Things That Can and Cannot be Said

“Things that Can and Cannot Be Said” by John Cusack and Arundhati Roy is one of the most disappointing things I have ever read. I think many of the ideas brought up in the text are worth discussing. But it a paranoid, self-congratulatory, shallow, and ultimately futile work that promises much but is at heart “all sound and fury, signifying nothing”

The book is essentially a series of essays built around an “extraordinary” meeting between Cusack (an American actor), Arundhati Roy (an Indian author), Daniel Ellsberg (the whistleblower who exposed the Pentagon Papers), and Edward Snowden, who leaked information on the US Government’s spying capabilities, in Moscow.

The book is an “extraordinary work” (it says so on the back cover). It consists of short, paranoid essays and chummy, arrogant interviews between Cusack and Roy. The conversations had good points, but I could not help but feel like it was an internal conversation between two righteous liberal “intellectuals.” I know that they are not idiots, but these conversations did not really have a center or purpose. It just felt like intellectual masturbation—a series of platitudes and slogans endlessly repeated.

The book was building up to this “extraordinary” meeting. The preparations were described in great details. The pre-conversations were described in detail. But when we get to the climax of the meeting, Roy writes

“The Moscow Un-Summit [Roy’s clever name for the meeting] wasn’t a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that we didn’t get the cautious, diplomatic, regulation [the book was full of many typos] Edward Snowden. The downshot (that isn’t a word, I know) is that the jokes, the humor, and repartee that took place in room 1001 cannot be reproduced. The Un-Summit cannot be written about in the detail it deserves. Yet it definitely cannot not be written about. Because it did happen. And because the world is a millipede the inches forward on real conversations. And this, certainly, was a real one” (81).

This paragraph is the equivalent of saying “we went to the best party / concert / play / dinner that has ever happened in the history of humanity. It was life changing and has the power to change the world. And only if you had been there!” It is the textual equivalent of Tenacious D’s song “Tribute,” which is tribute song to the “Greatest Song in the World,” not the song itself. When we get to the interview, it is only about eleven large-type pages and only discusses one or two points about nuclear weapons, giving the reader the most tantalizing glimpse into Room 1001.

What makes me the angriest about a text like this is that the issues that Snowden, Esllberg, and other have raised about the power of the State are important conversations to have. But this sort of smug text only detracts from the debate and makes one not want to engage with the topic in the first place, which is the last thing the authors wanted or hoped. This book is not worth reading and not worth purchasing.