I don’t want or need writers or artists to be good, pure, ethically uncompromised. They can have gaps and holes and leaps; I do not need their apologies, penance, or punishment. What I do want is writers and artists unafraid to be honest in accounting for when their beliefs take them to somewhere they didn’t deliberately aim for, when their actions are determined by ideological beliefs they have absorbed uncritically and now express without notice. If they cannot give me the why of these lacunae, I at least want the how. “How did you arrive at that thought?” I kept asking.
