Biden, Schumer and Pelosi to the Rescue — Let’s Celebrate Like We Should

Well, the Dems did it — passed the biggest anti-poverty bill in a generation over the UNIVERSAL opposition of Republicans in the House and Senate. And let’s hear it especially for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who got it done in the 50-50 Senate without one vote to spare (thanks to the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris). Yes, the Democrats had to make a big sacrifice — they were forced for now to give up the $15 minimum wage hike — but the rest of the bill is sweeping in its scope and Schumer managed to make his entire caucus happy, from Manchin to Sanders.

Progressives don’t celebrate their political victories enough — maybe because we have so few of them and our purism prevents us from enjoying the inevitable compromise of politics. But we need to take a big victory lap on the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which will not only put checks in the pockets of every taxpayer but also significantly decrease poverty in America, extend Obamacare, speed up Covid vaccinations, distribute billions in aid to struggling cities, states and school districts, and begin the vital work of improving our failing infrastructure. If you can’t cheer for this, then you’re the hair-shirt type of leftist who always sees the glass half empty. And you need to lighten up. (The Jacobin magazine web page had no mention of the historic legislative achievement this morning.)

Of course, some Republicans are now rushing to embrace the huge rescue bill, which will be signed into law tomorrow by President Biden. Even though not one Republican legislator in Washington voted for the bill, they’re all painfully aware that a whopping 70 percent (!) of Americans were cheering for it — including many of their suffering constituents. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, had the nerve to merrily tweet about the much-needed relief the bill will give restaurant industry workers — after opposing the legislation in the Senate.

I like Nancy Pelosi’s tart response to this two-faced GOP bullshit: “It’s typical that they vote no and take the dough.”

If millions more voters don’t continue defecting from the Republican Party at this point, it will deepen my despair about the human race. But if Biden, Schumer and Pelosi continue to think big and turn the federal government into an agent for positive change in people’s lives, then I think that Joe Biden will really become the incarnation of the man whose portrait he hung in the Oval Office: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s New Deal shifted voter loyalties — even in the South — for generations.

Errata and desiderata and all that… I’ve heard from some quarters that I was far too euphoric about the film Nomadland, which was much more positive about work life in an Amazon warehouse than was the book on which it was based. I plead guilty. As Amazon workers in Alabama and elsewhere battle to unionize — and to receive basic respect from their corporate overlords (read the Guardian’s account today of Amazon truck drivers forced to work overtime with no lunch or even bathroom breaks) — the film’s rosy picture of the Bezos plantation is indeed a false note in an otherwise beautiful film.

Book of the Year: Inside the Nazi Labyrinth – And Our Own

I just finished reading what must be the book of the year. I know that 2021 is still young, but if you have any interest in history, the mysterious nature of human cruelty, the equally unfathomable bloodline loyalties of family, and the dark labyrinth of espionage then you must read The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. After researching the poisonous life of Allen Dulles, America’s top Cold War spy, for my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I thought I knew everything important about the twisted escape routes of Nazi war criminals after World War II. And several of the key characters in my own postwar chapters make appearances in The Ratline, including Dulles himself and a few of the Nazi mass murderers whom he helped flee justice, like leading executioners and apologists Karl Wolff, Walter Rauff, Eugen Dollmann and Reinhard Gehlen. But the main subject of The Ratline is a high-ranking SS official I’d never heard of – Otto von Wachter. With The Ratline, Wachter now joins the death’s-head ranks of the Third Reich’s most evil functionaries.

Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline, is a professor and litigator of international law. But he pursues his long-dead and still largely hidden quarry not only with legal determination, but with the narrative skills of a great novelist. Sands’s zeal to fully understand Wachter and his crimes also has personal motivations. While acting as Hitler’s governor of Poland, Wachter rounded up tens of thousands of Jews and deported them to death camps – including many in Sands’s own family.

Sands’s  journey of discovery takes him from Vienna to Berlin to Krakow to remote villages in the Alps --  where Wachter hid for three years after the war -- and finally to Rome, where Wachter died in July 1949 under mysterious circumstances while in the care of a notorious pro-Nazi Vatican bishop named Alois Hudal. Along the way, the author develops a strange relationship – friendship is too strong a word – with Wachter’s youngest son, Horst, who lives in a decrepit castle outside Vienna surrounded by eerie memorabilia from his father’s life.

Horst barely knew Otto, who was either helping to run the Third Reich with disturbing precision (he was a lawyer who dispatched several of his own former law professors – all Jews – to the gas chambers), or on the run from the Nuremberg hangman’s noose while his six children were young. But Horst was absolutely devoted to his mother, Charlotte, also a dedicated Nazi – and felt compelled to carry on her revisionist mission regarding his dead father.

Through years of visits to Horst’s strange castle and frequent communications with the “Nazi son,” Sands felt equally compelled to make him accept the truth about his monstrous father. Horst is the only one of his siblings who will engage with Sands about the family’s dark past. And yet Horst keeps finding ways to deflect the awful truth, even when Sands confronts him with shocking photographic evidence of his father’s criminality, including pictures that showed Otto Wachter and other SS officials looking blankly on as 50 young, randomly selected Poles were executed by a Nazi firing squad in reprisal for the assassination of a Nazi official.

As Sands keeps digging deeper into Otto Wachter’s sinister past – poring over damning official records and even Charlotte’s psychotically cheerful diary entries about her “sensitive, joyful, optimistic husband” – Horst keeps urging the author to keep an “open mind” about his father and the reasons he enthusiastically became a Nazi in his youth. By the end, it’s hard for the reader to fathom whether Otto Wachter’s cold murderousness or Horst Wachter’s insistent obliviousness is more disturbing.

This is a deep and even entertaining, page-turning investigation into human evil and the family fog that usually surrounds it. I have read many books about Hitler’s reign and the compromised efforts to bring his henchmen to justice after the war. But none of these histories intrigued and haunted me like The Ratline. It will surely stick with you too.

Any thinking American will also be compelled by this book to consider our own nation’s war crimes during our lifetimes – and how none of these perpetrators have ever been forced to legally account for themselves. The torching of innocent men, women and children; the illegal wars; the assassinations; the torture. U.S. officials have their own dark records – and they all scurried free on their own ratlines without ever having to leave their own country.

But that’s another column and another book. I’ve already ordered Nicholson Baker’s Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. Baker is one if the few contemporary American authors who is properly disturbed by our own country. As David Bowie once sang, “I’m afraid of America… I’m afraid I can’t help it.”

Otto von Wachter

It’s Time to Think Big, San Francisco — Like Chesa Boudin

San Francisco doesn’t know where it’s going. Until recently, we were the tech capital of the world, god help us. Then the pandemic swept the city, and began sweeping the tech towers with it. Salesforce, the city’s biggest employer, is the latest to announce at least a partial withdrawal from its big downtown perch, with its 10,000 local workers being told they can work remotely on a permanent basis. This follows Dropbox’s recent announcement that it was selling its big San Francisco building. So if SF is no longer going to be the land of the walking dead – sorry, tech zombies (those of you who have human feelings) – then what will the city be?

 San Francisco’s corporate overlords are in a tizzy – as are their mouthpieces at the SF Chronicle. But, as I’ve been arguing, the people of San Francisco – those of us with real roots here – can now reimagine the city and make it what WE want it to be, not Ron Conway, the tech billionaire who for too long threw around his considerable weight at City Hall.

 Speaking of City Hall, this reimagining of San Francisco can’t be led by Mayor London Breed. She’s an uninspired, uninspiring political hack who was lucky not to be rolled up in the ongoing FBI corruption investigation of local officials. But there ARE local officials who are thinking big.

 District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for instance. Boudin got elected in 2019 on the promise to rethink law and order and he’s done that. He has established himself as one of the few bold DAs in the country who believe that diversion and community service are often more effective – and COST-effective – than slapping people in jail. Boudin also believes that cops should be held accountable for their violent and abusive behavior, which as we all know (even in liberal SF) is disproportionately directed at men and women with black or brown skin.

Predictably, the San Francisco Police Officers Association and other reactionary forces are up in arms over Boudin’s reforms. Some clown named Richie Greenberg, who actually once ran for mayor in San Francisco as a REPUBLICAN, is trying to mount a recall campaign against the DA. Greenberg and his cronies claim that crime has skyrocketed under Boudin. It hasn’t – crime in San Francisco has actually dropped by 32 percent over the last year.

But the opponents of change in San Francisco are not fact-based. Like the national GOP/Q (as Chris Cuomo calls them), they will do or say anything to impose their delusional political will on the people. We must defeat them in San Francisco – AND in Washington.

 It’s time for San Franciscans to think big. We did so when we elected visionary lawman Chesa Boudin. And as the tech giants whose shadows once dominated the city continue their great exodus, we must also think deeply about what this once and future beautiful city will be.

 We can begin by becoming known as a city of true social justice – instead of a capital of greed and despair.

Chesa Boudin

The Firm vs. Harry and Meghan… and Cornel West

OK, I admit it — I watched the Oprah Winfrey interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Hey, I’m still in lockdown, I’ve finished a new book (including the tedious production/photo credits/fact-checking/legal phase)… and I have a little time on my hands. So here are my un-expert reactions to the latest Royal Tempest: Meghan is impressively smart and articulate, Oprah is a hell of a celebrity interviewer, and Prince Charles — poor old, cold, remote Charley — is in deep shit. Again. Can’t he even answer his son’s phone calls? I mean, if Harry IS his son. He looks a lot like the royal guardsman who was keeping Princess Diana company when the Windsors were freezing her out. But now, I’m getting too deep into the royal woods… and — as with The Crown or Bridgerton — after a while, I begin to fall asleep. I’m a good Yankee, and ultimately all things monarchical bore me.

But then there’s… THE FIRM! This is the latest I’ve heard about the royal deep state — the faceless bureaucrats who wield the real power at Buckingham Palace and apparently have alienated Harry and Meghan. I can’t find out anything truly revealing about the Firm — and I wish that I cared enough to keep digging.

Meanwhile, back at one of America’s royal palaces — Harvard University — esteemed scholar Cornel West has left its ivy-covered walls for the more plebeian (and radical) halls of the Union Theological Seminary, where he began his academic career. West was denied tenure by Harvard — a weird, boneheaded decision during these post-George Floyd times, like the Royal Family’s decision to snub half-Black Meghan and her babies. Harvard’s denial of tenure to the distinguished, 67-year-old West is especially odd because the university already granted him tenure during an earlier stint there, as did Princeton and Yale. West’s only explanation for Harvard’s insulting decision was that he has aged out in the academic marketplace — or, even more disturbing, he violated a strict university taboo with his outspoken defense of Palestinian rights.

The Royal Family and Harvard University. Both are sclerotic, elitist anachronisms in supposedly modern, diverse democracies. Both institutions are run by “firms” with hidden ties to special interests. Why do we the people still revere them? Where are the guys with Viking helmets and antler horns when you really need them?

Cancel Cuomo — Or Poverty?

I get it. For four, long years we had to put up with a president who openly bragged about sexually assaulting women, was credibly accused of raping a journalist in a New York City department store dressing room, routinely targeted women with misogynistic insults, paid for sex with a porn star, and was photographed partying with accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. We had a grotesque pig as our president. And he got away with all of his sex crimes (not to mention his criminal subversion of democracy). So millions of Americans are justifiably angry, including me.

I also get that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is a bully and liar and sleaze — especially with women over whom he has power. At least five women have now publicly accused him of making unwanted, creepily intimate conversation with them — and he allegedly kissed one on the cheek and hugged another uninvited. But, at least so far, Cuomo does not seem to be as depraved as Donald Trump. He has not been accused of groping women’s vaginas or pinning them against walls and violating them. Nonetheless, there is now a Democratic lynch party in New York that is pushing Cuomo to resign — including the top Democrat in the state Senate.

Look, I’m no fan of Andrew Cuomo. Or I briefly was when I thought his televised pandemic performances made him seem like the only Democrat tough enough and nationally prominent enough to beat Trump. (Who knew that when it came to New York nursing homes, his straight talk was crooked.) I agreed with the progressive attacks on Cuomo, that he was too tight with corporate interests, that he was too much a captive of his own ego. Still, Cuomo trounced activist-actress Cynthia Nixon — whom I supported — in the 2018 Democratic primary, gathering over 65% of the vote. He went on to take nearly 60% of the vote in the general election, including a lopsided percentage of women, to win a third term in office.

So when Cuomo says “I got elected by the people — not by politicians,” I’m with him — on democratic principle. Barring the credible accusation of a sex crime — and not just pervy flirtation (which would probably eliminate nearly all male politicians in America, and some female ones too) — Cuomo should be allowed to finish out the term for which he was massively elected. If he’s arrogant enough to run for a fourth term in Albany next year, let the people speak. In the meantime, #MeToo frenzy has already cost the Democrats too many effective leaders, including deposed Senator Al Franken, while Republicans continue to merrily evade any such punishment.

A final note. Today, progressives should be celebrating the weekend passage of the enormous relief bill — a milestone that liberal Senator Sherrod Brown called the “happiest day” of his Senate career. When President Biden puts his signature on it, the sweeping law will not only deliver immediate relief to struggling Americans, it will establish a minimum-income safety net under millions of poor families with children.

With even Republican-leaning Senator Joe Manchin now saying he’s willing to at least curtail the filibuster if his GOP colleagues use it to bottle up urgent legislation, it looks like Joe Biden might really have a chance to go down in history as the most successful liberal president since FDR.

But instead, the New York Times leads today with a screaming headline about Cuomo’s battle with fellow members of his party.

What are we to do with Democrats? Always ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Heroes of the Second American Revolution, Part Two

As I was saying in the post below, By the Light of Burning Dreams, the new book by me and my sister Margaret Talbot of The New Yorker magazine, will examine crucial turning points in the lives of revolutionary heroes of the 1960s and ‘70s, epiphanies that changed their lives and the course of American history. Yesterday I ran a photo gallery of Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Kathleen Cleaver, and a mug shot of a Jane activist, one of the Chicago feminists who ran an underground abortion clinic before Roe v. Wade.

For the low, low price of a $50 donation to the David Talbot Show, you can pre-order a copy of By the Light of Burning Dreams. which will be published in June by HarperCollins. Don’t let Aaron Sorkin, Ken Burns or Doris Kearns Goodwin control your knowledge of American history. Liberate your mind with a rigorously independent chronicle of this searing history.

Here are some other legendary radicals who will be featured in the book.

Cesar Chavez electrified his United Farm Workers movement — which was as much a spiritual crusade as a labor struggle — with his death-defying hunger strikes.

But his martyrdom complex also became weighed heavily on his fellow organizers, including Dolores Huerta, another UFW saint who later said she should’ve argued more strenuously with Chavez.

Craig Rodwell started the first openly gay and lesbian bookstore in the world, named after Oscar Wilde. A refugee from a Dickensian childhood in Chicago. Rodwell also took the lead in publicizing the political importance of New York’s Stonewall riot in 1969 — which started when butch performer and activist Storme DeLarverie resisted police arrest outside a popular gay bar. Soon after, Rodwell and his bookstore staff organized the first Gay Pride parade.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved into a small Greenwich Village apartment in 1971 and began a year of living dangerously, recording songs that urged “power to the people” and joining with militant leaders to stop the Vietnam war and bring down President Richard Nixon. Washington authorities felt deeply threatened by the ex-Beatle’s radical turn and targeted him as an enemy of the state.

And in 1973, leaders of the American Indian Movement — including Russell Means and Dennis Banks — took over the sacred Wounded Knee site on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota with desperate members of the Lakota tribe. For 71 days, the men, women and children who occupied Wounded Knee withstood the ferocious, militarized assault of federal and local forces.

Among the unsung heroes was Madonna Thunder Hawk, who said the women warriors didn’t feel a need to trumpet their role, while the media focused on the “chiefs in their headdresses.”

The great escape of AIM leaders on the final night of the siege, through the heavily fortified lines that encircled them, is a dramatic, page-turning story. Banks, Thunder Hawk and many others lived to fight another day, proving — as Means said — “that John Wayne hadn’t killed us all,”

Donate $50 Saturday or Sunday— and get a FREE copy of this powerful book.

Pictures From a Revolution — Now You Can Read the True Stories

We won many battles of the second American Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s. But we didn’t win the war. And a younger generation of radicals must now learn from our triumphs and tragedies. That’s the message of my new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams, coauthored with my sister Margaret Talbot. This will be my last history book – they are mountains of labor that require increasingly too much of you. But in some ways, this is my most readable effort – not only because I cowrote it with a wonderful writer, but because the stories of the revolutionary heroes of the ’60s and ‘70s are so damn riveting.

These dramas from our radical past are usually told in corny ways (see Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 – or better yet, DON’T see it). Or this revolutionary history is rendered in censorious and scornful fashion. But the profiles of the legendary figures in By the Light of Burning Dreams are starkly honest while ultimately inspirational. These are the true stories of America’s second revolution that the nation must absorb before we can advance to the next historical stage.

 The book will be published in June by HarperCollins – and you can get a free copy by being one of the first ten to donate $50 to the David Talbot Show.

 I won’t be publishing excerpts of the book, but here’s Part One of a photo gallery of the men and women who “star” in By the Light of Burning Dreams. I’ll run Part Two tomorrow. (The collection of photos in the book is even more striking, and many pictures have never been published before.)

Tom Hayden was disowned twice in his youth, as I write in the chapter about the New Left’s most talented strategist – once by his father and then by the New Left itself. But he reinvented himself as an antiwar leader with his partner Jane Fonda, and their efforts helped finally cut off U.S. funding for the Vietnam war. Hayden latter demonstrated how to take “movement” values into the electoral mainstream, while Fonda overcame a Hollywood blacklist to make popular movies with progressive themes.

 Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the cofounders of the Black Panther Party, were the dynamos of Black Power, arming themselves to resist the violent repression of police departments and the FBI. Seale’s and Newton’s first hair-trigger confrontation with the notorious Oakland police is still a pulse-pounding scene – and Bobby narrated every fraught moment for me.

I also conducted a long and deeply revealing interview with Kathleen Cleaver, one of the savvy women who played a leading role in the Black Panther Party.

 Feminism was once a dangerous enterprise, and nobody took more risks than the Jane collective in Chicago, an underground group of women who performed abortions before they were legalized by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. The members of Jane put their freedom on the line so women could win control of their bodies and selves.

 Act now, as the TV ads say – Join the David Talbot Show with a $50 donation and get a free copy of this eye-popping American history you’ll never see on PBS. And come back tomorrow for Part Two of the photo gallery.

Woodward & Bernstein and the Myth of the Media Heroes

We like to think that the crusaders of the free press will always save us from the dragons that try to kill democracy. This was the Watergate myth that inspired so many students in my generation to become journalists. We tried our best (some of us) but as I near 70, American democracy seems more in peril than ever. Mark Dowie, whom I had the pleasure of working with as a fellow Mother Jones editor in the 1980s, is one of the few to make my best modern muckrakers list. Mark broke stories about the exploding Ford Pinto, the dangerous contraceptive devices foisted on women and many other big exposes about corporate malice. He has now authored a provocative history of investigative journalism titled When Truth Mattered, and I’m publishing an excerpt from the forthcoming book below.

In it, Mark examines the hollowness of the persistent Watergate myth. Even though they helped inspire me to become a journalist, I came to dismiss Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as captives of the Beltway culture — more adept at catching leaks from aggrieved government officials than exposing the true mechanisms of power in America. Read Mark Dowie’s viewpoint here:

There is no better place to start the rebirth of investigative reporting than with Watergate, regarded variously as “the most significant work of political reporting in history” .... “the standard for modern investigative journalism”... “the single most spectacular act of serious journalism of the 20th century” .... "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time” .... “a milestone” ... “a triumph.”  But because there is so much detailed media history about Watergate, it can also be a case study used to examine the true impact and consequence of a single investigative effort.

The convenient and oft repeated trope on the Watergate investigation is that two investigative reporters, with the support of a brilliant editor and a courageous publisher, changed the course of American history by ending the political career of Richard Nixon.

In his book, Watergate in American Memory, Columbia University Professor of Journalism Michael Schudson describes "a mythology of the press in Watergate [that] developed into a significant national myth, a story that independently carries on a memory of Watergate even as details about what Nixon did or did not do fade away. At its broadest, the myth of journalism in Watergate asserts that two young Washington Post reporters At its broadest, the myth of journalism in Watergate asserts that two young Washington Post reporters brought down the president of the United States. This is the myth of David and Goliath, of powerless individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might. It is high noon in Washington, with two white-hatted young reporters at one end of the street and the black-hatted president at the other, protected by his minions. And the good guys win. The press, truth its only weapon, saves the day.”

Historian Stanley Kutler, author of The Wars of Watergate agrees. There is mythology at work here. “As more documentary materials are released," he writes, "the media's role in uncovering Watergate diminishes in scope and importance. Television and newspapers publicized the story and, perhaps, even encouraged more diligent investigation. But it is clear that as Watergate unfolded from 1972 to 1974, media revelations of crimes and political misdeeds repeated what was already known to properly constituted investigative authorities. In short, carefully timed leaks, not media investigations, provided the first news of Watergate.” It was more like what Columbia University Professor Shiela Coronel calls “leak journalism” than traditional investigative reporting.

"At best," according to investigative historian and Harvard political science professor Edward Jay Epstein, "Woodward and Bernstein, only leaked elements of the prosecutor's case to the public" — details that would have surfaced in a day or two. “Re-leaked” might be a better word. It was the FBI, Epstein argues, “not reporters, that linked the burglars to the White House and traced their money to the Nixon campaign. Reporters covering the case for every paper that covered Watergate systematically ignored or minimized the work of law enforcement officials to focus on those parts of the story that were leaked to them," Epstein charged.

Watergate prosecutor Seymour Glanzer seems to agree with that assessment. ”Woodward and Bernstein followed in our wake,” he says.”The idea that they were this great investigative team was a bunch of baloney."

That didn’t stop Simon and Schuster from sexing up the second draft of All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s personal account of their investigation, to make the authors more heroic, their plot more David-and-Goliath, and give a nickname to “Deep Throat” that never existed before. Nor did it stop Warner Brothers from hyping their the movie of the same name, or casting two of the hottest, handsomest men in Hollywood, as "the story of the two young reporters who cracked the Watergate conspiracy...[and] solved the greatest detective story in American history. At times, it looked as if it might cost them their jobs, their reputations, perhaps even their lives.” The myth lived on.

Bob Woodward’s opinion on the matter is modest and should really close the case. “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that's horseshit," he says. "The press always plays a role, whether by being passive or by being aggressive, but it's a mistake to overemphasize the role of media in any outcome.” Carl Bernstein concurs, acknowledging that the "role of Bob and myself has been mythologized .... In great events people look for villains and heroes.” Both authors and their various hagiographers are aware, of course, that Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1974, by a landslide, after the story broke, and was forced out of office, not by their expose, but by congressional investigations that followed it by a year or more.

But heroes Woodward and Bernstein will remain for generations. Despite the debate over the true role their work played in the outcome, it was their prodding of politicians and federal agents that kept the government’s investigation alive, and that is what lead to the ultimate demise of Richard Nixon, a man who died with very good reasons to despise the media, whatever its true role in his demise.

"Who cares if journalism in Watergate was generally lazy?” asks Michael Schudson, “or if Judge Sirica or some FBI agents were as vital to Nixon's undoing as were Woodward and Bernstein? It does not matter, because the Watergate media myth is sustaining. It survives to a large extent impervious to critique. It offers journalism a charter, an inspiration, a reason for being large enough to justify the constitutional protections that journalism enjoys ... not to tell us who we are but what we may have been once, what we might again become, what we would be like ‘if.’"

Northwestern journalism professor Jon Marshall contends that “the full extent of the White House’s criminal conspiracy probably never would have been exposed without the Post’s efforts” and the patient persistence of Woodward and Bernstein, who continued chasing Watergate in spite of skepticism elsewhere in the press, including some within their own newsroom. More over, Marshall writes, “their stories strongly influenced the people who took the actions that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation and the prosecution of his top aides.”

“Watergate solidified the critical importance of investigative reporting," according to former Investigative Reporters and Editors Executive Director Brant Houston. “All the President's Men popularized and humanized investigative reporting," Houston observes, “and provided the inspiration for thousands of young people to become journalists who wanted to make a difference."

Woodward and Bernstein shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. By 1974 investigative reporting was back in full swing. That year four Pulitzer’s were awarded to investigative stories. Time declared it “The Year of the Muckrakers.”

In retrospect the ultimate value of the Watergate story was not in the questionable assertion that it brought down a president, but that the lasting image of two hard working, deeply committed reporters working tirelessly for weeks to produce an insightful expo- sure of national power, inspired an entire generation of young men and women around the world to become investigative journalists. More than half the investigative reporters I interviewed for this book attribute Watergate as the story that prompted them to stop doing whatever they were doing and become muckrakers. Say what you want about the reporters and their role in the project, the story itself definitely inspired what has since become known as the “Watergate Era” of investigative reporting. 

Watergate: The movie myth

Biden Insults Neanderthals

President Joe Biden irately condemned the leaders of Texas and Mississippi for their “Neanderthal thinking” after Governors Greg Abbott and Tate Reeeves announced that the people of their states no longer had to wear masks or take other Covid-19 precautions. This was an insult to Neanderthals, who recent scientific discoveries have revealed were actually pretty smart. These heavy-browed ancestors of the human race were definitely brainier than Abbott and Reeves (who responded to Biden with grunt-like Tweets).

In Texas, despite Abbott’s sunny assessment, the plague is still scything through the state, with morgues and cemeteries stacked so full of bodies there is a three-month backlog for their final destination. Texas lags far behind the national rate of vaccinations, and multiple Covid-19 variants are now surging all over the state. As his critics have pointed out, Abbott’s no-mask announcement was clearly his feeble attempt to change the subject from the collapse of the Texas power grid during the recent winter storm, which cut off millions from electricity and water.

Our tale of two countries is becoming increasingly stark. On the one hand we have President Biden and the blue states that narrowly elected him. Each day the Biden administration is rolling back the criminal corporatism of the Trump regime, implementing environmentally sound regulations, fighting for the massive $1.9 trillion relief package, and even reimposing some supervision over the CIA and Pentagon’s drone strikes which the previous administration completely forfeited.

On the other hand, we have states run by yahoos who have turned masks into symbols of federal oppression. Governors who froth up their MAGA base by declaring war on public health instead of on disease, while their case loads and death rates surge. In South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem NEVER imposed a mask mandate even though her state was among the hardest hit. And she was a rock star at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Orlando (as was Florida’s know-nothing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis).

Saw off these ignorant red states and let them die Darwinian extinction, you say? Believe me, I often feel the same way. Without the clammy grip of states like Texas, Florida — and even little, retro South Dakota — on Washington, the United States of America would be as socially enlightened as Scandinavia.

But like a toxic family, we’re stuck with stupid and weird relatives in our union. And there are no walls around Texas, with its 30 million, widely infected citizens. So we need to keep talking sense to these people, even though they keep electing rodeo clowns like Abbott and Ted Cruz.

Which brings me, finally, to Stacey Abrams, the true American hero of 2020. Because of Abrams, Biden can just barely win Senate approval for his Cabinet nominees and push through urgent legislation that has overwhelming public support. But Republican state legislators in Georgia and throughout the U.S. are now aggressively reimposing voting rights restrictions so they can continue their racist and backward reign. House leader Nancy Pelosi is fighting this power grab by state Republicans, but without 60 votes in the Senate her efforts to protect voting rights are doomed. This means we need leaders like Stacey Abrams and the citizens’ movement she created in EVERY state in America.

The fight for democracy is never finished. The people with money and power will always try to block or corrupt the popular will. It’s our job to beat them, over and over again.

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.