Saturday, July 07, 2012

Another Country

THINK if this were another country, like China, and a handful of dissident writers bucked what they saw as an overly bureaucratic and cronyistic literary system which produced stale and lifeless bureaucratic art. In, er, China. The well-credentialed literary bureaucrats, those who benefit in some way from the system, if only through seeing their work into disseminated print, naturally would see the dissidents as no-talent cranks and complainers worthy of contempt. How dare the dissidents not play by the same rules other writers play by? How dare they complain? Making noise and dissenting from the established system is a betrayal of the national literature itself! So the way system apparatchiks would view it. The literary dissidents would be ostracized.

This, in a country like China. It could never happen in a country like the USA. Could it?

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