While reading Norman Mailer’s lengthy novel Harlot’s Ghost on a Kindle, I was given an update: having got to page 625, I had 25 hours of reading to go. Too much information, I thought, and switched to a paperback copy.
Mailer’s hero, a CIA agent, was stationed in South America and busy interfering in local politics. Real people feature in the fictional story, among them James Jesus Angleton and Bill Harvey – famous battlers against the communist menace.
CIA activities described in South America range from hiring kids to paint anti-communist graffiti to infiltrating political parties and influencing elections. Meanwhile, the Russians are bugging and bribing and scheming, the adversaries engaged in covert skirmishes while the hapless locals suffer the effects.
How things have changed. There’s now a widespread perception that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is working from home while running the White House. Who knows if that’s true, but if it is, what a coup for the opaque former KGB agent. And what does it mean for democratic freedom in the world?
Reading about the CIA’s interference in South America, it’s obvious the US hasn’t always been a force for good. The CIA has a dire record of destabilising democratically elected governments. But the US itself has historically represented the preferred model, a liberal democracy.
In Buenos Aires, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo still remember their children murdered by the past military dictatorship. In that city, though, I was struck by the number, size and quality of the bookshops. No matter what repressive regime has been in charge, a nation’s spirit is kept alive by its intellectual life.
These days, politicians take advantage of the mesmerised inanition generated by social media to use less and less complex messaging. In the 2024 US election, Democrat appeals like Bruce Springsteen’s articulate post went up against a brightly coloured, dancing, singalong, nonsensical cartoon-style candidate – and lost. Why? Too many words.
While defending hate speech as free speech, the US is banning thousands of books.
You can reduce a nation’s intellectual resilience by omission, too – not by banning books, but by neglecting them. New Zealand Society of Authors CEO Jenny Nagle notes that government funding for books and reading in this country loses out disproportionately to every other major art form.
The Ministry of Education has prioritised declining literacy rates, yet has ignored the proven links between literacy, libraries and local content. 36% of all our school libraries have been decommissioned, and the study of New Zealand literature is not a prerequisite for the English curriculum.
Nagle argues programmes supporting excellent organisations such as Duffy Books in Homes and Read NZ that take books and writers into schools should be funded by the Ministry of Education instead of diverting funds from publishing and writing.
Frank Sargeson used to say there was no bad mood that couldn’t be cured by an hour’s reading. Reading can deepen empathy, take us out of our lives, increase understanding, provide rich entertainment. It shows us other people; it gives us ourselves. It could, like exercise, be prescribed as medicine. It provides an intellectual workout, perhaps staves off dementia. If you read a Dickens novel, you will increase the length of your sentences.
Words are powerful. Ignorance is a prison, and if you can’t articulate, you’re vulnerable. In these perilous times, our national and cultural identity, our cultural safety, is expressed and preserved via intellectual clarity. To quote American writer Joan Didion, “The ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”
Why then, Nagle asks, are our New Zealand books not officially considered a taonga alongside music and screen?
