Pimps and Prostitutes

Hollywood has also remained one of the foremost enemies of art; the likes of any grossly overpaid grossly overrated Hollywood actor becoming one of the foremost advocates for the integrity of Hollywood as a force for good in the world, speaks volumes.  Hollywood producers have remained steadfast enemies of Truth,  as has publishing become steadfast in its attention to profit before people; maintaining attention to a public that buys.  These, of course, are practices in a world of diminished literacy so much so that even publishing can only pander to taste, as degraded as ours has become.  Does Hollywood or conglomerate owned publishing believe other than their self-perpetuated delusions of who or what the people are, no different than the political state who works toward confusing the people for a public that serves, or at least a  public that buys and buys and buys.  We sit buy and marvel at free enterprise as fashion and cosmetic industries allow musical entertainers make upwards of eighty million dollars a year, thus seriously diminishing the salaries and benefits packages of the very employees that make the products the entertainer represents, allowing the public to become enamored by her image or enthused by her spirit enough to waste more money than they can afford; all of this while my health insurance goes up, salaries freeze, hours to work shrivel and Congress stall on health care reform. I dare anyone to name any of the top three to five publishers in America, especially, but anywhere in the world, and see if they are not committed to a contemptibly narrow programmatics of what should be published, all in the attempt to right  former  wrongs, political, social, ethical–how has the new hegemony not become a reanimation of the old?  I’ll never forget Oprah saying that you must believe in your own goodness and that your reward will take the form of money if you believe it will . . . High Priestess in the Cult of Mammon.All of the attempts to right former wrongs by multiculturalism have been perpetuated in an attempt to garner the resonance of truer voices, voices more real because they are more diverse. Brown-eyed writers and blue-eyed ones we used to joke were next, but with the culture of ignorance besetting all contemporary attempts at multicultural reevaluation, I wonder what kind of multicultural world has been envisioned.  I met an educated man, college educated, somewhere in his early fifties, who could not understand why an American poet made allusions to Greek poetry or mythology in his poems, finding it pretentious. The contemporary American politically correct version of multiculturalism is horribly narrow, terribly proscribed. We tell ourselves our moves toward corrections are necessary instead of what seems to me to be the prime motive in all diversity, increasing profits by sub-dividing the market.   Publishing has never been more enamored with any marketing ploy as much as they are with multiculturalism, diversity, diversity, diversity, all and only in the name of dollars.  Its macroeconomics.  And with enough resenters from formerly beleaguered camps, dollars are right enough.  Did we expect a bourgeois capitalist populist society to envision literary truth any other way?  Is it different because the authors are women or persons of color or post-colonial, all of these the new status quo?The bourgeoisie must kill its artists for two reasons: it increases the market value of the art, and in selling the art it does not have to pay the artist; someone else gets rich.