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CHRIS BACHELDER, U.S.! (2006)
An Old Mole Named Upton
SO, IS IT OK FOR ART TO BE POLITICAL AGAIN? Yet? Since when? Who said it ever wasn't? What rock have you been under?
As an amateur advocate of radical social change (it's hard to get work as a professional revolutionary these days) with artistic inclinations, I struggle daily with this question - one morning I was stuffing my bookbag with antiwar leaflets (Don't Talk About War Unless You're Willing to Talk About Capitalism!!!, available at http://users.skynet. be/ippi, and War Is Hell!!! Peace is Better?, from the folks over at racetraitor.org) and I glanced over at the picture of Leon Trotsky on my wall. You know the one. In Mexico. Where he's clearly breaking down some heavy science, probably a fine point of aesthetic theory, gesticulating mildly to die most certainly rapt interlocutor just out the frame. Maybe it's Diego Rivera. He's hunched over slightiy to the left, to emphasize some delicate distinction or other. Smirk? Sometimes his eyes seem to flash accusatorily with a sort of self-righteous judgment - the end of his van dyke seeming sharper, more pointed, than it is. It's actually pretty frizzy. Other times it seems like I caught him just having winked, hiding a twinkle in his deep black eyes, and I know he's laughing inside. Smug, safe, and secure in the pantheon of working class heroes. He'll never again struggle to throw off the dead weight of revolutionaries like himself or of revolutions like 1917. He didn't struggle too hard against Stalin either, but that's another story.
I mean revolutionaries of the art world as well. The twentieth century was just full of revolutions, you know. Yes, sometimes it even feels like history may be speeding up. Second time farce and all that jazz, which, by the way, was the other revolution of 1917. Or maybe it's more like fast forwarding through cable dramas on TiVo.
Thank goodness there's a novelist who feels sort of the same way. I'm talking about Chris Bachelder, whose U.S.! promises to knock this one out like Johnson did Jeffries in Reno, 1910. It's a regular rubber romper room of a ride, this book. Basically, it's about how the left keeps resurrecting Upton Sinclair,...