By BARLOW ADAMS
“During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”—Kurt Vonnegut
It’s a confusing time to be an artist, even more so to be a writer. It has never been easier to be published and widely read. It has never been more difficult to feel like either has a real impact. We live in a time of hilarious, terrifying dichotomy. Words have never been so prevalent, so powerful. Words have never been so superfluous, so cheap, haphazardly scrawled across the bathroom stall of the world. In the course of any given hour, you will effortlessly run across language that is ugly and hateful, beautiful and bolstering. Unless you take firm steps to prevent such encounters, you will be inundated with falsehoods and bent truths, pestered by revelations and vital communication.
According to market research company YouGov, only a little over half of Americans read at least one book a year. Generative AI tells me an average person browsing the internet can be exposed to around 490,000 words in a single day, roughly the equivalent to the length of War and Peace.
Are either of those things true? Is either source trustworthy? Does it matter? Will you check? Can you check?
Even the most meticulous and athletic of readers can be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of text encountered in the course of everyday life. It seems clear we have crossed a word threshold of sorts. Abandon all hope ye who browse here. This way lies madness.
We were never meant to produce information on this scale or at this speed, and we are not equipped to process it. Even the most fastidious and curious minded among us cannot engage with everything we read on the level dictated by modern misinformation. We cannot interrogate every inhalation in this new digital miasma, and so, with no other recourse, we hold our breath, literarily-speaking. We cease to engage, do our best to be unmoved other than at those select times we have the emotional and mental energy to be scholastically mobile.
It is into this atmosphere that we must thrust our art, our petty stories, comically outnumbered and outgunned by an algorithmic tide that obeys an outrage moon.
In such a climate, the impact of a custard pie falling from a six-foot tall stepladder might seem positively atomic in comparison.
So why do it at all?
Because it is here when literal truth has lost its punch that stories wield their greatest power.
Where facts falter, fictions can thrive. There is an audacity in writing a story, an impossibly arrogant hope that one can share a nonsensical space with a few dozen/hundred/thousand others, and in that arena fabricate empathy from shared delusion. The connection offered by this alchemy of imagination encourages an insidious compassion—extremely contagious, deadly on a cellular level to all manner of isolated self-interest.
This is art’s truest power. It can’t stop wars, end genocide, halt fascism in its tracks. Not directly. Even with all of us holding that laser focus Vonnegut spoke of. If it could, we wouldn’t be where we are. But it connects people, shows us our commonalities. Even in a post-truth era, it binds us in ways completely independent of fact or agreed upon circumstance.
What the world needs most is shared understanding and irrefutable evidence. It needs divine intervention, a de facto pronouncement in the undeniable voice of cosmic truth.
It’s not going to happen, of course.
But even that might not work at this point. Maybe the spin is too strong, the algorithm too potent. Almighty god might be an afterthought in a week, buried in an avalanche of engagement farming, bro-losophy, and click-bait exposés.
Maybe watering the weeds of empathy is the best we can do.
I’m here to tell you it’s enough.
It would be an understatement to say this has been a difficult period for many writers, particularly those who are socially conscious in any way. It can seem hopeless. There is no doubt we are facing a new breed of disillusionment, spurred on by what frequently seems like a willful abandonment of intellectual and compassionate ideals.
The painful truth is that the battle for the truth appears impossible to win by traditional means. Standard tools like debate, unbiased research, and even statistical evidence have become not just devalued, but demonized as tricks of the academic elite. The anti-science, anti-literary movement is in full swing.
But entertainment still thrives. Stories persevere. They infiltrate in ways outright education never could. So, make art, make entertainment. Amuse, distract, horrify. Make people feel, make them remember they are a part of something more, something human. Infect them with your kindness, your thoughtfulness. Inject them with your anger. Pepper the internet with tiny stories and poems, each a protest, each an audacious hope for a world that seems unimaginable in this moment. Dare to try. Think better of people than they deserve. Flail beautifully.
You probably won’t change the world, but you might change someone.
*A recent study by YouGov determined Americans now disapprove of the country’s actions in the Vietnam War by a margin of two to one. Some custard pies echo in eternity. Be the insidious slow-moving revolution you want to see in the world.
Read more of Barlow’s work here at Reckon.
Barlow Adams is a chronically ill writer in the Northern Kentucky area. He has survived kidney failure, lymphoma, and a saccular aneurysm. He occasionally wins writing awards and international competitions. He is overly fond of pie and smush-faced dogs.