Brooklyn Book Festival

Among the 260+ authors at yesterday’s Brooklyn Book Festival were LGBT stars David Rakoff, Edmund White, Jacqueline Woodson, and newcomer Justin Torres, and a highlight was the triple bill of Deborah Eisenberg, Wallace Shawn, and Fran Lebowitz discussing why Americans feel such anxiety these days. An overriding theme was that the very rich and a handful of mega-companies have run off with the country in their pocket, to astonishing little outcry from the nation at large. 

WS: “Most people in the United States feel the political system is not really a democracy as far as they personally can observe… People feel, in a Chinese way, ‘I go about my business but I don’t have much say in how things are run.’ The Chinese, at least, are bought off by a rising economy.” He also lamented the “de-educated population” “distracted by trivial arguments while really important issues are not even discussed.”

FL: “I have the solution: Privatize the private sector. The private sector is drowning in public money.” She decried that possessions and purchasing choices have come to substitute for personality. She also did an old school curmudgeon riff that in the past thirty years the Left has done nothing but ban smoking, and get gay marriage, and called both issues trivial.

DE: (continuing WS’s point about people being surprised, having elected a Democrat expecting a reversal of the egregious practices of Bush/Cheney, only to see Obama continue them.) “Those practices have been ratified, made irreversible. Political discourse stopped and a great silence has fallen.” She expressed dismay about the “incredibly compliant populace” and later said she was “really, really shocked by how timid, intimidated, how afraid people are to speak out.”

WS: shocked at how the majority of Americans’ “self-definition has changed from friendly to mean so quickly. Meanness is who we like to be.” He said the transition began with Reagan “who was both friendly and mean.”

FL: after NAFTA, the US factories have disappeared and been replaced by meth labs. “There’s New York. Meth labs. Megachurches. And L.A. That’s it.”

Comments

[Sandy]

"De-educated population" concerned with trivial issues. I'll say. I have a friend who thinks there is no outcry because so many people are medicated these days. And while I have to say that I hear a lot of talk (from this sparkling, admirable and smart-mouthed trio among others), I don't see me much action. I am heartened, however, by my activist friend Michael Bronski, who asks not WWJD? But instead always wonders WWEGD? (What would Emma Goldman do?) I'm afraid even the fiery Ms. G might be quietly neutralized now as she was (eventually) then. This child of the Sixties mourns the days of real protest.

[Skye Winspur]

This child of the Eighties would like to remind Ms. Lebowitz and other embittered baby boomers that real protest is still happening. It's what got Don't Ask Don't Tell repealed before you all died.

[Arthur Durkee]

Bread and circuses while Rome burns.

That's pretty much the way the media covers it, yeah.

I too mourn the lack of real protest. I also have said for some time that the main reason that LGBT activism is so lame these days is that most of the real radicals were killed off, mostly by AIDS, and most of the activism left is less radical. I mean, really—gay marriage is THE most important issue on our plates? Not hardly. There are FAR more pressing concerns. But it goes to show that the more conservative among gays, those who survived AIDS, have a much bigger voice BECAUSE they survived. So, with no offense intended to the activists of the 80s, "real protest" still needs to be a lot more than it is.