Let me start by looking at the old friends, good. My favorite piece this issue, Rue Matthiessen’s “There Was a Time,” is a beautiful paean to old friendship, to the joy and mourning that go with having and losing such a friend. I also love the short essays always faithfully contributed by David D. Horowitz, and this one, detailing the love of every day objects, is a favorite: “Companionization.” Ron Singer subtly underlines the wonderful old friendship of a married couple in “On (Re-)Reading Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy.” And Jim Meirose made me laugh with his memory of childhood terror, “First Frankenstein Juggernaut.”
Then there was the wonderful coincidence of Gregg Williard sending on a piece, “Films of Drop and Descent,” about nostalgia, old friends, and much loved films. Among other things, he writes about “Mad God,” by my old friend Phil Tippett, where my dear husband actually plays the Mad God. He says he didn’t know. Whichever way, it made me smile.
Okay, now we get to the bad old friends. Followed by the pieces struggling to make good new ones in their place.
There are a bunch of our bad old friends rising up recently (surprise!) that I think most of us wish would just recede back into the swamp of memory. Authoritarianism is the big one. The dominance of a voice of one sex and class. The agreement that it’s only old white guys, and their satraps and houris and enablers who are allowed to talk, who are allowed to distribute resources.
Here they are, back again.
And it’s worldwide. The old white guys of the GOP are hanging out with the old white guy right wing rulers of the world: Orban. Bolsonaro. Putin.
Then there are the left wing authoritarians. They’re the ones who insist because they’re on the side of righteousness, they have the right to tell other people what to do. Noam Chomsky has recently fallen into this category. Our old friend. As if any of us ever thought in our lifetime that we’d see Noam Chomsky on the same side as Henry Kissinger.
Two sides of the same coin. Two sides of the agreement that it’s only certain people who are worth listening to. Have a look at David Selzer’s poem, “ART,” in this issue, written to soothe my own particular rage about this matter.
And look at “The Female Touch in Iranian Film Making,” by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian. New friends give you hope, I always think. This piece reminds me that the ‘John Dean’ of the January 6th Committee meetings is Cassidy Hutchinson, a 25 year old girl. None of the old white guys have dared to say what is really going on in the corrupt, even crazed, corridors of power. It had to be her. Clear, brave, straight out. She saw it all. We know why. We know it was because all those old white guys thought she was only there to serve them. She wasn’t important enough to have any agency for herself.
Their mistake.
We hope it was a fatal mistake, too.
Finally, I want to say that when we go into denial about trauma, it simply keeps repeating itself until it’s faced and released. Have a look at “My Mother and a Cat,” which was a startling, even frightening, example to me. My mother’s trauma of being bombed by Americans in Japan of World War II reappeared in my own life in a shocking way. Until it was recognized. And freed to turn into smoother paths to the future.
May all our traumas, past and present, be freed as well. That’s what we’re doing when we’re writing. So never give up hope. And never give up writing.
Welcome back.