I have a friend who’s a pretty famous writer and he called me yesterday; he’d been to a dinner party with some other pretty famous writers and, “You know,” he said, “No one was talking about the war.”

What were they talking about? I asked him.

“They were talking about…” He couldn’t really remember. Their books. Other people’s books. None of which were about the war.

“They want it to be known they’re anti-Bush,” he said, “but it’s almost a matter of social identification, like they read the right books and eat at the right restaurants. The cool ones.”

What’s cool about not speaking out against the war? I wondered.

I thought about a review of a biography of Leni Riefenstahl that appeared in yesterday’s (Sunday’s) New York Times. Leni was always very interested in meeting the right people—“I must meet that man!” she was known for exclaiming—including Hitler. Her interest in (literally) giving blowjobs to power served her well; she had a brilliant career.

Concentration camps? She never heard of ‘em, she said.

This morning, President Bush could be heard on the radio denying a new report saying that as many as 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion. “Not credible,” the president tells us.

“I guess they think,” said my friend the writer, of his friends the other writers, “that if they step out against the war they’re going to look foolish, like some throwback to the ‘60s.”

Or maybe they’re cowards? Careerists? I don’t know any of these people he was talking about, so I really can’t say. I do know that Shelley said that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

It’s these same people that my friend met at the dinner party who are always moaning about how “there is no activism in this country.”

Read the article from yesterday’s New York Times, excerpted in Rosebud #81, below, about all the brave people who protested the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004. They were spied on by the NYPD; close to two thousand were arrested, innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights. Dissidents. Meanwhile, where were these writers?

The anti-war movement in this country could use their voice. I mean the fiction writers, the poets, Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators. Right now, by their silence, they’re legislating the continuation of the war and our turn toward this sort of Mister Softee fascism we're experiencing, as they enjoy their dinner parties and talk about all the “good books” one should read.