Movie of the Week: Eat the Rich — If You Can Stomach Them

The rich are not like you or me – thank god. This observation was driven home for me by the new Netflix documentary Made You Look, about the greatest art forgery scandal in U.S. history. For more than two decades, the Knoedler Gallery – the oldest art gallery in New York – sold over $80 million worth of fake Pollacks, Rothkos, Mothwerwells and other Abstract Expressionists to unsuspecting wealthy art collectors. The psychology and mechanics of the massive art fraud are fascinating -- a twirling-plates-in-air escapade carried out by the still stubbornly unreflective and unapologetic gallery dealer Ann Freedman, a Long Island housewife turned hustler named Glafir Rosales, and a talented painter who emigrated from China to Queens named Pei-Shen Qian. But I won’t give away the dramatic twists and turns of Barry Avrich’s documentary, which is the best movie of the week (if overlong by 20 minutes or so).

 What I want to zero in on here – and it seems like an unconscious aspect of the film – is the way Made You Look exposes the grotesque greed, narcissism and even hideous looks of the super rich. By the end of the documentary, you’re almost rooting for the art forgers, even though they’re nothing more than clever thieves, because the art collectors they bamboozled are such haughty and shallow specimens of the human race. (Not to beat on the Fear and Loathing drum too much this week, but where’s artist Ralph Steadman when you need him? Like his creative partner Hunter S. Thompson, Steadman had a Grosz-like talent for capturing the hideousness of the American bourgeoise.)

The documentary’s revolting cast of characters begins with the leather-tanned and expensively hair-gelled Michael Hammer, owner of the Knoedler Gallery, which he inherited from his filthy rich oil baron grandfather Armand Hammer. Michael also happens to be the father of actor Armie Hammer, recently revealed to be another strange acorn from the family tree.

 Then there’s petulant art tycoon Domenico de Sole, chairman of Sotheby’s, and his equally pouty (and anorexic) wife Eleanore. This Euro trash couple were duped into buying a Rothko for $8.3 million – because it was a steal at that price, until they found out it was worth nothing.

 Even the bit players in Made You Look are strikingly unpleasant to behold and hear – slimy art experts, curators and journalists who revel in their splash of fame on camera, despite their bad teeth and ill-fitting blazers. Are the denizens of the elite New York art world so addicted to their racket that they no longer think about their appearance?

 Made You Look is not a Michael Moore film. It doesn’t aim to rile up the masses about the idiocies and inanities of the 1%. But if you don’t feel like crusading for Elizabeth Warren’s tax- the-rich bill – or grabbing your pitchforks – after viewing it, then you’ve gone comfortably numb.

A Fear and Loathing illustration from the Ralph Steadman bestiary

Trump Is Baaack… And We’re Fucked If the Democrats Are Feckless

The least creepy thing about last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Florida was the gold graven image of Donald Trump that attracted a stream of his fanatical worshippers (a solid majority of whom selected Trump as their favorite presidential candidate in 2024). The most creepy thing was Trump in the flesh, who is STILL convinced that he’s our once and future president. A disturbingly big chunk of Americans has bought into Trump’s delusion — and it’s not just the Proud Boy and QAnon lunatic fringe.

America was never America to me, as Langston Hughes once sagely wrote. This came back to me as I was reading Peter Richardson’s galleys for Savage Journey, his authoritative book about Hunter S. Thompson (see below) that will be published in August. Thompson came to know our country’s true heart of darkness, and during the twisted Nixon presidency he rendered this nightmare with hallucinogenic precision. America is full of inner demons and terrors. And repulsive creatures like Nixon and Trump have slithered all too often from our dank, foul national id.

And so here is the Trump again, slogging his way out of the Florida swamp, his shoes sucking primordial mud, and marching onstage to delirious adoration at the CPAC torch rally. He is slouching toward Washington, again — make no mistake about it. And the only thing that can stop him is a successful Biden presidency.

That means the Democrats must quickly learn to play hardball. not just talk tough. They can’t let Mitch McConnell wear them down again with his rope-a-dope. They must find a way to push through the $15 minimum wage. They must truly rebuild America by passing Biden’s ambitious infrastructure package. They must abolish the Senate trickery that allows Republicans to bottle up Democratic judicial picks. And Biden must get behind Senator Elizabeth Warren’s eminently reasonable tax on the super wealthy, which even a majority of Republican voters supports. During the pandemic, the richest Americans (take Jeff Bezos, please) have obscenely hoarded even more wealth as millions have sunk into poverty. This class aggression cannot stand, man.

If the Democrats win in Washington — and in state legislatures around the country — then Trumpism loses. But if they again wimp out, we’re all fucked. Then we’ll witness, in even more horror, the Second Coming of the red-eyed Antichrist. And this time his clawed presidency won’t be playing nice.

Tom Ammiano’s Longest Run

What a wonderful story (by my old SF Examiner colleague Carol Pogash) in today’s NY Times about the VERY belated awarding of a varsity track letter to Tom Ammiano. Now 79 years young, Ammiano — the charismatic, sharp-witted heir to Harvey Milk’s gay political legacy — was denied the varsity letter he earned at age 16 for long-distance running by his Catholic high school in Montclair, New Jersey. He was never told the reason for the rank injustice but he knew why. “I was weird and different,” he told Pogash. But happy ending: Because of the intervention of a Jewish cantor (!) — you’ll have to read the story — Immaculate Conception High School has finally awarded Ammiano his varsity letter, over six decades later.

“I went to seventh heaven,” said Ammiano, when he heard about the school’s reversal. I expect to see the still stylish Ammiano now swanning about San Francisco in his varsity sweater.

Full disclosure and all of that — I’ve known Tom forever and I wrote the Foreword to his hugely entertaining memoir about life in progressive California politics, standup comedy, and school teaching (interesting mix). The book is called Kiss My Gay Ass (which he once yelled at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger) and you must buy it if you love reading insider accounts about the madcap political arena. (I love the title, but also liked another one he was toying with, Season of the Bitch, a wink and a nod to my own San Francisco history.)

Here’s to Tom Ammiano, still winning races after a long career as a political warhorse. Like his role model Harvey Milk, Ammiano knew that gay rights needed to be part of a rainbow struggle for all human rights. As former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos (another local hero) told Pogash, Ammiano — who became president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and later a California state legislator — fought for community control of the police long before it was politically expedient and won citywide health coverage in San Francisco long before national health insurance became a battle cry.

Come to think of it, Tom Ammiano deserves a lot more than just that long overdue varsity letter.

Where’s Hunter S. Thompson When You Need Him?

Who are the great journalists of today and yesterday? This question came to me lately for several reasons. I happened to watch Martin Eden yesterday, a wonderful Italian adaptation of the Jack London novel – until the last reel, when the film goes giddily off the rails. London’s conception of a great writer – a protean figure who combined elements of a Marxist working-class hero with Nietzsche’s Super Man – was wacky and uniquely his own. But it got me thinking – what real-life scribblers have exposed the hidden mechanisms of power, have burrowed deeply inside politics and the corporate economy and explained society to itself?

My list is heavily American – not just because I’m an American provincial, but because my kind of investigative journalism seems uniquely American. It’s also weighted with white men, because the Fourth Estate has been heavily dominated by this breed. And it mainly features alternative or independent writers (or news photographers) – because let’s face it, the stars of the mainstream press are lap poodles who seldom bite the hands that feed them.

 Here’s my list of great journalists, daring seekers of the truth who put their mission ahead of career. Of course, there are many such reporters, many of them unsung. But these journalists aimed for big game, often the biggest. I’ve even had the honor of working with or knowing some of them. All made a deep impression on me.

 Hunter S. Thompson. A surprise number-one pick, but as author Peter Richardson convincingly argues in a forthcoming book about the creator of gonzo journalism (Savage Journey), no journalist of his day wrote as passionately and truthfully about the deep evil of the Nixon presidency.

Just read these hot trumpet riffs about Nixon that Thompson blasted out. It will make you lament the fact we had no one like him to fully capture the warped malignancy of the Trump reign. (Matt Taibbi is a talented successor, but can’t hit Thompson’s crazy-true high notes.)

 “It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise… He speaks to the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unrecognizable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…

 “Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American Dream. Richard Nixon stands for everything that I would not want to happen to myself, or be, or be around. He stands for everything I not only have contempt for but dislike and think should be stomped out. Greed, treachery, stupidity, cupidity, positive power of lying, total contempt for any sort of human, constructive political instinct… Nixon represents everything that’s wrong with this country. Down the line.”

 This, my friends, is the flame-thrower journalism we need today.

Here is the rest of my admittedly impressionistic list (in no particular order). Feel free to post your own intrepid truth-tellers.

I.F. Stone

Mark Dowie

Susan Meiselas

James Ridgeway

Ruben Salazar

Warren Hinckle

 Robert Scheer

Orianna Fallaci

Glenn Greenwald

Robert Parry

Murray Waas

 Why no Woodward and Bernstein? Because, like a lot of establishment investigative reporters, their big Watergate stories were handed to them by an aggrieved wing of the Nixon government. Throughout his subsequent career, Woodward continued to be used as a channel by factions of Washington power. His reporting must be viewed through this lens. The same goes for Seymour Hersh, who began his career with the stunning expose of the My Lai massacre, but has been used too often by his deep state sources to settle scores (as with his shameful CIA-influenced book on President Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot).

 Give me fearless independent journalists who are not simply captives of their Beltway sources.

Hunter S. Thompson

This Must Be the Place: Reflections on Home

Where do you call home? That’s the existential question that many of us are feeling these days. Maybe you’re recently retired and short on savings. Maybe you just graduated and can’t afford to live in the city where you grew up. Maybe your city has become a ghost town during the pandemic, or because its big factory shut down. Maybe your hometown no longer feels safe or familiar or yours. Maybe you’re just restless and you want to hit the road, see what else is out there.

 I know a married couple in their late 50s whose dream house near California’s wine country, surrounded by an olive tree orchard like in Tuscany, was burned to the ground in one of the state’s recent wildfires. They barely escaped alive in the middle of the night with their dog. They decided to keep driving because home was suddenly seasonal tinder, their neighborhood reduced to ash and black sticks of once green trees.

They drove first to Southern California, and then visited Texas, Florida, New England, Wisconsin, Montana, Colorado, the Pacific Northwest. Everywhere had its attractions and everywhere had its demons. Freak storms or more wildfires. People who insist that Covid-19 is make-believe and public officials who feed their delusions. Finally, after about a year on the road, they returned home to California. But life now feels transient in Sonoma County. They crash where they can, in friends’ houses or in Airbnb’s, waiting for the next fire season to sweep through California, when they’ll again hit the highway. The new Nomads, the Flying Dutchmen.

 As David Byrne sang, “I'm just an animal looking for a home/ Share the same space for a minute or two.”

The Grateful Dead play a Haight Street concert

As we get older, we’re supposed to get more rooted, to know where we belong. Lawrence Ferlinghettii -- the poet, publisher and fixture of San Francisco bohemia – just passed away at the heroic age of 101, dying in the same rent-controlled North Beach apartment that he called home for nearly 50 years. But Ferlinghetti knew that he was a ghost long before he died. There has not been a San Francisco bohemia since the 1980s, the last time that struggling artists could afford to live in the city. The last time that San Francisco produced art – books, music, films – of any great note or quality.

Grace Slick nose-to-nose with Janis Joplin

 Of course, there have been a few exceptions in recent years. The Last Black Man in San Francisco was a little masterpiece of a movie that was willed into life by two natives – my son Joe Talbot and his childhood friend Jimmie Fails. But neither of these talented young men lives in the city anymore. They can’t afford it. And there is no creative community left here anymore.

Nevertheless, San Francisco still feels like my city, my family home. My father Lyle came up from Los Angeles with Bette Davis to star in Fog Over Frisco, and left his heart here. I married Camille, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, whose father came from Sicilian and Genovese heritage and whose mother was of Irish and Greek descent. Joe and Alice Peri felt like the best of old San Francisco to me – up from the immigrant working class, true-blue liberals, and stylish urbanites who made their martini generation seem cool. Camille’s dream was to also live in The City, and she began to as an ingenue, in a Nob Hill apartment ($140 a month). She took the cable car to her downtown job in the book buyer’s office at Macy’s (when the department store sold books) and later walked to her job as a cocktail waitress in the top-floor Crown Room of the Fairmont Hotel, where she served drinks to Tony Bennett between shows in the hotel’s legendary Venetian Room and to tourists who asked what time the famous fog would be rolling in.

Lyle Talbot and Bette Davis in Fog Over Frisco

Camille and I have San Francisco memories that go back through multiple lives and generations. Drunken nights and dead ancestors and dear friends who died far too young in an earlier plague. Whenever they return, our sons Joe and Nat still think of our old ramshackle house in Bernal Heights as home. And so, Camille and I hang on, scribbling away and dreaming of turning our earthquake shack “estate” (bought in the mid-1990s for $285,000, 10% down and borrowed from parents, the last time that people like us could afford to buy a home in San Francisco) into an artist colony. Maybe my sister and her husband – also writers – can build a small in-law house in our backyard. Maybe we can convert the basement into a work/live space for a young filmmaker.

Joe Peri in his World War II Navy uniform

 I’ve lived in San Francisco for 40 of my 69 years. I know it’s my home – which feels like a blessing and sometimes a curse. The tech invasion made the city seem alien. Now that much of the digital work force has abandoned the city, after dislodging thousands of longtime residents, San Francisco feels hollowed out by the pandemic. But the emptiness and strangeness that hangs over the city also feels like an opportunity.

 We have to think tribally these days. I was fascinated by the recent film Nomadland because that’s what the aging men and women roaming the highways of the American West have been forced to do. It’s not an ecstatic convergence like Burning Man, but there’s something even more uplifting about these transient desert communities of van people. Yes, and tragic too, because there is usually economic or psychic trauma behind these people’s nomadic wanderings.

Alice, before she married Joe

I also want to get off the grid these days – but I want to do it in the city that I call home. I want to embrace my tribal network – the family, friends and fellow activists/artists who are my kin – and make it a bulwark against the relentless assaults of what will always assail us. Corporate greed, ecological disasters, pandemics – along with the unavoidable decline and fall of the human body.

If we drop away from the herd, they will surely pick us off. Fire us, evict us, steal our savings, force us to wrestle with social problems as if they’re our personal failings. But if we stick together, we’re an army that can’t be displaced.

Recently, I completed a book, By the Light of Burning Dreams – working with my sister Margaret and brother-in-law Art. Like my book Season of the Witch, which told the story of San Francisco’s liberation in the 1960s and ‘70s, our new book recounts the dramatic tales of those who tried to liberate the entire country during this “second American Revolution.” I wrote a chapter about the brave stand taken by the American Indian Movement (AIM) and their fellow warriors at Wounded Knee in 1973. For 71 days, this community of resisters – including women, men and children --  was surrounded by the heavily militarized and violent forces of the Nixon administration. And yet on the final night of the siege, Dennis Banks and other AIM leaders were able to slip through the iron ring around them. Instead of being caught and killed like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, these warriors lived to fight another day. Because it was their land and they weren’t going to be chased off it or killed.

Figure out where you belong and take your stand. There is power in numbers, and in the certainty of home.

Does the U.S. Always Need an Enemy?

President Joe Biden’s nomination of career diplomat William Burns as the new CIA chief must be seen as a moral upgrade. Trump’s CIA director was notorious “war on terror” torturer Gina Haspel. And Biden’s first choice for DCI, Mike Morrell, was also associated with the intelligence agency’s “enhanced interrogation” regime. In recent years, the CIA — which has engaged in dark war methods including kidnapping, torture, assassination and mind-control throughout its history — has become even more of a death squad, running drone-kill operations with little governmental or legal oversight. So Burns’s tenure as CIA director, after more than three decades in the Foreign Service and the leadership of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will hopefully mark a sharp break with the past.

But during his Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee — which was described as a bipartisan “coronation” with even Senator Lindsey Graham heaping praise on the nominee — Burns felt predictably compelled to drop his diplomatic posture and brand China and Russia as enemies of the U.S. Burns rightly described Russia as a falling power, but one still capable of wreaking cyber havoc — as is the U.S. The Putin regime continues to display its despotic character by imprisoning dissident leader Alexei Navalny. But the Biden administration has made clear it will continue to hound political prisoner Julian Assange to the ends of the Earth.

Likewise, China is ruled by a loathsome dictatorship, but the U.S. is less concerned about the Beijing regime’s systematic human rights violations than it is about the rising power’s challenge to U.S. economic, technological and military hegemony.

The U.S. also has a long and tragic history in its relations to Iran, a dark past again rooted in the Allen Dulles-era CIA, when the U.S worked secretly with British espionage to overthrow that country’s democratic government (see the recent documentary Coup ‘53) and install a repressive monarchy in its place. And yet Burns, as a diplomatic envoy for President Obama, was able to hammer out a nuclear treaty with even hardline Iranian mullahs.

President Biden, echoing JFK, has said that America must lead by the power of its example instead of the power of its fearsome arsenal. Let’s hope that the Biden administration — including even the lethal and illegal CIA — lives up to that lofty rhetoric.

After four years of Donald Trump, and the much longer decline of American democracy, isn’t it time to finally stop imposing “freedom” on weaker countries and focus instead on our own corrupted institutions? The “enemy” does not hunker primarily outside of our borders. As the Pogo cartoon strip once famously declared, “We have met the enemy — and he is us.”

Mitch McConnell Presses Merrick Garland About Legal Philosophy on Vengeance

From the Onion… brilliant:

“Now, Judge Garland, how would you feel, hypothetically speaking, about the Justice Department using its power to just absolutely wreck the life of someone who may or may not have brazenly wronged you on the public stage, say, oh, I don’t know, five or so years ago?” asked the seven-term Kentucky senator, who spent much of his allotted time at the confirmation hearing inquiring whether the circuit judge prefers to seek recompense immediately or follows the “dish best served cold” school of thought. “You’ve had a long, distinguished career, both as a prosecutor and on the bench, and I guess what I’m most interested to know is how long you think you might be capable of holding a grudge. Would you say your approach to the law has been more ‘eye for an eye’ or ‘live and let live’?”

LOTS of People Talked… Another Confession in the Malcolm X Assassination

Someone would have talked. That’s the line that lone gunman true believers always use to win arguments. But as it turns out, LOTS of people have talked over the years. The latest revelation about the Malcolm X assassination just reinforces what many of us have long been saying — to massive ridicule from the power elite and its talking heads. The most promising leaders of major change in American society in the 1960s — including the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton and yes, Malcolm — were forcibly eliminated by national security and police agencies. Now ABC News reveals a deathbed confession by a former New York Police Department undercover officer named Ray Wood, implicating both the security unit of the NYPD and the FBI in the February 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. You can read more about it here.

As time goes by, the evidence mounts that during the 1960s, the national security establishment — under the direction of ruthless men like the CIA’s Allen Dulles and the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover — was a violent, repressive force, systematically killing or jailing any leader viewed as threatening to powerful corporate and political interests. This harsh reality about American public life has been widely accepted over the years, with recent movies like One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah matter-of-factly depicting the dark machinations of police and federal agencies against Malcolm X and Fred Hampton.

And yet the corporate media still widely dismisses any books or articles about national security assassinations of the Kennedy brothers or Black leaders as wacky conspiracy theories, lumping this growing and compelling historical truth with crackpot QAnon ideas and other crazy conjecture. The long, disgraceful campaign to smear “grassy knoll” researchers as “tinfoil hat types” has been carried out by lazy and uninformed — or worse, compromised — journalists. And the main beneficiaries of this propaganda are the very agencies that carried out the assassinations.

But smart, brave authors and filmmakers know the truth — and so do millions of Americans. When will the corporate media finally begin tying together the bullet holes?

Remembering Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is dead at 101 -- the bard of San Francisco bohemia; the cofounder of City Lights Books (after nearly seven decades, still a great world oasis of literary freedom); the crusty defender of creativity and weirdness. I remember having lunch with Lawrence at my former watering hole, Francis Coppola’s Café Zoetrope in North Beach, where the old poet and bookseller was also a frequent diner. I was interviewing him for my book about San Francisco’s raucous history, Season of the Witch. At one point, Lawrence turned around the interview on me and began asking questions. Why the title, he asked me? I think Lawrence was more a fan of jazz than rock. I began quoting lines from Donovan’s strangely dark hit song from 1966. When he heard Donovan’s dystopic line, “Beatniks out to make it rich,” Ferlinghetti exploded.

 “We were NEVER out to make it rich!” Ferlinghetti nearly yelled at me, as we sat in a corner booth at the café sipping a Coppola red. “The Beats were always broke. Ginsberg only got some money near the end of his life when he sold all of his stuff to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.” I explained that Donovan was being ironic, that he was warning about a world turned upside down with greed. But Ferlinghetti was still in a foul mood as lunch ended.

 That’s one of the things I loved about Ferlinghetti – his toughness. That’s why San Francisco radicals like him went the distance, turning their cultural creations into beloved institutions. City Light Books has become so revered that its current operators, set up for continued success when Ferlinghetti wisely bought the landmark building, were able to raise nearly a half-million dollars from loyal customers during the Covid-19 lockdown.

 It took someone as ornery as Ferlinghetti, who was already the grownup during the Beat years, to fight for “Howl,” Ginsberg’s anthemic poem, when the poet took flight, leaving his publisher to stand trial on obscenity charges. When Ferlinghetti prevailed in the 1957 trial, it was a blow for the cultural revolution that was beginning to take shape in San Francisco.

 But even as that revolution rose into a wave at the Human Be-In, where the Beats handed the baton to a new generation of seekers, massed in Golden Gate Park on a sunny winter afternoon in January 1967, the counter-culture elders still had a healthy skepticism about the oceanic upheaval they had helped create. Looking over the teeming humanity from the stage where the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary and they had held forth, Ginsberg turned to his old friend Ferlinghetti and asked, “What if we’re wrong?”

 Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were not wrong about the hippie invasion of San Francisco in the 1960s, which led to the gay revolution of the 1970s and the creation of the “San Francisco values” embraced by progressives around the world – and reviled by Fox News and its right-wing legions.

 And Ferlinghetti was not wrong decades later when he turned against another invasion of our city, this time by the robotic hordes of the tech industry, whom he castigated as a "soulless group of people" -- a "new breed" of men and women too busy with their digital gadgetry to "be here" in the moment.

 Yes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti could be as crusty as day-old San Francisco sourdough. But his cantankerousness was always in defense of the right principles and people --  the exploited, the underdogs, the freaks who make all the beauty in the world. Until the very end, he stayed in North Beach, he painted and he wrote poems, and he sipped wine and ate pasta at neighborhood cafes.

I want to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti when I grow up.

 (That’s Ferlinghetti, far right, with Ginsberg, Dylan and poet Michael McClure outside his bookstore.)

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.