Salman Rushdie on Free Speech

From yesterday's PBS.org article entitled "Salman Rushdie Warns Free Speech Under Threat":

Writer Salman Rushdie has made a public speech, nine months after being stabbed and seriously injured onstage, warning that freedom of expression in the West is under its most severe threat in his lifetime.

Rushdie delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, where he was awarded the Freedom to Publish award on Monday evening. Organizers said the honor “acknowledges the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers who take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face.”

He said that “we live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”

“Now I am sitting here in the U.S., I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools,” he said. “The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.

From Salman Rushdie's 5-11-12 NEW YORKER essay entitled "On Censorship":

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes “censored art,” and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Tropic of Capricorn,” every viewer of “Last Tango in Paris” or “A Clockwork Orange,” there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who “know” those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.

The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? “And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.”

At its most effective, the censor’s lie actually succeeds in replacing the artist’s truth. That which is censored is thought to have deserved censorship.

To read the entire article, click HERE. 

From Matt Bai's 8-16-22 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "The Attack on Salman Rushdie Is a Warning About Where We’re Headed":

If you’re too young to remember the late 80s, you might not understand what a pervasive symbol of Western freedom Rushdie became. This was after he published his novel “The Satanic Verses,” with its portrayal of the prophet Muhammad that so infuriated Iran’s radical clerics.

Rushdie stayed mostly out of sight for many years, though he reemerged one night in 1991 at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he spoke on the sanctity of the First Amendment. Every public appearance he made in the decade or so after the fatwa, with private security lurking nearby, constituted an act of remarkable courage.

If there was debate in this country over the rightness of Rushdie’s cause, I don’t recall it; even Jimmy Carter, who condemned the book in a pusillanimous New York Times op-ed, defended Rushdie’s right to be heard. Back then, pretty much everyone agreed that democracy demanded basic tolerance and free expression, even if we sometimes argued vehemently over what kind of speech was appropriate in the public square.

Those were the days when the ACLU defended the rights of Nazi sympathizers to march down the street in Illinois. And when even Republican presidents exalted the American press as a contrast to communist repression and theocratic rule — despite their evident disdain for what journalists wrote.

Those were also the times when the leadership of both parties rejected violent rhetoric — let alone actual violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing — in response to political or religious grievance. You may recall that former president George H.W. Bush resigned from the National Rifle Association, an important political constituency, in 1995 after it referred to federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.” (The NRA apologized; Bush didn’t relent.)

What a different society from the one we have now, when the most basic propositions in American life are up for debate — if anyone even knows how to do that anymore.

Now the movement conservatives who once proclaimed themselves a bulwark against mob rule can’t even find the spine to distance themselves from an armed attack on the Capitol. They grovel, instead, before a leader who would have joined the uprising himself if anyone had been willing to drive him.

Two days after Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, responded to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last week by saying that the Justice Department was in “an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” an armed man, and apparent Donald Trump supporter, tried to enter the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati.

How close is this to a political fatwa? How long until Trump and McCarthy’s holy war starts taking the lives of political opponents and journalists?

Meanwhile, as my Post colleague Margaret Sullivan notes, cultural conservatives around the country are doubling as school librarians, rooting out books by such authors as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Maurice Sendak. Mainstream Republicans cheer them on.

The moment demands a brave, intellectually liberal response. Good luck with that. The left’s commitment to open debate has all but disappeared when we need it most, as a stunning number of activists and academics embrace the idea that free speech is a tool of oppression, wielded by the White elite.

Even the ACLU isn’t really in the free speech business anymore, preferring instead to enforce social justice orthodoxies. First Amendment rights are still celebrated on campuses and social media — so long as you adhere to the accepted lexicon of identity and a sanctioned version of American history.

(Yeah, I know: “Both sidesism!” Give it a rest.)

Is any of this as egregious as urging on violent extremists? On the sliding scale of anti-democratic behaviors, no. But ask yourself this: If Rushdie had written his book in 2022 instead of 1988, and if the blasphemy had revolved not around Islam but around, say, the left’s notion of gender fluidity, how many leading Democrats would be standing up to champion his artistic freedom?

The answer is: very few. And that’s a problem, because the only winning response to lawlessness and censorship is a rededication to bedrock democratic ideals — and not only when it reaffirms your worldview.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

From Jake Kerridge's 8-15-22 GUARDIAN article entitled "Why The Satanic Verses Would Never Be Published Today":

Having spent the weekend in a deep gloom following the obscene attack on Salman Rushdie, I rejoiced to read reports that he had started making jokes from his hospital bed. His “usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact”, his son Zafar has said.

A Rushdie who stopped making jokes would no longer be Rushdie. He is a fundamentally comic writer, whose masters are Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens, and it was trying to be funny about Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses that brought the world crashing down on his head back in 1989. Rushdie knew well that the only way to understand something, be it an idea or a person, is to find out what is funny about it; to joke about something is to pay it the compliment of taking it seriously.

In the 33 years since The Satanic Verses came out, however, there is an increasing suspicion of satirical comedy as an appropriate means of telling the truth about the world. Thus The Satanic Verses would be never published today, particularly in an industry that is becoming increasingly risk-averse.

Indeed, publishers are terrified of causing offence in any way nowadays, and if their authors are accused of transgressing against today’s orthodoxies by the moral guardians who congregate on social media, the likeliest response is a stream of apologies or, in some cases, the dropping of the author.

When Kate Clanchy’s Orwell-prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me was accused of perpetuating racist and ableist tropes, she felt insufficiently supported by her publisher (and one staff member who expressed the same view was forced to publicly apologise). Neither Clanchy’s book nor Rushdie’s are unproblematic, but we seem now to be a long way from the era in which Rushdie’s publisher, Penguin, not only stood by him but refused to bow to pressure to cancel the paperback edition of the novel; Clanchy’s publisher, by contrast, released her from her contract.

This sort of situation seems likely to intensify. It was recently reported that the old guard are now leaving publishing houses such as Picador and Vintage, and the industry is becoming increasingly dominated by a youthful generation with an in-built resistance to work that causes offence. If The Satanic Verses were to be submitted today, it would be assessed by sensitivity readers, the professional scrutineers whose job is to point out to authors unwitting instances of such offence [...]. 

In 1991, David Britton, a publisher and pornographic bookseller from Manchester, had the distinction of seeing his novel Lord Horror proscribed by a magistrate – the last novel to be banned in Britain. The London literary elite were conspicuous by their absence at Britton’s (successful) appeal, although the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock did testify on his behalf.

Britton’s novel was a jet-black satire on anti-Semitism, accused of anti-Semitism itself: but then people who deem themselves worthy of deciding whether or not books should be banned are probably not the sort of people who are good at spotting irony or nuance.

Writers who want to use humour are often told by those who seek to censor them that they must “punch up”, not down, and only make fun of those higher in life’s pecking order than they are. Was the atheist Salman Rushdie punching down when he made jokes about things that Muslims, so many of whom face prejudice and persecution, hold dear? Or was he trying to give readers an awareness of the possibility of a different perspective on religion?

The answer may not be clear-cut: but the world will not be a wiser and happier place if writers are forced to shy away from anything that might, in someone’s eyes, cause offence.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Rachel Pollack, R.I.P. (1945-2023)

Rachel Pollack (1945-2023) passed away on April 7. Rachel was one of my Clarion West instructors back in 1996. Appropriately enough, she taught the final week of the workshop, capping off an already intense summer with her own special brand of esoteric initiation. I immediately embraced Rachel's metaphysical approach to teaching fiction writing. Her unique ideas were both liberating and inspiring. I found her emphasis on employing Hermeticism as a tool to unlock one's creativity to be a great relief after having endured so many university writing workshops that emphasized a practical and quotidian approach over an oneiric and intuitive one. She went well out of her way to encourage me in my writing and even devoted a considerable amount of time and effort offering me much needed advice regarding a novel-in-progress I was working on in the late 1990s. Needless to say, this was valuable time she could have been devoting to her own writing career. In an elliptical and roundabout manner, she unwittingly gave me the idea for what would eventually become my first novel, UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES.

Rachel won prestigious awards for her transcendental, magic realist novels. She received the World Fantasy Award for her 1996 novel, GODMOTHER NIGHT, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her 1988 novel, UNQUENCHABLE FIRE. I consider Rachel's finest book to be her criminally overlooked 1998 short story collection, BURNING SKY. In fact, when teaching Creative Writing classes at CSU Long Beach, I often use her 1982 short story, "Angel Baby," to demonstrate how to utilize first person point of view to best effect.

Rachel's groundbreaking 1993-95 run on the Vertigo comic book, DOOM PATROL (in which she introduced the first trans superhero), was recently republished by DC Comics in a massive omnibus edition. I recommend this book highly. Rachel discusses her transgressive tenure on DOOM PATROL in Alex Dueben's 5-23-22 COMICS JOURNAL interview, "'ONE OF THE THINGS THEY DEFINITELY ARE IS QUEER': AN INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL POLLACK."

Besides being an award-winning fiction writer, Rachel was also a world-renowned expert on the Tarot. Her 1998 book, SEVENTY-EIGHT DEGREES OF WISDOM (an in-depth analysis of the major and minor arcana), is considered to be a classic in the field. On May 1 of this year, her 2002 Tarot book, A WALK THROUGH THE FOREST OF SOULS, was released by Weiser Books in an extensively revised and updated edition. You can buy A WALK THROUGH THE FOREST OF SOULS right HERE.

“For forty years, Rachel Pollack has been one of the finest writers and thinkers about Tarot, and A Walk through the Forest of Souls feels like a distillation of everything she has been trying to get us to see. A must for people who want the Tarot in their lives or just for people like me who want it in our stories.”

--Neil Gaiman 

 

Here's an excerpt from Christopher Priest's 4-17-23 GUARDIAN obit:

All her fiction has a sensitivity to the images and mythology of the tarot, subtly imbued with insistent awareness of the state of transgenderism. Pollack’s work as a teacher and interpreter of the history and symbolism of the tarot became a consuming passion. She wrote the texts that accompanied several individual tarot decks, including her own, called the Shining Tribe Tarot, as well as that of the German surrealist artist Hermann Haindl and another deck based on the work of Salvador Dalí.

She said that she always looked at the tarot more as a spiritual guide, a kind of wise friend that helps discover who we are, than as a device for fortune-telling. For her, “divination” provided a means of having a two-way conversation with the divine.

For 30 years she and the tarot writer Mary Greer taught seminars at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, in upstate New York, and from 2002 Pollack taught an MFA course in creative writing at Goddard, a liberal arts college with campuses in Vermont and Washington.

Pollack was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a family of Orthodox Jews. She grew up with the awkward sense of being an outsider experienced by many young people who are attracted to the arts or literature. In her case the mystery of gender was an extra factor of her young life. To her it was literally unspeakable, cutting her off even more from her family.

Pollack was once asked if she had ever been a “nice Jewish boy”. She said: “I’ve always been Jewish, even when I thought I wasn’t, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been a boy, even when I thought I was. As for nice, I’ve always tried to be, but I’ve also always tried to be tough.”

She attended New York University, graduating with a degree in English, and earned her master’s in English from Claremont Graduate University in California. She said that 1971 was her annus mirabilis. This was the year when a work colleague introduced her to the tarot. Until then she had heard of it only from TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Exploring the images and symbols of the tarot led her to a further interest in the Kabbalah, the esoteric discipline of Jewish mysticism. In the same year she sold her first short story, Pandora’s Bust.

To read Priest's entire obit, click HERE.

Sky360

From Tamlin Magee's 5-9-23 VICE article entitled "UFO Hunters Built an Open-Source AI System To Scan The Skies":

Last year, the Pentagon began releasing regular reports on UFO sightings after the U.S. government established an office dedicated to tracking the aerial anomalies—which it calls unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs—for the first time. But ever since the Roswell “flying saucer” crash of 1947, officials have frustrated veteran UFO hunters, often dismissing the mysterious objects as “swamp gas,” “weather balloons,” or, more recently, “sky trash.”

Now, frustrated with a lack of transparency and trust around official accounts of UFO phenomena, a team of developers has decided to take matters into their own hands with an open source citizen science project called Sky360, which aims to blanket the earth in affordable monitoring stations to watch the skies 24/7, and even plans to use AI and machine learning to spot anomalous behavior.

Interest in UFOs has waxed and waned over the years, but with the Pentagon’s recent declassification of the “Tic Tac” videos in 2020—an unprecedented acknowledgment of mysterious aerial phenomena from official sources—the frenzy was well and truly reignited.

Confirmation of inexplicable flying Tic Tacs or not, that overarching air of secrecy has never really gone away. Although the Director of National Intelligence now discloses UAP sightings, many of those remain unsolved, and the US Navy has said that releasing more videos would be a national security risk.

Unlike earlier 20th century efforts such as inventors proposing “geomagnetic detectors” to discover nearby UFOs, or more recent software like the short-lived UFO ID project, Sky360 hopes that it can establish a network of autonomously operating surveillance units to gather real-time data of our skies.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

The Satanic Temple vs. Chicago

From Emma Camp's 5-6-23 REASON article entitled "The Satanic Temple Sues Over Right To Give 'Invocation' at City Council Meetings":

The Chicago City Council, like many other legislative bodies, typically opens meetings with an "invocation"—essentially, a prayer or moment of reflection. Clergy from a wide range of religious backgrounds have given these invocations, and a Satanist minister wants to join their ranks. But the city has refused to let him—and refused to explain the decision. Now, this minister has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the city.

The Satanic Temple is a nontheistic religion that, as noted by the lawsuit, is "federally recognized as a church and a religious public charity." Contrary to popular belief, members of the group don't actually worship Satan. Instead, they follow a series of seven "Tenets" focused on broad ideas of compassion, rationalism, and freedom.

The Satanic Temple has often tested religious-freedom policies and challenged anti-abortion laws on religious-freedom grounds. It's achieved middling success in the courts. Just this month, the group experienced a significant legal victory after it won its lawsuit against a school district that attempted to block the formation of an "After School Satan Club." The group also successfully sued in 2015 to remove a large 10 Commandments monument from the Oklahoma state Capitol.

This most recent lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, marks at least the third time The Satanic Temple has sued after being blocked from giving an invocation or prayer before a legislative body.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

RFK Jr. on JFK Assassination

From Stephen Neukam' 5-8-23 THE HILL article entitled "Robert Kennedy Jr. Sees ‘Overwhelming Evidence’ CIA Involved in JFK Assassination":

Robert Kennedy Jr., the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate, has backed a conspiracy theory that the CIA was involved in the killing of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, arguing the evidence is "overwhelming."

"There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder," Kennedy said in a Sunday interview with John Catsimatidis on New York City radio station WABC 770. "I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point" [...].

Kennedy Jr. suggested in his Sunday interview that his uncle’s killing in November 1963 had to do with his refusal to commit U.S. forces to Vietnam [...].

During the interview, Kennedy also floated the conspiracy theory that the CIA may have been involved in the killing of his own father, Robert F. Kennedy, a former U.S. attorney general who was fatally shot in Los Angeles when campaigning for president in 1968.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

After School Satan Club

From Julia Mueller's 5-1-23 THE HILL article entitled "Federal Judge Rules Pennsylvania School District Must Allow After School Satan Club":

A school district in Pennsylvania must allow students to convene an After School Satan Club, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

“In a victory for free speech and religious freedom, a federal court has ruled that the Saucon Valley School District must allow the After School Satan Club to meet in district facilities,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced.

In a Monday filing, issued in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and shared by the ACLU, a judge found that “here, although The Satanic Temple, Inc.’s objectors may challenge the sanctity of this controversially named organization, the sanctity of the First Amendment’s protections must prevail.”

To read Mueller's entire article, click HERE.

QANONSENSE UPDATE: "Joe Biden Is Dead, and James Woods Is Playing Him Now"

Our latest "QAnonsense Update" is a two-step process. Step One: Read the following passage from my latest book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP:

"The cognitive dissonance among the QAnon crowd has never been more pronounced than right now. Given the extreme state of denial in which these people have placed themselves, I would not have been at all surprised if, at the moment Joe Biden placed his hand on the Bible and was sworn in as the forty-sixth President of the United States, willfully blind followers like Rick Rene would take to the internet and insist, 'Don’t believe the fake news, my friends! That’s not Sleepy Joe! No! That’s just a hologram! It’s really Trump in disguise! He’s been planning this all along! He’s succeeded in fooling the Deep State at last! We win! We win!'"

Step Two: After watching filmmaker Rod Webber's recent interview with a QAnon acolyte named "Q-Anon Mike," ask yourself if this drone's worldview is more insane or less insane that the hypothetical one I dreamed up in the above passage only a few days after Trump lost the election in 2020. To see Webber's interview, click HERE.