Arundhati Roy is her name.  She is from India.  Her first book was called “The God of Small Things”  She was sued in India for what one reader considered salacious sexual description, so liberals all over the world fell in love with the work.  She made a great deal of money, and will make a great deal more before she’s through.  Her latest book is called “Power Politics “ Discussing it with Bill Moyers, she related her work to what she sees as the worldwide battle going on between capitalist globalization forces (read: tyranny) and the defense of the proletariat by the worldwide socialist globalization forces – which she calls “democracy.” (Photo is a hotlink to a Salon bio of Miss Roy.)

I watched this moron on the PBS program, NOW (only accidentally the acronym for the femi-nazi organization, one supposes.).   The date was September 20, 2002.

Miss Roy doesn’t think in terms of nations, she told Moyers.  She thinks in terms of civilization.  That is, everybody.  

Obviously, she wishes to tell you how to live in the way that she knows is best.  She wants to wipe out all national borders. (Mexico must love her.)  She wants to deny starving millions food by disallowing corporate farms.  She wants to tell you how much energy is proper for you to use.  (She has been of late fighting hydroelectric development in India in the belief that the raising river lakes will flood out lots of family farms, which is absolutely true.  One wonders if America should breach all her dams so that people can live in the dark on the returned river banks and grow turnips instead of working in a factory or office, owning a home, sending their kids to a good college and vacationing in Alaska or Cancun.)  

The outcome of  Miss Roy’s form of economic strangulation eliminates many unnecessary things like modern hospitals, safe septic arrangements and universal basic education.  

God knows that a subsistence level agricultural life doesn’t need paved roads.  (A lack of progress being the ironic result of progressive belief).  The construction of roads, we hear, raises the gap between the rich and the poor.  The rich can drive Porsches and the poor can only drive Fords.  It is much better, apparently, when nobody can afford a car.  Hell, it must be even better if nobody can afford anything.  If everybody lives in a mud hut, the gap between the rich and the poor is really narrow.  Besides, a mud hut does not require a carport, so will limit global deforestation. (But will we then be facing a worldwide mud shortage?)  

Withal, it seems she wants to control the size of your home, where it is located, how it is constructed, what kind of furniture you are allowed to have in it, what kind of appliances you are allowed to use in it, what color you paint it and how much you pay for it.  These all flow directly from progressive philosophy, as Russia, North Korea, Cuba and every other country that tried it, clearly proves.

Moyers fawned all over her, complaining that her noble efforts to correct the way things are done on the planet get in the way of her turning out another glorious tome of  breathtaking brilliance.  Miss Roy is heading for a Nobel Prize in literature.  Mark my words.  If she lives long enough to turn out five or six more books, she’s a shoe-in.  Those Swedes dearly love the color red, and weep openly in their frozen streets every time a progressive economy collapses under its own stupid socialist weight.

Speaking of Nobel Literature awards, Miss Roy reminds me of a character invented by the first American to win that prize, Sinclair Lewis (a determined socialist who would have also wept at the fall of the Soviet Union – and blamed it on those he despised most, the people who provide non-government jobs.).  Miss Roy is almost a dead ringer for Carol (Mrs. Doctor) Kennicott, who was the midwestern small college educated daughter of a judge much impressed by the arts.  Early in Lewis’story she marries the stolid, unimaginative, duck hunting, bass fishing, furnace stoking doctor from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, then rides the train from civilization (Minneapolis) to Hell (G.P. is a farming town of several thousand souls.  It is very unlike Paris, and so, is a toilet.)

For the next 400 pages of this novel, called “Main Street,” poor Carol weeps and rages over the greed, sexism, bourgeois taste and gossipy visciousness of the town’s business community, who she believes are robbing the farmers and preventing them from organizing soviets, or agricultural cooperatives.  Her anger washes against those terrible capitalists time and again.  They won’t paint the visiting farmer’s rest room in modern colors.  They won’t build a giant new courthouse with heroic columns and rooms where plays by the best socialist dramatists can be held.  They have large houses while the poor have small ones.  And, so on and so on, yatta, yatta, yatta.  

But for the ending, which is unintentionally hypocritical and so proves the antithesis of the author’s theme, one can read  the first three chapters and have the whole story.  In the ending, Carol, after running away to Washington, D.C., which being the governmental center of a capitalist nation is just a big version of the burg she left, returns to Gopher Prairie!   

Main Street, like Miss Roys first book,  was highly praised, and became a stock in trade for school literature reading lists.  It is literary junk, but fascinating if you think of it as an example of a television soap opera written by Karl Marx, who is at the time of the work’s creation suffering from an anal fixation that prevents him from realizing that he wants to be a Wall Street banker.

Arundhati Roy is Carol Kennicott – fighting nobly and heroically against everything that works, everything that changes a nation from a starving mass of skeletons to people complaining that the quality of movies isn’t what it used to be.  Arundhati Roy is, in other words, a dodo.  A kind of bird that can only exist without competition, and isn’t that a perfect description of socialism?

And, there she was basking in the obsequious atmospherics of Bill Moyers, re-radiating his anti-capitalistic tripe while expressing sympathy and affection for the totally uninformed American people who haven’t the faintest idea what is actually going on in the world.  

Bill Moyers is an intellectual lightweight. His show, NOW is a two-step program for the development of progressive fantasy in America.  This Friday’s guest, the bestselling author from India, Miss Roy, is a juvenile leftist with delusions of Shiva-hood. Give no money to PBS or any of their affiliate stations, unless you are as stupid as they think you are.  (LL)
 

© 2002 Oregon Magazine