Artists of Resistance.

• Author: Zinn, Howard

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

The billionaire mandarins of our culture can show us the horrors of war on a movie screen and pretend they are making an important statement ("War is hell," says the general as he orders his troops forward into no man's land). But the artists go beyond that, to resistance, defiance.

Here is Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Conscientious Objector":

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba; business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth. And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up. Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran. With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp. I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll. e.e cummings, whose own experience with the First World War had powerfully affected him (see his memoir, The Enormous Room) wrote in the same vein but in his own unique style:

i think of Olaf glad and big whose warmest heart recoiled at war: a conscientious object-or. His wellbeloved colonel (trig westpointer most succinctly bred) took erring Olaf soon in hand. In that poem, the colonel and other soldiers proceed to torture Olaf, and cummings wrote:

Olaf (being to all intents a corpse and wanting any rag upon what God unto him gave) responds, without getting annoyed "I will not kiss your fucking flag." Langston Hughes, observing the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini, wrote simply:

The little fox is still. The dogs of war have made their kill. Countee Cullen could also make his point in a few words. Waiting for his fellow writers to speak out on the outrageous framing of the "Scottsboro Boys" in Alabama, he wrote:

Surely, I said, Now will the poets sing. But they have raised no cry. I wonder why. In Catch-22, Joseph Heller created the absurd war resister Yossarian, who at one point, on a...