One of my favorite novels is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. It explores his experience of being officially “forgotten” by the bureaucratic thugs who ran Stalinist Czechoslovakia. His name was erased from places it had been. His books were removed from shelves. His photographs were disappeared. The punishment for saying ideas contrary to totalitarianism, was for the government to pretend that what had actually occurred, never occurred. Survivors of societies tightly controlled by pretending, tell us about the soul destruction that accompanies this experience of collective lying. The same apparatus operates in the personal. For those of us who are introspective, we have learned the hard way that pretending that something never was, creates a hole in the heart — facing the reality of the present and the past is our only way out of the pain caused by the repressed. Most of our problems revolve around unresolved pain projected onto the present, and onto people who did not cause it.
Recently Yale University took back Bill Cosby’s honorary doctorate. Cosby is now a convicted sex offender, guilty of multiple, compulsive rapes. I think that Yale’s attempt to dissociate from his crimes is hypocritical. They kept intact the honors they had bestowed upon the various war criminals who passed through their gates. It’s a PR move. How do they pick people for these honors anyway? They are looking for people who have accrued their own meaning and then they announce a relationship to them to enhance their own brand. Erasing what actually occurred is a short-cut from avoiding the larger questions: what and who are they actually associated with, and what crimes and pain have those people caused? What are their real values?
The Motion Picture Academy is taking away memberships from Cosby and from Roman Polanski. This action is supposed to show that the American entertainment industry opposes sex crimes. What a joke. Globalized American entertainment is the greatest advertisement on earth for violence, war, weapons, sexism, rape, colonialism and sexual abuse. By pretending that these two men never reached the level of approval required for acceptance into the Academy, is an act of hypocrisy. Their artistic contributions are actually opposite from each other-Cosby being banal and Polanski, a great artist. Now that these two men are negative brands, the Academy pretends away their previous status, as a smokescreen for their own purpose.
Then we get to writers. Right now there is a lot of media attention about Junot Diaz, the only Dominican person who has been allowed in/used for branding/appreciated by the white corporate literary industry. The accusations against him include clear-cut physical assault: forced kissing- which is an action heavily propagandized by the products of the Motion Picture Academy. It also includes yelling, assholeness, bad boyfriend stuff, vengefully obstructing people’s career development, and rudeness. He has said that he knows his behavior was wrong. He believes that the sexual abuse he experienced as a child contributed to his violating and harmful behavior. Some people doubt his sincerity. I don’t know what is true, but I do know that some people who have suffered in childhood spend their lives hurting those in front of them, and very few of those people ever put those two things together. So, it cannot be easy, for this recognition is desperately necessary and so, so rare. And we must support everyone who is run-over by people in pre-recovery state of rage, just as people who make the connection need our support.
The women who have been hurt by him, finally feel empowered to speak out, and that is the most important element of this event. Not only do they get heard, but their actions open other doors and also raise a lot of other questions. Are we now going to say that famous men being mean or dishonest, and derailing the careers of women who oppose them, is grounds for public scandal, and that it will be covered extensively by the media? If that is the case, prepare yourselves for the entirety of our media being devoted to this for the rest of our lives. Just going by my own experience, of the few famous white men I have met, 70% were sexist, narcissistic, lying, brutal jerks. If they are all going to be brought down, bring it on!
But don’t pretend that no one ever loved them, even if it was just because we were told to. And do not take people’s books out of the stores, do not cancel their readings, don’t pretend they never existed, or don’t exist now. And don’t pretend that we never learned from them, never enjoy their work, and were are never enriched. However, if we are going to discover that this 70% were actually over-praised, that is something I am interested in. But I would rather that institutions expose why they over-rated men, or tokenized them, why they used them, exploited their brands, or built them up because in the case of most white men who “make it”, they had something that reminded the gatekeepers of themselves.
One of the things that this case, and others before them, reveal – is that some young talented women with ambition feel that the only way they can get opportunities or access that men have, is to date, flirt with, befriend, or associate with powerful men. Women who do not fit the profile for privilege are getting the message that only through intimate association with men who have what most women can’t get, can we be seen or be given a chance. And this unfair, culturally distorting reality, means that famous men who are lonely, are confronted with women interested in them because they need to correct a discriminatory lack of access. The famous men can respond to this by being cynical about the body before him, by lashing out with indifference, by blatant transactional cruelty, or they could just help women artists, and use their powers to open those doors. If women had a fair chance to be included based on our own points of view and artistic aesthetics, these types of situations would be less fraught.
Writers are not priests or politicians. We not only cannot claim to be clean or perfect, quite the opposite, we are driven by our contradictions to reveal the complexity of human co-existence. If we only read books or see art by people who are clean, we will have nothing to look at. The Art of Writing is not offering a blueprint for sainthood, but the opposite, a reflection on human flaw. Kundera, himself, faced charges of at one point in his life attempting to be complicit with the regime that ultimately ran him out of town. If that effort to conform did take place, it did not work, as he lived out his life in exile in France.
Image Credits: Kaz-CC
