I wish it were possible for me to write about difficult political issues without hearing in my head the exhausted groans of so many, many people I know who react to any type of political discussion the way they'd react to a pinprick. I have many political beliefs -- I proudly call myself a pacifist, a libertarian, a moderate progressive -- but perhaps my most deeply-held political belief is this: civil debate is always a good thing. Talking about politics is not a waste of time, and it doesn't have to devolve into the familiar noise of, as songwriter Stephen Stills once so aptly put it, "hooray for our side".

Not long ago a friend who writes for Litkicks asked me what kind of articles I'd like to see in the future. I said that I'd like more topical relevance, more political/social engagement (I said this partly because I knew this writer was highly knowledgeable in this area). But her response showed that I'd tripped some kind of trigger by mentioning the word "political". She wrote:

I'm not a big "espouse the party ideals" kind of person.

I was very surprised by this reaction. I wrote back that I already knew this, and that this was why I'd thought her contributions might be valuable. But her response points to a popular general perception that modern political writing is equivalent to party-line hackwork. This is really a shocking and disappointing development. Of course an article that follows a party line is useless, and of course I wouldn't want to run an article like that on Litkicks. To be useful, a political article must straddle a fence. It must address both sides of a difficult issue, and reach for a synthesis that might persuade some readers to change the way they think. That's the whole point of political writing, isn't it? But I'm afraid it's become a habit for readers to automatically dismiss political debate as pointless self-congratulation. This leaves many people like me, who'd like to sincerely debate controversial and important topics and learn from the experience, with nobody to play with.

T. S. Eliot is not obliged to love me. The topic of anti-semitism comes up often when this great poet and literary critic is mentioned, but I think it's a sign of our chronic over-sensitivity that we consider it a moral felony of the highest order for a poet to be a snob. T. S. Eliot has the right to hate whoever he wants.

He never hurt anybody, and I never saw any evidence that he wanted to. I love his work, his Dante-esque vision, his moral seriousness, his (yes) sense of humor. If he met me, maybe he'd hate me because I'm a Jew. He'd probably also hate me because I'm a modern American hipster slacker, a fast-food eater, a casual dresser. Who cares? It doesn't mean he wanted to Holocaust me to death.

Wednesday's post about the lack of international/intercultural communication on the Internet got my wheels turning. I think there's more to this topic.

Cultural insularity is the world's status quo, and there is currently no momentum at all towards a global language. Sure, the Esperanto organization still runs annual conferences, but we all know Esperanto was a well-intentioned dud. It was founded in 1887 with the publication of a book called Lingvo Internacia by Lazar Zamenhov, a Polish Jew. The movement was a hit, but the language never took root, and by the time Zamenhov died in 1917 Europe was in its worst depths of violence. The Great War provided insurmountable proof that Zamenhov's ideas about global peace through global communication were naive. (His children were then persecuted and murdered during World War II for being Jewish, being Baha'i, and being related to Lazar Zamenhov).

Why, in our web-connected age, do we still exist in information silos defined by nationality and language?

This is, for me, probably the greatest disappointment of the Internet era. (Okay, the fact that I didn't get to keep my million dollars of dot-com stock was my biggest personal disappointment, but that's a different kind of disappointment). An incredible technological unity has been established all over the world -- from my office computer to Africa and Asia and South America and everywhere on this planet, we all speak HTML and Unicode and TCP-IP and HTTP. So why isn't there more global cultural interchange going on?

Unless you're color-blind like me (yes, I'm color-blind, and yes, that probably does explain the color scheme here on Literary Kicks), you probably see two different color chips in the photo above.

Milan Kundera's novels are punctuated by philosophical asides, and whether you agree with him or think he's full of crap (or fall somewhere in between), he provides plenty of fodder for keeping the hamsters running on the wheels in your brain. Like his other books, his novel Immortality contains several digressions. Or at first they seem like digressions, but in the end, they serve the whole in a maddeningly perfect way.