Okay, okay, so Stan Goff (left) doesn’t mention books specifically in his Huffington Post exocriation of all things American, but this is what he does say to the citizens of the world: “Boycott American cultural products. They are propaganda aimed at turning your children into mindless consumers and your nations into obedient colonies.” To which we can only reply, what, even the nice Howard Zinn books? Or, for that matter, Hideous Dream and Full Spectrum Disorder by… Stan Goff?
Coincidentally, Richard Nash, who published those two books at Soft Skull Press, recently opined against the “reflexive anti-Americanism” of U.S. progressives on his blog. Though he doesn’t mention Goff by name, he compares such outbursts to “that quasi-narcissistic psychological formation that D.W. Winnicott talked about where an infant fails to be able to distinguish between itself an the world and takes on a form of omnipotence that presumes that it is a hurting machine, that everything it does is wrong, a situation as likely to produce fucked-up behavior (on an individual or imperial level) as the omnipotence that thinks that everything it does is right.”
As it happens, Soft Skull dropped Goff’s third book, Sex and War, after he refused to let them edit the manuscript; that book is now available in a self-published edition through Lulu.com. “You could say he’s seized the means of production, or you could say he’s become arrogant,” Nash reflected, when reached for comment about the HuffPo essay.* “And both would be true. As would be to say, he also has a lovely humility at times. And I admire his passion so much.”
*I confess, I wanted to find out if Soft Skull still considered itself indie after publishing a book that got selected for the Today book club, or if that was proof they’d joined forces with the ideological state apparatus.