The Politics of the Super Bowl
After being an ardent NFL fan (and a high school football player), I stopped watching football a few years ago. The head injury crisis (particularly after my own brain trauma in 2017) simply made the game unenjoyable for me. Then the Covid eclipse made pro sports even more invisible for me. But I have to admit, when I heard that Tom Brady — who will turn 44 this year and has won a staggering seven Super Bowl rings — is going to star in another Big Game (as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB this year), it made my head, yeah, explode.
As a hardcore 49ers fan back in the day, I used to bemoan the team’s failure to sign up the Bay Area boy wonder, who could’ve kept the post-Joe Montana, post-Steve Young dynasty going for years more. I assumed that, like Joe, Tom Terrific was a good San Francisco values kind of guy. But then I heard he was a Trumpie — and Brady joined my enemies list. While I was still watching football, he became the player I loathed the most — a loathing made easier by the ruthless, robotic personality of Coach Bill Belichick and the win-at-any-cost ethos of the New England Patriots.
And now Brady is a Buc, but he’s just as easy to hate. A Florida resident (like you know who), he recently bought a mansion in the same exclusive neighborhood as the even more repulsive Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Facing off against Brady in this year’s Super Bowl will be Kansas City’s 25-year-old QB Patrick Mahomes, who has appeared in a Black Lives Matter video, joined LeBron James in a 2020 voter registration drive, and spoken out forcefully for “equality” in our nation.
If I end up watching the Big Game on February 7 — which I admit I just might — I know which team I’ll be rooting for.
Stand Back and Stand Ready… to Protect Democracy
That should no longer be just a Trump message to the Proud Boys — it should be the motto of democracy’s defenders. It’s now brutally clear that Donald Trump tried to defy the will of the people and declare a dictatorship… up until the final hours of his administration. As the New York Times just revealed, not only was Trump leaning heavily on state officials and judges to overturn the vote and inciting an insurrectionary mob, he was also conspiring with Justice Department Jeffrey Clark to overthrow democracy through extra-legal machinations. (And how many other seemingly milquetoast bureaucrats like Clark are there interspersed throughout the federal government, waiting for their big treasonous moment?)
The Times also reports today that a broad progressive coalition formed immediately to defend the results of the presidential election. This is a bracing evolutionary step for the American Left, which has tended in the past to sheepishly accept whatever authoritarian power grab that Republican wolves engineer. Less encouraging were the members of the progressive coalition, like a woman identified as a leading liberal “messaging” expert, who cautioned strongly against using the word “coup” to describe Trump’s post-election aggression. Well, excuse me, but that is precisely what Trump was attempting until the midnight hour. Why sugarcoat a fascist putsch?
The front page of the Times (which is especially compelling today) also carries a sobering report on the January 6 Capitol invasion and how it inspired a global network of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, QAnon conspiracy freaks and other far-right militants. These anti-democratic forces, by and large, don’t see the spasm of Washington violence as an inglorious defeat, but rather as a harbinger of what their power can accomplish if it’s fully organized (and weaponized).
Most of the MAGA base still regards Trump as their leader — and Trump himself has made it clear that his dark political ambitions are far from vanquished. This is another reason why it’s vital for American democracy to convict Trump in the Senate — and then pursue him until the end of his days in state courts for his endless crimes. If Trump makes a political comeback, or if he acts as kingmaker (or rather dictator-maker) for a demagogue smarter than he is, then American democracy might finally die.
Under these dire circumstances, Democrats should hold their noses and cut a deal with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Yes, he’s an oozing pustule on the body politic, but McConnell also came to loathe Trump and rightly regards him as poison for the Republican future. Our only hope to convict Trump in the Senate next month — and to drive him from the electoral arena — is by cutting a deal with McConnell.
More important, the forces on the left — and I’m talking about everyone from antifa street fighters to liberal members of Congress — must stay mobilized and on high alert against further attacks on democracy. Those in the post-election progressive coalition who advised against sending Protect-the-Vote protesters into the streets as Trump attempted his coup were probably right. These counter-demonstrations might have played into Trump’s hands by allowing him to scream "Anarchy!” and declare martial law. The system — even Republican election officials — did hold. Democracy’s defenders didn’t have to pour into the streets this time, until Joe Biden was officially declared the victor — and then the demonstrations were dancing in the streets jubilation.
But there will be fire next time — and there WILL be a next time. And we can’t be caught soft and asleep. Yes, as I argued yesterday, channel your passion into the system now — keep pressuring the Biden administration to do the right thing, instead of adding to the nation’s sound and fury. But stand back and stand ready. If Biden fails or is foiled — and if the forces of fascism again threaten U.S. democracy — we must be prepared to fight.
Give Peace (and Biden) a Chance
I understand the continuing rage of the militants and anarchists in Seattle and Portland, one of whose leaders denounced Joe Biden as a “feckless” tool of the power elite, as radical protestors in those cities again took to the streets and battled with police. The Pacific Northwest has a LONG history of radical activism (see the recent novel, “The Cold Millions”). But now is the time for the American Left to channel its understandable fury into pushing the system forward, instead of further destabilizing it. The left-wing echoes of right-wing tropes in these recent protests (with radicals carrying the same “Not My President” signs that MAGA rioters wielded as they stormed the Capitol) were, to put it mildly, unnerving.
Yes, Joe Biden is a creature of the DNC, a longtime spear carrier for corporate centrism. But he also strikes me, at age 78 and after suffering more personal anguish than most Washington politicians, as a decent man who wants to lift America from its dark hole. Who wants an FDR-like legacy before he dies. A man who has already signaled in his first days in the White House that he will be a bolder, more progressive president than Obama or Clinton.
Should leftists therefore just pack up their battle gear and go home? No, that would leave the field to the MAGA army, which remains fully mobilized. But we need to engage with the Biden administration in forceful but constructive ways. This will not be easy for the left, which has been in combat mode (or AWOL from mainstream politics) for a long time. But it’s essential.
As I write in “By the Light of Burning Dreams,” the forthcoming book by my sister Margaret and me, nearly a half century ago Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda left their comfortable New Left bubble and harnessed the growing antiwar ardor of heartland America, slashed Congressional funding for the Vietnam War, and helped finally end that long conflict. Hayden and Fonda accomplished that historic feat, while other radical leaders were going underground or burning out, by learning to trust their fellow American again, and by building a coalition that included seven religious denominations, labor unions, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, veterans groups and farmers. In his memoir, “Reunion,” Hayden wrote of the night when their hard work finally paid off in the Capitol building. After cheering the war budget-cutting vote from the House balcony, Hayden and his Indochina Peace Campaign comrades “walked into a starry Washington night, thanking the heavens for our trust in the process.”
We need to revive Hayden’s and Fonda’s radical will to revive American democracy. And rebuilding a peace movement — to align itself with Black Lives Matter and the Sunrise environmental movements — should be a top priority. President Biden is off to a generally good start on social justice and the climate emergency because of strong grassroots pressure in those areas. But a nationwide peace movement is still missing in action. As as result, Biden’s national security appointments have been from the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party.
My point is that especially in areas where Biden is tilting right (like national security), we need to build broad coalitions and to pressure power — not just scream and trash in the streets. Tom Hayden was forced into the streets for a time, he was branded an “ideological criminal” by the Nixon administration and put on trial for conspiracy in Chicago. But then Nixon was toppled from power (with several of his top aides going to prison) and Hayden saw the historic opportunity to organize middle America and end an endless imperial war.
We need the same bold vision — and organizational discipline — today.
Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Warren?
Looking back on the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden was probably the only Democrat who could’ve beaten Trump (a depressing assessment of America’s political psyche), but Elizabeth Warren was clearly the best candidate to lead the country out of its economic morass. I understand why President Biden can’t pluck her out of the 50-50 Senate for his Cabinet or some other high post. (Massachusetts weirdly has a Republican governor who would tip the Senate back to Mitch McConnell’s control if Warren vacated her Senate seat.) But why did Senator Amy Klobuchar get picked as the host of the Inaugural ceremony instead of Warren? I’d much rather have seen the solid voice of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in that high-profile ceremonial role than the bland voice of Midwestern centrism — a woman who not only drew fewer Democratic primary votes than Warren, but had to drop out of the running for VP because of her racist record as a Minneapolis DA. (A woman of color who eagerly locked up black people when SHE was a prosecutor proved more politically acceptable.)
Elizabeth Warren came to mind again because a recent article in the January 18 issue of The New Yorker reminds us that Senator Warren has been fighting for working people for a long time. Back in 2015, she introduced the Schedules That Work Act, which would’ve prevented service employers from firing their workers for asking for regular hours and compelled them to give two-weeks notice of any changes to their schedules. “The bill never had a chance of passing,” Jill Lepore notes in the magazine. It never even came up for a vote in the Senate millionaires club, even after it was reintroduced in 2017 and 2019.
Warren has tilted at windmills on behalf of working people for many years. Even before she was in the Senate, she clashed with then Senator Biden over the crushing power that the credit card industry — which Biden championed — wielded over struggling Americans. Biden graciously gave her props for putting up a good (if losing) populist fight. Old Joe is nothing if not gracious, even when serving the financial elite. But now, as he tries to be the new FDR to revive America’s blasted economy, he needs to surround himself with true-blue progressives like Warren.
So, yes, keep Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, because we need every Democratic senator (especially progressive ones). But let’s also bring her into the White House limelight where she belongs as an influential economic advisor. Warren was a Biden loyalist when it counted, after she dropped out of the race, much to the fury of Bernie supporters. She was effusively loyal again after Biden’s inauguration, declaring, “Here we sit tonight, and we have a decent man as president of the United States, one who believes in the competency of government.”
It’s time for Biden to repay the compliments. Colorizing the Cabinet was a good move on Joe’s part. But he must also bring smart, aggressive progressives into his brain trust. It’s the only way he can deliver on his bold economic promises and undercut the phony populism of MAGA Republicanism.
Lovely Day One in the White House
That’s a beautiful picture of President Joe Biden (below), standing next to the new First Lady and holding his youngest grandchild, eight-month-old Beau (named after his dead oldest son). The Bidens seemed at home right away in the White House. (I hope it was properly fumigated to get rid of Covid contamination and exorcise the sulfurous fumes of the Trump cabal.) The nation’s first grandparents didn’t seem to miss the round of canceled inaugural balls; they didn’t need to slow dance like the sexy Obamas on their inaugural night. It was reassuring enough to have old Joe and Jill in the people’s house where they belong.
President Biden immediately signaled the reversal of the Trump reign by signing a flurry of executive orders and declarations aimed at ending “the Trump policies that were deeply inhumane and did not reflect our country’s values,” in the crisp words of new national security advisor, Jake Sullivan. Together, these 17 new presidential commands state that grandpa Joe actually cares about little Beau and the next generations of humanity. That singular lack of concern about future generations has been the dark hallmark not only of Donald Trump, but of Mitch McConnell and the entire Koch brothers’ corporate sponsorship of Republican rule. These rich and powerful men just don’t give a damn about future life on the planet, even their own flesh and blood, only their bottom lines and reelections.
So let’s take a minute to celebrate President Joe Biden’s day one, history-making flurry of proclamations — and the dawn of a new day in the United States and the world.
Here’s a partial list of what Biden accomplished yesterday with a wave of his presidential pen:
Returned the U.S. to the Paris climate accord; terminated the Keystone XL pipeline carrying dirty shale oil from Canada; rescinded Trump rollbacks to auto emission standards; imposed a moratorium on oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; reestablished a working group on the social costs of greenhouse gasses.
Established more coordination for federal response to the coronavirus pandemic; restored the directorate eliminated by Trump that oversaw global health threats; terminated Trump’s efforts to leave the World Health Organization, sending Dr. Anthony Fauci to a WHO executive board meeting today.
Overturned Trump’s ban on travelers from Muslim countries; protected DACA “Dreamers” from deportation and established a path to citizenship for other immigrants; reversed Trump order to exclude noncitizens from the census count; stopped construction of Trump’s Mexican border wall.
Directed federal agencies to make equity a top priority and eliminate systematic racism; canceled Trump’s 1776 Commission, which attempted to rewrite American history and whitewash the national stain of slavery.
Extended a federal ban on evictions and foreclosures; called for Congress to cancel up to $10,000 in individual student debt.
Now it’s our job to continue pushing the Biden-Harris administration to keep doing the right thing — against the iron resistance of the GOP-corporate lobby that has already begun the fight. We have to win — for all of our little Beaus.
America, the Infomercial
Yes, I was often moved today — how could you not be? Four years ago, I was watching in shock and horror as Donald Trump (!) was sworn in as president. Today, as Van Jones put it, in addition to Joe Biden’s at times stirring speech about the need for national unity (while also crushing white nationalist extremism), America’s “cultural firepower was back on line.” After the cultural wasteland that began on Trump’s inauguration day, when to his fury he couldn’t get any A-list entertainers to celebrate his takeover, we were treated on Joe and Kamala’s day to an all-star cast.
Some of this evening’s highlights for me: Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters singing “Times Like These.” Yo-Yo Ma playing “Amazing Grace” (but one rendition of this overused hymn would’ve been enough), and whoever sang Leonard Cohen’s equally omnipresent “Hallelujah.” Fran Lebowitz says there’s no such thing as guilty pleasures — why feel bad about something that makes you feel good? — but I also took guilty pleasure in John Legend singing Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and Justin Timberlake and Ant Clemens teaming up on “Better Days.” OK, and even Jon Bon Jovi’s rendition of “Here Comes the Sun.” Hey, I wanted to feel good tonight. We all did.
But still, thanks to Jake Tapper for keeping it real tonight. While even Van Jones was sounding heavily dosed with X (“after the rain comes the rainbow” — yeah, man), Tapper was the only CNN talking head to point out some dark truths. There was no peaceful transition this time, like his happy-talk colleagues kept chirping. People died just two weeks ago at the Capitol crime scene. Tapper said he didn’t want to be Professor Buzzkill, but he also pointed out that “if we whitewash what happened, it can happen again. And next time, it could work.” Indeed, Tapper continued, if it weren’t for a handful of decent and honorable state officials around the country, Trump could’ve stolen the election and turned America into a dictatorship.
So yes, fireworks good. The Black Pumas — an Austin band I never heard before tonight — good. Essential frontline workers, diligent schoolteachers, kids who bundle care packages for elderly shut-ins… all very good. But fascism bad. And the wolf is lurking out there, maybe even next door. If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deliver on their promises to a devastated America, then democracy triumphs. But if this administration stumbles or sells out, then Trump was just the dress rehearsal, the comic relief before the real horror.
The Biden inauguration’s missing verses
Even when America is on its best behavior, as it was today in Washington for Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration (ding dong, the Don is dead), there’s something always left out. Yes, Biden hit many fine notes during his speech (more on that later) before he collapsed near the end in a mishmash of rhetorical cliches. But the celebrity high points came during Lady Gaga’s triumphant version of “The Star Spangled Banner” (wisely she left out Francis Scott Key’s vituperatively racist stanza about hunting down slaves who sided with the British during the War of 1812) and J-Lo’s tacky medley of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land"” and “America the Beautiful.” J-Lo also left out a couple key verses from the classic Guthrie folk song — the same ones that have been excised from the schoolroom version of the song which has become an alternative national anthem. The missing verses from the song. which Guthrie wrote during the Great Depression, seem strongly relevant these grim days. So let’s remember them here:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said: 'Private Property.'
But on the backside, it didn't say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I saw my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me?
Book of the Week
I’m starting to think of the Show as small-scale Salon, the politics and arts publication I started with a group of of other disgruntled dreamers back at the dawn of the dotcom era. Salon was originally conceived as a books journal, because we felt that even then books didn’t receive enough media attention, and that you could write about the entire universe by writing about books. The publishing industry keeps churning out books, but little effort or money is spent on marketing them — and as book sections disappear or downsize, only the top commercial titles get much attention.
So the Show will do its small public service each week by bringing your attention to the one book (some weeks maybe more) that avid readers should know about. You can help out by alerting fellow readers in the Comments Section below to books you’ve recently enjoyed.
Some of the books that we’ll be highlighting here are written by friends or authors I know. But I wouldn’t highlight them unless they were worthy of your attention. This is true of today’s Book of the Week. Author Philip Gefter is a friend of many years. I’ve been honored to know some very talented people. The author of this review, Karen Croft, is also a longtime friend — and colleague — of mine. I’m very pleased to welcome her today as a guest to the Show.
What Becomes a Legend Most
A Biography of Richard Avedon
By Philip Gefter
HarperCollins, 2020
Reviewed by Karen Croft
Once upon a time, not everyone took photographs all the time.
This book is about that time—following the Second World War—when great artists walked the streets and knew each other and were regularly featured in glossy magazines. The photography in those publications (Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and many other coffee table galleries) were not just shiny—they were often a hybrid of editorial, commercial and art work that is hard to find today.
This kind of photography was not about “taking pictures” as much as “making” pictures—after much thought and preparation, and with painstaking technical and artistic skill in processing and editing them afterwards.
For students and lovers of photography, Philip Gefter (a writer and editor at the New York Times for more than 15 years) has composed a biography of one of photography’s greatest practitioners. Gefter’s intelligent—often philosophically poetic—prose is delicious, making this a rich peek into a lost world.
But even if you think you don’t care about photography, this is a great American success story—complete with the angst and tragedy that implies—and perfect therapy for the harsh times through which we’re suffering today. It is encouraging, and calming somehow, to read about a time when hard work, years of experience and deep talent actually mattered—and was valued in America.
“What Becomes a Legend Most” (a reference to one of Avedon’s most famous ad campaigns) is a biography told through a series of sharply observed stories that portray a man who was in the right place at the right time, and knew how to take full advantage of it.
In 1955, Avedon was in Paris shooting for Harper’s Bazaar on the set of the movie “Trapeze” starring Burt Lancaster, which was filming at the Winter Circus. Avedon met the animal trainer, whom he cajoled into lining up elephants (!) as a backdrop for the lithe model Dovima (in YSL for Christian Dior of course). The logistics seem impossible and so does the perfection of the photos; they are as astounding as the inspiration to create them.
https://www.avedonfoundation.org/the-work
Gefter allows us to wallow in the luxury of mid-century creativity, when mere mortals lived on the same planet with the likes of Francis Bacon, Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev, Leonard Bernstein, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, and the Beatles. Each vignette is more incredible than the last, as Avedon—who was regarded as an obsessively controlling studio photographer—moves through the world seemingly destined to run into the most photogenic and fascinating talents of his time.
Avedon happened to be in Paris in 1961, when Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union. Asked to take publicity photos by a mutual friend, he agreed on the condition he could use them for Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon then banished everyone from a studio he had rented, and spent hours with the dancer, establishing a rapport based on mutual passion for the arts, and made pictures (there and later in New York) which are Michelangelo-like in their rapturous portrayal of the sculpted male body.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/08/wild-thing-2
Earlier that same year, Avedon was in Palm Beach to photograph John F. Kennedy before his presidential inauguration. It was January 3, the day the US officially severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Kennedy was absorbed in communications with President Eisenhower’s office as Avedon set up his equipment. Secret Service men and stylists filled the room as JFK dictated memos to his secretary. Avedon later said of President-elect Kennedy: “When I’d ask him to look around, he’d stop dictating. But the moment I finished he’d start in where he left off. I’ve never seen such a display of mental control in my life.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2011/01/03/132616931/kennedys
Avedon also took riskier trips. In 1971, he went to Vietnam to work on a project of his own. He called it “Hard Times,” saying, “All the people I have photographed in the last year and a half have been affected by Vietnam—as has all of American life. Vietnam is an extension—oh, unfortunately—of every sick thing in America.” He was dropped into the jungle to join a U.S. infantry platoon. Later, he waited seven weeks in steamy, decadent Saigon to shoot “The Mission Council”—the PR group for the war—which he considered his definitive portrait of U.S imperial power.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/55502
Richard Avedon, a native New Yorker, died in 2004 at 81, after living through and chronicling one of the most fascinating epochs in history. As Gefter says of Avedon’s work: “It is a remarkable collective observation—a large artistic gesture across the American century.”
You can buy the book here
The Winter of Democracy
In Washington DC, over 20,000 soldiers occupy the capital the day before our unpeaceful presidential transition, while Trump — in his last hours in the White House — frantically stuffs the Defense Department, NSA and CIA with loyal moles, executes as many poor and black people as he can, and sells pardons to war criminals and rich felons at a closing day clip. In Russia, the astonishingly courageous dissident Aleksei Navalny gets thrown in prison again, following a kangaroo court hearing in a police station, immediately after he arrives home from a German hospital where he miraculously escaped death at the hands of Putin poisoners. Meanwhile, in Uganda, former rap star Bobi Wine is imprisoned inside his gated compound after challenging the suspicious election victory of Dictator for Life Museveni. Democracy is always a wilting flower, barely kept alive by a few heroic leaders and the people’s stubborn will.
The American people were aroused in 2020 — and remain so into 2021. Millions of people still fervently believe in the cartoon fascism of Donald Trump — a blind loyalty that bared its fangs on January 6. Meanwhile, record umbers of people — even in Georgia, God bless them — turned out at the polls to topple the toxic reign of Trump and Mitch McConnell. The electorate for and against democracy has never been so mobilized in my lifetime.
And now what about the Biden presidency? Will progressives go to sleep again, like we did after Barack Obama’s election? We know how that slumber turned into a national nightmare. Or will we stay mobilized, pressuring Biden to deliver on his economic, environmental and social promises — i.e. his progressive agenda, the only way to demobilize Trump’s populist base?
Putin’s Russia, Museveni’s Uganda — we were only two or three state vote counts away from continuing in that dark direction under a second Trump administration. The threat is still there — we can see it in the number of active-duty, reservist or retired military officers and soldiers involved in the bloody Capitol riot; in the far-right echo chamber that keeps alive the stab-in-the-back lies about the election; the members of Congress who pack guns and embrace wild QAnon theories about the world; and the ruthless demagogues who are willing to say or do anything to become the next Donald Trump.
Lady Liberty or the Tiger? The choice is still in the hands of the American people.
“But I thought David Talbot is rich”
Um, sadly no, I’m not. And yes, that’s another reason you should donate $25 today (or $50 if you’re a big spender) to keep this little ship afloat. I know, I know — we just survived an Election Year, and politicians are STILL begging us for cash. Then there’s the pandemic, which has devastated our economy and left many of us scraping for food and rent. There are many demands on our limited funds.
But here’s the thing: we need an independent flow of information and ideas. That’s the lifeblood of free societies — that’s how they live or die. So, along with contributions to my favorite candidates (and, hey, we did pretty well in recent months), I’ve decided to pay my share for The Guardian, Common Dreams, Democracy Now, 48 Hills, Journal of the Plague Year and other publications I frequently read. I’m also mulling over subscribing to the newsletter of Matt Taibbi, whose reporting and insights I’ve valued over the years.
It took me years to finally get off Facebook, and I still use it as a redirect page, so I’m not going to lecture you about the evils of the social media giants. (The New York Times has at least two pieces today about how Facebook and Twitter enabled the metastasizing white nationalist Trump culture.) But you should know that I’m no longer going to join the conversations on my Facebook page. I’m determined to recreate the liveliness of that chatter on these pages. Here at the David Talbot Show we’re just one click away — so join us.
Now, back to my fortunes as a journalist and author — or lack thereof. This is not a whine. How tedious that would be. I made my choices in life, to remain outside the velvet coffin of corporate journalism, and I’ve been happy to live with the consequences. Even my beleaguered family adjusted to the ups and downs of this life. So this is simply a factual report on the bank account of an independent media maker.
It’s true that I’m the son of a once-famous Hollywood actor, Lyle Talbot. (That’s Lyle below with Loretta Young, one of his real-life romantic companions, in “She Had to Say Yes,” a racy, pre-Code movie.) And my late father had his flush years, as well as his lean ones. Hey, he was an ACTOR. I read somewhere while he was still doing the occasional TV show that something like only 5 percent of the membership of the Screen Actors Guild (which he cofounded back during the Great Depression) actually made a living from acting. So I was amazed that my dad was able to keep the roof over our family of six (sometimes barely). And when he died at the advanced age of 94, after a very full life (read all about it in my sister Margaret Talbot’s lively biography, “The Entertainer”), Lyle was able to leave each of his four children with an inheritance of $50,000.
Most of my windfall promptly went to paying off debts that my wife Camille and I had accrued as we built our own family. But easy come, easy go. My father, who was a bit like Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, always echoed him during hard times in his show biz career. “Something will turn up,” he’d confidently say.
Camille and I often echo his plucky remarks whenever we’ve hit a challenging time: when I leapt into the unknown in 1995 to start Salon, despite nagging debts and mortgage and young kids; when I had to borrow money to finish “The Devil’s Chessboard”; when I had my stroke and Camille had to indefinitely delay her own book to care for me. No one got rich off Salon, including me. We were always a prayer away from bankruptcy, despite all the dotcom hype. And I’m here to tall you that earning bragging rights as a “New York Times best-selling author” (twice) doesn’t earn you a dime in royalties. But through it all, our mantra remained “Something will turn up” — and it almost always has.
That’s why I’m still doing what I do — voicing news and opinions that seldom get aired, and giving others a platform to do the same. If we stick together, if we help each other thrive, we’ll never be silenced. Please donate today. The Show must go on.
Biden Beat Trump… and Now Obama?
During his first days and weeks in the White House, Joe Biden is signaling that he will go bigger than he and President Obama did during the economic collapse of 2008-9. Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion relief package, if it gets through Congress relatively intact, will immunize 100 million Americans in 100 days against the rampaging coronavirus, put $1,400 more dollars in the hands of Americans, expand Obamacare by making it more affordable, rescue flailing local and state governments, and help schools open classrooms again by making them safer. On the global level, Biden is promising that the U.S. will immediately rejoin the civilized international order by embracing the Paris accord and making the climate crisis a top priority, rescinding the travel ban on Muslim countries, and reuniting children caged at the Mexican border with their families.
Biden can be another FDR, as he’s been promising, because the post-Trump times seem even more devastated than the economic crisis that President Obama inherited from George W. Bush. Biden is also the first Capitol Hill creature to take over the White House in decades, so even Republicans are praising his deft touch as a “finger-tip politician.” The GOP, of course, has its own deep problems — but while the party sorts out its post-Trump identity, some Republican legislators might find it useful to be seen as being cooperative with can-do Joe during a medical and political crisis that has torn apart the country.
Biden, as opposed to the more cerebral Obama, seems like the right POTUS for these wrong times. Obama, as the the first African American president, was also under more pressure to appease the political establishment — and power centers like Wall Street — than Biden will be. Biden is poised to use his crisis as more of an opportunity, funneling government aid to the people who really need it, not just to the big banks.
I was a Bernie-Elizabeth Warren enthusiast. Both of these Democratic candidates thought much bigger than Biden on the campaign trail, and I was excited at the prospect of either one of them going all the way. But Democratic primary voters — traumatized by Trump — decided that old Joe was the best shot at winning in 2020. And they were right. Now Joe Biden also seems like the best hope we have for redirecting America and actually getting some big legislation through Washington’s long gridlock.
Go. Joe, go. Three cheers from the left of the Democratic Party as you get sworn in this week and pursue the art of the possible.
Farewell, Margo St. James
San Francisco has lost another legend — sex worker rights advocate Margo St. James. There are coyotes roaming the streets of the virus-blasted city these days, but no more COYO)TE (Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics), the prostitutes union founded by St. James in 1973. With each death of a monumental figure from San Francisco’s wild years, the howl continues to fade in the city. I knew many of these larger-than-life characters, through my newspaper work or demimonde wanderings — or from writing “Season of the Witch,” for which St. James sat for a long interview. Carol Doda, Patrick and Terry Hallinan, Marty Balin, Spain Rodriguez.. I miss you all and the city loses more of its luster with each fadeout.
The obits have been filled with many of Margo’s greatest hits, and I won’t repeat them here. But allow me to stress what a tough, politically astute woman she was under the smiling, farm-girl veneer. Among her clients back in the day were members of the San Francisco police force — good Catholic boys who nevertheless used the services of St. James or her colleagues. One night, a friend of hers on the force tipped her off that disgruntled cops were going to kill progressive Police Chief Charles Gain that night. St. James tracked him down at a local college where he was scheduled to give a speech and told him to go home, “The cops are going to bump you off,” she warned the police chief.
St. James was able to save Chief Gain’s life — but not that of Mayor George Moscone, who had hired him, or his progressive ally Supervisor Harvey Milk, both of whom were assassinated by ex-cop Dan White in 1978.
Margo St. James’s more colorful antics got her regularly in Herb Caen’s column. But she was a serious if eccentric and unpredictable woman. Late in life, she married newspaper reporter Paul Avery, another gutsy San Franciscan who had pissed off dangerous people, including the cops and the increasingly unhinged Black Panther leader Huey Newton. I knew Paul too, briefly working as his editor in the colorful San Francisco Examiner newsroom — though nobody could really manage the buccaneering Avery, who continued to smoke himself to death through wracking, lung-scraping coughs.
Margo St. James… Paul Avery… they don’t make them that way anymore in the City by the Bay. Her ashes will be spread with Avery’s on her beloved Orcas Island during a ceremony this summer. (That’s Margo in the middle with supporter Jane Fonda.)
“Thank you, but fuck you for being there.”
That’s Washington DC Metropolitan police officer Michael Fanone in an interview with CNN. And that is exactly the right response to the Capitol rioters who were preparing to kill Fanone with his own gun, after yanking him into their mosh pit by his helmet. Fanone, a 40-year-old father of four who suffered a mild heart attack during the melee, wrestled for his life with the stormtroopers. “It was like a medieval battle scene,” said Fanone, one of the outnumbered riot cops who faced thousands of Trump attackers outside the Capitol on January 6. The desperate Fanone finally pleaded that “I have kids” — and a few of his tormentors took pity on him and escorted him back to police lines. So, yes, thank you — but fuck you.
I believe that our shattered U.S. democracy needs a strong dose of law and order now — or the next assault on our system of government will be even more catastrophic. So, yes, power to the FBI agents who are now rounding up the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, QAnon quacks and other fanatics who violently overran the Capitol building last week — some with murderous intent.
And all power to a righteously furious Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who announced yesterday that she not only intends to hold Trump accountable for incitement, but any members of Congress who were accomplices of the bloodthirsty mob. The snakes are clearly in the marble halls of Washington, not just swarming outside. And Congressional leaders need to impose law and order in their own building first and foremost. Any fanatic who whipped up the mob, gave them directions and targets, tries to carry firearms onto the floor of the House or in any other way defaces or disgraces democracy needs to be removed from Congress and prosecuted.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/01/15/dc-police-officers-capitol-riot-prokupecz-newday-vpx.cnn
The Best Movie of the New Year
“One Night in Miami” is a dazzling word display, based on a true meeting between Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Cassius Clay — on the night in February 1964 when the 22-year-old boxer beat Sonny Liston to become world champ (and would soon become Muhammad Ali). With a screenplay by Kemp Powers based on his play and directed by the great actress Regina King, “One Night in Miami” is more than a harmonic clash and convergence of four American icons — it’s a deeply moving love letter to African American men. The film portrays Malcolm X as a vulnerable and haunted man, instead of the steely orator who inspired a new generation of black men and women and struck fear into white America.
British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir turns in the film’s standout performance as Malcolm, who was facing the combined wrath of the Nation of Islam leaders, from whom he was breaking at the time, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI — and this malevolent alliance would assassinate him the following year. I loved reading in today’s San Francisco Chronicle how Ben-Adir — during his research for his role — tapped into Malcolm’s bravery and anguish: “The most important conversation I came across was Malcolm with (comedian and activist) Dick Gregory that around this time he felt weak, he felt hollow and that no one knew the torments that he went through.”
The movie ends with this prophetic quote from Malcolm: “It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country."
The film just premiered on Amazon’s Prime Video.
Leftists for Trump
Yes, there were some… among them friends and former colleagues of mine. Some still might have Trump’s back — I don’t know because I haven’t canvassed them all. (Maybe I don’t want to know.) Yes, Adam Walinsky — the former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy — caused a big public uproar back in 2016 by declaring he would vote for Trump out of understandable disgust with the Democratic Party embrace of the permanent war state. Yes, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was asked by President-elect Trump to join his anti-vax campaign and last summer he spoke at an anti-shutdown rally in Berlin that included white nationalist extremists. (But Bobby Jr. also denounced Trump as a “bully” during the 2020 presidential race and made clear he was going to vote Democratic.) Glenn Greenwald, who came to prominence as a columnist for Salon (the independent online publication I founded in 1995), announced he was forced out of The Intercept last year for his critical coverage of Hunter Biden and became a favorite guest of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Oliver Stone, while denouncing Trump as a raging narcissist, has also embraced Vladimir Putin and the Trumpian attack on “cancel culture.” Longtime critics of the deep state like Peter Dale Scott — a mentor as well as a friend — welcomed Trump’s skeptical view of the military-industrial complex (which the president hypocritically further enriched and empowered), his withdrawal of troops from the Middle East, and his refusal to be badgered by the national security state and the mainstream media into another Cold War with Russia.
People (especially thoughtful, open-minded people) aren’t just one thing. We should allow for complexity — yes, even when it comes to opinions of tyrants like Trump who are “clear and present” dangers to democracy (at least for a few more days). And just because we sided with the likes of David Frum and John Brennan in our furious resistance against Trump, doesn’t prevent us from resuming our attacks on these men as the former apparatchiks of — and continuing apologists for — U.S. terror.
The American Left has been politically marginalized for so long that sometimes our leaders and intellectuals lose their balance and join arms with sketchy characters or populist movements. We should criticize these people when they lose their way, but we should also remember that in most respects they are still our friends and allies. I trust these left-wing mavericks more than Liz Cheney or Bill Kristol or any of the other neocon warmongers that CNN and MSNBC now embrace.
WTF Is Going On?
All the pundits and scholars are trying to figure out these holy-shit times. The New York Times checks in with historians like Jay Winik and Timothy Snyder. CNN and MSNBC regularly check with Doris Kearns Goodwin (lose the bad wig!), Michael Beschloss (lose the shoe-polish hair dye!) and Douglas Brinkley. These historians all say we’re living through, um, “historic” times. Thanks for your insight! For the deepest insights, I read actual history books — or literature.
Last night I finished “Red Pill,” the latest novel by Indian-British writer Hari Kunzru, who now lives with his wife and two young children in Brooklyn. The novel is a timely, disturbing evocation of the growing political and psychological menace of our times. The protagonist of the novel, a New York writer with a febrile sense of the billowing danger around him, comes undone while attending a scholarly retreat in Berlin — in a historically haunted mansion on the shores of Lake Wannsee, near where the Final Solution was devised by the demonic visionaries of the Third Reich. Our narrator meets the mind-fucking creator of a popular TV show that glorifies the purging violence of rogue cops; he witnesses the refugee lives that await millions of us as the world’s social and environmental order collapses; he feels targeted by the billowing technological authoritarianism of our day. He stares into the abyss, and he loses it.
Near the end of “Red Pill,” our narrator is back in New York with his deeply worried wife and their young daughter, being pieced together by anti-psychotic drugs and a baby boomer-era shrink who doesn’t get it. He “thinks too much” — life is not so labyrinthine, the psychiatrist in “a long heavy skirt and silver Indian jewelry” blithely tells him. He tries to resist. “I told her that what she said might once have been true, but the internet had changed things. There were underground currents, new modes of propagation. It wasn’t even a question of ideas, not straight-forwardly, but feelings, atmospheres, yearnings, threats. What kind of threats, she wanted to know. Well, I said. A lot of people quibbled about terms, but essentially I was talking about Fascism… I saw that I had no hope of persuading her. She was too old, too insulated by her degrees and her shelves of books. I was being, she told me blandly, rather melodramatic about what was essentially a marginal set of ideas. We weren’t living in Weimar Germany.”
“Red Pill” concludes with a 20016 presidential election party where the liberal New Yorkers begin the evening quaffing Champagne and donning ironic party hats, but by the end have descended into a horror show. Late that night, as Trump slouches toward his Electoral College victory, the narrator lies awake in bed, clutching his wife and young daughter. It’s a stormy night in New York. “Outside the wide world is howling and scratching at the window. Tomorrow morning we have no choice but to let it in.”
And now, over four years later, the nightmare is finally over. Or is it? The “carnage” that Trump ferociously declared had taken over America really now is consuming us as his reign spits and crackles to its smoking end. Over 4,000 American a day still dying from the plague that he made worse; National Guardsmen with automatic weapons crowded into the marble grandeur of the Capitol; barking mad Congress members like Lauren Boebert of Colorado, yelling shrilly that “I call bull crap on Democrats” during yesterday’s impeachment “debate,” like some emotionally distraught high schooler.
Let’s stick with Boebert for a moment — because no matter what now happens to Trump, political leaders like Boebert and the Americans they represent aren’t going anywhere. Before winning her upset Congressional victory, Boebert ran a restaurant in rural Colorado where she encouraged her waiters to openly carry guns. Just because. She has expressed sympathies for the bizarre beliefs of the QAnon cult. While Capitol security anxiously rushed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to a secure location during the January 6 violent invasion, Boebert tweeted news of her escape. “Today is 1776,” Boebert crowed on the bloody day in Washington. Instead of hiding away Boebert during the impeachment proceedings yesterday — perhaps with her legal team to prepare her own defense against sedition and incitement charges — the Republican leadership in the House gave her an on-camera platform to air her ravings.
So, yes, I’m afraid the carnage will not end on January 20. I will celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden and that of Kamala Harris. But we all have to sleep lightly these nights. The wind is still howling and scratching at our window.
Postscript: You needn’t bother with Kunzru’s meandering, confusing essay about our fraught times in the current Harper’s. His fiction gets much deeper into the American malaise than his journalism.
The Speaker Has Spoken
Nancy Pelosi is my Congressional representative. I’ve not always been happy with her. Sometimes she struck me as more of a bag woman for Democratic coffers than a tribune of San Francisco values. I even voted against her one or two times during the Democratic primary, as a protest against her endless reign. But I’ve never been prouder of my Congresswoman than during the last week.
Democracy, as I’ve written many times, is a fragile eggshell in the tumult of history. And American history has seldom been as tumultuous as it’s been in recent months and days. During these times, we need strong leadership — power that recognizes it’s founded in the majority will of the people. Fortunately for our beleaguered, bleeding country, we have leadership like that now. In representatives like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jerry Nadler of New York.
Opening the impeachment debate today on the House floor, Speaker Pelosi solemnly declared that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our country” and “feeling his power slip away,” she declared, he unleashed a mob on the sanctity of the Capitol to terminate “nearly two and a half centuries of democracy” in “a fiery clash.”
Pelosi was firm in her constitutional certainty, but also in a state of mourning for what America has become. She wore, appropriately, a dark blue suit that was nearly funereal. And she invoked the hallowed words of assassinated martyrs Lincoln and Kennedy.
We now know how dark a day that January 6 was. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the primary targets of the bloodthirsty insurrectionists, just declared she feared for her life, adding she was unable to provide further details for security reasons. The aim of some militants was clearly to decapitate not only the leaders of the Democratic Party, but any Republicans they deemed traitors to Trump’s cause.
So when Nancy Pelosi tells Pentagon officials to man up and approve the carrying of weapons by the National Guard troops now protecting the Capitol building in advance of next week’s presidential inauguration, I’m all for it. I’m also for increased security in state capitals around the country — especially in Lansing, Michigan where goons planned to kidnap the governor and where the statehouse was invaded by apes with long guns to protest coronavirus public health mandates. The ire of these unhinged militia types is often directed against women in office, with the Capitol mob chanting last week to get “that bitch” and “cunt” Pelosi. Misogyny and fascism often go hand in hand.
But yes, we also have to guard against 9/11 fervor and block any legislative hysteria aimed at rolling back the rights of peaceful protesters. Trying to exploit public horror over January 6, some state legislatures — unsurprisingly in Mississippi and Indiana, and elsewhere — are trying now to penalize BLM activists. https://theintercept.com/2021/01/12/capitol-riot-anti-protest-blm-laws/
So yes — let’s get armored to defend democracy. But never forget the values that we’re defending.
The Devil and Mr. McConnell
For years he made a profitable deal with the Devil. In return for his loyal, even blind support, he got his judges, his tax cuts for the super rich, his wife in the Cabinet, his pork for Kentucky. But after making good use of the Great Satan in the White House, Mitch McConnell is now ready to “purge” his Republican Party of Donald Trump, according to this evening’s New York Times. The Senate Majority Leader (for a few more days) reportedly “hates” Trump for inciting a mob to trash the Capitol — which McConnell thinks of as HIS house. And his rumpus with Georgia Republicans also cost McConnell his Senate throne. So it’s little wonder that, according to the Times, McConnell is now ready to vote for Trump’s impeachment — along with other major Capitol Hill Republicans like Rep. Liz Cheney, her party’s number three official in the House.
So are McConnell and Cheney and the other rats scurrying from the sinking ship now heroes? Well, I’ll let out one big cheer for them — because Trump might be walking dead, but he’s still a dangerous zombie. And he needs several stakes driven through where his heart should be. There are still many thousands of Trump fanatics who are willing to throw themselves against the enhanced security of the nation’s capital — as well as numerous state capitols — on Inauguration Day. And there are still Congressional crazies like Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama and Paul Gosar of Arizona, who urged on the Trump barbarians last week and are STILL unrepentant seditionists. So yes, one cheer today for Mitch McConnell… and a bigger one if he really does vote for impeachment.
But let’s not forget that McConnell was Trump’s biggest enabler in Washington for four years. It took him fearing for his life — a fear that his black constituents must feel every time they cross paths with the police or confront the white militants who proudly displayed the Confederate and Trump flags last week in McConnell’s “sacred” Capitol building.
Yes, McConnell himself was a Satanist until Satan does what he does and went a little too far.
The Smiling Policeman
His son Marcus remembers his “indomitable smile. No matter what came at him, he had that smile.” And a LOT came at Prentice Earl Sanders during his nearly four decades as a San Francisco homicide detective, a career capped by his stint in the 1990s as the city’s first African American police chief. Along the way, Sanders — who died on Monday at 83 — had to fight his way for respect, even in liberal SF. Here’s how I quoted Sanders , who was born in Jim Crow-era Texas, in my book “Season of the Witch”:
“There wasn’t some scowling cracker on the other end of the whip. In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile. Like they were doing you a favor when they told you they didn’t have any jobs open after you’d seen half a dozen white guys fill out applications, or you couldn’t buy a house, when they’d just sold one to a white guy who made less money.”
During his storied career as an SFPD homicide cop, during which he was paired with other legends like Rotea Gilford and Napoleon Hendrix, Sanders had to fight for justice within the department and on the streets. In my chapter about the Zebra serial murder case in the 1970s, during which a small Nation of Islam death cult targeted white victims and pushed the city of tolerance to the brink, I tell how Sanders kept his cool throughout the powder-keg times. As he and his partner Gilford pursued the Zebra killers, they could feel the racial tension building all around them, sensing “the whole place could go up in smoke.” During the city’s disastrous experiment with a “stop and frisk” policy aimed at black men, Sanders even had to intervene to stop a confrontation between Gilford and brutal white cops from exploding in gunfire.
I was gratified to read in the SF Chronicle obit that Earl Sanders often had a book in his hands. His grandson Prentice, whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, has a similar love of books. Prentice — who is a friend of my son Joe, costarred in his short film “American Paradise,” and helped develop the feature “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” — often was reading a book while he was visiting or crashing at our house. As soon as I recommended a book to Prentice from our library, he would devour it and engage me in conversation about it.
Earl Sanders belongs to a legendary time in San Francisco history — and as these lions disappear, the city seems smaller. But I’m counting on the younger ones like Prentice and Joe to keep the city’s flame burning.
