Q: Blaster Al writes,
About six months ago we got a batch of old poetry journals and chapbooks and such in at the store. And in the course of skimming through these I dipped into one that appeared to be some sort of critical symposia on Bukowski. So I'm dipping in here and there, and reading around in it--and I hit this one piece that was clearly more cogent and interesting than the others. I settled down and was reading along in it. All at once, right before my very eyes, Jack, it sort of gave a twitch and dived off into this rant--which was familiar enough to me so that I sat up and exclaimed, "Ha! and By God! This thing has suddenly started sounding like Jack the Raver!" Well, turns out, it was. I had a good chuckle over that.
What made you start raving about President Bush in a poem about Peter Küstermann?
A: Ike talked about the military-industrial-academic complex, in his second warning.
Ward Churchill lost his job for comparing the 9-11 victims to Eichmann.
Most academic writers don’t speak truth to power.
I can think of exceptions, like Chomsky and Howard Zinn, or Chalmers Johnson.
But for the most part they hold their tongues because their jobs are at stake.
Q: In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich says the middle class brought their own destruction down on themselves by acting rich. By not helping the people behind them to achieve the gains they had won. By denying what they had to the poor, it was easier for the rich to hoodwink and bamboozle them. They set a trap and caught their own leg in it.
Universities have become trade schools, and they teach people how to cheat and lie.
Game the system.
Well, guess what. You don’t game the system, the system games you.
You stand up to the system.
How many writers in universities do you see doing that.
A: I’m agreein’.
Q: Oh, I see.
You felt like
Küstermann was criticizing
A: I don’t know.
I got defensive.
I didn’t want to
hear my country criticized by somebody who didn’t live under the rules we
did. Have you looked at the TV
lately? Have you looked at what
I am operating in the tradition of Tom Paine and Common Sense.
I doubt that his film will criticize whatever political regime he works under.
I believe he had found a way to reconcile the conflicting urges to attack the system and protect his livelihood. Not jeopardize his livelihood.
He should have been making a film about dissent in his country. What happened to dissenters where he came from.
Q: Do you mean to say you think your work has been rejected because publishers don’t like what you have to say about free-market capitalism? About corporate control of the arts? About marketplace censorship?
A: I am to the Mall Builder culture as Solzhenitsyn was to the Russian state.
The poster boy for marketplace censorship.
As
It spurs me on.
Q: FDR,
A: That’s it.
They are unanimous in their hatred of me.
I take it as a badge of honor.