Of Grapes and Legions

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Social Issues I try to keep politics and social issues out of this publication, whose primary purpose is to follow the explosive development of digital publishing, the demise of the print industry, and wonderful new opportunities for authors. This week's issue is, however, very much involved with both writing and social issues that have shaped literature in the past, and promise to do so again in these parlous times. The Black Legion was nominated for an Academy Award in 1937. Speaking of writers, it was adapted from an original story by Academy Award winning producer Robert Lord, and scripted by Abem Finkel (1889-1948; Academy Award co-nominee for Sergeant York (1941), and by novelist/screenwriter William Wister Haines (1908-1989; Slim, 1934; High Tension (1938); and other works of fiction and nonfiction.

Hate Groups Here is the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, providing up to date information on the U.S. hate movement. With the economy and other factors, hate groups in all states have mushroomed recently. "Numbers reflect explosive growth of radical right," says SPLC Report newsletter.

Today's social and economic crisis will put an end to the vapid yodeling of the Reagan era, with its enormous Republican deficits and social inequities blamed on the Democrats, by a dishonest and muck-racking corporately owned press (lying about the imaginary 'liberal media'). These are hard times, for real, and that's not just empty rhetoric. It will help to take off our Rupert Murdoch kaleidoscopes, put on 20-20 eyeglasses, and realized that we're in the midst of the 9th inning of a universal play between Lords vs Labor, Patricians vs Plebeians. Usually, the working stiffs lose, and the rich get richer. I'm no millionaire, so I'll stick with the middle class and its interests. On the publishing front, today's crisis will create the next wave of great U.S. literature, out of the muck of today's bestselling emptiness of ideas and dearth of lasting, meritorious writing.

The Nepression of 2008-2011 and counting (Nepression being neither recession nor depression, but whatever the individual wants to make of his or her lot). By literary writing, I refer not to sentimental pablum or attitude formula that rrrrrrrr-ockets up the charts in the inbred review industry, nor to the academic genre of 'stories in which nothing happens.' If we look at a typical high school or university survey syllabus, we find that it consists mostly of authors who, in their day, managed to bypass the industrial and academic gatekeepers and achieve the kind of stunning popular success disdained by English majors as 'commercial (ugh!) fiction.' But these are precisely the kind of authors whose work is that which generally lasts for generations or centuries. Much popular work is vapor that has no lasting meaning or feeling; as is true of most academically and portal-approved 'literachoor' (a word used, if not coined, by that über-self-promoter, Ezra Pound). As I like to observe, the list of self-published authors (barred by gatekeepers) includes most of the typical syllabus. It reads like a Who's Who of Literature, from Shakespeare and Dickens (weekly journals) to D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other deities worshiped by English majors. As rousing commercial successes in their day, most did not starve to death in garrets or suffer horribly for the amusement of that segment of students who are like evil little kids with a stick for poking frogs (authors) in jars.

The difference between dross and lasting value is that a certain small minority of those wildly successful author-blooms do not fade with their generation, but remain vibrant and pungent in all later generations. That is entirely in the hands of the book-loving public, and beyond the control of publishers, Lit professors, marketers, and other artillerists of hype.

This is not to say that academics are all wet—their best penslingers resuscitated Shakespeare and Dickens, kept alive Emily Dickinson, and salvaged Fitzgerald when the Jazz Age succumbed to the vinyards of wrath. They nourished a rich modern poetry tradition—even if inhabited by a verbally violent mob of would-be sonneteers and partisan sloganeers, who bash each other with beer mugs in the Bohemian underworld of putsches and pretzels, also known as English Departments. Academic literachoorians have inhabited a rarified and inbred world of 'stories in which nothing happens' (except copious references to the author's reading list, largely understood only by other Lit professors, not by the broader public). Out of vestigial curiosity, I recently revisited John Barth's 1968 Lost in the Funhouse collection of short stories. I had to put it down after a story or two, while reaching for my airline relunch bag. I searched instead for a real work of fiction, rather than a hermetic and obscure work about fiction. Academics have served as hyperpneumatic trombones and a useful chorus in the New York publishing comedy of the past half-century. That has mainly served to pad the bottom lines of the world's five largest (did I say oil?) companies, which own media empires as footnoted tax write-offs, because publishers in the 'New York Times Bestseller' racket are vastly more skilled at losing money and picking lame runners than The Producers of Springtime for Hitler).

I wonder if, aside from ecology and predictably Orwellian clichés, the late era of conglomerated, monolithic print publishing in New York will leave behind any lasting, genuine literature on the order of Dickens, Melville, or Fitzgerald. Which of the thin line of front-list authors allowed into print during the gatekeeping monopoly of New York print elephantiasis (1960ish-2010ish) will appear on Literature Department syllabi a hundred years from now? Would some Valley of the Dolls media-hyped money churner find its way next to Dickens' Great Expectations or Huxley's Brave New World? How many real authors lie moldering in unmarked graves, with their unpublished tomes in skeletal hands—and a Big NY 6 stake, cheaply plated in silver, through their hearts? The current, real revolution in publishing, though technologically rather than ideologically based, is overturning the vested, multi-billion dollar monolith of a fossilized industry bent on delivering ice to Eskimos or coal to Newcastle. Amid the rest of the economic disruption of our times, there will be interesting circumstances for the astute and perceptive author to write about ordinary people, and inadvertently create the next Nobel Prize tale of the little guy enduring under the yoke of the very rich, who grow ever richer. So hear this, authors known and unknown: the current economic disaster, coupled with the greatest personal freedom ever seen in publishing, presents an unprecented opportunity for you to become the next Steinbeck.

The Black Legion In 1928, the Ku Klux Klan staged the largest march in its history—through Washington, D.C. at the height of the Republican era of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover; which proves that immigrant and minority bashing precede financial panics and the resulting ground-level suffering. The Twenties were still Roaring, everyone thought he or she was an expert investor, and the reckless good times could never end. Sound familiar? Within a few years, a desperately poor, starving, and nearly hopeless US public voted overwhelmingly Democratic, and Hoover was the most hated man in the USA. FDR, whose administration was savaged by relentless political warfare by the very rich—who called him a socialist and a communist, which in the USA is akin to crying "Atheist!" in a crowded church—counseled that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Grapes of Wrath To understand how social issues shape writing, we have only to look at that continuing bestseller, The Grapes of Wrath and its author John Steinbeck Jr. (1902-1968). Steinbeck was an American author who received the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. According to the Nobel Prize organization in Sweden, Steinbeck was honored "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining...sympathetic humour and keen social perception." He won for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and for his corpus of 16 novels and other works, including short stories. Steinbeck's influences included Ed Ricketts (1897-1948), a U.S. marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher with whom he cooperated on Sea of Cortez after they became friends in Monterey, California during the 1930s. Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row during that period, based on his observation of factory works around the Monterey wharves. Ricketts died in a 1948 car-train collision at age 51. Steinbeck and Ricketts had a rough-hewn quality about them that reminds one of their contemporary Woodie Guthrie (1912-1967). They were part of a world-wide Bohemian continuum, including the German Wandervögel (literally, 'wandering birds') of the post-war generation, with their guitars and folksongs, whom history has largely forgotten in documenting the grotesque and colossal rise of European fascism and communism after World War I. This long-standing and amorphous movement traces its roots to intellectual reactions to the Industrial Revolution (which began in the UK around 1750, and has continuously played as late as the present day, with its major industrial and economic spikes during large wars). Bearded and/or long-haired men like Steinbeck, Ricketts, and Guthrie were models for 1950s Beatniks and 1960s Hippies in popular culture and sensational press hysteria. Steinbeck, Ricketts, and others no doubt influenced ecology writers like Rachel Carson (1907-1964), bestselling author of Silent Spring (1962) and other consciousness-raising works about the dangers of DDT and other environmental dangers.

The Generals of October

The Generals of October is a fictional thriller about a Second Constitutional Convention that threatens to reshape or destroy the U.S. as we have known it. It's a fiction-coated, scary what-if scenario, which the author thoroughly fact-checked and which has been accepted as a reference work (despite being fiction, a rare distinction) at a number of leading law school libraries in the U.S.

The novel anticipates the worst crisis since U.S. history since the Civil War—right around the corner, amid a climate of divisive hatreds, increasing economic woes, and spiraling civil unrest. Written in the 1990s, it is a visionary exercise in what is very likely to happen when the public discourse is poisoned, as now, and back-to-back serial recessions (terminology from the novel, written during the illusion of prosperity during the Dot-Com Bubble) let demagogues in Congress and the media persuade a desperate and gullible public to support CON2.

What is CON2? There is a ticking time bomb in the U.S. Constitution. Article V allows us—almost encourages us—to rewrite or even discard most or all of the Constitution as the whim strikes us. There has only been one Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia in 1787. Do today's foundering fathers believe they can improve on the Founding Fathers? To hear today's extremist politicians and hate media hacks, you'd think they are the inventors of genius. But it's a doomed exercise in futility, with terrifying results. The author is the first person to think Article V and CON2 through to its ultimate, inevitable conclusions. Throw aside all the empty formula thrillers—this is the real thing. If you want something to really scare you to death, this is our future on steroids. Find out all the ways we can destroy the United States, by not paying attention, and by believing in snake oil sellers.

The Generals of October is both a rousing, entertaining thriller, and a cautionary tale. The premise comes directly from Article V in the U.S. Constitution. "What if voters grew tired of financial ruin, government chaos, and endless bickering--and let raving demagogues sway them into ignoring the voices of reason, and into voting for a Second Constitutional Convention (CON2)?" Can today's shallow, self-interested politicians really do better than the Founding Fathers? The recipe for doom is right there, inshrined in our founding document. Young Army officers David Gordon and Victoria 'Tory' Breen must unravel the conspiracy of the treasonous Hotel Generals. David and Tory must bring together the forces of tradition and reason-and help restore the United States to order, liberty, and sanity. Cpt. David Gordon is on a military intelligence mission, masquerading as an Inspector General officer. Lt. Tory Breen is the Executive Officer of the most ultra-secret computer operation in the nation's capital, which is highjacked by military extremists for a take-over of the United States, using CON2 as a Trojan Horse. Along the way, they fall in love—and must solve a terrible personal secret from her past life.