Steve Wasserman makes the case. No one in recent memory has made it better [e.a.]:

It is now possible through the magic of Internet browsing and buying to obtain virtually any book ever printed and have it delivered to your doorstep no matter where you live. This achievement, combined with the vast archipelago of bricks-and-mortar emporiums operated by, say, Barnes & Noble or Borders or any of the more robust of the independent stores, has given Americans a cornucopia of riches. To be sure, there has also been the concomitant and deplorable collapse of many independent bookstores—down by half from the nearly four thousand such stores that existed in 1990. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the landscape of contemporary American bookselling and publishing makes it hard not to believe we are living at the apotheosis of our culture. Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

This is, strangely, a story that has not received near the attention it deserves. And yet its implications are large, especially if papers are to have a prayer of retaining readers and expanding circulation. There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them.

Read it. And then go hit up the richest philathropists you know to start supporting culture, ’cause we’re gonna need ‘em.

I’m sick of the blogosphere—or sick of the popular political hangouts, at any rate. They have no perspective, no knowledge, no experience, no wisdom, no drive to understand what is happening, to discover the truth. They have no mission beyond scoring cheap political points. They have no heart and no soul.

Except when they do.

Here’s Wretchard, of the Belmont Club:

I think a fairly large percentage of people see the world according to preconceived notions and are impervious to arguments to the contrary.

Sometimes the biases stem from bitter experience and thus actually have some basis. I knew from an early age how murderous Communists could be and therefore the arguments of people like Noam Chomskey have no effect on me whatsoever. Occasionally I worry about that. Sometimes I ask myself whether it is always true that communism is murderous and intellectually I must admit it doesn’t always follow they are evil or wrong. But I will candidly admit that experience has colored my view.

Jose Maria Sison was recently arrested in the Netherlands and now it is coming to public light that he ordered the execution of thousands of activists, workers, farmers, etc in his mad purges and in his efforts to maintain a grip on his organized crime network which styles itself as a communist insurgency. But to many persons who know only what they read in the papers, Sison remains a “revolutionary hero”. Sison — or rather the Sison they imagine — is their kind of person, of a piece with their world of radical literature, plays, activist songs, and the distant romance of revolution which is romantic only alas, when distant. They can hardly accept, though facts now being covered in the papers make it inescapable to avoid, that their support of Sison indirectly resulted in the murder of thousands. Sison’s “killing fields” are a miniature replay of the Cambodian killing fields, which the antiwar generation can scarcely admit it facilitated, even after they piled up the skulls. It’s not something antiwar generation would have caused knowingly, you understand. They meant well but it all went so wrong. That was the trouble.

And in the debate over whether to Surge or Retreat I think the sides are squaring off according to temperament more than logic. Some people hate the sight of war — and rightly so — so much they are willing to take it from sight at any cost. Even if the consequences are greater than the war’s. That’s why cost/benefit is not an issue. Aesthetics is.

Maybe the only meaningful persuasion is aesthetic persuasion. Teaching people to see the evil they do even when they mean well. Teaching them to count the cost by showing them those who bear it. Teaching them that it is not enough to say “sorry”; to engage in “healing” or to move on. That it’s unacceptable to smash things up and retreat “into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” But it’s hard. Maybe it’s impossible.

Wretchard, who is dedicated to seeking the answers and whose site is suffused with poetry, was of course quoting from Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy––they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Yes, Wretchard, the only meaningful persuasion is aesthetic persuasion. Indeed one of Bush’s speechwriters (I really wonder which one it was) recently tried that gambit with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. It foundered, unfortunately, on the shores of American ignorance and insensitivity, if this is any indication.

Greene doesn’t really help the White House’s argument. Indeed, most people would read Greene’s novel as a refutation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And why draw attention to a fictional character who has been used to outline Bush’s alleged flaws?

Actually, I’d hope that “most people” would read Greene’s novel for the story, and that perhaps they would have some of their preconceived notions challenged. That’s what happens when people read novels or watch movies: they let down their defenses, and they empathize with the myriad variations of the human condition, which does not fall neatly into categories like “dove” or “hawk”; “wingnut” or “moonbat”; “conservative” or “liberal”; etc.

The person to invoke Fitzgerald most persuasively recently was Azar Nafisi, in Reading Lolita in Tehran, a work of dissident literature and aesthetic persuasion—for those who would be persuaded, that is. By describing daily life for herself over the course of 18 years, Nafisi makes it crystal-clear that Iran is indeed totalitarian: that is to say, to live there is to experience totalitarianism.

Try explaining that to someone like, say, the whippersnapper Ezra Klein, who has a following in the leftosphere and no experience of the world and yet is convinced that he has all the “correct” opinions, and of course all the answers:

Iran is a repressive country. It is not a totalitarian dictatorship, no matter how many people want to simply assert otherwise. And that’s really all there is to the contrary: Assertions. In his post on the subject, Kevin Sullivan wrote, as a parenthetical aside, “(and [Ahmadinejad] is a totalitarian, Ezra),” an odd argument given that Ahmadinejad isn’t even the most powerful person in the country. Elsewhere, Ken Baer told me that he didn’t think such arguments even needed to be made, which shows how safe folks feel in the Iran-is-totalitarian-consensus, but struck me as unsettling.

Then there’s his whippersnapping twin Matthew Yglesias, whose taste in literature runs to Harry Potter, with the occasional Chabon novel thrown in (with which he seems disappointed because it doesn’t have a clear political message) and who reveres TV dramas. With that aesthetic diet, here’s no danger of his expanding his imagination beyond America (which, one would think, would be important for a writer who writes about foreign policy to do). Yet Yglesias too disdains the label “totalitarian” for Iran, and has promoted the notion that anyone who calls Iran totalitarian is just a warmonger.

[W]hile you’d certainly rather live in a liberal democracy than under the Iranian political system, this is no kind of totalitarianism and the many people throwing that word around are just warmongering ignorantly.

Six months later, he’s hammering away at the same theme:

Iran is often characterized in the American press as a “totalitarian” regime, by both conservative and liberal hawks. Leading Democratic Party political operatives like Ken Baer will call you an apologist for the Iranian regime if you dispute this “totalitarian” concept. Thus “you” may well think that Iran is, in fact, a totalitarian society.

Which it isn’t. The Iranian regime, though harsh on political dissidents, isn’t Stalin’s Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution.

Dude, you are wrong. Grow the hell up. What you learned in poli sci is but a framework for trying to come to grips with—or attempting to control—messy, messy, uncompartmentalized, mind-blowing reality. Feed your head. With poetry. With accounts of what it’s really like out there in the wide world beyond your complacent notions of it. You’ll be a better man, with better ideas. And maybe you won’t be so disappointed by Obama, who has already fed his head with poetry, and who has come out a better man, with better ideas. (Not perfect. Better.)