonists engaged in these struggles. 

One of the living examples of the use of language as an obvious form of resistance is Gabino Iglesias, whose novels include entire passages of untranslated Spanish as well as accents that identify protagonists’ cultural and class backgrounds. Iglesias’ first book, Zero Saints, is an ideal example of Harlow’s observation that resistance narratives “may be positively or healthily challenging” to readers who are unfamiliar with texts that ask of them a larger degree of “awareness.” The predominance of Spanish in Zero Saints challenges the idea of English as the “American language,” while the protagonists and the narrative serve as “resistance” to the major political climate that has given rise to the horrors of human trafficking and economic inequality.

Language can be such an important part of a literary text, providing not only an element of resistance but of reality as well.

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*Artwork: “Roots and Wings” by Patti Durr, as found at the Whitman Works Company art gallery blog. Used without permission, so please undo my error by visiting their website and checking out the beautiful and relevant artworks displayed and discussed on their blog.

Words Can Make a Difference

 

An inspiring article about neoliberal French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy appeared in this morning’s New York Times newspaper (2023 March 1).

Did you say Inspiring? Yes. I actually used that adjective — and more shockingly I’m applying it to the philosopher’s words.

I know, I know. It is downright frightening that I could be lulled into admiration for anything said by or about a proponent of near-fascist ideals, but there it is. The report is an introduction to a new documentary film that Lévy has recently made about the Russian colonization of Ukraine: Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine).

The inspirational arguments I’m drawing from this report — a combination of news, review, and analysis — come not from any of the millionaire philosopher’s particular sociological views (such as the gratingly sexist and anti-environmentalist arguments he’s expressed), but from his larger sense of “liberation,” “resistance,” and “relevance.”

Specifically, I’m drawn to Lévy’s notion of “tikkun olam,” the idea that Jews have a responsibility to “repair the world” through good deeds.

The Hebrew term — “mipnei tikkun ha-olam” — is derived from a Medieval mystical tradition that sought to separate the sinister and the sacred in the world by bringing people together for the contemplative performance of religious acts.

Lévy’s 1977 book Barbarism With a Human Face is credited with the popularization of the idea of “tikkun olam,” spreading it beyond the liberal Judaic community where it is at the heart of progressive social action programs that strive to improve the world through tzedakah (charitable giving) and gemilut hasadim (acts of kindness).

The ideals of “tikkun olam” appeal to me, especially as I learn to struggle against my mind’s addiction to the wicked brew of nihilistic cynicism and academic detachment.

The greatest inspiration I glean from this Times report of Lévy’s career is his notion that words can be powerful weapons of resistance and liberation. And while the philosopher endorses the power of words as expressed in philosophical argument offered in the textual and audiovisual media, I see in this the idea that Art has strengths that extend far beyond aesthetic and entertainment values. Art can change the world, influencing human activity toward good or evil.

The controversial philosopher claims his original muse was his father, André Lévy, an Algerian refugee whose teenaged engagement as a resistance fighter in Spain and France during the Second World War gave stimulus to the young Bernard-Henri’s idea of going to wartime Sarajevo in the early 1990s to make a documentary film about the genocide of Bosniak Muslims. The film Bosna! was released in 1994.

Lévy said his belief in the power of individuals to wake up the world was cemented during the time he spent filming, observing, and talking to people in Sarajevo. “Bosnia showed me that ideas matter, words can make a difference, decision makers can be convinced and that individuals can be a grain of sand that blocks the machinery.” (NYT)

 

I couldn't help but be delighted by the beauty of these tribal engagements with reality.

• An Australian aboriginal creation story says the universe was sung into being. 
  
  
• Papua New Guinean tribes believe there is no separation between the physical realm and the world of spirit. That's perhaps why plants and animals also hold divine powers.
  
  
• A pygmy tribe in Africa uses song and dance to thank the forest.
  
  
• Southern African bushmen shamans use a dance ceremony to enter the spirit realm. This spirit realm is a world that exerts great power upon our corporeal reality.

If Only?

 Do you remember when the news sites were rippling with suggestions that neuroscientiests had found a link between "reading serious literature" and increased empathy? While discarding old papers from my files I came across an essay by Prof. Julie Sedivy from a 2017 issue of Nautilus. 

Without discarding the research entirely, Sedivy pretty much shows the holes that can be poked into the various findings. But I have to admit: I want to believe that our reading habits can make us better people.

"Simplicity" as Resistance Writing

Writing is a viable source of protest and resistance for a quiet “recluse” like me. You can understand why, when I was flipping through some old magazines at home, I was inspired by an article about Taiwanese writer Liu Ka-shiang (劉克襄).

He was profiled in the August 2011 edition of the Taiwan Panorama magazine, in which he was put forward as an example of a “quiet” resistance artist who writes on everyday life, inspired as he is by the encounters he experiences during his daily long walks and occasional extended tours.

Liu earned a reputation for his “slow travel” guides that appealed to the “non-mainstream” tourist. He sums up his collection of over 70 published titles as an attempt to capture “a Taiwan that most people don’t know about — one that is either long gone or on the way out.”

Addressing the idea of writing as a form of resistance for quiet, solitary personalities like himself, Liu argues that a writer can “do more than stand on the front lines of protest.”

Liu is a proponent of storytelling as an act of critique and education. He also finds solace in poetry. Through storytelling he advocates for Nature against the Industrial crush that increasingly threatens Taiwan. With poetry he re-energizes himself by communing with the world of spirit and energy.

And by taking long walks he re-invigorates both mind and body, and heightens his connection to the Natural world. “After you’ve walked a long time, you discover … the meaning of simplicity.” 

Art and the Sinking Ship

 

My friend gave up his career as a bureaucrat and became a painter. But he’s struggling financially, surviving on a budget that is well below the poverty level. And I think, at times, it’s killing him. It hurts when I see how he and many others among both my real-world circle of friends and my social media contacts are struggling to make ends meet. Some are fortunate to have full-time teaching jobs, but many are relying on income from box office, bookstore, and art gallery sales. 

It was with this dual sense of foreboding and admiration for them that I read in The New Republic a book review written by economic journalist Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, who was critiquing Shannan Clark’s art history The Making of the American Creative Class. 

I’ve copy/pasted and summarized what I see as the most surprising, frightening, and intriguing elements of Kaiser-Schatzlein’s piece. There’s a link at the bottom so you can read the original essay entitled “The Artist Isn’t Dead” at The New Republic website. You really ought to read Kaiser-Schatzlein’s full essay.

Here’s what I see as the most important takeaway, with most of this quoted directly from the review:

The creative class as we know it emerged as a by-product of industrialization and the introduction of a consumer economy. White-collar work exploded into existence between 1880 and 1949, far surpassing the growth in blue-collar work. In the growing mass consumer economy, manufacturers had to find a way to make their goods desirable to the public, and so mass advertising was born and white-collar work became creative. Advertising dollars funded the growth of newspapers as advances in printing technologies enabled mass employment for writers, photographers, printers, graphic designers, editors, and artists.

The Great Depression tore a jagged hole in the heart of this culture industry, driving creative across all spectrum to join together in unions and guilds. Unionized cultural workers were able to achieve a middle-class salary that, for a while, kept up with the rising wages of unionized industrial workers. Meanwhile, the New Deal programs that hauled the United States out of the Great Depression and launched it into the prosperity of the postwar boom directly supported cultural workers as well. 

This dynamic combination of organized cultural worker groups and government support encouraged a flourishing of the culture industry that did quite well until the ugliness of McCarthyism struck against them. The anti-liberal phobia effectively neutered many cultural industry labor groups by forcing a culling of their more radical members. The larger labor movement, which at the top was thoroughly white, male, industrial, and conservative, was happy to watch the creative and perhaps more diverse left flank die. 

But then in the late 1960s the U.S. economy began to deindustrialize, which slowly eroded the bargaining power of the labor movement as a whole. By the 1970s, a number of newspapers and magazines began shutting their doors. During the Reagan and Clinton ears the hydrochloric acid of Neoliberalism flooded over the New Deal levees of socioeconomic security and started corroding not only the financial systems, but social and cultural structures as well. Public support for social welfare programs declined, income inequality skyrocketed, and prices exploded to feed the needs of the financial sector. In an age of toxic individualism, creative workers were largely left to fend for themselves. They are not doing so well.

The culture economy is brittle. Art organizations, from museums to concert venues, require a massive structure of employees to function properly. The creative classes also need an audience: people with enough income to buy a range of books and paintings, and enough free time to go to concerts and museums. Sadly, our current economic system leaves the majority of people, including creative workers, vulnerable and powerless.

Artists and other creatives are but a slice of the art world, which itself is a portion of the wider culture industry that is verging on collapse. Many creative people today are swimming barely above the poverty line. The walls are caving in everywhere: book publishing is contracting and consolidating; the music and film industries are taking huge blows as they transition to streaming; and journalism continues to shed workers.

Across the entire economic system we are seeing the need to empower workers through organized labor movements while ensuring these working people have affordable-yet-excellent healthcare, childcare, education, food, and housing. But unionism is not nearly enough. The creative class en masse will need to get behind political movements that aim to provide low-cost housing, curtail the financial sector, and reinvest in public schools and municipal infrastructure. We falsely see culture through the keyhole of individualism, which makes it almost impossible to connect the conditions of the working people in general with the bleak economic prospects facing artists, writers, performers, dancers, and other cultural creatives.

We are all in this together.

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Source:

“The Artist Isn’t Dead” by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein.
Published online for the January 4, 2021 issue of The New Republic Magaazine.
Read Kaiser-Schatzlein’s essay at:
https://newrepublic.com/article/160695/making-american-creative-class-book-review-artist-dead

Graphic:
Echo of a Scream
Art by David Siqueiros, Mexico