Spellcheck, the Poem

By MWC Editor At large Tom Engelhardt

Sometime in the early 1990s, I took my son, then perhaps seven, to see a revival of The Charge at Feather River, a 3-D cowboy-and-Indian(-and-cavalry) film from 1953. Mine was a nostalgic journey. Would I still duck, I wondered, when that crude 3-D form did the one thing it was capable of -- throw something at me? My initial 3-D foray, Fort Ti, also in 1953, had left me behind a seatback as the first flaming arrow, the one with my name burned into it, headed off-screen. Forty years later, when the arrows winged their way toward me, I still found myself flinching

As a movie, Charge turned out to be retro even for 1953: The Indians were especially evil and the plot was based on the oldest pop hook in the American cultural pantheon, the capture of white women by savages and their subsequent rescue. Still, I can't deny that, sitting there in that dark movie theater, I found myself reliving some of the best moments of my childhood; for "war" on screen, with friends in park and countryside, or with toy soldiers on the floor, was the sunniest part of growing up for many boys of my generation (and generations before that). I had more or less forgotten about my son, perched beside me in silence, until he tugged on my sleeve. "Dad," he said in a stage whisper that filled the theater, "I'm confused. I thought the Indians were the good guys."

So there we were, just post-Gulf War I, way post-Star Wars and Rambo, post early versions of Dungeons and Dragons and the first video games, and I realized that the American story of my childhood was gone; the one that once sent chills up my spine when the cavalry bugle sounded or the Marine Hymn welled up as our soldiers advanced; the one that explained (without even seeming to) why they lost and we won, why they fell by their scores and we didn't. An American victory culture had more or less evaporated.

Sometime in those same years, I sat down and wrote my book, The End of Victory Culture, about how that had happened; how an American tradition of triumphalism (and a war story intimately connected with it) -- after the Bomb, the Great Red Scare, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and so much else -- had finally collapsed. Whether we won actual wars or not, it was history. Finis. And the book soon seemed as superannuated as the former antiwar activist of the Vietnam era who wrote it.

How could I have guessed that, in 2000, we would elect a President and pals who had stayed way too long in those dark movie theaters; who had managed to avoid engagement with the Vietnam War on any side; who still gloried in the idea of an American war story and the triumphalism that went with it; who not only wanted to dominate the world militarily, but wanted to replay those scenes where the bugles blared and the bluecoats charged on a global stage? How could I have imagined that we would have a President whose dream was to dress up like G.I. Joe, appear in front of massed ranks of soldiers chanting "hoo-ah!," and issue threats ("dead or alive") out of old cowboy movies? How could I have imagined that, at least once a month, I would pick up my superannuated history of the Cold War, open it to a passage on withdrawal plans that weren't meant to withdraw us from Vietnam, or Richard Nixon's "madman theory" of the presidency, or what growing up nuclear really meant, and simply crib it for some Tomgram (with the barest of alterations)? How could I have imagined that such ancient material would once again be as live as tomorrow? Yikes!

All this came back to me in part because quite a different book I wrote, about another world I once inhabited and also thought was going, going, gone, is now in paperback. I'm speaking of my novel, The Last Days of Publishing. I wrote it, too, because I believed something was over, something that should not be forgotten. When I began writing it just around the turn of the new millennium, I had been an editor in or at the edges of mainstream publishing for almost a quarter-century, and had found my faith not in writing or reading, but in publishing itself oozing away. It must sound counterintuitive -- beginning a book based on my loss of faith in publishing and then trying to get it published -- but there we are. Even more surprising, writing that book I had the best time of my life, in part because it proved so enjoyable to create an alter-ego editor with a very different editing style but with whom I could share thoughts about our strange craft.

Soon after I completed the novel, I was swept away by Tomdispatch and the publishing series I now co-edit, the American Empire Project, both of which, in some strange fashion, renewed my faith in the published word in every form (even the one that probably started me on my life of reading, the cereal box). By the time I began The Last Days of Publishing, I had lived through the triaging the publishing business had undergone -- as almost all independent houses were gobbled up or wiped out, and then the larger publishing ensembles were engulfed by giant entertainment conglomerates trying ever more desperately to scale the global entertainment heavens product in hand.

The book itself is such a modest object (even if its goal -- to break you into another universe -- is immodest indeed); and because the effort that goes into breaking the code of any good book, of turning those squiggles of ink into worlds of being, is so desperately labor-intensive, the book sits relatively uncomfortably in today's entertainment package, where the codes are generally already broken for you. So in a way I wrote my novel to break a code and the habits of a working lifetime; to rid myself of my world and, at the same time, memorialize it. But here too, the world I wrote about refused to go away -- not just the small presses that spring to life with absurd and wonderful hopes all the time, but the majors -- no longer freestanding "houses" -- where "literary" life continues with all the downsizing fierceness of Bush's America and Barbara Ehrenreich's new book Bait and Switch.

In case you hadn't noticed, by the way, this is a pitch -- and I swear to you, if you're patient just a little longer, there will be a payoff. As those of you know who have been reading Tomdispatch for a while, it's a freebie website (thanks in part to the wonderful support of the Nation Institute which houses the site and made me an Institute Fellow). So you never arrive to find one of those desperate pleas posted urging you to send in your money and save Tomdispatch, nor to my version of NPR's Pledge Week. To tell the truth, I love the freeness of Tomdispatch -- and I've been willing to go out as a book editor and do the necessary work to keep it so. That freeness seems like part of the essence of the site and I hope never to have to violate it. But when it comes to getting all of you to buy books, especially my books... well, that's another matter. There I have no mercy.