We are deep into what I believe is the most important electoral cycle of my lifetime.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are engaged, fired up and motivated in all sorts of ways.
I am seeing this on my Twitter account, where people who self-identify as writers are posting tangentially or directly political tweets. This, of course, leads to a spectrum of reactions from “nah, not my scene” to “HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT ABOUT MY GUYS”.
The relationship between art and politics has always been a contentious one. There are a lot of people out there who think that art and politics should not mix. They do not want to hear anything from artists about broader societal issues and politics. I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard or read people saying that celebrities should shut up about politics.
This is the same approach as the infamous retort “shut up and dribble” when basketball players made political comments.
The idea that sport and entertainment should not be political is as old as the hills, and is also old-as-the-hills obsolete. That ship sailed decades ago. Sport between nations, in case you hadn’t noticed, is war via sporting event. One look at how the Olympics actually operates should be enough to disabuse any normal thinking person of the notion that there is no connection between sport and politics. The entertainment industry in the USA found out the hard way how political entertainment can be when numerous writers and actors and directors found themselves being perp-walked before HUAC in the McCarthy era, with some of them being tossed into exile when they defended their constitutional rights, refused to answer impertinent questions, and told HUAC to go take a hike.
My person opinion is that art is, fundamentally, subversive. Many artists break taboos when they create art. Partly this is because they do things differently, because they see the world differently. (That also makes many artists deeply flawed human beings, but that is a whole other subject).
Writers have always been at the forefront of societal transformation. Karl Marx influenced the world for ever when he published Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. George Orwell painfully satirized totalitarianism in Animal Farm and 1984. Henry Miller and Anais Nin scandalized many but opened many eyes with their erotically and sexually charged writings. Ayn Rand influenced many with Atlas Shrugged (but don’t get me started on how a second-rate fantasy novelist somehow became regarded as a great American thinker on politics, economics, and governance). Vaclav Havel slowly subverted and worked to undermine the totalitarian government in Czechoslovakia with his books and poetry.
The written word is powerful. Artists, whether they realize it or not, can and are often subversive. The laughable ranks of state-approved writers, poets and artists paid by the government in the former USSR demonstrate that totalitarian governments recognize this, and want only their own “approved” artists who will create hagiographies for the regime. Everybody else becomes automatically regarded as subversive, vulnerable to being banned, exiled or charged with nebulous crimes like “treason” and “sedition”. It is no accident that those charges have been the go-to charges for hundreds of years by totalitarians and dictators of all political persuasions.
Erotica is definitely subversive, for it peels away the veneer on an enduring Western societal taboo, especially in the UK and the USA – the idea that sex is a subject that must not be discussed, a topic only suitable for discussion behind closed doors between responsible adults. The pathology is ridiculous, the behaviors are dysfunctional, and the results are terrible. But the attitude persists.
If I have any role to play in erotic writing, it is certainly not going to be furthered by peopling my books with polemics about politics. Subversion is far more subtle than that. The most subversive art is art that reels you in via story-telling, and only afterwards do you realize that it contained a deeper message.
I will continue to try to stay away from politics on my social media platforms, but if somebody brings a subject out into the open, I will participate if I feel I have something to say, and I will be tough on people who show up unprepared for discussion. In the meantime, I will work in my own way on my personal time to send totalitarianism and authoritarianism, masquerading as populism, back to the past age where it should have remained.
The rest of the time I will continue to work on the Books of Loukas, and Belem will continue to write smut and filth. That is, if I can persuade him to stop thinking about it and actually hammer on a keyboard.