The brilliant novelist Russell Banks passed away a few days ago. He was a creative and radical thinker, a member of Students for a Democratic Society decades ago, and a founding member of the John Brown Lives! community in the Adirondacks. His novel about John Brown, Cloudsplitter, is essential reading. I want to hold up the last paragraph of his novel Continental Drift as a fitting epitaph:
“Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”
Bill Ayers 