Stalinist and Capitalist Attitudes about Writing and Blogging

Posted on September 28, 2004 in Blogging Censorship

“I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ‘she asseverated’ and I had to stop reading to get a dictionary.

Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard, the product of capitalism, would feel quite at home in a Stalinist dictatorship. Stalin obsessively tracked the lives of his artists, telling them how to write, how to paint, how to compose music. In the late 1940s, for example, the music czars dragged Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Dimitri Shostakovich before them. “Your music is too hard to play,” they told the trio. “The average musician cannot master these notes. There are too many instruments for the regional orchestras to assemble. You have allowed bourgeosis influences to corrupt your style.”

In some writing groups, I hear the same complaint. “You have to write for the market,” they say. “Writing is not worth it if you don’t get paid. So Keep It Simple Stupid.” Many quote Samuel Johnson who said that only a fool doesn’t write for money. Johnson, who scraped by on nothing, counted himself as a fool. It’s good to be one.

The market demands dumbing down, simplicity, paucity of metaphors. It invites ridicule of those whose creations take some work to understand. Stalinism and Capitalism both celebrate mediocrity as high art. They both depend on ignorance. They both use what appeals to the public to control the public. And they hate those who find their own path.

In both Stalinism and Capitalism, the artist is an interchangeable part. If the powers of the world — the commissar or the employer — don’t like the product, they remove that cog and replace it. Often, it is not the dedicated artist who succeeds under the system, but the dedicated asskisser.

Under my ideal system, which is libertarian, what ultimately decides what gets created and distributed is the human spirit. As I have said many times before, blogging and the Net amount to a folk revolution. It fills working stiffs and employers with dread because it refuses to define itself based on market surveys. What I like about bloggers is that they define their product for themselves and are grateful for any attention they get. To blog is to be free to mispell, break the rules of grammar, and metaphorize, to be vivid where others would be dull, to be original where the market suppliers resort to cliche’.

History shows that the best artists feel they have nothing to lose. Which is why I think many in traditional media fear the independent blogger, why they make a big deal of the lack of resources and an infrastructure to ensure perfection. Some justly fear that it will be found out that, for years, they’ve been writing for no other end than to generate copy to meet deadlines. A deadline can result in serendipitous copy, but just as often if not more so, it results in vapid, shallow, and dead writing that fails to challenge the mind and integrity of the reader.

To be a blogger demands this: that you are committed to have your voice regardless of cost. And to read blogs or any good writing demands that you work a bit, that you go places where you have not been before. The blogger’s obligation is to provide honest, in-depth, original material . The reader is not passive, but must attempt to interact with the blogger. If you don’t get what is being said, either ask or use a dictionary.

To hell with Elmore Leonard and all the other authoritarians, both right and left, who want us to stay comfortably within our limits, who censor through flimsy ridicule.