Slightly Different Fools

If I were forced to choose between the vacuous, celebrity cult of Salman Rushdie, and the base materialism of most of corporate globalization these days, I would choose the latter. The problem with Rushdie isn’t simply that he has never been a very good writer, although a learned man, but that having found an audience, he insists on speaking. It is well-known that novelists and artists do not understand politics. Ian Buruma has written about Mario Vargas Llosa’s anger, and political ineptitude. Politics isn’t about the evocative metaphor. Thankfully, most novelists are ignored.

The chasm between writers and artists on the one hand, and money-makers on the other, is a joke. Among most educated people today, there simply isn’t that much diversity. Not having a big car or a big house does not make you radically different from those who do. On the contrary, when you inhabit a landscape shaped by big cars, it is naïve and futile to resist them. This is not to say there isn’t a venerable tradition of asceticism. There sure is, and for a few people it provides a sense of relief. But it’s a fleeting idea. A distant history.

Men who read books think highly of themselves. But good books do not make you wiser. Interestingly, that is something good books teach. Perhaps they just make you see the world a little differently. Someone like Rushdie, who has read many good books, and tried to write a bit, has not learnt the most important lesson. We aren’t that great.

Here is a self-help generation, brought up on crass music and reality TV, which thinks it can plan its way to an empty immortality. A smaller group, which reads Rushdie and watches Tarantino, thinks it is different, and exults in its oddities. What difference? Marginal, even cosmetic, deviations. We are all bound in petty myths about ourselves. We have no deep well to derive a sense of meaning from. We bumble along, ordinary products of our times.

The biggest problem with those pretending to be subversive is they simply aren’t that smart.