WOMEN WRITERS, INTELLECTUAL AND ARTIST"

Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2017) ("This is a book on women writers, intellectuals, and artists who argued passionately for the aesthetic, political, and moral obligation to face painful reality unsentimentally. These may seem list a strange cast of characters to call to your aid during a crisis, but here they are: Simone Weil, while less well know than the others, achieved a cult like status in the early postwar religious revival for her austere and unconventional mystic Christianity; Hannah Arendt was one of the most important political philosophers of the twenty century, and her star has risen only higher the further we get from her own moment; Mary McCarthy, well know in her own day as a novelist and a critic, remains a figure of note in American literary history primarily for her autobiographies and her best-selling novel The Group; Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual of the late twentieth century, an icon in popular culture, and a controversial but highly regarded critic of the arts and politics, although less well regarded for her own artistic practice; Diane Arbus was one of the postwar's era's most influential photographers and artists; and Joan Didion, after a long and successful career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, became a celebrity upon the publication of her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking and its Broadway adaptation with Vanessa Redgrave. Though these women are hardly unfamiliar to contemporary readers or scholars of the late twentieth century, they do not constitute a recognizable group, and it likely that few readers will be familiar with all of them. Moreover, they would not have appreciated being classed by their gender, however much they might have found the adjective 'tough' accurate." Id. at 1. It is a bit unfortunately that Ms. Nelson could not identify a single woman writer, intellectual or artist, of color--Black, Latin, Asian, Native-American--as being "tough enough" for inclusion. On another point. The following passage stuck out for me given its echoes now in Trump's vision of America. "Like the masses, the Nazi elite also banished reality, but in this case by regarding it as" mere inconvenience, something utterly plastic and subject to the will. Given enough power and the time to use it, these men would remake reality into the fantasy of the leader. In this sense, thinking has stopped altogether. There is a thought married to power, a reality is transformed ignored to conform to the idea. As Arendt explains, description becomes prediction: the 'Jews are a dying race' means 'kill the Jews.' The elites, she says, 'instinctively' understand this. Thought married to power means the destruction of plurality, something that the masses have already lost in their isolated loneliness. 'It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or co-builders of a common world.' Other human beings' perspectives on the world become not only a matter of inconvenience to the elite but an obstacle to remaking reality. To the extent that the inconstancy, disruption, and the discomfort of opposition inherent in plurality seem endanger the grand thought, plurality will be compromised, if not destroyed." Id. at 63 (citation omitted). Does not that sound like what the Trump elites, e. g., Bannon, Miller, Sessions, Pence, Kelly, and the like, are doing in their America First, white nationalist, oligarchy are doing? Any reality they dislike is "fake news.").