I had a character in Playing Hurt called Lum Moyen.
(From l’homme moyen sensuel, or man of average
sensibilities.) This is how an author explores who he is.
Finds out what he thinks. Playing Hurt was the first book
in the trilogy RACE, SEX, AND LIBEL. It’s a book that asks
what colored town would be like in Utopia. I realized a white guy
can’t write about race from the perspective of a black character,
in fact, he can’t write about it at all. Last book I wrote about
what Marshall McLuhan called endless mental rutting
in advertising and entertainment. I object to it, but there’s nothing
one can do, except be aware of it, and try not to let it influence you.
I think I feel the same way about multiculturalism as an agenda.
I don’t like the propagandizing. But what can I do except sound like
an old peckerwood still living in the days before integration.
Talk about social engineering. I don’t think brainwashing
is too strong for what they’re trying to do. Imagine a corporation
paying an instructor to hold a diversity seminar in which he alleged
that white people are the primary cause of racism and black people
don’t have anything to do wiv it. Their own social pathologies
are a by-product of the system. That is, I cause it.
I, Mr. Baldwin? I brought you over here in chains?
It seems to me that you’re up there and I’m down here.
Not enough black people on television, Mr. Baldwin?
How many is enough? There are enough for me.
Jazz and classical music at the junior college
radio station have been replaced by soul music.
It isn’t an improvement. It’s a step back.
Maybe I am a conservative.
Some things used to be better.
Maybe I’m elitist.
An effete corps of impudent snobs.
Nattering nabobs of negativism.
Spiro Agnew was funny.
Does anybody remember
who Spiro Agnew was?
He took money from
highway contractors.
A television viewer can’t write about
advertising and entertainment. A fish
isn’t conscious of the water it is swimming in.
Until you pull it out of the water. That takes
imagination. The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens
called it. Essays on Reality and the Imagination.