Can We Really Romp Outside of Our Kennels?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says we’re headed for “normal-ish” life again (even as the nation passes the grim half-million dead mark). The Atlantic agrees, predicting that summer in America will be “near normal.” Over one and a half million Americans are being vaccinated against Covid-19 each day, and millions more carry the antibodies. Most of the people in my aging group have received at least one shot, and the frontline health care workers in my family have all been fully immunized. My wife Camille and I have begun talking about expanding our social bubble for the first time in nearly a year. We’re begun blinking in the sunlight, like miners trapped below for seeming forever.

But… it’s too soon, folks, to go crazy. And yesterday, on a sunny, breathtaking afternoon on Crissy Field in San Francisco (see my photo below), people WERE going crazy. Fully half of the men, women and children crowding the walk/bike paths of this popular Bayside park had abandoned their masks, including many sweating joggers who went huffing-puffing by us as we strolled. At one juncture on the scenic path, a group of middle-aged, unmasked people had congregated to chat in one another’s faces, merrily oblivious to the fact that they were blocking all foot traffic.

Now I don’t like to stereotype the Covid-clueless — but, hell, here goes. Many of the unmasked who went yakking by us on their dumb phones were Marina types — what we used to call yuppies. Self-centered, shallow, youngish men and women who don’t think twice about breathing heavily all over someone else. Then there were the Pacific Heights types — the wealthy, entitled, middle-aged men and women who were probably inoculated by their private physicians back in early January, ahead of nursing home residents and ER workers. This was the type idly congregating on the footpath yesterday so you couldn’t get by without squeezing against them. When I snarled something angry at one of them through my mask, she simply stared disdainfully at me like staying socially distant was MY problem.

Worst of all, you can’t simply reject these people as stupid MAGA zealots. They’re San Franciscans, for god’s sake, and they’re supposed to know better.

So what are we to do with these uncaring, unsocial people as we stagger towards normality? Public health officials keep warning us that we need to keep observing pandemic guidelines for the foreseeable future. But the Covid-clueless stopped giving a shit about public health, if they EVER cared about it, long ago. Particularly on sunny afternoons on Crissy Field. This is federal land, owned by and for the people of the United States. But too many treat it as their exclusive backyard — a gift bestowed on the rest of us by the billionaires who live next door.

As San Francisco basked in bathtub weather yesterday, the city did indeed seem like an idyllic oasis. But there is trouble even in paradise.

If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own

For many years, that was the spunky sign-off of Scoop Nisker, the roguishly independent newscaster of San Francisco’s underground FM radio. And under the equally irrepressible leadership of educator/activist Mickey Huff, that is the mantra of Project Censored, the independent media project founded back in 1976 by Sonoma State University professor Carl Jensen. Under Huff, the media project not only issues its annual list of the most important news stories overlooked by the mainstream media, but ways that media consumers can become more actively critical of the major news producers and ways that independent media producers are competing for the public’s attention.

Project Censored has just released its latest State of the Free Press 2021 paperback, including its annual list of ignored stories and a provocative Foreword by Matt Taibbi, which is worth quoting. (You can order the book here.)

“In some ways the modern corporate press is worse than it’s ever been in taking on powerful interests, and less interested than ever in addressing wealth inequality or the problems of poor people,” writes Taibbi. A new ideological wrinkle has been added to the mainstream media’s longtime disinterest in depressing or complex stories. Today’s news media is “not merely in the business of ignoring (Project Censored-type stories), it’s now actively engaged in teaching audiences to DISBELIEVE (my emphasis) in the very existence of such stories.” In other words, news and issues that should be on the front pages or at the top of news broadcasts are dismissed as fake or politically incorrect.

Taibbi cites Project Censored’s fourth overlooked story this year, “Congressional Investments and Conflict of Interest.” Because legislators on both sides of the aisle (including, yes, Dianne Feinstein, who has been much on my thoughts lately) were busted for using their insider Washington status to make killings on the stock market, the politically polarized press didn’t know how to sustain public outrage over this bipartisan corruption. But there is no more blatant an example of Washington swamp sleaziness than the story of powerful Senators and Congress members cashing in on Wall Street — including on the pandemic panic — while the rest of us were struggling to keep a roof over our heads.

Wake your own outrage about the failures of our media. The press is supposed to be the watchdog of democracy. But too often it’s slumbering in a cushy bed or snarling at the wrong targets. Order your copy of the new Project Censored paperback today.

The Senate vs. Democracy

So much — TOO much — now depends on Joe Manchin, the swing-vote Democratic senator from West Virginia who is owned lock, stock and barrel by corporate forces. If Joe Biden has any hope of pushing his ambitious domestic spending plans through the 50-50 Senate, he must first win over Manchin, or even more unlikely “moderate” Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins — the Lucys who always snatch away the football from the Democratic Charley Browns at the last second. This is why no major progressive legislation has passed our House of Lords in years. The Senate is a plantation-era relic that favors the elites from small, conservative states and reinforces minority rule in America — along with the Electoral College, that other anti-democratic relic bequeathed to us by our venerated Founding Fathers, most of whom owned other human beings and ruled their domains by the lash.

It was good to see astute political reporter John Nichols dissect our U.S. Senate problem in the latest print edition of The Nation. And I can understand why the frustrated left-liberal publication also devoted space in the same issue to arguments for a parliamentary instead of a presidential system and even a blue-state secession from red America. But while these articles go too far beyond the fringe of what’s possible in the current U.S., Nichols is too constrained in his Senate reform demands.

Pitchfork mobs in our hallowed Capitol chambers might not be the answer. But we need to overthrow the corporatist power of this exclusive club. The sight of the ancient multimillionaire Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein hugging the reptilian Lindsey Graham after the right-wing cult-controlled, doll-eyed Amy Coney Barrett was rammed onto the Supreme Court nauseated millions of citizens across the land. But this kind of stomach-churning bipartisanship is the rule in the Senate.

Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are now talking tough — because the country is a steaming mess and the Democratic rank-and-file are in no mood for appeasing Mitch McConnell. So yes, let’s start with restoring some democratic balance in the Senate as Nichols proposes, by ending the filibuster, making the District of Columbia the 51st state, and trashing the DNC playbook that keeps picking safe, centrist Senate candidates in red states who invariably get their asses kicked by Republicans (see Kentucky year after year).

But we ultimately need to go beyond these reforms. If democracy has a future in America, we can no longer allow this elite legislative body to stand in the way of urgent progress. As Nichols observes, a senator elected with just 136,000 votes in Wyoming can cancel a senator elected from California with over 6 million votes. This is not majority-rules democracy. This is a formula for continued rack and ruin in America.

Movie of the Week

No movie captures the wounded, restless heart of America today better than Nomadland, which premiered Friday on Hulu. The movie tells the story of Fern (Frances McDormand), a woman just shy of retirement age whose life in a Nevada company town is erased (along with the town’s zip code) when a local gypsum mine and factory are closed and her husband dies. She becomes a nomad, wandering the desert highways and RV camps of the American West like countless other older men and women who suddenly find no place for themselves in the country’s heartless economy.

You can read the reviews elsewhere of director Chloe Zhao’s (below) aching yet life-affirming masterpiece, which is based on a 2017 nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder and has the timeless feel of a classic like The Grapes of Wrath. But let me just say that while McDormand turns in another Oscar-winning performance — much more subtle and real than her other small-town turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — the true stars of this film are non-actors like Bob Wells, a real-life evangelist for the nomadic life. The unvarnished conversations between Bob and Fern, especially the final one about life and death, will reverberate inside you for a long time.

What a beautiful movie — it makes you cry for America and believe in Americans all at once.

Facebook vs. Journalism

For over two decades, tech giants have been relentlessly destroying journalism around the globe by engaging in massive intellectual property theft. Finally, the media in some countries are fighting back. The Australian government is debating legislation that will force tech behemoths like Google and Facebook to share some of the vast wealth they’ve been accumulating for years by stealing news stories and selling advertising on these pages. Google and Facebook suck up a staggering 81 percent of all online advertising revenue in Australia.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Google is moving quickly to evade the Australian government’s wealth-sharing mandate by cutting individual payment deals with media companies like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. that will generate significantly less money for the media companies than the government arbitration system will. Facebook is taking an even harder line against Australia, blacking out all news articles posted by publishers or users.

Ponder this for one moment. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is worth $90 billion. His corporation is valued at over $720 billion. But he won’t kick back one shiny dime for the enormous news content that he hijacks every day. As a result, Zuckerberg and his top investors float on clouds of filthy lucre, while the ink-stained wretches who actually produce the the information that we rely on get downsized, laid off, sped up and generally devalued.

And those lucky media companies that landed deals with Google, because the Silicon Valley colossus got scared by the proposed Australian law and the international precedent that it might set? Will they share their windfalls with their newsrooms instead of just channeling the dividends to their investors? Don’t hold your breath.

I hate to keep beating the same drum, but of course I will. This is why you must declare your independence from Facebook and its stolen news feed — which Zuckerberg & Co. can black out whenever they want to play corporate hardball with publishers. We must unplug our minds from Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter and all of the major tech brands that wield far too much power over our information flow.

Free yourself by donating to your most valued sources of news and commentary. In fact, donate $50 right now to The David Talbot Show. You’ll not only strike a blow for press freedom, you’ll get a free copy of my new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution, to be published in June. After making your donation, be sure to email your name and address to: david@talbotplayers.com.

Thanks for your contribution — and for keeping your mind free.

The Texas Syndrome… and the End of the World

In a new book titled The Precipice, Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord — who has spent his career thinking about doomsday scenarios — predicts that humanity has a one in six chance of self-destructing in the current century. His prognosis sounded dire to me, but my thoughts about the human race and our seeming predilection for mass destruction only grew bleaker after following the collapse of basic infrastructure in Texas this week. It’s not just the power outages, food and water crises, hospital blackouts and disappearance of other fundamental services that have turned major cities like Houston into Third World hellholes. It’s the collapse of political leadership in the state. Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who has cozy relations with the state’s all-powerful energy industry, lamely tried to blame the state’s widespread crisis on the freezing of solar and wind equipment, which supply a small percentage of the state’s electricity. Abbott now has “blood on his hands,” charged a Democratic state legislator, as Texans begin to die in the severe winter storm.

Abbott and his even more ideologically extreme lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, are simply incapable of addressing the the corporate politics of energy in Texas because they’re owned by fossil fuel giants and major utilities. And the voters of Texas put these men in office — and they again sent Senator John Cornyn and the even more ruthless opportunist Ted Cruz to Washington. None of these men are allowed to even whisper “climate crisis” in the wake of this latest freak storm, let alone confront real solutions to the corporate corruption that led to the collapse of Texas’s power grid this week.

As long as people remain enthralled by “leaders” like these men, humanity will keep marching inexorably toward the cliff. Will we shake ourselves free from our death wish — or are we all Texans at heart?

Let’s Hear It for Socialized Medicine!

Cuba will soon begin inoculating its citizens — and the populations of poor countries so far overlooked by Big Pharma, and even tourists. The small, poor island nation has succeeded in developing a Covid-19 vaccine — which it proudly calls “Sovereign” — because the Cuban government has invested deeply in biotech research and development along with its world-class public health system. Now the only obstacle to Cuba producing even more life-saving vaccinations for struggling nations is the U.S. economic blockade, which limits the flow of laboratory equipment and raw supplies necessary for the mass production of the Sovereign shot.

This is one more Cold War relic — and retro measure from the Trump era — that President Biden needs to trash-bin. President Obama began the long overdue opening to Cuba during his final stretch in the White House. Now, with Cuba’s mighty little biotech industry poised to fight a global pandemic, there is even more reason to eliminate the U.S. sanctions that have long hobbled the bastion of Caribbean socialism. While Cuba’s biotech industry has managed to produce most of the vaccines necessary for its own population, the economic blockade has produced bread shortages on the island and has emptied its pharmacy shelves of even simple pain relievers.

Let Cuba help save the world, President Biden. Stop pandering to right-wing Miami Cubans who think you’re a Communist and will never vote for you. It’s time to let Cuba rejoin the global economy.

For more on Cuba’s Covid miracle, read this.

The Bitch vs. The Mitch

The nasty hair (or hairpiece) pulling is in full display now in the Republican Party. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer political organization. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell declared that Trump was “morally and practically responsible” for the mob attack on the Capitol, and Trump predictably had to fire back: “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again. He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country.”

Trump, of course, is right about McConnell being a “hack” — as his vote to again acquit the former president of impeachment charges, while calling on state prosecutors to lock him up, starkly demonstrated. When faced with grand, principled decisions, McConnell is a master at finding the weaselly, political escape hatch. Trump is also right to call out McConnell’s wife (and his former Transportation secretary) Elaine Chao for her big family stake in the Chinese shipping industry. When it comes to Washington corruption, McConnell is the wiliest old Swamp Fox around.

The GOP feud is already hurting McConnell, with the latest polls showing a nearly 30 percent drop in his favorability ratings back home in Kentucky (whose idiotic voters keep reelecting the Swamp Fox or Lizard King or whatever he is). But here’s the beauty part — Trump is also poison for the future of the Republican Party. His mad rants from Mar-a-Lago might hurt targets like McConnell, but his continued bullying domination of the party only keeps driving away college-educated and suburban voters from the GOP. There has been a growing stream of Republican voter defections since the January 6 mayhem, and the party meltdown will continue as long as the Donald still clings to the top of the GOP tower like a wounded and howling King Kong.

Joe Biden and the Democrats should continue to take full advantage of the Republicans’ uncivil war, barreling ahead with their ambitious rescue and rebuild plans with or without the support of the few sane members left in the opposition party. Trump — and McConnell — are the snarling twin faces of the Republican Party. And they, and their repulsive party, deserve each other.

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?

Why does everything in America suck? We have failing public schools, broken highways and bridges, pathetic mass transit, a public health system that can’t handle pandemics (or even basic public health), a workforce that works harder for less than workers in any other advanced country, and so on. As Dylan once sang, “Everything is broken.” The reason for this social decay, argues economist Heather McGhee is racism. Sure, corporate greed and the expropriation of our political system by the Koch brothers and their ilk hasn’t helped, McGhee acknowledges. But white resentment of public spending – even when it lifts their own boats along with those of racial minorities (especially Blacks) – is “the key uncredited actor in our backslide,” states McGhee.

 The economist made her argument yesterday in a New York Times Sunday Review essay titled “Our Economy of White Resentment” which everyone should read. (She expands on her provocative theme in her new book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.) Here are some of McGhee’s bullet points that we all should consider:

  * White people who exhibit LOW racial resentment against Black people are 60 percentage points more likely to support increased government spending than are those with high racial resentment.

     * A new Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study calculated that in 2019, the country’s output would have been $2.6 trillion greater if the gaps between white men and everyone else were closed.

  * And a 2020 Citigroup report estimated that if the U.S. had adopted policies to close the Black-white economic gap 20 years ago, our GDP would be some $16 trillion(!) higher.

In other words, racism is bad for business and bad for society. Dividing and conquering the races might be good for corporate capitalists, but it sucks for the rest of us – as Fred Hampton was preaching over a half century ago, before he was drugged and assassinated in his bed. (See my Movie of the Week review below.)

 The economic stupidity of racism was again on stark display in recent days, as the owners of the popular Sonoma wine country restaurant The Girl & the Fig shut their doors rather than rehire the young server Kimi Stout who was fired for wearing a Black Lives Matter mask. Apparently one racist customer complained about the mask being worn by Stout – who identifies as brown and queer -- prompting the restaurant owners to ban their employees from displaying BLM messages. And now The Girl & the Fig proprietors would rather put dozens more people out of work – and risk the survival of their little goldmine – instead of adapting to the growing sentiment that, yes, Black lives DO fucking matter.

 Along with a peaceful political revolution, we need another cultural revolution in this country. In my youth, we advanced the radical idea that “all you need is love.” We envisioned a rainbow society where people of all colors, genders and sexual orientations could harmonize.

 It turns out that our vision is not just hippie-dippie. It’s the only way for America to prosper.

The Republican Party Must Now Officially Be Regarded as a Domestic Terrorist Organization

… and other observations. I sound off on the week’s headlines with Georgia Kelly, host of the Praxis Peace Institute, one of the most provocative platforms in the country.

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.