More Reality

Have I been unfair in these posts?

Put yourself in my place. Last year I find an anti-ULA smear essay republished, leading to smears against the organization I’m still strongly identified with, in influential publication after influential publication. (Most recently, a smear against me.)

In an interview for the book containing the essay, author Tom Bissell calls ULAers “authoritarian.” This, about blackballed writers of absolutely no standing.

The worst slur in the essay was likening us to genocidal Bolsheviks. I’m not exaggerating. (”—lots and lots of tombstones.”) Malicious? Just possibly?

An unaware reader would never know that Tom Bissell’s sponsors were the ones holding power and influence in the literary world (including his unnamed editor friends), and ULAers were the banned writers reduced to cleaning toilets. “The Big Lie” at its most egregious.

What would happen if actual Bolsheviks took actual control of the country?

Outspoken, anarchist-leaning undergrounders would be quickly liquidated. On the other hand, the go-along-to-get-along crowd, writers like Bissell and Beller, would join the Party immediately, and claim they’d always been in it.

Conformists and apparatchiks in one system would be conformists and apparatchiks under any system.