THE PEN AND THE SWORD

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Originally uploaded by J.Olson.

In an article in today's New York Times, PEN American Center President Salman Rushdie writes of how "in our dumbed-down, homogenized, frightened culture, under the thumbs of leaders who seem to think of themselves as God's anointed and of power as their divine right . . . it is harder for writers to claim to be, as Shelley said, 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world,' to believe in the literary art as the proper counterweight to power, and to see literature as a lofty, transnational, transcultural force that could, in Bellow's great formulation, ''open the universe a little more."

"Harder," says Rushdie, "but no less necessary."