Movie of the Week… And Coming Attractions
Judas and the Black Messiah, now streaming on HBO Max, is like a disturbing, suppressed memory. For over 50 years, the execution of rising Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton by a death squad organized by FBI and Chicago law enforcement officials, has been a tell-tale heart buried in America’s violent history. The 21-year-old charismatic Panther preached a socialist vision of the future that united exploited people of all colors. “White power to white people,” he would chant. “Brown power to brown people. Yellow power to yellow people. Black power to black people.” Hampton was trying to build a rainbow coalition, denouncing racism as a capitalist ploy to divide and conquer people, when he was assassinated in his bed early one morning in December 1969 by Chicago lawmen. Hampton’s messianic story — and his betrayal by his bodyguard, William O’Neal, who turned out to be an FBI informer — is so compelling that it drives the film relentlessly along its narrative path.
Judas and the Black Messiah is shot by young director Shaka King in a gritty, realistic style and features some gripping performances, chiefly that of LaKeith Stanfield, whose rabbity yet proud portrayal of the snitch O’Neal steals the show. The less powerful performance by Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton is a serious but not fatal flaw. Perhaps it’s time for U.S. filmmakers to admit that British actors can’t pull off every American role. The real Fred Hampton was a bigger, more commanding figure in all ways than Kaluuya manages onscreen — as this old video footage of a Hampton speech demonstrates.
It’s so darkly thrilling to see some of America’s long-disappeared history finally get dramatic exposure. The truth is that U.S. security officials acted like ruthless Maoists during the 1960s, on the principle that power comes from the barrel of a gun. Men like the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover (played in the film with excessive zeal by Martin Sheen) and the CIA’s Allen Dulles decided, in concert with other powerful officials, that charismatic leaders like the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton needed to be eliminated in the interests of national security. The U.S. establishment, including the mainstream media, still has a hard time admitting how bloody the official reaction was to the progressive upheavals of the ‘60s.
So the powerful Judas and the Black Messiah is a welcome corrective to years of historical cover-ups. Let the truth-telling continue.
Coming Attractions… I have five more copies of my forthcoming book, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution (co-authored with Margaret Talbot) which I’ll be giving away FREE to the five people who move quickest to donate $50 to The David Talbot Show. Act now and after making your $50 donation, email your name and address to david@talbotplayers.com for a free book when it’s published in June…
Speaking of the heroic radicalism of the past (and the Talbot family), I’m pleased to announce the making of the documentary The Movement and the Madman by my brother Steve, a longtime, award-winning PBS producer. You can view the trailer here…
My friends have also been busy in lockdown. I’m looking forward to the imminent release of Zoe Carter’s new album Waterlines. One of my fondest pre-pandemic memories is when Zoe dropped into a small dinner party that my wife and I were hosting and ended up playing some Van Morrison and John Prine tunes in our living room on her acoustic guitar. She’s a very talented singer. You can pre-order Zoe’s album here…
And finally, congratulations to Carla Malden, a fellow product of Oakwood School and Old Hollywood, on the publication of her new novel, Shine Until Tomorrow. With its theme of time-machine-travel to San Francisco in the ‘60s, Carla’s novel is right up my paisley alley. You can order the book here.
Joe and Bernie and Donald and Gavin and Wiener… The Friday Grab Bag!
Random thoughts and epiphanies… Bernie Sanders doesn’t like sharp-tongued Neera Tanden, Joe Biden’s nominee for budget czar. But Bernie sure loves Joe, whom he sees as the second coming of FDR. Sanders, who now wields his own power not only as the leader of the Capitol Hill left but as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, says he’s pals with Joe, who keeps his White House door open for him. “He sees the progressive movement as a strong part of his coalition,” enthuses Bernie. NY Times pundit Paul Krugman also applauds the way that President Biden is going big with economic relief and infrastructure rebuilding. In fact, the only voices on the left who are critical of Biden so far seem petty and marginalized. Keep going big, Joe, and keep channeling your inner Bernie (or FDR) and you’ll keep the left wing of your party happy…
As Senate Republicans prepare to again absolve Donald Trump of his crimes – even after he incited a mob to hang his vice president and bludgeon their Congressional colleagues – the GOP can now officially be designated a domestic terrorist organization. As he broods in Florida exile, like other deposed dictators over the years, Trump insists he is still leader of the Republican Party. And Senate Republicans weirdly agree, even though it ensures their party’s continued collapse. Let them keep embracing their corpse of a leader. Their necrophilia will be their doom…
I’ve been ranting lately about the crazy cancel crusade of the San Francisco Board of Education. I’ve also not been happy with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s feckless leadership, which the pandemic brought into stark relief. Gavin is at his best when he’s playing to the crowd and he’s not plagued by crises. But New York Times editorialist Ezra Klein is right – the Golden State’s political leaders too often talk a good game but don’t deliver. Klein, however, is under the neoliberal delusion that State Senator Scott Wiener is somehow a political hero, because he keeps trying to push through legislation in Sacramento that would create denser housing around public transit stations. Yes, the Bay Area and the entire state have a serious NIMBY problem that blocks housing development and other big projects. But Wiener’s legislative “solution” to the state’s severe housing crisis is actually a giveaway to the real estate lobby, his major corporate sponsors. Sorry Ezra, but Scott Wiener – who always wants windfalls for wealthy developers, even as he talks about “housing for the people” – is as big a dick as they come in California politics. And his pro-developer legislation keeps getting defeated for good reason…
Speaking of Klein’s editorial, here’s a depressing statistic about my hometown. Nearly half of San Francisco is white, Klein observes, but only 15 percent of students enrolled in the city’s public schools are white. Yes, that means that a vast majority of white San Franciscans are sending their kids to private schools. I’ve known some of these parents over the years. They justify spending $30 or $40,000 (or more) a year to educate their son or daughter in privileged cloisters by criticizing the quality of public schools or by talking about their kids’ needs for special (read entitled) treatment. But these otherwise enlightened fathers and mothers are nothing less than moral hypocrites — and often veiled racists. The only way to improve public education in America is for more white middle-class and upper-middle-class families to commit to this path. My kids went to public schools and they are better equipped for life in the real America than the private-schooled young adults I know. Elite private schools are an affront to American democracy. And any liberal or progressive parents who send their children to these bastions of snobbery are sellouts. Pure and simple…
And speaking of reimagining post-pandemic San Francisco (one of my regular themes), Tim Redmond of excellent 48 Hills takes up this theme…
Check in tomorrow for my Movies of the Week.
That’s all, folks!
In San Francisco, Only the Elite Will Get an Elite Education
The San Francisco Board of Education, hard on the heels of stripping dozens of names from public schools (some for sound reasons, others for idiotic ones), has now terminated the merit-based admission system at Lowell High School, one of the most respected public schools in the nation. From now on, only the city’s prohibitively expensive and racially segregated private schools will be feeders to the best universities in America. For decades, Lowell has collected the “best and brightest” from throughout the city’s diverse population and produced such distinguished alumni as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, California Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, sculptor Alexander Calder, primatologist Dian Fossey, Gap clothing entrepreneur Donald Fisher, comedian Margaret Cho and actor Benjamin Bratt. But now the San Francisco public education system will no longer have an academically distinguished school. This is another blow at quality in American public life, rather than a step toward racial equality — as San Francisco board members, who voted 5-2 to academically downgrade Lowell, advertised their decision.
Concerned Lowell parents have every reason to complain about this latest politically-correct, harebrained decision by the San Francisco public school czars, who fast-tracked the controversial move so they could stifle public outrage. “I don’t agree a merit-based system is inherently racist,” Lowell parent Mihir Mehta told the San Francisco Chronicle. “There are lots of ways diversity can be improved or enhanced at Lowell without blowing up the admission process the way it’s being done.”
I was a San Francisco public school parent too. I’m proud that my two sons, Joe and Nat, are products of public education. Most of the friends they made in school were from African American families who lived in other neighborhoods, and their close relationships with these kids and their parents and grandparents helped shape the young men my sons became — and changed the lives of my wife Camille and me. Camille was active as a school parent and I proudly served on the parents-teachers board at the San Francisco School of the Arts, where my son Joe, now a critically-acclaimed director, got his only film education. Will SOTA, a public school whose admissions are based on creative evaluations of young applicants, now also be canceled?
My family knew about the racist attitudes embedded in SF public schools, among some administrators, students and their parents. I heard from African American kids who felt singled out for punishment and mistreatment by teachers and school officials. Every institution in America is rife with racism, to one extent or the other. So I sympathized with the members of the Lowell High School Black Students Union who recently demonstrated for racial justice.
“Why is the idea of diversifying so terrifying? People want to protect Lowell from what? Black people?” asked freshman Hannah Chikere, one of some 45 African American students at the Lowell protest. “Sometimes I wonder what would happen to me if I went to this school in person. Every student is judged down to the detail of their being. It’s insensitive to call our cries for help exaggerations or stories.”
The racial composition of the Lowell student body — over 50 percent Asian, with 29 percent districtwide, compared to less than 2 percent Black students, with 8 percent districtwide — is simply long overdue for correction. This racial imbalance between Asian and white students on one side, and Black and Latino students on the other, also creates citywide tensions — some of which turn up in the recent rise in Black on Asian street crimes.
So, yes, we must seriously address the racial injustices in the public school system — which will take years of sustained, districtwide effort. But “blowing up” Lowell High School without any public debate and stripping names from schools without engaging in nuanced historical research is a stupid, counterproductive way to begin this process.
Dream City: It’s Time to Reimagine San Francisco
Each day brings news of Big Tech’s exodus from San Francisco. Yesterday it was Salesforce — the city’s biggest private employer and dominatrix of the downtown skyline with its gleaming dildo in the sky — that announced it too was joining the shift to remote work, telling most of its employees they can continue to bang away at their keyboards from home, even after the pandemic. Tech brands like Yelp, Twitter and Dropbox have also downsized their SF offices or shut them completely, with city office vacancy soaring to nearly 18 percent. This trend has the San Francisco Chronicle, which has become more of a real estate player than a newspaper, all aflutter. In today’s frantic front-page story about the Salesforce decision, reporter Roland Li interviewed only big business types, who predictably predict doom and gloom — falling employment, shrinking tax bases, etc. etc. Li didn’t rouse himself to interview ONE local political official, community leader, social worker, longtime resident — not ANYONE whose life has been disrupted by the tech invasion of the past decade.
The Chronicle and its sister organization, the Chamber of Commerce, might be having nightmares about the corporate tech outflow from San Francisco. (“The Bay Area’s status as the premier tech hub is in doubt,” frets anguished reporter Li.) But for most of us longtime San Franciscans, this is the silver lining in the plague. Emptied of many of its tech workers — who tended to work in bubble environments and contributed little to the life of the city — San Francisco now seems less crunched and, well, creepy. The robotic work force that suddenly poured into the city after the late Mayor Ed Lee’s disastrous Twitter tax break in 2011 succeeded in forcing thousands of solid San Franciscans out of their homes and creating a gaping wealth gap. And now as the techies flee the urban wreckage they caused — to Austin or Portland or Charlottesville or wherever they and their laptops call home — San Francisco can breathe a sigh of relief. And begin to reinvent itself.
To remake San Francisco, we shouldn’t rely on SPUR, SF.citi, the Chronicle editorial board or any of the other corporate brain trusts. As I’ve been arguing, we need to convene the broadest and most diverse array of local citizens in order to rebuild a truly livable city.
Speaking of which, I’m enjoying Spirits of San Francisco, the new book by my friend and former Salon colleague Gary Kamiya. The book, which is evocatively illustrated by local artist Paul Madonna, offers walking destinations (some familiar, many off-the-beaten-path) throughout our glorious city by the sea. In his Preface, Gary presents a city in lockdown, largely devoid of its usual bustle. In some great cities — like New York, he observes — the plague’s empty streets have a haunting, ghost-town effect. But in a city as beautiful and self-contained as San Francisco, the emptiness inflames the imagination. “In San Francisco, a deserted street seems to open a window to the place’s deepest heart… Every street is already a de Chirico.”
As San Francisco blessedly loses some of its corporate octane, let’s use this transition period wisely to dream the city we want to live and work and play in. A city whose human creativity matches its natural splendor.
You can buy Spirits of San Francisco here.
Democracy or the Abyss: Rep. Jamie Raskin’s Closing Remarks
This is all you need to hear from today’s trial of Donald Trump.
Death — It’s So Hot Right Now… But We STILL Can’t Talk About It
Death is supposed to be the great equalizer. No matter what our station in life, we all end up dust… and all that. But actually death plays favorites. Death is a racist pig. Death stalks the poor and nonwhite and the overworked and underpaid. The coronavirus plague has again taught us that. So yes, death is in the air again, in the daily morbidity reports from all over the world. But even though it’s everywhere, our society still rejects its hovering presence. Western society, with its tyranny of diversions, has raised escapism to its highest (or lowest) form. We won’t think about death, we CAN’T think about death. We plug our ears, our eyes, our minds like children during terrifying movie scenes. And yet it waits for all of us – there’s no way to escape it, no matter how much we ignore the inevitable.
I’m at the age now when our hold on life is most tenuous – and so we’re awarded priority appointments for Covid vaccinations. (Age and preexisting conditions have their benefits.) Nearly everyone I know is walking wounded – cancer, stroke or heart attack survivors; hypertension; diabetes; stomach disorders; prosthetic knees or hips – or some combination of the above. And yet hardly anyone I know wants to talk about death. They avoid the subject like the, well, plague. They make light of it, or they grow nervous, or they dive too frantically into it.
One of the only friends who has engaged me in a deep and honest conversation about death is Mark Dowie, whom I first met back in the 1980s when we were both editors at Mother Jones. Mark is over 80 now, but he doesn’t seem grimly obsessed with his advanced age – just cognizant of it. He has been writing a fascinating account of his late-in-life friendship with a woman who had a terminal disease -- their emotionally wrenching but exhilarating “dates” and her ultimate death on the day of her choosing. It’s a remarkable, first-person story by a talented writer with a successful career – and yet Mark can’t find a publisher for it.
It was Fred Branfman, another fearless writer, who convinced me years ago to devote one week of Salon – the online magazine I founded in 1995 and ran for 10 years – to the subject of death. Other publications were featuring breezy summer entertainment supplements at the time – Salon did death. Nobody I knew thought or talked about death more than Fred. He had seen a lot of it as a relief worker in Laos during the secret U.S. air war there, which he helped expose. American culture, he would tell me, is in such deep denial about the end of the life cycle on Earth – that’s why were so materialistic and neurotic. Even our images of death – gloomy crossings on the River Styx or swoonings that look like sexual ecstasy – betray our deep unease about the subject. But Fred and I would get into it. Does homicide – and genocide – give murderers a feeling of power over death? That’s the kind of question that Fred and I would’ve spent an entire lunch noodling over, even in my harried, deadline days.
One afternoon when I met Fred for lunch in San Francisco, he told me that his Hungarian lover Zsuzsa, who was home in Budapest, and he had been crying for so long on the phone about the idea of being parted by death that his mobile battery had finally died.
A few years later, Fred suddenly contracted a fatal disease and Zsusza lovingly nursed him until the end. After he died, she was eager to get his memoir about his full and eccentric life published and I told her that I would try to help. She was in the airport in Budapest, about to board a plane to the U.S. when she dropped dead of a heart attack. Or perhaps a broken heart. Zsuzsa was not yet old – but she couldn’t live without Fred.
I think of Fred often these days, and Zsuzsa too -- but the conversations I have with them about death and life are silent.
There are others with whom I have unspoken talks about death. I knew Kathryn Olney for a long time – ever since the 1980s when she too worked at Mother Jones, as a young fact checker. She was part of our dance-night pack, when our crowd would hit the I-Beam or The Stud – in exuberant defiance of AIDS, an earlier plague. She was from somewhere in the Midwest, and more wholesome than the rest of us, but always eager to fit in. She didn’t seem to know how beautiful she was. She appeared embarrassed by her majestic height, instead of rocking it like a model. As a fact checker, she was shy about bringing up writers’ mistakes, but insistent about correcting them. That’s what I’ll always remember about Kathryn. Her stubborn insistence that she be taken seriously, to be admitted to the cool kids’ inner circle, to elevate our standards.
In 2019, she pushed her way into my world again. She was dying slowly of cancer. I was recovering incompletely from a stroke. We both lived with the shadow. She seemed angry and frustrated. She suspected, probably correctly, that she wasn’t getting the best treatment. With her fact checker’s persistence, she seemed to know more about her condition than her doctors. My stroke had left me more obviously disabled, but ironically more at peace with whatever is left of my life.
One night, I included her in a group outing to the Alamo, our neighborhood cinema/funhouse, to see a screening of my son Joe’s movie The Last Black Man in San Francisco. When Joe was a boy, my wife sometimes went on excursions with Kathryn and her kids to the beach or the zoo. Driving her home that night in our packed car was fun – it reminded me of the old days, coming home sweaty and high from some nightclub after hours of dancing. It was the last time I saw Kathryn. I should’ve known that it was MY time to contact her when she didn’t call or email for months. So, as I said, now our conversations are soundless too.
I don’t feel morbid when I dwell on death. It makes me feel more alive. I’m always curious to read how others – especially those whose minds I’ve come to respect – face the end. I wrote about George Harrison in my post-stroke memoir, Between Heaven and Hell, because like me I felt George was preparing for his final exit for his entire life. But long before George and our generation of seekers discovered the wisdom of India, the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century absorbed some of these ancient insights. I recently read a biography of Thoreau, who died far too young – at 44 of tuberculosis, a disease that scythed its way through much of his generation. I was anxious to get to the end of the book, to see how the great philosopher, civil libertarian, and naturalist left this world.
Thoreau, I was delighted to read, went out in an exemplary way, with humor and composure and a sense of another destination. By the time his old friend Parker Pillsbury dropped by his home in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau’s voice was reduced to a whisper. “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you,” Pillsbury solemnly said. “One world at a time,” Thoreau replied with a smile.
Not long afterwards, another friend, Sam Staples, paid a visit to Thoreau’s death bed and later declared that he “never saw a man dying with so much pleasure & peace.” Thoreau’s sister, Sophia, who rarely left his side near the end, remarked on her brother’s “child like trust” in his fate, “as if he were being translated rather than dying in the ordinary way of most mortals.”
Thoreau rejected all opiates to ease his pain, insisting to another friend that he “preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering, rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics.”
Thoreau’s mind was “clear to the last,” wrote his biographer Laura Dassow Walls. At the end, Sophia was reading to him from his account of a memorable river voyage he once took. “Now comes good sailing,” she heard her brother whisper. They were his final words.
The Woody-Mia Wilderness of Mirrors
Here we go again… in the never-ending psychodrama of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, we will now have a four-part HBO documentary series this month by filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering. This duo has been exploring the sexual exploitation of women for years now — in fact, I edited the companion book to their powerful 2015 documentary about abuse on campus (The Hunting Ground). I haven’t yet seen the Dick-Ziering dissection of Allen, who was accused of molesting 7-year-old Dylan, Mia’s and Woody’s adopted daughter when they were a couple. But based on news reports, it seems the HBO documentary, Allen v. Farrow, is weighted heavily in favor of Mia, who — along with Dylan and Ronan Farrow — have succeeded in purging the celebrated filmmaker from polite society and cost him book and movie deals.
Woody Allen, his wife Soon-Yi and his adopted son Moses Farrow — a family psychologist who has painted a very dark portrait of life in Mia’s home, especially for her adopted Asian children — declined to cooperate with Dick and Ziering. So none of their of them were interviewed for the HBO series.
Without their cooperation, I wonder how fair and balanced that Allen v. Farrow will be. We know how obsessive that Mia, Ronan and Dylan have been in their own anti-Woody hunting ground. (And, btw, can we stop repeating — as the New York Times’s Nicole Sperling does today — the obviously unlikely claim that Allen “sired” Ronan? Based on his looks, the young crusading reporter — whose #MeToo zeal has been questioned by a much better Times reporter, media columnist Ben Smith — was probably “sired” by Mia’s ex, Frank Sinatra, to whom she briefly returned during her relationship with Allen.)
Here’s the deeper point. Woody Allen was cleared of child molesting charges by two separate investigations — the Yale Child Sexual Abuse Clinic and the NYPD. He was also closely scrutinized and cleared to adopt two infant girls with his wife Soon-Yi — who have since grown up and apparently regard their father with great love and respect. Child molesters are typically driven to repeat their crimes. No such charges, besides Dylan’s (who was under Mia’s strong influence), have ever been leveled at Allen.
Perhaps Woody Allen is as deeply sinister and conniving as Mia Farrow and her offspring want us to believe. But so far there has been no compelling evidence of this. Nonetheless, his career and reputation have been severely damaged — undoubtedly for years to come. In his recent, compelling memoir — which had to be published by small, independent Skyhorse Books after Ronan Farrow pressured Hachette to cancel Allen’s contract — the filmmaker claimed he doesn’t care anymore about being blacklisted.
But we — the thinking public, the readers of books and fans of movies — must care. When people with the overflowing talent of Woody Allen are canceled from our culture — on no legal basis — then we all suffer. I don’t want to live in a society whose artists are fearful and cowed. I respect the work of Dick and Ziering, but they should not have the final word on this case. How many investigations must a man endure before he’s declared free of sin? Before we’re allowed to see his work?
Stupor Bowl VV
It was the only football game I tuned in throughout this entire strange season. I was ready for some excitement. Hey, after 11 months of lockdown, the entire nation was ready for some excitement. Instead, we got bionic Tom Brady again plodding up and down the field in his inexorable campaign to win his seventh Super Bowl ring. Yawwnn… The boring blowout was not the game that America needed for rejuvenation.
Somewhat more entertaining were the commercials, although too many companies blew their kajillion ad dollars on completely forgettable spots. Among the ads that were somewhat amusing: Lemon Seltzer (a relentless downpour of lemons for a true lemon of a year); Dr. Squatch (apparently a soap for men who are hairy outdoors types — who knew!); and Alaska Air, with its harried flight crews doing “The Safety Dance.” Apart from these and a couple of others, the parade of commercials again revealed a morbid America hooked on violent superhero “entertainment,” junk food, pharmaceuticals, smart phones, and stock gambling. America, America, God shed his grace on thee?
The frequent medical reports on the players didn’t revive my love of the game: a QB had a bad toe that would require off-season surgery; other starting players were soldiering on with injured backs, knees, pelvises; and one was listed as “questionable.” I was reminded that NFL football is more of a train wreck than a sport. And Super Bowl VV even lacked the perverse pleasure of a demolition derby.
To relieve the oppressive lethargy of the game, l looked forward to the halftime show. I’m not part of his fan base, but I’d caught The Weekend not long ago on Saturday Night Live and was moved to download a couple of his songs. Yesterday’s extravagant show biz display did not make you forget Prince’s stellar Super Bowl show or even the gray-haired Who. But I did enjoy The Weekend’s final number — “Blinding Light” — featuring the star romping on the field followed by an army of dancers swathed in head bandages. It was a weird but ecstatic moment — a reminder of our medical sorrows and a liberation from them.
And for one fleeting moment I cheered.
Get My New Book — Free!
As I’ve argued on this page, there’s no such thing as a free press – it costs money! But you CAN get a free copy of my latest book. By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution (coauthored with my talented sister Margaret Talbot, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker) will be published by HarperCollins in June. And if you’re among the first TEN people to donate $50 to The David Talbot Show, I will send you a free copy of this timely book as soon as it’s published. So, as they say on TV, act now! (Read the last paragraph for further details.)
Let me tell you a bit about By the Light of Burning Dreams. It tells the stories of revolutionary heroes of the 1960s and ‘70s, focusing on turning points in their lives that not only radically transformed them but changed the course of American history. This is not dewy-eyed hagiography – these leaders are fully revealed, flaws and all. But neither is it backlash history, designed to belittle and demean. Margaret and I aimed to write a history of “the second American Revolution” that is both unflinchingly honest, but also inspirational. These are the stories that those of us who lived through these thunderous times – as well as young activists today – must ponder and learn from.
Margaret and I were lucky to interview many radical icons of the past who were still living (some still are) – including Madonna Thunder Hawk and the now-deceased Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement; Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panther Party; Dolores Huerta and Luis Valdez of the United Farm Workers movement; and Heather Booth, founder of the underground abortion collective, Jane. I knew others from my own activism during these “Movement” days – like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, who blazed a path back into the American mainstream from the marginalized left.
I began working on this book back in 2016, as Trump was just starting to menace America and before the rise of protest cultures on the right and left. By the Light of Burning Dreams now seems more urgent than ever.
Allow me to also assert that the book is also very readable, filled with eye-opening tales and insights you’ve never before come across. To put it simply, Margaret and I know how to write. And as I always say, when it comes to the ongoing argument of history, the best story wins.
So donate $50 to The David Talbot Show today – and become one of the speedy ten to reserve your free copy of By the Light of Burning Dreams, which will be mailed to you in June. After making your donation, email your name and address to: david@talbotplayers.com.
Thanks for your support. And happy reading!
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s America — or a Green America?
What’s the matter with America? That question still nags me, even after Joe Biden – day by day -- undoes the poisonous legacy of Trump. (And thanks, Mr. President, for the latest reset – cutting off the weapons flow to Saudi Arabia’s criminal war in Yemen.) I understand Biden’s “America is back” refrain – but it still has an ominous ring to me. Because like Langston Hughes, I feel that “America never was America to me.” Long before Marjorie Taylor Greene and today’s GOP/Q, as Chris Cuomo cuttingly describes the current Republican Party, there were members of Congress like Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina who in May 1856 attacked abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, beating him so savagely with a heavy, gold-tipped cane that he inflicted serious brain damage on Sumner and shattered the cane. A South Carolina colleague of Brooks, Rep. Laurence Keitt, held horrified onlookers at gunpoint so they couldn’t intervene. Brooks was not jailed or even given a congressional reprimand for his near-murderous assault. And pieces of his “True Cane” were cherished as holy relics by his gleeful South Carolina constituents.
So yes, America never was America to me. It’s a strange, blood-soaked, genocidal, beautiful, freedom-loving land. It was founded in slavery and in the mass slaughter of its native people. And yet it created jazz and rock ‘n’ roll and skyscrapers that are works of art and life-saving medicines. It gave birth to Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, John and Robert Kennedy and so many other inspiring figures.
But yes, then there’s today’s Republican Party. Only 11 House Republicans voted to remove the deeply unhinged Rep. Greene from committee assignments, even though she has endorsed the assassination of their Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, among other violent and bizarre positions. Many of their congressional districts might be gerrymandered and secluded, but the 199 Republicans who voted in support of the QAnon-aligned Georgia congresswoman represent a big slice of America. These are your and my fellow Americans -- like members of Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s (R-Illinois) family who call him a soldier in “the devil’s army” for acknowledging Trump’s defeat and other fundamental facts.
Who elected Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress, after she embraced dangerously cuckoo ideas — like the one about the Jewish banking family who ignited California’s wildfires with a space laser — and chased a traumatized Parkland shooting survivor down the street, bragging that she was packing? The article about Greene’s congressional district in today’s New York Times was well-timed to address my curiosity.
Yes, the report contains some hair-raising tidbits about “those people” – like the billboard that greets visitors to the district, proclaiming,“Every tongue will confess Jesus is Lord – even the Democrats.” The NYT reporter adds, “To underline the point, ‘Democrats’ is red and adorned with the devil’s trident.”
Now I admit – it’s hard to have a rational dialogue with people who deeply believe that you and your kind are Satan worshippers who feast on the blood of infants. But America is teetering on the brink of another civil war – just as it was in 1856 when a racist congressman thrashed a Capitol Hill colleague to an inch of his life. And when, the same year, a pro-slavery mob invaded the free-state town of Lawrence Kansas and killed every male – man and boy – about 200 in all. In response to today’s growing extremism on the right, we could arm ourselves and respond in kind like John Brown and his righteous army. Or we could try to understand these fellow Americans and bring at least some of them to our side.
It’s no surprise that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s white, working-class district – wedged between the suburbs of Atlanta and Chattanooga at the base of the Appalachian Mountains – is economically distressed and besieged with opioid addiction. These people are desperate, and in their desperation they’ve turned to a crazy lady who has convinced them she understands their plight. But wacky conservatism will never deliver struggling men and women from the clutches of poverty. As I’ve written often, only FDR-like federal relief programs can do that. Franklin Roosevelt won over Southern whites for generations with big projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority that not only brought power and light to benighted rural districts but put thousands of people to work with good jobs.
To his credit, President Biden gets that. He wants to go big. He wants to retrain and employ many thousands of out-of-work coal miners and others sidelined by the global market in the new green economy. Biden’s only obstacle to this sane future is the GOP/Q, with its crackpot explanations for white America’s miseries. Biden – and we – have to brush aside these Republican extremists and win over our fellow Americans. The alternative is too grim to even contemplate.
My Christopher Hitchens Problem
I knew and liked Christopher Hitchens before I disliked him. I met him in the early 1980s, not long after he had relocated to the United States from England to write for The Nation. I admired his wit, humor and intelligence. But mostly I admired his understanding of political journalism as a blood sport. In those years, only Brits seemed to know how to practice the savage trade — American journalists, by comparison, were earnest and dull. So as a young Mother Jones editor, I eagerly signed up Chris to take down Tom Wolfe — the prominent New Journalist who had become a dandy of the Reagan Right — and he scored a direct hit with his scathing cover story, “A Wolfe in Chic Clothing,” highlighted by a memorable Robert Grossman cover illustration of the white-suited scribe with a fork stuck in his chest. (Hitchens wielded his pen on the unsuspecting Wolfe after they dined together.) I think the Mother Jones skewering of Wolfe was Hitchens’s first cover story in an American glossy.
Like many fellow journalists, I drank and supped with Hitch, always finding him a charming companion. I was introduced to his first wife, Eleni. We feted him at Mother Jones soirees and went to dinner parties together. When I launched Salon in the dotcom ‘90s, I again recruited Chris as an occasional essayist. I remember one watering hole excursion in San Francisco before we were to be interviewed on radio, when Hitchens downed one drink after another at a North Beach bar. I struggled to keep up with him, but I lost count of the glasses he drained. And still, he never slurred his words, never stopped his conversational stream — wicked, bilious, uproarious. How he later managed to walk into a radio studio and keep up his smooth patter I will never be able to fathom.
Hitch, a bisexual, told me leaving Barbara Ehrenreich’s house in Washington DC one night that I was “the most beautiful man in America.” But I’m sure he told that to all the reasonably handsome creatures who crossed his path. He once said that he was doomed to be only with women as he aged and grew fleshy because the fairer sex had lower standards than men.
So I was one of many who knew and was captivated by Christopher Hitchens. But that was then. As the years went by, his writing was just as gleaming and cutting, but his thinking grew, well, sodden. Twenty years after he sliced Tom Wolfe to ribbons for me, Hitchens too joined the ranks of the neocons, exuberantly and shamelessly promoting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He’d always loved playing the bad boy, pulling the nose of Mother Teresa and even sticking a thumb in God’s eye. But this time, Hitchens’s antics were more serious — he became a propagandist for a criminal war. And in drunken middle age, he rechristened himself as a Colonel Blimp — like his naval officer father — calling on the imperial forces of the U.S. and U.K. to give a good thumping to the desert wogs in Iraq and anywhere else in the Middle East he thought should be straightened out.
Hitchens, already in free fall from the idealistic socialism of his youth, took the final dive after 9/11. The assault on America had “exhilarated” him, he crowed. He now saw the clear lines forming in the “battle between everything I love and hate.” His reductionist views of Muslim countries and cultures would’ve appalled his hero, George Orwell.
Hitchens reportedly died bravely in 2011 after a struggle with cancer, refusing a death-bed conversion from atheism. He would never sell out as a God worshipper, even in extremis. But his political conversion was too easy.
And now ten years after his messy life and career come the biographers — and the gatekeepers. His second wife and widow Carol Blue-Hitchens and his good friend and fellow literary executor Steve Wasserman seek to protect Hitchens’s flame — and they have circulated a letter to “Family, Fiends, Colleagues, Fellow Scribblers, Brothers & Sisters, Comrades” urging us to withhold all cooperation with “self-appointed, would-be biographer” Stephen Phillips, who is writing a book about Hitchens for W.W. Norton.
I count Wasserman as a friend and “comrade.” But this dismal effort at literary prior restraint is beneath him — and certainly not in the spirit of Chris Hitchens himself, who stood for fearless and acerbic prose, even when he himself was woefully wrong. Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman have been taken to task for their “preemptive censorship” — as they should be — by biographer David Nasaw, writing in the pages of Hitchens’s old left-wing platform, The Nation.
But my problem with the Hitchens estate goes far beyond the well-meaning but wrong-headed effort to protect his posthumous reputation. My problem is with the man himself — or rather the man he became. Swanning around with the likes of Paul Wolfowtiz, David Frum and Bill Kristol, becoming a fellow at Stanford’s right-wing Hoover Institution. The young Hitchens, the one I admired and published, would’ve sneered at this older version of himself. In fact, I would’ve hired him to do a take-down on the bibulous, saber-rattling windbag that he became.
Rennie Davis — Not the Golden Globes — Had the Final Word on “Chicago 7”
In one of those synchronicities of modern life, the death of Rennie Davis was announced around the same time as the Golden Globe nominations, which include Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 in the Best Movie, Director and Screenplay categories. Now I’m, as you know by now, a child of old Hollywood and — the gods help me — I’m a fan of show biz awards shows. I’ll tune in the Golden Globe Awards later this month because it’s hosted by funny Tina Fey and Amy Poehler — and because it’s even honoring those old lefty heroes Jane Fonda and Norman Lear. (Quick aside: I once went to Norman, who served on my Salon board of directors, for some business counsel. “Norman,” I began our meeting in his office, “I need your advice…” He cut me off: “Go to her, drop to your knees, BEG her forgiveness!” Very funny man.)
But, as usual, I’ll be railing at the TV set when the gold statues are handed out. Last year, the foreign press handed its Golden Globe for Best Movie to Quentin Tarantino’s repulsive Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I mean, who are these people in the foreign press? And this year I’m already fuming over the nominations of Mank (a strangely lifeless, overpraised movie featuring a caricatured performance by the usually artful Gary Oldman) and, even worse, The Trial of the Chicago 7.
As far as I can recall, there has NEVER been a good Hollywood version of American radicalism. But Sorkin’s movie was particularly bad — sentimental, cliched, fake — even by Hollywood standards. I was a young New Left activist at the time, and I remember enough to tell you that we NEVER called these antiwar defendants “the Chicago 7” — because that would’ve been a racist erasure of the one non-white defendant, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, who was later severed from the case by tyrannical Judge Julius Hoffman for demanding his legal rights (after being infamously bound and gagged in the courtroom). They were — and always will be for us — the Chicago 8.
So yes, Sorkin’s fabrication of history begins with the very title of his film. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear directly from defendant Rennie Davis, who not long before his death penned a gently humorous but scathing critique of Sorkin’s Hollywoodization of the trial. I quote briefly from it here:
“I was portrayed as a complete nerd afraid of his own shadow. I felt sorry for Tony winner Alex Sharp who played me… I once told the Chicago defendants that no movie producer will ever fully capture the courage and elegance of the actual defendants. It was my honor to know them. They were an inspiration that is needed again today.”
Let me salute Davis, as he and the other brave leaders of the movement against the Vietnam War continue to pass over to the other side. Thank you, Rennie.
PS This photo of Davis — in the center, with plaid shirt and glasses — and the other Chicago defendants was taken by the great Richard Avedon during the trial.
Must All Heroes Be Canceled?
The San Francisco School Board is officially now the laughing stock of the nation, with its “incorruptible, Robespierre revolutionary” zeal (in the words of my friend Gary Kamiya in The Atlantic) to slap more politically correct names on 44 public schools. One school board member wondered aloud if schools should be named after ANY prominent people, because human beings are by their very nature, well, human. Malcolm X, for instance, was a pimp before he became a Black liberation leader — but the board decided to excuse his earlier exploitation of women because of his later radical heroics. No such waiver was granted less revolutionary figures.
So can our rigid times allow for heroes, flaws and all? It’s a question that I’ve been chewing over for some time because I’ve just finished coauthoring a book (with my sister Margaret) about the radical heroes of the 1960s and ‘70s. All of them had personal and sometimes political liabilities. Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer. So was Tom Hayden — and a drunk as well. Dennis Banks and Russell Means — the charismatic leaders of the American Indian Movement — were both street criminals before they became heroes of the Native American rights movement. And so on, and so on. And yet it took these extraordinary men and women to galvanize people and move history forward. For me, their human flaws and how they struggled with their demons make them even more fascinating — and yes, heroic.
So screw the little Robespierres of the world — the censorious bureaucrats of the left and right who try to purge life of all ambiguity and complexity. I might not look up to statues of Washington and Jefferson anymore (I draw the line on slave owning). But I still want heroes, even with feet of clay.
The Lost Dreams of Youth — and Other Self-Publishing Tales
My long, dear friend Richard Ravin has written a novel that I was moved to blurb. I did this not because Dick is a long, dear friend — in fact, I’ve lost good friends in the past when my publication Salon reviewed their work badly. I praised Nothing to Declare because I truly enjoyed it. The book, which is a journey back in time to the Santa Cruz (California) of my tribal youth, should have been grabbed by a major publisher. In fact, it’s so much better than many of the new novels that come my way — elegantly written, emotionally deep, and (I can attest) historically true, even though Dick (a Boston-born boy) was not part of my Santa Cruz grand experiment in political and sexual revolution. So, at my urging (nagging?), Dick finally went out and self-published his novel. If you’re looking for a good read about our 1960s-’70s generation, this is the best fictional treatment I’ve read in years. You can buy it here.
I know what you’re thinking — self-publishing is a vanity game for losers who aren’t talented enough to score a New York book contract. But that’s not true anymore. New York publishing has increasingly become a sales racket, with titles purchased and promoted based on the author’s age, gender, looks, social media marketability etc. — with literary quality coming a distant last. Now that’s not true of all New York literary gatekeepers, I hasten to add. And yes, I myself have been fortunate, by and large, in the publishing jungle. But, too often, mediocre (but “hot”) authors get lucrative contracts, while much more worthy scribes get snubbed.
In fact, book publishing has become such a dispiriting maze that some authors I know who could land contracts with leading houses are seceding from the business and self-publishing because it’s less stressful — and perhaps more profitable. Take another long, dear friend of mine — Karen Croft. As I recently reported, she has written a wonderful, witty, Wildean book of essays on the decline of common decency, Mind Your Manners: How Bad Behavior Is Destroying Civilization. You should also click on her page and immediately buy this mordant little classic. It’s not only hugely and wryly entertaining (and instructive), it’s beautifully printed by a small shop in Florence, making it more of an artifact than a product (another creative part of the publishing process that the book industry has long ago forsaken).
Come to think of it, maybe authors have always been screwed by the publishing industry. Lately I’ve been reading the 2017 biography of Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls, and I came across this forlorn entry in Thoreau’s journal — which he wrote after the success of his most famous book, Walden. “It costs so much to publish,” Thoreau complained, “would it not be better for the author to put his manuscripts in a safe?”
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
The Man Who Exposed the Warren Commission
Historian Gerald McKnight, whose 2005 book on the Warren Commission, Breach of Trust, remains the best dissection of the notorious JFK assassination panel, has died. McKnight, who was at one time the chair of the history department at Hood College in Maryland, is still one of the few campus scholars to ever take on the explosive subject — which nearly six decades after the gunfire in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza remains taboo in university (and media) circles. It was the Warren Commission’s glaring coverup of this national trauma that began the deep erosion of the public’s faith in authority. But rather than examining this fundamental “breach of trust,” timid scholars and pundits today continue to mouth the party line about accused “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald — and lump all independent Kennedy researchers with paranoid QAnon cultists.
But Gerald McKnight, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once, was not easily intimidated. A crusty veteran of the Korean War, he simply followed the path of his honest scholarship, even when it was widely considered politically and (academically) incorrect. His book on the willful failings of the Warren Commission — which should have been called the Dulles Commission because of ex-CIA chief (and Kennedy-hater) Allen Dulles’s huge influence over the panel — still ranks as one of the Top 10 books on the Kennedy assassination. That’s Dulles, the dark subject of my book The Devil’s Chessboard, looming (in a bow tie) behind President Johnson as LBJ was given a copy of the Warren Report in 1964.
Here’s an excerpt from a 2005 interview conducted with McKnight, courtesy of Alan Dale:
I think there are several telltale (Warren Commission) evasions: 1) The WC’s failure to launch a real investigation into Oswald’s Mexico City trip. This, I believe, is a key to what forces or interests were behind the murder of JFK. 2) The destruction of JFK autopsy materials and the writing of a second autopsy protocol after it was learned that Oswald was murdered—in short, the fabrication of the JFK autopsy protocol. 3) Lastly, the fact that the FBI and the WC had the Atomic Energy Committee (AEC) run sophisticated Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) on Oswald’s paraffin casts and other forensic materials and then failed to include those results in the final Commission Report. The fact that some of the best evidence in the case was never disclosed in the Warren Report leads to one inexorable conclusion: that results exonerated Oswald.
Some people, especially those born after the assassination, seem to think this is “old news.” How do you explain to them that the unanswered questions surrounding that event are still incredibly relevant more than 40 years later?
A president is assassinated—there can be no more de-stabilizing crime in our system of government—and there is no good-faith effort to uncover the facts. What does this say about the legitimacy of our government? Moreover, once JFK was removed, there followed possibly history-altering changes in our foreign policy. Had Kennedy lived, would he have liquidated our involvement in Vietnam? Many credible historians speculate that he would have ended our involvement by the end of 1964. Kennedy’s tentative steps toward a rapprochement with Castro’s Cuba ended with Dallas. Once LBJ heated up our Vietnam involvement, the Soviet-American detente growing out of the peacefully resolved 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was terminated. This raises the foreboding question: Was JFK’s assassination a coup d’etat?
More on Gerald McKnight
Democrats, Stay Strong… Or Get Rolled Again
It’s bracing to see Democrats — from President Biden down — finally stand up to Republicans. Either Republican senators sign onto Biden’s big $1.9 trillion bailout plan — or the Democrats will play the “reconciliation” card and ram the bill through the Senate with no GOP support. Republicans are screaming about Democratic bullying — but this is exactly what Mitch McConnell and his majority did when they rammed through Trump‘s massive tax cut for the rich in 2017 without one Democratic vote.
Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer know that if they again cater to Republican senators — this time a pack of 10 led by the inevitable card sharks Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — the GOP will only water down and drag out essential legislation. This is EXACTLY what Republicans did to President Obama’s economic recovery plan and health care proposal. The result back in 2009 was a bailout that was geared more to Wall Street than to Main Street and a minimalist health plan that sacrificed the single-payer option. Obama’s concessions to Republicans set up the Democrats for the great Trump populist backlash of 2016. Sure, it was a phony, gilded populism and Trump proved to be a crooked crony capitalist, not the man of the people that MAGA zealots still weirdly embrace. But the point is that Democrats get screwed whenever we compromise with the GOP and when we side with Wall Street — and the party DESERVES to get punished.
So now Democrats need to keep breathing fire as they try to get the country back on its feet. It’s reassuring to hear that even the wobbliest Senate Democrat — Joe Manchin of West Virginia — has advocated reconciliation hardball if no Republicans jump on Biden’s bailout bandwagon. But even more inspiring to me lately is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose response to the traitorous Ted Cruz was perfect when he tried to tie himself to her call for Congressional investigations into Wall Street racketeering. She’s all for bipartisanship when it comes to the GameStop probe, AOC declared, but she draws a line when it comes to working with the likes of Cruz: "I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there's common ground, but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out," the New York congresswoman wrote in a tweet directed at the Texas senator.
That’s the way that Democrats should work with their conniving colleagues across the aisle. Bipartisanship with a bite.
Support Free Speech
Free speech — it’s coming to the USA. Even Twitter billionaire Jack Dorsey is now talking about the need to decentralize the social media giants which dominate global discourse. Of course, like oil giants Exxon and Chevron, these tech monopolies also want to delay the alternative future — with Google and Facebook threatening to shut down the Internet in Australia if they’re forced to pay reasonable fees for their massive news theft. And these tech giants are already buying decentralized social media engines to make sure they’ll own the future too. But this is all the more reason for us to declare our independence from Facebook and the other prison camps of thought.
To keep independent media alive, you must help support it. You can do this by donating or subscribing and by joining the discussions — not on Facebook or Twitter but in our own oases of open discussion. As I’ve written, I have started subscribing to about a dozen independent sources of news and commentary, outlets, blogs and newsletters that I value for their bold reporting and free thinking. I, too, have now put up my shingle with The David Talbot Show — and I’ll continue writing my frequent posts as long as you find them valuable.
Please donate today — and please join the discussions on these pages. Believe me, your thoughts are much more valued at The David Talbot Show than on Zuckerberg’s plantation.
Movie of the Week
The Dig
Yes, the new Netflix film based on the true archeological discovery at Sutton Hoo, England on the eve of World War II features deep and sensitive performances by Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty, the landowner on whose estate the ancient Anglo Saxon treasure was discovered, and Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown, the working-class excavator who led the dig. And yes, the film is a great relief in its sober and somber mood and its quiet belief in the maturity of its audience — particularly after the usual raucous fare dished out as entertainment (I’m thinking here of the cynical and overhyped White Tiger). But what really tied together the room for me was the sudden appearance midway through The Dig of a secondary character played by actor-musician Johnny Flynn. Whether he’s performing his songs or appearing in films, Flynn has become a favorite of mine.
In The Dig, Flynn plays a shy, introspective amateur archeologist and photographer with a seemingly doomed love for a married young woman (played by Lily James) and a date with destiny in the skies as an RAF pilot. His stumbling diffidence in the movie mirrors his quiet personality on concert stages, where he deflects audience adoration by modestly segueing from one brilliant song to the next.
I still think of Johnny Flynn as a singer and songwriter, so I’m especially keen on seeing his next film role, for which he seems perfectly suited — the starring role in a David Bowie biopic.
Watch the trailer
And here are a couple of Flynn songs:
The Water (in concert with a surprise guest)
Book of the Week
Walking with Ghosts
By Gabriel Byrne
Do all of the Irish write like poets? Probably not. But if actor Gabriel Byrne had no gift for the dramatic arts (which he clearly does), then he could’ve made his living with a pen. Like his first book, Pictures in My Head (1995), his new autobiography shimmers with musical language. The 70-year-old actor conjures finely-observed memories of his childhood on the outskirts of Dublin, where his working-class family of eight was stuffed into a modest home, and young Gabriel found refuge in the wild fields and farmlands around him – or in the dark cinemas where Hollywood dreams unspooled.
But the stories that made the deepest impression on me are his portraits of the actor as a young man. He writes of his days on the London stage when he was badly roughed up by drunken English soldiers newly returned from policing the Irish Troubles, the sun-blanched afternoons around swimming pools in the Los Angeles wasteland (livened up once by an earthquake), and how he fled in shell-shock from the publicity barrage of the carnal Cannes premiere of The Usual Suspects. One of his most memorable tales is from Venice, where he was given a role as a spear-carrier in a 1983 TV miniseries starring his idols Olivier, Burton, Gielgud and Richardson.
Richard Burton proved, as advertised, to be a wonderful drinking partner and sympathetic mentor. But Laurence Olivier seemed to be a tougher nut. When Byrne stumbled upon the great man rehearsing his lines by himself one day, all the tongue-tied young actor could do was ask for the time.
“Are they paying you for this thing?” Olivier barked. Byrne stammered that they were.
“Then you should buy yourself a watch.”
Byrne has a gift for the self-effacing anecdote. He lashed himself with Irish guilt for days afterward. But you also had to think badly of Olivier – what an arrogant old curmudgeon! But the story has a lovely ending.
As production halted and the cast prepared to leave the splendor of Venice, Byrne found a small envelope in his dressing room. In it was a handwritten note from Olivier.
“Apologies old chap if I appeared rather brusque when we met. I was attempting to knock my lines into my stupid old head.
“I’ve thought about your question regarding the time. It’s something I think about a great deal these days. And in reply please allow a greater mind than I to answer.”
Oliver then quoted Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 60,” underlining the following lines:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end…
And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
Affectionately
Larry
You can (should) buy Byrne’s beautiful memoir at your local independent bookstore – or online at Bookshop.org, the indie consortium.
Big Pharma Makes Me Sick
There’s fuming and foaming throughout the land over Wall Street’s big-footing of small day traders — the so-called “dumb money” that outwitted the smart money by driving up the stock price of companies like GameStop and AMC (go, movie theaters!) after the big banksters had decreed that it was game over for these struggling businesses. So, yes, down with the Wall Street titans and the way they’ve rigged the stock trading system. But let’s also raise our pitchforks at the pharmaceutical manufacturers that are profiteering from the worldwide COVID plague at the expense of billions of people around the world — after getting heavily subsidized with OUR taxpayer money. In my mind, the executives who run these Big Pharma corporations are more loathsome creatures than even the corrupt czars of Wall Street. While we get sicker and poorer, they are robbing our public treasuries — on both the R&D AND distribution ends — to get infinitely richer and more powerful.
If you’re not feverish already, you will be after reading this article on the unmitigated greed of the coronavirus vaccine makers. These companies’ vaccine research was heavily subsidized by the U.S. and European governments, with Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna admitting that the entire cost of its vaccine R&D was underwritten by taxpayer dollars. And yet these companies insisted on secret contracts with nations, complete immunity from lawsuits (no matter how serious the side effects turn out to be), and tight ownership of patents so poor countries have to wait patiently in line for the life-saving vaccines. And after this massive infusion of cash and this web of legal protections, the vaccine makers are STILL shaking down public treasuries for each shot that goes into an arm.
Pfizer is charging the U.S. government nearly $20 per vaccine —nearly $5 more per shot than the company is charging European governments. And meanwhile AstraZeneca — based in Oxford, England — is only charging the European Commission $2.19 per shot. Then there’s Maryland-based Novavax, which has proudly announced that its vaccine will soon be ready — after receiving a whopping $1.6 billion from the U.S. government (i.e., us). There’s only one catch — the Novavax shot might be useless against the rapidly spreading COVID variants. And there’s no provision for the U.S. to recoup its investment if the vaccine turns out to be a dud.
Why are the contracts with vaccine manufacturers still being withheld from the public? And since these life-saving drugs were developed at “warp speed” with billions of dollars of public money, why are the patents still private? India and South Africa have filed lawsuits to force the sharing of vaccine patents so they can begin the mass inoculation of their people. But Big Pharma has blocked these efforts, calling its rank profiteering the “lifeblood” of its industry. Unless the Biden administration intervenes, Big Pharma will will continue to play God, deciding who gets to live and die. And we’ll just have to keep underwriting their divine power.
