The Candy Monkey Raves

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Two years earlier, I'd sat in front of another TV and watched him steal the presidency in broad daylight. Then a bunch of vicious airborne murderers had come along and scared the common sense out of everyone. In one morning, they'd managed to bestow upon this evangelical simpleton an air of presidential dignity. He saw his chance and bounced the rubble in Afghanistan and kept the bellows of war going (Iraq was next) and now the Democrats were too chickenhearted to oppose him. It was the poor who were going to pay, as they always do, and who gave a damn about them?

This outburst -- and I think that's a fair word -- takes place toward the end of Candyfreak. My intent was not to piss off those 59 million Americans who voted for Bush, but to express anguish over the net loss of humanity in this country. That's actually what the book is about, beneath all the confectionary mishegoss.

Still, I was well aware that including such passages was going to ruffle feathers. My editor asked me, more than once, to consider the risks of "alienating Republican readers." To which I responded: "Republican readers -- isn't that an oxymoron?"

Obviously, I'm kidding.

My point here isn't to bash Republicans, but to suggest the sad disjunction that now exists between the arenas of art and politics. Because what really bummed me out about the Amazon haters wasn't that they disagreed with my politics, but that they immediately summoned such genuine outrage at me for deigning to express a political opinion at all. They regarded Candyfreak as entertainment, which meant that I was supposed to serve as a candy monkey for them: swinging from my zany licorice ropes and making funny gibbering noises.

By including my political views, I was in direct violation of the First Law of Social Apathy, which holds that popular culture should be divorced from the moral questions and concerns of current political circumstances. What folks want from the pop culture is a nice soothing mind bath. A few chuckles. A nice melodrama in which to park our emotions for a couple of hours. In a word: opium.

But one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) is to call people out of their narcotized stupors, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion. William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

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