Captive Mind

Camille Paglia writes:

...Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as "a wise Latina" trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment -- a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism when even the doughty Ann Richards was saying to the 1988 Democratic National Convention: "After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." What flatulent canards mainstream feminism used to traffic in! Astaire, idolized even by Mikhail Baryshnikov, was one of the most brilliant and peerless dancers and choreographers of the 20th century. The agile but limited Ginger Rogers, a spunky, smart-mouthed comedian, is only a footnote. Get real, girls! This is the kind of mushy balderdash I doggedly had to plow through for five years in trying to find a good feminist poem for my collection, "Break, Blow, Burn." I never found one. Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

It's that last sentence that jumped out at me.

Because in book club tonight we discussed The Captive Mind. Its author defected from red Poland because communist cant - the rules of socialist realism - threatened to suck the life out of his poetry. He found that threat abhorrent. But he felt irresponsible about abandoning his native land. So at the end of his book he imagines that someday, when he dies, he will need to justify his defection to Zeus:

I shall say to him: "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me."

Poems designed
to toe a party line,
fall apart when closely read.

They dance about, but the soul is dead.