On Being Silenced

People miss the point Jelly Boy made at the Miller Theater podium April 17th when he said to Jason Shinder, "I know you'd like to silence me."

Eric Broomfield, like most of the writers and artists in the ULA, has been silenced his entire life-- as most of the population is economically and culturally silenced. That it's done benignly doesn't change the fact that it happens. There's a wide gap between Ivy League elites, who still dominate the print media and literary culture in this country, and the rest of us-- as the gap between rich and poor now exceeds historic gaps throughout history; of Ancient Rome, or France's Ancien Regime. The clown, April 17th, symbolized the forgotten man-- those people the literary Overdogs don't know about and don't want to see.

The bottom line of course is that the April 17th event was the most exciting literary event ever-- and the most meaningful, because it saw the sudden looking-glass meeting between two starkly different segments of American culture.