Alex Buchanan, Armchair Anarchist

The following was published in issue #48 of The American Dissident.  Part 1 was published in issue #47, as was the cartoon below.  

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A Dialogue de sourds with an Armchair Anarchist

Part II

Many have been inclined to kill the messenger by character assassination: they say he is a womanizer, he is bitter, he was unsuccessfully analyzed, he is disloyal, he is even, in the words of one accuser, ''dangerously mentally ill.'' Mr. Masson himself wonders whether it was ''possible that the analysts could not hear my 'message' because the messenger was so obnoxious.'' But to those in power, all whistle-blowers, dissenters and boat-rockers are obnoxious, at least while they remain lone rebels. One protester is crazy, two are a conspiracy and three are a movement.

— Carol Tavris, social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles

 

s a critical writer and thinker, I make an effort to avoid ad hominem.  Now and then, however, when someone blasts me with insults, usually via psychological projection, I’ll slip and blast back with the same crap, although always after I’ve attacked the message via facts and reason.  In essence, to kill the messenger via ad hominem is a very common ploy today, conscious or not, in an effort to divert attention away from the message.  Politics stands as a pitiful example of that.  It is also a tactic used when one is incapable of responding with a factual, logical retort to the messenger’s message. 

     After a lengthy nine-month or more back and forth almost on a daily basis with self-proclaimed anarchist, Alex Buchanan, I decided to terminate the dialogue de sourds, for it had become a waste of time.  Evidently, anarchy was an ideology.  Reason and facts are ineluctably the prime enemies of ideologues.  And so I wrote:  

BTW, I am not pissed off in the least.  It's quite simply that you and I hold completely different viewpoints... and that we've essentially expressed them... and that the discussion is now going nowhere... but into the cesspool of childish name-calling.  So, I simply suggest terminating the "discussion."  I've got better things to do... and hopefully you do too.   

nd of course Buchanan responded in an endlessly long email, which was his usual m.o., so I simply wrote without reading the whole thing:    “Pipedream away…  A world without hierarchies is certainly a pipedream.”  I let him have the last word, which he did in a single sentence. 

At least I float above the delusional sea of reactionary nihilism.

But then, I couldn’t resist and responded:  Not quite sure how death is somehow a delusion.  In any case, I don’t really abide by a particular ideology, unless belief in reality like inevitable death somehow constitutes one.  In that reality, when I die, I won’t give a damn about anything or anyone.  And in that sense, how not to be a cynic, for cynicism is reality.  Also, I suppose I am a reactionary because I am against in-lockstep groupthink socialism/communism and the metastasizing of Marxist DEI/CRT ideology today in all spheres of society including the press, literature, and education… and the consequent racism obsession, chaotic, uh anarchic, open borders and resultant increase in crime, drugs, sex trafficking, and unfettered government spending, absence of accountability, and war-all-the-time.  How that somehow makes me “delusional” is a quandary.  And so Buchanan wrote yet again.  

A space of perennial negativity becomes exhausting, because nothing can be created or affirmed there.  I wrote that yesterday. As well as this, which was in my journal: Slone’s cruelty has resulted in more creativity than probably would have been standard. I can at least give him that.

     How not to respond to the “cruelty” remark… and so I did.  

As I reflect, your “Slone’s cruelty” remark is indeed extraordinary.  To label all of my life’s “work” of anti-establishment criticism—hundreds of pages of essays, poems, and cartoons—as “cruelty” even outdoes the insults I’ve received over the decades from other artiste and poet cogs of the establishment, be they socialist, communist, capitalist, reactionary, or anarchist.  

And with your fine art of incomprehensible “density,” as you labeled it, I’m sure you’ll somehow weasel around the remark…

To dismiss a critic like me as “cruel” is a clear indication of your true anarchist hatred for freedom of speech, the very cornerstone of democracy—obviously NOT of anarchy.  Murder, torture, rape, etc. are “cruel.”  Exercise of freedom of speech is NOT “cruel,” unless of course one is a left-wing snowflake who hates the message of the speaker.   

ell, I guess I “cruelly” rejected his masterpiece essay (see last issue for a few examples from it!  LOL!  And, man, he really does constantly employ psychological projection!  “Berserk”?  Projection 101!  And so, the anarchist weaseled around the remark.  

My remark that you're cruel has only to do with your personality, not your "life's work." It's odd to see you even refer to what you do as "work." Who has validated it as such? By the way, your definition of "anti-establishment" is incoherent, big surprise. This is because your definition seems to demonstrate that all "the establishment" is in your head is any entity which is not you. Far from being anti-establishment, that is nihilistic solipsism. Moreover, by no metric whatsoever can you say that anarchists are the establishment. As for merely myself, I'm the furthest possible distance from the establishment as one could get. In my writing, I didn't dismiss you as cruel.

     And so, I was left wondering how Buchanan knows me so well that he can conclude that my “personality” is so “cruel.”  Hell, I never even met the guy!  Aberrantly, he ended with yet another ad hominem.

Against your bourgeois masochism, 

This anarchist who believes in egalitarian freedom

     And so I responded.  

You, clearly, are bourgeois!  If you weren't, then you'd be working in a factory, painting houses, picking grapes, or shipyard welding like I once did.  Instead, you sit and write. How much more bourgeois can one get?  You want to get paid for your writing; I do not want to get paid for mine.  So, who is really the bourgeois writer?  Again, you project!!!  Projection is your m.o..  

Your idols were/are "bourgeois" including Marx, Chomsky, Bernie, Che (bourgeois medical doctor), and on and on.   Weasel out of that reality!  And, how the hell am I a “masochist’?

     Well, he didn’t respond…

Sara Custer Inside Higher Ed

Below is the front cover aquarelle for issue #48, the latest issue published October 2024.  Needless to say, Sara Custer and Inside Higher Ed did NOT respond to the email (see below) and front cover sent to them.  Thus is the state of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, in the realm of higher education...

From: George Slone <todslone@hotmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, May 5, 2024 8:05 AM

To: sara.custer@timeshighereducation.com <sara.custer@timeshighereducation.com>; sara.custer@insidehighered.com <sara.custer@insidehighered.com>; Doug Lederman <doug.lederman@insidehighered.com>; scottjaschik@hotmail.com <scottjaschik@hotmail.com>; scott jaschik <scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com>

Cc: kathryn.palmer@insidehighered.com <kathryn.palmer@insidehighered.com>; elizabeth.redden@insidehighered.com <elizabeth.redden@insidehighered.com>; jessica.blake@insidehighered.com <jessica.blake@insidehighered.com>; dari.gessner@insidehighered.com <dari.gessner@insidehighered.com>; publishing@insidehighered.com <publishing@insidehighered.com>; editor@insidehighered.com <editor@insidehighered.com>

Subject: Custer, Lederman, Jaschik satirized in a new P. Maudit aquarelle

 

To Ed-in-Chief Sara Custer, Ex-Ed-in-Chief Doug Lederman, and Ex-Ed-in-Chief Scott Jaschik:

You have been satirized in a new P. Maudit aquarelle (see attached).  If there is an untruth in it, please do let me know, so that I might adjust the aquarelle.  That said, shouldn’t rare hardcore critics be permitted to voice their views in higher ed today?  I think you guys could use a satirical cartoonist, someone who dares criticize the higher ed honchos at the helm… like you.  Hey, I’m actually available to fill such a position!  In that light, I attach my Curriculum Mortae.   Anyhow, please do share the aquarelle with your colleagues and please do publish it in Inside Higher Ed.  Thank you for your hopeful attention! 

Au plaisir,

G. Tod Slone (PhD—Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit, Founding Editor (1998)

The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence

www.theamericandissident.org

wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com

todslone@hotmail.com

217 Commerce Rd.

Barnstable, MA 02630

NO RESPONSE.

Scott Jaschik Joshua Kim Inside Higher Ed

 

A Critical Note on the Writing Industry

The following essay, written by the editor (blogger) appeared in issue #47 of The American Dissident.  It was sent to the targets, who in the darkness of the academic/literary establishment did not deign to respond.  I post it now because it is referenced in a counter-essay critique written by Dana Stamps II, which will appear in issue #49 due out in April.

A Critical Note on the Writing Industry

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

―George Orwell, "Why I Write"

By the Editor 

Criticism, real criticism, seems to be absent—inexistent—within the writing industry/community in the same darkness as in the arts industry/community. When the chambers of commerce and tax-payer money-distributing state cultural organizations support those industries, evidently that is indicative of a certain writers/artists castration and cooptation. To criticize, really criticize, those industries and their diverse cogs is essentially a prohibited activity, punishable usually by ostracizing, rejection of debate, and perhaps a little sprinkle of ad hominem.  

    The Cape Cod Writers Center brochure, which I picked up at one of the Cape libraries, incited me to write this essay.  First, however, it provoked me to sketch a satirical cartoon on the Center and its Keynote Speaker.  And, of course, as I usually do, I sent it to the targets who, as they usually do, chose not to respond. Silence is golden for those who detest debate (i.e., democracy).

    As a Cape Cod washashore writer and cartoonist, who never took a writing workshop course and whose writing is almost always provoked by vacuous statements issued by “esteemed” and “distinguished” writers of the emerita ilk, I have been excluded (fully ostracized) on the Cape, so I sure as hell know what “inclusion” really means.  In essence, it simply means thou shalt not criticize (question and challenge) the elite hypocrites manning the diverse cultural helms and usually bellowing Diversity, Equity… and, of course, Inclusion.  My lengthy list of bona fides of DEI-Exclusion, besides the Center, includes Mid-Cape Cultural Council, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Cape Cod Times, Provincetown Arts, and the Cultural Center of Cape Cod.

    In 2012, I’d written and disseminated a free-speech broadside, “CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER:  Proponent of Censorship, Ostracizing, and Banning.”   Unsurprisingly, it did not elicit a response, nor did the tract distributed in 2014, “J’accuse Cape Cod Poets, Writers, Artists, Journalists, and College Instructors for Grotesque Apathy Regarding Issues of Basic Human Rights and Democracy.”  Again, silence is golden for those who hate debate (i.e., democracy).   

In any case, the writing statement of privileged Keynote Speaker/Yale University English Lecturer Verlyn Klinkenborg, part of which was highlighted in the cartoon, was amazingly anodyne and was, essentially, the opposite of George Orwell’s statement above, which reflects why I tend to write and, of course, explains my being DEI-excluded. Sadly, writing has largely become another arm of the establishment industry. The writing workshops, writing professors, writing conferences, writing agents, writing scholarships, grants and awards, writing degrees and courses, writing magazines like Poets & Writers and Book Pages are integral parts of it.  Few writers dare criticize the writing industry and those making careers out of it.  Do so… and be prepared for full ostracizing. Below is Klinkenborg’s full statement, as it appears in the Center’s brochure on page 3.  

Why Write

We assume the answer is somehow implicit and that it’s a question barely worth asking. We write to express ourselves, of course, to join the global conversation of writers. We write because it’s culturally acceptable and desirable – an approved activity – and because good writers seem to accrue respect and admiration. But if you let the question – “why write?” – sit with you, you begin to realize there’s something strange and almost indecipherable in it. It’s a radical question – a troubling one that’s always been worth thinking about. My hope in my keynote talk is to look closely at this question – and in doing so, perhaps trouble you in ways you may find useful. 

Why write, according to Klinkenborg, is “a question barely worth asking,” and yet he asks it.  His response likely reflects the writers at the helm of the Center:  “to join the global conversation of writers.”  Yet that is certainly not why I write.  And so somehow I am not part of Klinkenborg’s all-inclusive term “we.”  My first criticism thus would be for writers like Klinkenborg to avoid that term, used perhaps by most political hacks.  As far as those like him, I am certainly not part of the “conversation,” not part of “we.”  The most absurd part of his statement is that “we” (all writers) somehow write to become acceptable, desirable, and approved.  Orwell must surely be rolling in his grave.  I sure am… and yet I’m not even dead… yet.  Soviet-State Poet Gorky must surely be clapping in his grave.  Recall he praised Stalin’s gulag concentration camps.  

     It is aberrant that an educated person like Klinkenborg would argue that so-called “good writers seem to accrue respect and admiration” without wondering or noting by whom. Clearly, the admirers tend to be the privileged establishment academics and other cultural apparatchiks with voice who deify writers, as laureates, honorable, and acclaimed.  If a writer is openly highly critical of the writing/money machine, he or she will certainly not be respected and admired by machine cogs like Klinkenborg.  Most writers learn to obey the prime writer’s taboo:  thou shalt not criticize the hands that feed (e.g., the distributors of tenure, grants, invitations, publications, awards, etc.).  And in the absence of hardcore criticism, as in “let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine” (Thoreau), the writing machine (e.g., Cape Cod Writers Center) will prosper and continue to co-opt and castrate writers… in the darkness of “selling more books on Amazon.”

    Klinkenborg states, “But if you let the question — ‘why write?’ — sit with you, you begin to realize there’s something strange and almost indecipherable in it.”  In reality, perhaps it is something the “we” cannot contemplate, but it is not really strange at all, at least no stranger than why we exercise, why we travel, why we watch the news.  Death obnubilates everything, which is why society (the establishment) likes to ignore that fact. In essence, I write because writing helps me deflect from the reality that death is indeed waiting around the corner to annihilate me and everything I’ve ever written. Society depends on death denial and the rule of insanity.   

The Center has a definite stench of elitism, which reflects that of writing and art in general.  Its 2023 conference, for example, takes place at “The Resort and Conference Center at Hyannis.”  Self-glorification seems to have become its m.o., as in “our distinguished faculty,” “acclaimed authors teachers,” and “vibrant, nationally recognized literary organization.” A thinking individual would, of course, wonder who made the “distinguished” and “acclaimed” designations and why. Twelve Conference “faculty” designates and three “agents” have been chosen to teach the courses.

     As for the monetary aspect of the Center, pages 17 and 18 of its brochure inform that to attend, the cost is $80; and to listen to Klinkenborg, the cost is an additional $30. The writing courses are as high as $170 (for three sessions).  For a one-hour manuscript evaluation by a chosen “mentor,” the cost is an additional $150. The Center is financed partially, if not largely, by public tax dollars via the Mass Cultural Council and the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.  The Cape Cod 5 Cents Savings Bank is also a funder.  A few of the course titles that stand out, at least for me, include “Selling More Books on Amazon,” “Query Killers,” “Agent Panel,” and “Poetic Form:  Thinking inside the Box.” The last one seems to sadly incarnate poets and writers today.  As for “Tone in Poetry,” the title of another course, I wrote the following poem a decade ago.  Do you think the Center would like it?  Do you think it would like me to read it at the Conference and discuss the need for real criticism and debate in the field of writing?  Well, I sent this essay to the Center.  No response was ever received… 

The Tone Is the Message Is the Tone

I like what you’re saying but

you’ve got the wrong tone,

wrote an editor, then

another and another and another.

Grab a flap of flab from the belly literati,

twist and tug, twist and pull, 

bring forth hesitant, repressed indignation.

If you want to increase your congregation,

replied yet another… tin soldier 

of the vast ocean army of invincibility,

you’ve got to smoothen out 

the wrinkles in your voice.

Speak rude truth, and rage, rage 

through the dying light of the establishment,

and educe ineluctably 

the buried anger of crushed individuality.

I’d like to publish some of your work, 

wrote another tin man, though

disguised in mask of freethinker. 

You make some very interesting points, 

but I don’t think our niche of readers 

would appreciate your peculiar bluntness.

With the ax, fall revenues,

with the sword, tumble advertising dollars,

with the shotgun, shrink subscribers,

with the right tone, wane truth and justice,

with the pen of thin skin, butchery behind charade.

I’d like to see more of you in our publication,

wrote another editor,

but your discourse needs to be more civil.

It even makes me feel a bit uncomfortable,

so I could imagine our audience might also feel that way.

Kill the voice and the word be sameness

Kill the discrepancy and business be usual

Kill the messenger and the message be no longer

I think what you need is to add a little humor,

wrote a friend, 

to get more people on your bandwagon, then

you could turn the blade on your laughing readers.

Ever humorless, though, and angry, raucous and uncivil,

fed with the fodder of consistency on how to build a constituency, 

I still choose the coffin of anonymity…

The Tone Is the Message Is the Tone

The following is a poem I wrote in 2010.  It resulted from real criticism (quotes in italics) received.  Let it stand as an example of From the Dross, I Create, a chapbook I compiled and published a year ago.  

The Tone Is the Message Is the Tone

I like what you’re saying but

you’ve got the wrong tone,

wrote an editor, then

another and another and another.

Grab a flap of flab from the belly literati,

twist and tug, twist and pull, 

bring forth hesitant, repressed indignation.

If you want to increase your congregation,

replied yet another… tin soldier 

of the vast ocean army of invincibility,

you’ve got to smoothen out 

the wrinkles in your voice.

Speak rude truth, and rage, rage 

through the dying light of the establishment,

and educe ineluctably 

the buried anger of crushed individuality.

I’d like to publish some of your work, 

wrote another tin man, though

disguised in mask of freethinker. 

You make some very interesting points, 

but I don’t think our niche of readers 

would appreciate your peculiar bluntness.

With the ax, fall revenues,

with the sword, tumble advertising dollars,

with the shotgun, shrink subscribers,

with the right tone, wane truth and justice,

with the pen of thin skin, butchery behind charade.

I’d like to see more of you in our publication,

wrote another editor,

but your discourse needs to be more civil.

It even makes me feel a bit uncomfortable,

so I could imagine our audience might also feel that way.

Kill the voice and the word be sameness

Kill the discrepancy and business be usual

Kill the messenger and the message be no longer

I think what you need is to add a little humor,

wrote a friend, 

to get more people on your bandwagon, then

you could turn the blade on your laughing readers.

Ever humorless, though, and angry, raucous and uncivil,

fed with the fodder of consistency on how to build a constituency, 

I still choose the coffin of anonymity…