Op-Ed: Papuans and Zulus by Saul Bellow
Despots do not accept the autonomy of the literary imagination. Freedom of the imagination, dangerous to them, is related to the independence of the soul. This independence is not peculiar to artists, it is common to all human beings.
….In the U.S., we were protected in the past by a sense of humor. In the days of Mark Twain, of Mr. Dooley and H. L. Mencken, we were still able to kid ourselves. Mencken’s wicked jokes on Boobus Americanus — his term for the average man — had a salutary influence on the discussion of public questions and on public behavior. Sometimes crude, openly prejudiced but often very funny, he banged away at the professors, the politicians and the Jim Crow South. But fanatics and demagogues had far less influence in those pre-sensitive days. Child gangsters did not then kill the kids who “dissed” them.
Righteousness and rage threaten the independence of our souls.
Rage is now brilliantly prestigious. Rage, the reverse of bourgeois prudence, is a luxury. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority’s admission of guilt for past and present injustices, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and “justly” angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism.
As a onetime anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo.
We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.
As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
Saul Bellow, professor of literature at Boston University, won the Nobel Prize in 1976.