The great belief of all Moabites is that literary and artistic criteria, as such, should be abolished. They see ideological enemies everywhere. For once, let us spring to the defense of classical Marxists in whose mantle the Moabites like to cloak themselves. It is true that Marx ideologized everything, but not in such a crude and reductionist way. That is, even Marxists, of the more educated or cultured sort, apply literary criteria.
Every word carries the history of literature, the feel of the whole country.
It follows then that with us language is losing its edge for lack of proper education and because of constrictive doctrine. The art world is being penetrated by narrow dogmatism in the same way. At a Modern Language Association convention a couple of years ago in San Francisco, I got the strong feeling that the participants, scuttling between vulgarly titled panels like beetles in a Sartrian hell, knew very well that what they were up to was nasty and useless. This cheered me up, as a sign of impending ideological dissolution. Meanwhile, our culture has largely split into the pretentious and the pop, I believe, just as jazz did decades ago.