Reality Is Messy

Patrick Warner wonders if the "current censorious cultural atmosphere" has made satire impossible:

The CanLit environment has become toxic to the imagination, which doesn’t like categories and operates on the principle that most people exist in tension between opposites: generous/selfish, honest/dishonest, conformist/non­conformist, and so on. Reality is messy, and people are full of contradictions. Literature and the arts have always been the virtual agora, the meeting place where minds explore what it is to be human, often stepping outside the conventions of the day to criticize as well as to empathize. Rarely is a truly fine writer a dogmatist or a card-carrying party member. Most writers I know see dogma and the party line as the domain of hacks, careerists, and people who can’t think critically. Harold Bloom, steeped as he was in the U.S. culture wars of the 1990s, saw this coming and predicted, perhaps rightly, that politicizing literary culture would destroy it.