Yaphet Kotto, RIP… Myanmar Mon Amour and the New York Times STILL can’t come in from the cold
And now a moment of silence for the late, great actor Yaphet Kotto, who died on Monday in the Philippines (where he had moved). The obits all focused on Kotto’s co-starring roles in Alien, Live and Let Die and the well-scripted police series Homicide. But I remember Kotto for his performance in Blue Collar, the gritty 1978 Paul Schrader film about three Detroit autoworkers (Kotto, Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel) who stand up against the corrupt, cozy pact between their company and union. Kotto was often compared with James Earl Jones (whom he replaced on Broadway in The Great White Hope). But I always found Kotto even stronger and more centered a screen presence.
Wildcatters Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto in Blue Collar
Kotto turned down parts in the Civil War drama Glory about a Black company led by a white officer and as the chauffeur in the sentimentally racist Driving Miss Daisy. And his explanation was pure Kotto: powerful, righteous, dignified. “Do you see me taking orders like that? I couldn’t see myself… taking it from some old (white) lady either. Some other actor may be able to put that on and make it look real, but I couldn’t do it.”
Kotto was the dramatic symbol of Black power for me. He wore his strength with grace and ease, and when he was on screen, he always held the camera. I miss him already.
Myanmar Mon Amour… The massive civil disobedience in that Asian country against the military regime that has dominated the country for the past six decades is truly inspiring. Though a poor country, workers throughout Myanmar have gone on strike against the junta’s recent coup and the economy has nearly ground to a halt. The military kleptocracy is buffered by oil revenue and black market booty from drug trafficking and other illegal scams. But sooner or later Myanmar’s massive civil disobedience will start to topple the corrupt generals. The Myanmar people’s protest tactic reminds me of the teaching of the 16th century French intellectual Étienne de La Boétie – a close friend of the philosopher Montaigne. Boetie insisted that all people had to do to overthrow tyrannical regimes was to withdraw their support. If enough people pull away their hands and stop holding up a tower of power, it will soon topple. I know he’s not politically correct anymore, but Dr. Seuss had the same subversive idea in Yertle the Turtle.
Boétie on the tower of tyranny: just let it fall
The New York Times can’t come in from the cold… Whenever I see David Sanger’s byline in the Times, I reach for my water pistol. He’s one of the correspondents who’ve long haunted the halls of Langley and Foggy Bottom, and like the national security apparatchiks he covers, Sanger can’t envision a world where the United States is not in mortal combat with Russia or China. In his latest think piece – on the front page of the Sunday Times – Sanger twice quotes former CIA director Robert Gates --- a permanent fixture in America’s military-industrial complex – who urges (unsurprisingly) an escalation of the cyber war with Russia. Sanger also quotes President Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who frets that China’s strategy is to compete with America not militarily but in the economic and technological arena. And the problem with that is….? I thought we Americans are supposed to thrive on good old business competition. But clearly the U.S. empire prefers global domination.
David Sanger, the reporter who won’t come in from the cold… ever
Look, I get it – Putin truly is a “killer” as Biden recently described him. But that’s what human rights activists should be calling the leader of Russia – not the commander in chief of the United States. Many of the world’s leaders – including the rulers of allied nations Saudi Arabia and Israel – are killers. But Biden refrains from that type of blunt language with regard to MBS and Bibi. For that matter, as Putin impolitely observed, who is a bigger “killer” in the world arena than the United States? Biden doubled down on that dubious distinction by launching more bombing raids in Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen.
I realize that America has no mass peace movement these days. But there are many political figures, academics, activists and even former military officers whom the New York Times could contact for critical analysis of America’s endless wars. Instead, the Times keeps turning to hacks like David Sanger (and the Washington Post to his counterpart, David Ignatius) for the latest spin on U.S. empire-think.
,,, And for more on the corporate media’s strangulation of debate about the U.S. national security colossus, check out Chris Hedges’s interview with me in his video show On Contact.
The First Book Review: “By the Light of Burning Dreams”
Kirkus Reviews has weighed in with the first review of By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution — and it’s a good one. Two excellent authors — Jessica Bruder (Nomadland) and Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing) have also heaped praise on the book, which is a family co-production by me, sister Margaret Talbot and brother-in-law Arthur Allen.
Writes Bruder: “By the Light of Burning Dreams crackles with the radical energy of the 1960s and ’70s. It’s a shot in the arm of bold idealism, an indispensable companion for today’s revolutionaries that reminds us what can happen if we dare to believe in – and fight for – a better world."
And Keefe writes: “In these linked portraits of activists and radicals at a watershed moment in history, David and Margaret Talbot tell a profound story about idealism in action and the rousing, inspiring, often messy ways in which popular movements and charismatic individuals fight injustice and bring about revolutionary transformation. By turns sweeping and intimate, and built on fresh interviews and original reporting, By the Light of Burning Dreams feels like necessary reading in our own tumultuous moment: an urgent reminder that change can happen and a vivid illustration of how it does.”
The book will be published in June by HarperCollins. You can get a complimentary copy if you’re one of the first five to donate $50 to TheDavidTalbotShow.
And stay tuned on this space for announcements about our online launch party, hosted by City Lights Bookstore, and other upcoming book events.
The China Syndrome: From Massage Parlors to the CIA
In his bloody attacks on two Atlanta massage parlors, including the slayings of six women of Asian descent, mass murderer Robert Long was clearly in the grip of racist and sexist mania. But let’s take this to the next level. Long was also in the demonic grip of his rigid Southern Baptist upbringing, which defines sexual pleasure outside of traditional heterosexual marriage as hell-bound sin. There are countless young men in America like Long who are whipsawed between an increasingly anarchic (and racist) pornographic culture and its B-side – an equally zealous and soul-killing Christian fundamentalism.
Democrats were also quick to blame Trump for the spike in anti- Asian violence, And, of course, the deposed dictator – now sunning himself with reptilian luxuriousness in his Florida swamp – was indeed guilty of frequently bashing China as the source of “kung flu” disease and other treacheries.
President Biden, on the other hand, has been full of concern for America’s fearful Asian communities. He and Vice President Kamala Harris met with a range of Atlanta’s Asian leaders today. But meanwhile Biden’s secretary of state, Tony Blinken, was duking it out yesterday in full view of the press with his Chinese counterpart at a very undiplomatic conference in Anchorage. And the Senate was unanimously confirming William Burns as the new CIA director, who spent his confirmation hearings targeting “predatory” China for daring to challenge U.S. economic and technological power.
Biden CIA chief William Burns (left) wants to go adversarial with China
I’m no apologist for Xi Jinping’s regime, especially its iron-fisted response to Hong Kong’s democracy movement and minority groups like the Uighurs. But, as China’s top diplomat told Blinken yesterday, the United States has a lot of gall lecturing Beijing about human rights these days – after the wave of unpunished police murders of Black Americans, the January 6 uprising, and the growing white nationalist threat. Sorry, Tony, but just “acknowledging” your national demons does not exorcise them.
Joe Biden has already done many things right on the domestic front, rolling back the dark reaction of the Trump years. Just this week, his successful Cabinet appointments of two strong progressives -- Native American Deb Haaland as interior secretary and Xavier Becerra as heath and human services secretary – underline the new era in Washington. Biden’s new deal has also inspired political leaders to his left – like Senator Bernie Sanders – to become more influential players. As Tim Redmond pointed out in 48 Hills, Sanders’s hearings on economic inequality this week were historic, even if largely ignored by the media.
The newly confirmed interior secretary, Deb Haaland
But if the Biden presidency is to truly usher in a new American era, it must begin downsizing the U.S. empire – not starting a new Cold War with China, or dropping more bombs on Afghanistan and Syria. Biden can’t keep talking out of both sides of his mouth: peace and sanity at home and murder and mayhem abroad.
The Next Civil War - Is It Inevitable?
The Next Civil War – that’s what the new issue of Harper’s magazine is calling the growing fissure between red and blue America. The country’s majority rallied in record numbers in the presidential election – and then in the Georgia Senate runoff race – to take back the country from a white nationalist minority. And President Joe Biden has surprised everybody – and delighted progressives – by using Republican-like tactics to push through his massive relief bill, while advocating constraints on the filibuster so he can win party-line Senate approval for his other big legislative goals.
Meanwhile, the white Republican minority is in full revolt against majority rule, trying to sabotage voting rights in state legislatures across the country and to spin the bloody January 6 insurrection at the Capitol building as a “largely peaceful protest.” But the violent mayhem that day – and the massive Republican support for disrupting the democratic process – must be seen in the glaring light that Harper’s does. January 6 was an alarming escalation in the new “antebellum era.”
To the credit of President Biden and his administration, they’re not backing down in the face of solid Republican opposition – even with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell threatening a “scorched earth” response. And progressives continue to push Biden to go all the way in bailing out America, with Reps. Pramila Jaypal and Debbie Dingell introducing a Medicare for All bill today, and Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a new tax on corporations that pay their CEOs obscene fortunes.
As I’ve long argued, the only way that aggrieved workers, veterans and other dispossessed Americans who fell for Trump’s MAGA mumbo-jumbo can be won over is for a Democratic administration to really deliver for them. Green jobs that can support families, fair taxes, affordable health care. And voting rights and immigration reforms that are seen as sensible and equitable.
The McConnell cabal will do everything it can to block Biden’s legislative agenda. And Republicans across America are doing everything in their power to limit access to the ballot box. Because that’s the only way they can win – by subverting democracy.
We can’t let them win. We have to keep organizing, keep winning political offices, and keep delivering real change for the American people. Or it’s the fire next time.
Oscar, Where Is Thy Sting? Reflections on Plague-Year Movie Watching
Like all streaming beings, I’ve watched a lot of movies during the plague year. So I actually viewed most of the films nominated for Academy Awards, which were announced yesterday. The good news is that the Hollywood establishment is now spotlighting a more diverse range of filmmakers. The bad news is that the overall quality of moviemaking hasn’t significantly improved.
The Oscar nominations were still dominated by two white men, with David Fincher’s Mank and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven vacuuming up a lot of nominations. Although these two films explore troublesome subjects – the corruption of creativity in Hollywood and the anti-imperialist radicalism of the 1960s – they still are limp, formulaic exercises. I’m a big fan of actor Gary Oldman, but the only memorable performance in Mank is the cameo by Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst. Nobody plays a smooth, old reptile better than Dance.
Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and Charles Dance as Citizen Hearst
What more can be said about Sorkin – he’s the kid always waving his hand for the teacher’s attention in civics class. He means well, but his idea of ‘60s radicalism seems largely derived from his childhood viewing of The Mod Squad.
The insufferably well-meaning Aaron Sorkin
It was dismaying to read that Netflix dominated this year’s Oscar selections, with 35 nominations. The streaming empires that are taking over Hollywood obviously like prickly subjects to get viewers’ eyeballs, but these films ultimately play it safe. The streaming giants seem to know they now have global, captive audiences and they want to titillate and divert them but not add any angst to their locked-down lives.
Even the movies by the new wave of women and non-white filmmakers generally lack bite. I strongly liked Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, but as readers reminded me, she took a dive on Amazon (did she hope for a Prime Video distribution deal?), depicting work life in one of its robotic warehouses with a rosy glow.
The only film nominated for Best Picture that has the true grit of its subject is Judas and the Black Messiah, which was made by old-fashioned studio Warner Brothers. Young director Shaka King was not afraid to conjure the darkness of the Fred Hampton story, the charismatic, 21-year-old Black Panther leader who was betrayed by one of his top deputies and assassinated in his bed by a FBI/police death squad.
Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton
Filmmakers with courage and creativity need to remind themselves: the Revolution will not be streamed.
Alan Merrill — and Other Unsung Singers Who Died of Covid-19
And on this dark anniversary day, let’s also remember some of the unsung musicians who died of the new plague — including Alan Merrill, the longtime indie rocker who gave his final breath nearly a year ago in March 2020. Merrill’s beautiful cover version of Left Banke’s 1966 bittersweet hit “Pretty Ballerina” suddenly popped up on my computer. Here’s to you, Alan, in that nightclub in the sky…
Top 12 — The Best Songs of 2021
Like I was saying, we need a little joy in our lives these days. And here are the songs released so far in 2021 (or remastered and rereleased in the last two-and-half months) that make me the happiest. They range from contemporary blues-rock, to African-Amsterdam dance music, to 1980s-style synth rock, to Malian guitar pyrotechnics, to urban cowgirl music.
I’ve been turning to music to raise me up ever since I was a teenager in the 1960s. Back then it was the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Who, Byrds, Arthur Lee and Love, Jefferson Airplane, Doors, Otis Redding, Donovan, Canned Heat, Traffic, Mama and Papas, Aretha, Van Morrison, all of Motown and especially Stevie Wonder (and so many more) who took me to higher ground. Today, I grab whatever sparkling gems that catch my eye. Music no longer has a revolutionary force to change the world, but it can still change my mood, can still transfix me for hours with my headphones on — like I’m still that teenager in his bedroom catching signals from the great beyond and still believing they can alter my existence, if not the rest of humanity.
Knock me your ‘lobes on these tunes… and suggest some new songs that are high on your playlist…
Maximo Park
Maximo Park, “All of Me”
Anansy Cisse, “Foussa Foussa”
Ratboys
Ratboys, “Go Outside”
Olivia Ellen Lloyd, “Excuse Yourself”
The Bones of JR Jones, “Stay Wild”
Stella Chiweshe, “Njuzu”
Wau Wau Collectif
Wau Wau Collectif, “Salameleikoum”
Peia
Satori, featuring Peia, “Mori Shej”
William the Conqueror, “Alive at Last”
Painted Shrines, “Heaven and Holy”
Nahawa Doumbia
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,”
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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