Here’s an observation by Charles Baxter in his review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom:
“What has happened, I think, is that the public sphere is regarded here as a total loss, so that all the big problems are imagined as unsolvable. The result is a particular kind of despair, the sort that arises from rage with no outlet, the core emotion of a large proportion of educated readers during the George W. Bush administration. Corrupted by ruinous quantities of money and the cynical application of power, the public world depicted here seems incapable of saving anything of value. At every point where a citizen tries to enter that world, he encounters active lying and the operations of expedient logic, and, in the novel’s view, he becomes a collaborator.”
…and thus the ongoing dilemma…who would want to be a collaborator?
Yet in trying to share with others that sense of despair, in trying to communicate the rage behind it, one is constantly met with the exasperating rejoinder – well, what are you doing about it?.
The only honest answer, of course, for those like myself who remain firmly ensconced on the margins, is nothing…or very little, besides criticizing the seemingly infinite menagerie of the criticizable (or whining, as some folks would say, employing what just might be the most annoying word of recent times).
In short, one evidently should not criticize (complain, whine) about political/social/cultural phenomena unless one is not only prepared to, but actively engaged in doing something about it. --- which, to go back to Baxter’s description, would locate the now-legitimized doer in the realm of collaborator – at least according to that person’s own values.
