Once upon a time at my last best undergrad school, I dove deep with the whole Sartre/Camus thing, and existentialism more broadly.

I always liked the little Algerian better than Jean-Paul. Part of the reason for that was Sartre’s insistence that all art be political on some level. “Committed” literature, in the case of us word peoples.

As a belletristic partisan, I didn’t feel that was a necessary dictum or a useful restriction to put upon myself.

Nowadays I feel something else. Not the opposite, but off to the side.

I drove by the half-dead little cinema in this town, which I’ve entered a few times, (including to see Snowden), and glanced up to see what was playing now.

Black Widow.

For a number of inexplicable and explicable reasons, the words grabbed my eyes hard. They really should have been enough to get me to pay, to go see it.

I won’t.

Why not?

Because the current cash crop of Hollywood … big budget superhero movies … are not politics or art or cinema or anything else worthwhile. They’re nothing, except perhaps narcotics for slaves, to put them into a trance and then a fitful sleep, after a long day picking silicon in the fields of their capitalist masters.

I’m riffing there on Edward Abbey, who once said that rock and roll was music for slaves. While conveniently neglecting to mention that his preferred forms of classical were very much music for oppressors.

I forgive Abbey his prejudices, and hope he will look down from Valhalla and forgive my headbanging trespasses in the spirit of detente’.

You can’t not want music, anyway, of some wrong kind or another.

Anyway, I will probably continue to watch Marvel movies only in motel rooms when there’s nothing else on, rather than actively supporting them by buying a ticket.

I’ll shop at Amazon only when I have no other choice, and only walk into a Walmart when I’m dragged in.

I’ll still favor the music of Leonard Cohen and kindred spirits, because that’s music for the slaves in revolt.

I’ll still believe that all art, and all commerce, is political whether it sets out to be or not.

First. We take Manhattan.

Then we take Scarlett Johansson
.