Punkass Mishra vs Amish Tripati.

Punkaj Mishra's grandfather was born as the subject of the British King Emperor. This ceased to be the case when Britain found its Indian Empire a source of neither profit nor prestige. This did not mean that India & Britain ceased to cooperate in economic & military matters. But both became less and less important to each other.

In an article for Harper's, Mishra pretends such was not the case.  

Speaking Reassurance to Power “It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929,

six years before the US decided to get shot of the Philippines. Imperialism was a waste of money. Also it increased the immigration of darkies.  

“that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.”

Germany wasn't a 'great imperial power'. It had some shitty colonies which nobody else wanted. Most of its critics & philosophers were on the side of the Kaiser.  

Wilson, born in 1895, came of age when national energies were still turned inward,

America formally annexed the Philippines in 1898.  

and a largely Europhilic American intelligentsia

fuck off! Santayana observed that Americans- even in Europe- made it a point to cut their meat with the knife in the right hand & then transfer their fork to it. They seldom conformed to the sartorial conventions of the European aristocracy. Since they were as rich as fuck, they were applauded for this.  

possessed little cultural capital or self-confidence.

Nonsense! American heiresses were marrying into the European aristocracy- if such was their taste. America was had been self-confident since the time of Benjamin Franklin who was a big hit in Paris. 

He lived long enough to deplore his country’s midcentury turn from doctrinaire isolationism to righteous superpowerdom.

He was a posh cunt turned Lefty nutter.  

“Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country,” he wrote in Patriotic Gore (1962), “it is always to liberate somebody.”

Americans liberated Paris. Fuck you, Yankee Doodle.  

Wilson came to dislike the “all too conscious American literary self-glorification which is a part of our American imperialism.”

He disliked everything which wasn't him. Hilariously, he thought Nabakov's Russian was subpar.  

He caustically noted the behavior of onetime radicals rushing to embrace personal opportunities for wealth and status in their freshly affluent society.

The US overtook UK in per capita income before he was born. When was there a time when Americans didn't embrace wealth & status? John Jacob Astor, obviously, was an exception. He chose to give up his fortune to become a tramp. 

John Dos Passos, writing on Barry Goldwater, sounded like a “teenager squealing over the Beatles.”

He didn't want to pay yet more in tax to finance a bloated Federal bureaucracy.  

He identified John F. Kennedy as an intellectual poseur, defying a burgeoning cult of American writers who viewed the U.S. president as a serious reader and thinker.

Name one. Kennedy had his Camelot & those who were part of that charmed circle had an incentive to pretend the guy who thought them smart was smart himself.  

During the Vietnam War, Wilson refused an invitation from Lyndon Johnson with, as the president’s special consultant recorded, “a brusqueness” never before known at the White House.

 He was invited to read from his work during the White House Festival of the Arts held on June 14, 1965. This was to pave the way for the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts. Nobody gave a shit for Wilson though some had a vague memory of having read 'Hecate County' which actually had some good bits. 

It is not hard to imagine what America’s preeminent critic

Trilling?  

would have made of the writers exulting over their inclusion in Barack Obama’s reading lists (issued occasionally while Obama worked, on Tuesdays, on “kill lists” targeting young men in South Asia and the Middle East).

Nothing at all. There was no connection between the two things. Obama wasn't a fucking serial killer. He had inherited a war against terrorists who had attacked New York & Washington. 

What do we think of Punkass who pretends to greatly care about Muslim terrorists who consider it an act of piety to kill innocent Hindus?  

It’s easier to guess what Wilson would have thought of Marilynne Robinson declaring, as late as 2024, that Joe Biden was a “gift of God, all eighty-one years of him,”

coz Wilson would have been a Trump supporter right?  

or of Timothy Snyder delivering, that same year, a “Biden benediction.”

Or Mishra delivering benedictions on murderous Ayatollahs?  

Wilson’s vision of the brittleness of the American intelligentsia

it kept rising in productivity & prestige 

before a brazenly imperialist regime

Britain had a King Emperor. That was brazen imperialism. Pretending America had any such thing is monumental bad faith. It's like saying 'Woke ideology has caused the American intelligentsia to undergo gene therapy so as to turn into goats being fucked by Hamas  

has never been more fully realized.

Than by Punkass. Yet he remains silent about gene therapy being used by American intellectuals who want to be such goats as appeal to the carnal appetites of murderous Jihadis like Donald Trump.  

While threatening the annexation of lands on multiple continents and absentmindedly supervising genocide

Israelis need supervision. Left to themselves they would turn into goats & let Hamas fuck them in the ass.  

in Palestine, Donald Trump is actively attempting to hollow out, with scarcely any effective opposition from their custodians, all major academic and cultural establishments in the United States.

He is hollowing them out so they can be fucked in the ass by Jihadis with ginormous dicks.  

Many Americans are demonstrably disgusted, shamed, and angered by their tyrants

some such aren't clinically insane. Not many, but some such do exist.  

, but mainstream literary and intellectual institutions seem unable or unwilling to give voice to them.

Because they have turned into goats and are being fucked in the ass by Jihadis like Donald Trump.  

As its icons flee to Canada and Europe,

Jason Stanley is a shithead, not an icon.  

“resistance liberalism” is being outsourced to Harvard University, where its pusillanimity is further revealed through a president carefully implementing Trumpian strictures against “campus culture.”

Why are US campuses not stringing up Jews? Is it because College Presidents are pussies?  

This swift and near-total capitulation to political depravity is for many

crazy 

people outside the United States an extraordinary sight.

Why aren't White Americans chopping off their own heads and shoving them up their own poopers? Is it because they are all a bunch of pussies?  

The American intelligentsia has presented itself since 1945 as the worldwide guarantor of intellectual and creative freedom.

No. It has acknowledged that it is stupid- when compared to guys who do STEM subjects.  

From the beginning of the Cold War, its cultural institutions,

remained shit or got shittier. Smart people stayed away.  

whether the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a number of prominent creative writing programs,

which are about becoming the next Stephen King & earning mega-bucks. The alternative is having to teach creative writing.  

or PEN America itself, have promoted the idea of a literary sphere that is credible and respectable only when it is independent from political parties, state-controlled institutions, and propagandistic media.

Unless you are a darkie or a lesbian in which case Grievance Studies is the way to go.  

Of course, it was always possible to argue, as Viet Thanh Nguyen

whose book 'the Sympathizer' made him a lot of money. The TV series starred Robert Downey Junior.  

did recently while complaining about “writers who say nothing,” that American literary institutions are not autonomous but “a part of empire, supported by the state or by powerful donors who benefit from the imperial machinery.”

Get rich, then get woke. Otherwise people think you suffer from a feeling of sour grapes.  

Indeed, Cold War–era American institutions and personalities who promoted the ideal of aesthetic autonomy while trying to dissuade writers and artists from left-wing politics and propagandizing (sometimes with the help of CIA subventions) represented a glaring contradiction.

Not really. Arthur Miller married Marilyn. If his plays made money- what was not to like?  

Their own failure to stand up to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demagoguery

He gave Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy & Roy Cohn their start. Then, his services were dispensed with.  

hardly recommended their version of artistic iconoclasm and political neutrality.

Guys like Wilson may have seemed important in the Thirties. But times had changed. Keynesianism had rescued Capitalism from itself.  

Nevertheless, outsiders marveled at the pronounced American sense of moral and cultural primacy, which seemed to be guaranteed by hard power and enforced synergistically by the State Department, PEN America, the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Ivy League universities.

No. They marvelled at America's wealth & capacity for innovation. After 1965, the smartest scientists & mathematicians in the world- not just refugees- were queuing up for jobs on American campuses. When RK Narayan first took up a visiting Fellowship in the US, no one there knew a Tamil from a camel. By the time AK Ramanujan reached there, he found Neelakantha Sastri's book collection in the library stacks.  

The experience of fascism and despotism in Europe and Latin America, and racist imperialism in Asia and Africa, had forced nearly every writer and intellectual of stature around the world, from Albert Camus

Raymond Aron? 

and Julio Cortázar

Borges?

to Naguib Mahfouz

Taha Husayn? 

and Nadine Gordimer,

she was beaten up in her own home in 2006. She was 82. Coetze was smart. He got the fuck out of South Africa.  

into moral commitment, which became more explicit and articulate during crises. None of these ineluctably engagé authors, however, could count on, in their own nations, the same sprawling material infrastructure for literature and ideology that had been forged by the United States during its crusade against Soviet Communism.

Mishra does not understand that American private enterprise created that 'material infrastructure'.  

As it happened, many victims of tyrannical regimes and fanatical movements ended up seeking refuge in the United States.

Jim Crow America afforded Whites security and opulence.  

These exiles and expatriates, from Hannah Arendt to

Auden & Isherwood?  

Thomas Mann, Czesław Miłosz to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

Salman Rushdie?  

helped define the intolerable pressures on the individual conscience in our time, and stressed the importance of saying “no” to violence and falsehood.

This is just as important as saying 'no' to the Grim Reaper.  

Their robust negations appeared to put both them and their American hosts on the right side of history, compared with writers in the unfree world of authoritarian regimes, who seemed to have been permanently tainted by lies, equivocations, and evasions.

Punkass is tainted by all the shit he spews out.  

It was from the elevated ground of the open society

as opposed to a Chinese concentration camp 

that Martin Amis, briefly a proponent of collective punishment for Muslims, exhorted Westerners in 2007 to feel morally superior to the Taliban, and Salman Rushdie, champion of a “war of liberation” in Iraq, condemned, in 2012, that year’s laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan, as a “patsy” of the Chinese regime.

A 'patsy' for the West who wanted China to be colonised for at least 300 years, had been given the Nobel Peace Prize. The Chinese, quite rightly, jailed the cunt.  Mo Yan thought this a good thing. 

More recently, cultural organizations and academic institutions reenacted the old Cold War skit casting the eastern seaboard as the vanguard of human emancipation as they denounced Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine

Why weren't they praising Putin?  

and extended support to Ukrainian writers and academics.

They should have shat upon them.  

For all its claims to superior virtue,

Why does it not claim to suck off hobos at truck stops?  

the liberal American intelligentsia manifests very little of the courage and dignity it has expected from artists and thinkers in less fortunate societies, as hooded and masked officials disappear students for the crime of writing school-newspaper op-eds and liking social-media posts.

It doesn't take either courage or dignity to do useless shit.  

Dissenters from far-right orthodoxies in the United States did not face such a concerted onslaught even in the early Fifties, when, threatened by the House Un-American Activities Committee, pursued by the FBI, and canceled by the Library of Congress, Thomas Mann departed the arsenal of democracy for Switzerland.

His kids were left wing. Switzerland, it must be said, had lower taxes than the US at that time. Mann didn't want to pay 90 percent marginal tax on royalties. He wanted to pay 6.5 percent.  

Today, the “disgusting exhibition,” as Mann saw the witch hunts of McCarthyism

Highly progressive taxes are a witch hunt against rich authors.  

“of primitive Puritanism, hatred, fear, corruption and self-righteousness” is much more extensive.

Yet few American intellectuals are moving to Tehran.  

The destruction of U.S. institutions

is imaginary.  

in order to suppress criticism of Israeli war crimes

such criticism can only be effectively made by those who undergo gene therapy, turn into goats, & get sodomized by Hamas.  

speaks to a pathology of self-mutilation that is striking even when measured against Stalin’s and Mao’s regimes (which, though infinitely more brutal, cared, above all, about projecting an image of national autonomy and sovereignty).

There you have it folks. Punkass thinks America isn't doing enough to catch up with Stalin's Soviet Union.  

But the American intelligentsia is very far from manifesting a movement of moral and political self-criticism comparable to that of the intrepid dissidents it celebrated during the Cold War.

Dissidents weren't 'self-critical'. They didn't say 'you know, maybe I was too hard on Mao. 30 million people may have been happy to starve to death. I too may have enjoyed 're-education'.'  

No second “Harper’s Letter” has emerged,

because nobody noticed the first.  

locating the threats to free expression in an extremist ruling class, narcissistic Silicon Valley oligarchs, free-speech hucksters, and cravenly self-censoring media organizations and think tanks.

The more cunts like Punkass talk, the more support those guys get.  

The writers crying “Je suis Charlie” in 2015

didn't like Muslim terrorists 

have not made themselves heard saying “Je suis Refaat Alareer.”

Coz he was a Muslim. If Hamas hadn't killed him, chances are he was one of them.  

Nor has an institutionally backed solidarity rally of the kind that occurred after the attempted assassination of Rushdie been witnessed at the New York Public Library over the targeted killings of writers and journalists in Palestine. (Rushdie himself has accused student protesters of anti-Semitism and of supporting a “fascist terrorist group.”)

Nor has Punkass turned into a goat. Is it because he is a homophobic kaffir cunt who doesn't sincerely love and desire sodomy at the hands of Jihadis?  

More than seven hundred writers signed a letter endorsing Kamala Harris.

Much good it did her.  

No one among them attempted, against the genocidal foreign policy of a senile president and his loyal deputies, the type of mild but prominent dissent voiced by Robert Lowell

who was as crazy as a bed bug. He tried to strangle his wife.  

in an open letter to Lyndon Johnson that the New York Times published on its front page on June 3, 1965: “I . . . can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust.”

It was shitty. The Federal Government was pissing tax payer money against the wall.  

Resistance liberalism yet again demonstrated its limits when Anne Applebaum,

who knows Gaza & Iran take attention away from Ukraine which is bad for Poland.  

one of the most voluble heralds of global “autocracy,” took a strict vow of silence over the American-Israeli campaign of extermination—perhaps because she had once argued, in an article titled “Kill the Messenger,” that assassination was a legitimate strategy against Palestinian journalists.

Is she of Jewish heritage? No. Her pappy was an Ayatollah.  

It is possible that many writers believe, as John Updike did during the napalming of Vietnam, that they “had voted,” thus earning their “American right not to make a political decision for another four years.” Like Updike, they may think that their “stock in trade as an American author” includes an identification with the United States’ “national fortunes,” and that, as “privileged members of a privileged nation [they] believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world.”

Worse yet, American dentists refused to turn into goats so as to be sodomized by Hamas just because, as they said, 'dentistry has nothing to do with exterminating those fucking animals'.  

In any case, only a few writers, strikingly almost all of non-Western ancestry,

but mainly settled in the West.  

have taken the risk of pointing out truths distorted or concealed by interlocking class and ideological interests. As Kaveh Akbar

who shows little interest in returning to the land of his birth.  

put it recently: “It is excruciating to be the Muslim in every room forcing people to think about genocide, but I do not have the luxury of shitty cynicism or breezy despair.”

He enjoys the luxury of not being killed for homosexual acts.  

It is also excruciatingly awkward for me, a nonresident alien (in IRS parlance),

i.e. a guy getting paid in dollars for writing shite of this sort 

to say this: that the liberal American intelligentsia seems to have relaxed too cozily into imperial cultures of exaggerated self-esteem and self-satisfaction.

Very true. I was talking the other day to the current Viceroy of Pakistan who is from Texas. He wears solar topee & says 'panee lao y'all'. I asked why he felt so comfortable slipping so cosily into the rule of Imperial proconsul. He replied that he had originally undergone gene therapy so as to turn into a goat & had travelled to Waziristan so as to offer his anal cherry to Jihadi terrorists. Sadly, he was intercepted by Field Marshall Munir who appointed him Viceroy so as to have somebody to blame if Imran dies in jail. 

A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries;

George Washington was a hippie. He opposed George III's wars against American Indians. Washington Irving was his homosexual lover.  

its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.

Not to mention Sir Keir Starmer rampaging over England's green & pleasant land.  

Until 1945 at least, American writers resembled their counterparts elsewhere around the globe:

No. They were distinctive. Wilson, it is true, was programmatic in the manner of a Continental intellectual.  

mostly uncertain about their nation’s role in the world

No. There was a consensus that they shouldn't be dragged in to the problems of the 'Old World'. Still they wanted freedom of navigation & thus Hitler declared war on them.  

and troubled, if not personally damaged, by the age of extremes.

Some were. Most weren't.  

The endless economic crises, wrenching social and political conflicts, and far-right insurrections of the low, dishonest decade

were irrelevant to the US. If Commies or Nazis wagged their tail, they would be slaughtered.  

made it impossible for many writers to remain neutral observers of social and ideological struggles. The pressures of conscience and craving for drama took Dos Passos

who moved to the right 

and Hemingway

who liked Castro 

to the Spanish Civil War. Edmund Wilson reported from picket lines during the Great Depression,

America had its own indigenous tradition in this regard- Henry George, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair etc. 

travelled to the Soviet Union, and authored an introduction to revolutionary thought.

He thought the American intelligentsia should 'take Communism away from the Communist party'. 

After 1945, an isolationist country

It was no longer so. Only the US Navy could ensure 'freedom of navigation'. The Brits were too broke to do an effective job.  

found itself the world’s preeminent power, made stronger and more prosperous by a war that had reduced much of Europe and Asia to ruins.

Productivity & capacity utilization had greatly increased. The American capacity to do both pure & applied science had qualitatively increased. But the Soviets were nipping at their heels & got to Outer Space first.  

Visiting the United States in 1960, Italo Calvino noted the growing “abyss” between America and the rest of the world that made the country seem as alien as the moon.

Italy would become more Americanised. By the late Eighties you could even get proper Chicago style pizza in Naples.  

Calvino was struck by the relatively luxurious circumstances of American writers, and wondered whether the price for such plenitude was a “death of the soul.”

He was already making good money. But he would get a lot richer. This didn't hurt his soul any. 

Others worried, especially after the quick intellectual surrender to McCarthy in the early Fifties,

What surrender? The ban on the Communist party was never enforced. It was McCarthy who was driven out of public life.  

about more tangible threats to the life of the mind in a simultaneously rich and conformist civilization.

The Puritans on the Mayflower were non-conformist in religion. The had no objection to getting rich. Punkass has done quite well for himself.  

The intellect in

Jewish 

America, Irving Howe

who was Jewish 

warned in his classic 1954 essay “This Age of Conformity,” was increasingly prone to “some undignified prostrations” before wealth and power.

What if Jews start assimilating, not just culturally, but also religiously? The solution was simple. Build truly upscale Synagogues in posh suburbs & pay your Rabbi top dollar. Also, get your shiksa g.f. to convert to Reform Judaism. Think of the money you'll save on nose jobs for your daughters. 

External observers have long been struck by the rampant depoliticization

which means there is less money for being 'politicized' 

that has made the most celebrated American writers

George R.R Martin? No. This cunt means some guy who teaches Grievance Studies & is promoted by a small citation carter.  But this means Suraj Yengde is to be preferred to Punkass Mishra.

susceptible to the lures of unprincipled power and vacuous celebrity: for instance, David Foster Wallace spending over twenty thousand words to investigate, indecisively, whether John McCain was a moral hero and a “real leader or merely a very talented political salesman,” when a quick glance at the voting record of the warmongering Republican senator would have sufficed.

McCain was a genuine war hero. That's why he wasn't popular. It is no accident that America prefers draft dodgers or those who pulled strings to stay the fuck away from Vietnam.  

In recent years, writers abroad who are, or romantically see themselves as, necessarily alienated critics of society

coz otherwise who'd pay to read their shite.  

have been baffled to see American counterparts gratefully receiving laurels from Barack Obama,

who was and still is very popular 

“our own Black shining prince,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates, borrowing from Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Malcolm X, put it. In their eyes, some unprecedented confusion of literature with neoliberal chic occurred when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read aloud, at the PEN America World Voices Festival, her Atlantic article that she had wanted to title “Why Is Hillary Clinton So Widely Loved?”

Clinton looked like a sure-fire 2 termer.  

as the former secretary of state looked on fondly. These spectacles of writers speaking reassurance to power confirm Christopher Lasch’s diagnosis of more than half a century ago: that American “intellectuals, as a class, had achieved official recognition, affluence, prestige, and power, and something of the mentality that goes with them”:

50 years ago, there were 'intellectuals'. Now there are guys whose research is the basis of a billion dollar tech start-up, on the one hand, and, on the other, there are losers who beg for favours from Epstein.  

they had developed a stake in the perpetuation of the Pax Americana.

Whereas non-intellectuals eagerly looked forward to the day they were nuked to death.  

Robert Frost matched the most spineless Stalinist hack

because he had a penis. Lots of Stalinists did so too. This proves Frost was a Stalinist.  

by hailing the advent of “a golden age of poetry and power” when Kennedy arrived at the White House. In a new poem written for the inauguration, Robert Frost proposed an unprecedented alliance between imperial and literary authorities: 

We see how seriously the races swarm 

In their attempts at sovereignty and form. 

They are our wards we think to some extent

For the time being and with their consent,

To teach them how Democracy is meant.

Fortunately, he had been unable to read out this shite because 'the sun was in his eye'. He forgot Kennedy was Irish. The English had colonised Ireland as they had planted colonies in America. His Elizabethan triumphalism was a red rag to Irish patriots who had not forgiven 'Gloriana' for her nine year war on O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone.

The central working assumption of PEN America and of the State Department—that the liberal American can teach the seriously swarming races what is meant by democracy

there was no such assumption. The US preferred military dictators like Franco, Ayub, Park, etc.  

—has been annihilated. Even some commonly used concepts that once seemed self-evident—American democracy, globalization, the West, and the rules-based international order—

Biden's 'Summit for Democracy'? The thing was a joke. The US is happier with Munir than Im the Dim.  

lie shattered. And it won’t be possible anymore for the liberal American intelligentsia to run up massive intellectual and moral deficits with American power as the invisible reserve currency.

Anyone can run up imaginary deficits or surpluses. What is becoming unaffordable is 'boots on the ground'.  

Its helplessness today puts into sharper contrast its will to power,

Fuck power. Money matters. You have enough of it, you also have power.  

its often peremptory redefining of what art, literature, politics, democracy, and human rights are or are not.

Fuck off! Cretins can't define shit.  

Shorn of its revolving door to the State Department and the Democratic Party establishment, PEN America will henceforth eke out a miserable existence, trying to simulate moral and intellectual supremacy long after its demise.

Nobody gives, or gave, a fuck about it. 

Other enforcers of America’s postwar cultural hegemony are also likely to find themselves diminished.

Because they haven't 'enforced' shit. Either your new Netflix series clicks with viewers or they end up watching Korean soaps.  

And, perhaps, a brutal estrangement from sources of power and patronage would be salutary in the long term. It will be hard, though not impossible, for the beneficiaries of the remarkable American bonanza of grants, fellowships, and awards to break out of their elitist self-isolation and turn into dissidents.

There are some Foundations with deep pockets which sustain this 'eco-sphere'. But  if you pay people to tell stupid lies, all you end up with is lazy shitheads endlessly recycling their own stupid lies.  

At the same time, adaptation to a regime of insolent cruelty and mendacity would require

emigration to Iran? 

an amount of shitty cynicism that is fatal to intellectual and imaginative work.

Nonsense! Cynics are good writers. Wide eyed idealists produce dreck.  

Too many consciences will be torn and shaken.

& anal cherries will be lost to randy Jihadi goat-fuckers.  

American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself

by chopping off its own head & shoving it up its own rectum to show solidarity with Jihadi goat-fuckers.  

in order to salvage its dignity and purpose.

It is a great indignity for a writer or intellectual not to have his head securely lodged up his own rectum.  

But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table.

Nor will they seek to gain some protein in their diet by sucking him off.  

Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.

Punkass may be powerless. Amish Tripati, who is 6 years younger than him, is rich, sells millions of copies of his books, makes India's most watched documentaries  & presided over the Nehru Centre in London as a senior diplomat. I suppose he will end up in the Cabinet. 

Meanwhile, Punkass has to get by on intellectual affirmative action.