Where Are the Journalists with a VOICE?
“I drink and I know things,” as Peter Dinklage (in the role of Tyrion Lannister) told us. Actually, I drink less these days, but I seem to know more. I’m old and battered. But I know more. And I write it with a bit of style. That should be worth something. In fact, if you’re a frequent visitor to The David Talbot Show, it’s worth $25 – or 50 bucks if you’re flush.
R. Crumb memorialized the day Warren Hinckle fell afoul of the SFPD
When I was coming up in the world of journalism, there were many stellar columnists and commentators. Men and women who, yes, drank and knew things – and told them to us with passion and conviction. These were the bylines that shook the halls of power, that got put on presidential enemy lists, or barred entry at City Hall. These ink-stained warriors were not afraid to pick fights with the high and mighty – or with left-wing piety -- and they made daily poetry of their crusades.
F. Stone knew where the muck was
I’m thinking of the likes of I. F. Stone, Molly Ivins, Alexander Cockburn, Stanley Crouch, Warren Hinckle, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin. These were the scribes who got my motor running, who made me want to jump into the mosh pit of American journalism.
Stanley Crouch did not suffer fools — on the left or right
But nowadays, what do we have? Not so much. New York Times columnists like Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Bret Stephens… dull, duller, dullest as Winston Churchill once mordantly summed up John Foster Dulles. The featured writers at my local San Francisco Chronicle are even worse (and this was a newspaper once known for its colorful columnists). There’s age-old Phil Matier who looks and reads like a cop. Then there’s a mush parade of younger columnists whose earnest, predictable, politically correct bleating makes them instantly forgettable.
Molly Ivins knew how to raise hell and have fun
In daily journalism, we’ve gone from the age of miracles and wonders to mediocrities.
I tried to liven things up when I was running Salon. We featured flaming voices like Crouch, Camille Paglia, Anne Lamott, Glenn Greenwald, Richard Rodriguez, and younger versions of Jake Tapper and Michelle Goldberg. And today we have a few digital mavericks like Matt Taibbi, who also know how to wield a slashing pen.
And you still have me.
Camille Paglia, one of my Salon’s most wicked and original voices
But drinking and knowing things doesn’t come free. If you like to check in at my barstool and hear what I’m mouthing off about, you should buy me a drink. That’s the way it works.
Come on, fellow barfly – dig in and donate today.
Guns, Germs and Carbon: Escaping the Republican Death Trip
The Republican Party is the party of death. It’s time for party leaders to admit the obvious and start wearing the death’s head skull that was the ghoulish insignia of Hitler’s SS. Yesterday, President Joe Biden – a reasonable man to a fault – lashed into the GOP as “despicable…sick…un-American” for moving aggressively in states from Georgia to Arizona to rob voters – primarily minority citizens – of their democratic rights, in the biggest assault on enfranchisement since the Jim Crow lynching era.
But it’s not just the Republicans’ (maskless) identification with the Ku Klux Klan terrorists of yesterday. It’s the party’s iron embrace of the gun industry and the right of crazed men to shoot up crowded public places with military assault weapons. It’s the party’s sick defiance of basic public health hygiene in the face of the most deadly pandemic in over a hundred years. And it’s the Republican last-ditch defense of the fossil fuel industry, which is intent on ravaging the environment and killing as many people as necessary so it can monetize the last barrel of oil and seam of coal. (As of yesterday, the death toll in Texas was 111 people due to the freak winter storm that blasted through the red state, one of nature’s many violent surprises in the climate crisis.)
Guns, germs and carbon – to paraphrase Jared Diamond – that’s what today’s Republican Party stands for. Death, death and more death. The only people who can rationally (if inhumanely) support such a passion for extinction are those who are profiteering from it. (Just look at Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s list of contributors.) But, of course, the GOP has also attracted millions of irrational followers too. Christian zealots who fear and hate women and long for the end times that Republicans are quickly bringing about. White nationalists who fear and hate people with darker skin colors. Taxpayers who’d rather trash their community parks, schools and public services than lift the boats of poor Black and Latino citizens along with their own.
The Republican Party death trip has become so twisted that even conservative propagandists like David Brooks of the New York Times and PBS NewsHour are jumping off the GOP’s wild horses of the apocalypse. In his Times column today, Brooks even cheers for Biden’s $3 trillion plan to revive America, if fretfully.
Joe Biden and his advisors have reportedly learned from the cautious corporatism of Barack Obama, and are going big. Biden keeps offering Republicans on Capitol Hill an olive branch, and keeps holding onto the idea that the Senate filibuster – the McConnell tool of obstruction -- can be amended and not ended. But Biden knows what he ultimately must do. He must blow past Republican death worshippers in order to breathe new life into his dying country.
At his press conference on Thursday, Biden said he ran to oust Trump from the White House for three reasons: to restore decency to the political system, to rebuild America, and to unify the country. He will never have the cooperation of the Republican Party to accomplish these goals. And he knows it.
Republicans are headed for the graveyard. The rest of us need to bail out of their hearse.
Down Among the Palms: David Harris, Lenny Siegel, Stanford Protest… and Me
I admit it. I was an outside agitator. During the early 1970s, I would hitchhike or take a bus from Santa Cruz, California, where I was a college radical, over steep Highway 17 to my girlfriend Pookie’s apartment in Mountain View. I was engaged in militant activism against the Vietnam War in Santa Cruz, so I felt it natural to join protests on the nearby Stanford campus when visiting Pookie. Stanford was, after all, a center of the military-industrial complex, with much of its engineering and scientific research being underwritten by the Pentagon and put to nefarious use in Southeast Asia.
David Harris, the all-American Stanford student body president turned draft resister, had become the face of “The Farm’s” antiwar movement, his celebrity status reinforced by his marriage to folk singer Joan Baez. But Harris was sent off to prison for draft resistance in 1969, and by the early 1970s, the fight against the Vietnam War had become more furious, with new more militant leaders in the place of Harris.
David Harris today
So one night I found myself down among the palms that lined the boulevard into the heart of the Stanford campus. It was a frantic night, marked by raids on buildings where war research was conducted, the sounds of screaming, shattering glass and police sirens. At one point, a group of us pressed ourselves face down against the earth, while riot police floodlights scanned the pitch-black palm grove. I was not familiar with the campus terrain or with the other protesters, but I had seen how brutal the local riot police could be. I remember the thuds of police batons on prone bodies and the beating of my own heart against the ground as I wondered whether I would escape the Tac Squad sweep.
A police riot on the Stanford campus during a Vietnam War protest
This all came back to me as I read Disturbing the War, the new memoir by Lenny Siegel, one of the leaders of the Stanford antiwar movement. Lenny started his academic career at Stanford with the aim of joining the growing tech industry, like countless other students at the campus in the heart of Silicon Valley. But along the way he got radicalized, joined in many Stanford protests, and ran a radical think tank benignly called the Pacific Studies Center. I don’t think I ever told this to Lenny, whom I haven’t seen in decades, but the mentoring and advice I got from him (and from my sociology professor G. William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America?) started me on my path of scrutiny into dark power in the U.S. Lenny would later marry Jan Rivers, one of a pair of beautiful activist sisters who befriended Pookie and whose family home felt like one of the main beehives of Silicon Valley progressivism.
During one Stanford protest, writes Siegel, he threw a police tear gas canister into a building operated by the Stanford Research Institute, a hub of Pentagon R&D. Siegel was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. “But we knew better. We were disturbing the war.” Years later, when Siegel was serving as vice mayor of Mountain View, the Stanford protest came back to politically haunt him. But he was unapologetic when confronted with his past by a Bay Area TV reporter. Siegel explained that his militant action “was nothing compared to napalming a peasant village in Vietnam.”
Lenny Siegel today
There is something bracing about Siegel’s forthright attitude about law-breaking activism in the face of criminal monstrosity like the Vietnam War. As Siegel points out, too many histories of this fiery period are written by academic bystanders and don’t capture its full human drama. But Siegel gets it.
“I am struck,” he writes, “of the chutzpah of the Movement. Young people, only a fraction of whom were backed by their parents, took on some of the most powerful institutions in world history, and we made a difference.”
What adds to the coolness of Siegel’s story is that he never sold out. His youthful antiwar activism morphed into a lifetime of political struggle --for safe and socially useful labor in Silicon Valley, clean environment, women’s rights and affordable housing. Lenny Siegel is still one of my role models.
You can hear him speak on Friday March 26 at 4 pm Pacific, in a Zoom forum sponsored by the Praxis Peace Institute. For registration information, click here.
The Psychedelic Madness of Covid-19: A Personal Journey Through the Italian and American Health Care Wonderlands
Cary Tennis was a brother-in-arms during the wild struggles of Salon, the web startup I led during the dotcom free-for-all. Not only did he write the popular “Since You Asked” advice column, Cary was one of Salon’s free spirits — a member of the band of brothers and sisters who helped create a unique publishing oasis for over ten years. Or, as I sometimes described it in those giddy years before Big Tech and Big Media swallowed digital media, we were the inmates who took over the asylum.
After our wild ride at Salon, we went our separate ways, and Cary and his wife Norma sold their home in San Francisco — a city that felt less and less like the bohemian refuge that had once upon a time attracted us — and moved to a Medieval town in Tuscany where they started a new life.
Then Cary came down with Covid and began another hallucinatory journey — one that I could relate to after being hospitalized for five weeks with a serious stroke in 2017. So once again Cary and I became brothers — linked by medical calamity, survival (or “Stayin’ Alive” as we recently sang to teach other), and a late-in-life appreciation for life.
So today I’m reviving our Salon by posting Cary’s first-person story. Here’s to my brother’s durable spirit — and to Norma’s own resolute heroism.
Learning from Delirium: My Covid-19 Nightmare
By Cary Tennis
When the Italian ambulance crew brought me home on a stretcher after five weeks in the Arezzo hospital, I was so weak I could not walk. I had lost 30 pounds. I had to be helped into the house. The doctors had told my wife, Norma, by phone that I had been close to death, that she should prepare for the worst, that the situazione was molto, molto grave. They had also asked her, in a roundabout way, if I had a history of mental illness, if I was mentally fit enough to, say, drive a car. That is because I went crazy in the hospital. I experienced postoperative delirium, or Covid-19-induced psychosis.
It began on Election Day. Since I live in Italy and follow American politics closely, I had planned to go to bed early on Tuesday, Nov. 3, so that I could get up at 3am Wednesday—9pm Tuesday on America’s East Coast—and follow the early returns as polls closed. But early that evening we received an urgent phone call from an American neighbor whose husband had just been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. She needed to take his medicines to the hospital and was afraid to drive on the Italian roads at night, so I volunteered to drive her. At this point, I was only thinking of responding to the emergency. Though of course the pandemic was raging, I had no thought of Covid-19, other than to take the usual precautions. She sat in the back seat of the car on the passenger side. We were both masked. I kept the windows open.
The next day I felt a bit ill, and I learned that she and her husband had both tested positive for the virus. By Thursday, prudence dictated that I be tested. By Saturday, Nov. 7, I had learned I was positive, and went into quarantine.
Here is the tricky part. A few days into my quarantine at home for Covid-19, I became seriously ill with a relatively rare gastric problem called a volvulus, or twisted section of the colon. I was taken to the hospital immediately and operated on. Soon after surgery, I became infected with the Klebsiella bacterium, and had internal bleeding, and acute renal failure, and Covid-19-induced pneumonia. That was around the time the doctors called my wife, telling her to prepare for the worst, that I might not make it, and asking her, in a roundabout way, if I was sane. Because I’d been acting like a nut job.
My memories of those first few days after surgery are sketchy and filled with hallucinations. I remember only flashes. I know this: The doctors were struggling to save my life, while I, in an animal fury, fought them, believing they were there to kill me.
If I had been in an American hospital, perhaps I would have understood what was happening to me. As it was, I had awakened from the deepfreeze of anesthesia into a frightening world of alien voices from which I believed I needed to escape to save my life.
If this had been an American hospital, my biggest shock might have been the bill. This being Italy, my biggest shock afterwards was that there was no bill. Having had major surgery in San Francisco and in Italy, I can say this: American healthcare is great except for two things: If you get sick, the cost of treatment might drive you into bankruptcy. And your doctor’s good judgment may be overruled by your insurance company.
American hospitals are clean, beautiful, gleaming temples to wealth and prosperity. Tuscan hospitals are drab, poorly maintained, government-style buildings where the wait is long and the “system” is a frustrating patchwork of forms and officials.
The difference is, in Italy, no one is turned away for lack of insurance or lack of funds. Everyone receives high-quality care. No one gets a bill. Healthcare is a human right.
In America, we venerate freedom. We enjoy freedom, not only the freedom to maximize profit according to market forces, but the freedom to be tricked, conned, swindled and victimized, a freedom we call “individual responsibility.”
In Italy, people aren’t so free. In Italy, “big-government” laws and regulations protect the innocent from predation and, to an extent, hamstring business. For instance, one is not “free” to fall into ruinous credit card debt because credit cards have strict limits and must be paid back monthly. Nor can most employees be fired “at will.” Nor is one “free” to opt out of the healthcare system. You’re going to get medical care whether you like it or not. People are going to care about you whether you want them to or not. You are a part of society whether you like it or not. Every day people brought Norma food while I was in the hospital. She had more food than she knew what to do with. These were not social workers and visiting nurses. These were what you call “neighbors.”
I find that kind of nice.
But back to my Covid-19-induced delusions. In the intensive care unit where I was recovering, nurses kept telling me to put my oxygen mask on. In my delirium, I did not know what the oxygen mask was for. I came to believe that it had special powers, that it was linked to the Internet. I believed I was not in a hospital actually but in a hotel room, a resort of sorts, with others and that somehow when the account to pay for the room was set up, our account and the accounts of the other “guests” in the room were connected via unseen wires in a big block of oak wood mounted on the wall. I surmised that via quantum physics the setup, or the password, or the account, existed in two states at once, and thus our account was being drained by the others in the room which was why they kept telling me to put my mask on. In this delusion I believed that we went on a shopping trip to a grocery store in some locality which I recognized but could not name. There, I was given a ham to hold. I saw myself in diapers sliding down a stainless-steel chute, or conveyor. I had to hold the ham and go through a scanner which would divide the cost of the ham between me and the other “guests” and “hotel staff.” I believed that the reason “nurses” kept telling me to wear the oxygen mask had something to do with our linked accounts, which had something to do with a dense oak log with wires in it, which I could not see but knew was there.
Later in my stay, I began planning to undo this treachery once I was released. To do so I would need to purchase a lead-shielded briefcase, so I began searching the Internet (by this time my phone and computer had been returned to me) for a lead-shielded briefcase I could put my laptop in. That would solve all my problems.
At another point in my ordeal, at another hospital location, they took my clothes and put me in a medical gown. I hated the gown. So I dug my safety razor out of my bag and, quite laboriously, as a safety razor is designed precisely to not cut things, I began tearing the sleeves of the hospital gown until I could pull it off.
Then I got out of my bed—I was temporarily in a single room—and made my way to the bathroom, tearing out the IV lines as I went. Because I wanted a shower!
I made a terrible bloody, shitty mess of the bathroom. I was caught and sent back to bed. They confiscated my safety razor.
People ask me why I did that. How should I know? I had gone crazy.
It’s been pretty hard to take, this knowledge that I lost my mind. For I am not the person who did these things.
Or am I?
Of course I am. Research suggests that what happened to me is not all that uncommon among Covid-19 patients.
“Many of the psychiatric manifestations of COVID-19 are a consequence of psychological stressors, such as fear of illness and death, prolonged social isolation, and uncertainty and fear about the future. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that the virus itself can precipitate psychosis among infected individuals.”
So says this study on Covid-19-induced psychosis. Several mechanisms are suggested. One is “direct viral infiltration into the central nervous system.” Another involves “dysregulation of cytokine networks.” And “a third possible mechanism of psychosis in Covid-19 patients may be related to the severe sensory deprivation associated with hospital isolation measures.”
This last possibility would fit my case. Not only could I receive no visitors, but the language barrier isolated me even from the doctors and nurses. Hard as I have studied Italian over the past five years, I still find it hard to follow Italian speech. The hospital rooms were noisy with electronic beeps, doors slamming, nurses yelling, machines whirring. I could neither understand simple instructions nor conduct the casual banter with nurses that can be very reassuring in a stressful situation.
I wonder if the subjects of my hallucinations arose out of what was actually happening to me. For instance, did my struggling with the nurses turn into this delusion: sliding down a stainless-steel chute … in a chilly room full of waiting shoppers, and then placed in the back of a pickup truck, still holding the ham and the grocery bags, to be driven back to Arezzo from Florence? Or was it Florence? I have a vivid memory of an elevator on a hillside to the grocery store below. I don’t know what city it is in. Possibly a German city, or Lisbon, or Florence? A university town … with a commercial street … we stayed in a hotel … it was on the river …
As these fragments of memory come together, this, too, is a part of recovery: sorting out the images that are clearly delusional and attempting to replace them with memories of things that actually did happen, which is hard because the delusions are often more vivid than the memories of what really happened. Parts of real memories have become enmeshed in the delusions! Will they return, these pieces of actual experience, to take their rightful places in my factual memory? Or will they be discarded along with my delusions?
Unlike normal dreams had while sleeping, these dreams persist as though they actually happened. They’re in the wrong box. They have gotten mixed in with the box of “stuff that actually happened.” I have to put them in the other box, the box of “stuff I imagined.”
That’s not easy. It’s a new box I’ve had to create to accommodate this new category of phenomenon. I never had a box for persistent delusions before. It is similar, I will say, to the box that contains certain hallucinations I had as a teenager and young adult under the influence of LSD. In both cases, the visions are vivid and long-lasting.
The only difference is, when I came off the LSD, I knew immediately that what I had experienced were hallucinations. By contrast, it is taking me much time and effort to fully accept that the things I thought happened in the hospital did not actually happen.
It’s scary. I feel I walk on a knife edge now, an edge that I could fall off of again. That is frightening. Now, as I contemplate that possibility, the fear rises in my throat. It’s early morning, I’m safe in my house in Italy, Norma is upstairs taking a shower and listening to her Greek language tapes, the pigeons are cooing outside, and I am safe. But could this happen again? Could I be slowly losing my mind?
I fear that my brain has been damaged.
But who knows? Perhaps for my whole life I have taken my sanity for granted. Perhaps all along my “sanity” has been precarious. So where is the boundary line? What differentiates certain somewhat crazy impulsive decisions I have made, based on what I imagine may happen in the future, and these vivid delusions, in which I believe something to be real in the present?
But back to the hospital. More than anything, I longed to be home. I did not understand the gravity of my illness. I did not know that my kidneys had failed. I did not understand that I had Covid-19 pneumonia. All I knew was I wanted to be home, and every time a nurse or doctor would come to my bedside I asked the same question: When can I go home?
Norma claims that I was never in the psychiatric ward, but I have a vivid memory of an Italian doctor saying, “You are in the psychiatric hospital. You are in the psych ward.” All I could say to him was, please, I just want to go home.
Speaking of going home, here is another difference between healthcare in Italy and in the U.S. Incredibly, in the U.S., in December 2009, after a similarly serious and in some ways more traumatic surgery, I was kept in the hospital for only seven days and discharged on Christmas Eve, with no training for caring for my surgical wound and living with my new reality. Nor was an ambulance even provided for the short trip from University of California-San Francisco medical complex to our house at Ocean Beach. So, because I could not bend from the waist, Norma and I had to improvise with pillows in our Toyota RAV4. Once home, with drainage tubes still coming out of my back, with my surgical wound still fresh, with no knowledge of how to use the intermittent catheter, I was more or less on my own. “Free” to handle this on my own. “Free” to make my own medical decisions. The only explanation for this was the pressure of the insurance company to get me out of the hospital as quickly as possible.
Why the reluctance to provide an ambulance for the short trip home? Why the difficulty acquiring home care afterwards? And why the fight to respect my doctor’s orders for radiation treatment at Loma Linda? My suspicion is that many of these “shortcomings” were not the fault of the medical practitioners themselves, but rather the chokehold that the insurance industry has over the practice of medicine in the United States.
That would not happen in Italy. In Italy, the minute I was home, the nurses started coming by. I was under constant care. I was not abandoned, as I was in the US. In the US, it seems, the business of medicine is like any other business: It’s about money. In Italy the business of medicine is medicine.
Unfortunately, while in the Tuscany hospital I could not eat. I spent hours imagining the food I would consume when I got out. Food was placed on the table by my bed but I ate very little. It was painful to eat, and the food disgusted me. Was my sense of taste gone? Had it been distorted by the virus, so that good food tasted disgusting? I do not know. I do know that eating was painful. My esophagus, after surgery, was very sensitive. Even swallowing water was painful. Also, this may sound like a luxury problem, but eating while lying in a hospital bed, unable to fully prop myself up, having to twist to my left and lean over a stack of Tupperware containers of deliberately bland fare … made the experience especially difficult. I am a man, not an animal! I needed to sit at a table, with a table cloth and silverware! So I did not eat. So I lost weight. I became thin. I shrank. I became weak. I could barely turn myself over in bed or push myself up to a sitting position. And I could not walk.
This is one way in which the Italian system failed me. I think it is because Italian hospitals do not usually feed patients. Families feed patients! But since we were in isolations wards, no families could come in. So the hospital did the best it could.
When two physical therapists finally visited me near the end of my stay, it was terrifying to find that my legs would not hold me up. The physical therapists helped me across the room and back to my bed, and I was already exhausted. Oh, the fear! What had happened to me? How would my life go on after this?
And then I would spend hours again dreaming about food.
I thought about spaghetti alle vongole — spaghetti with clams. And this is another example of the altered state I was in: Norma takes ceramics classes with Edi Magi, a highly regarded local artist. It occurred to me that I could propose a spaghetti alle vongole project to them. For in my state I considered it paramount that one have the correct bowls, that the whole spaghetti alle vongole experience depended on having a complete set of white ceramic bowls. Another hallucination, whose vividness and urgency verged on the obsessive.
This is what my journal shows, with drawings:
From my journal:
“(1) Deep Large Heat-Conserving (in oven) Serving Dish for up to 1,000 grams pasta & clams.
(1) Shell Bowl
(6) Deep individual pasta bowls
(6) Wide Saucers
Lemon Water to drink.
And for the hands, 6 nice hot towels, a bowl of hot water w/a gardenia floating in it. Also 6 drying towels.
Also: The One Bright Towel—the pleated towel keeping the serving bowl hot long after the expectations of tepidness.
Plus 6 small Frizzante & lemon bottles.”
From my journal:
“Now I obsess about food, mostly food from my past. I lie here imagining recipes for jambalaya, chicken and yellow rice, paella, and for spaghetti alle vongole, and a surprise today, a craving for canned peaches and cottage cheese. Also for a white bread grilled cheese with pickle slices.
“I bought a juicer [online from my hospital bed]. I just pulled the trigger on Amazon.it. It has arrived [at the house, so Norma told me]. I have this vision of buying carrots, celery, beets, spinach, fruit, sprouts, and doing a daily juice. And hanging out around my downstairs door. Just hanging around.”
And now to the present. As the pandemic rages on, as our town goes into lockdown again, I feel day by day the energy and strength of a healthy man return. I mark the milestones: Today I walked up a flight of steps; today I circumnavigated the town; today I walked all the way to the grocery store and back.
Like a ragged man returning from war or shipwreck, I am greeted with cheers by friends and strangers alike. News travels. I am one of the lucky ones. I take up again the routines of caffè and cornetto, fish and vegetables at the Friday market, sitting in the park in the afternoon looking west out over the Valdichiana.
Often during these long, slow days of lockdown, I will be sitting in the sun or reading or walking idly along when the happy memory again rushes into view: I’m lying in that Misericordia ambulance on December 15, 2020, heading south from Arezzo on Stradale Regionale 71, looking out the window at the restaurant signs and stoplights of Ripa di Olmo, of Madonna di Mezzastrada, of Puliciano and Rigutino, Ottavo and Vitiano, on the way to Castiglion Fiorentino. What a wonderful thing. I endured. I survived. I came home.
Cary Tennis
City Lights Book Party — You’re Invited!
Tuesday, June 8 at 6 pm Pacific (9 pm Eastern). Put that in your calendar. That’s when my sister/coauthor Margaret Talbot and I will launch our new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution, at a Zoom party hosted by legendary City Light Bookstore. Now there are many bleak aspects to the Covid pandemic — but having an online book party, with book lovers from all around the globe, is a joy these days. (Keep you eyes on this page or the City Lights events calendar for Zoom info.)
And somehow I think the spirit of City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who recently exited this mortal coil, will also be in attendance. Many of the revolutionary heroes featured in our book made treks over the years to Ferlinghetti’s literary mecca in San Francisco. They were flawed heroes, they made tragic mistakes, but their triumphs and even defeats still compel America (and the world) to a higher place.
Margaret and I were fortunate to have frank discussions with many of the crusaders featured in our book: Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panther Party; Dennis Banks and Madonna Thunder Hawk of the American Indian Movement; Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers; Heather Booth and other members of Jane, the underground abortion collective in the days before Roe v. Wade; Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda of the Vietnam antiwar movement.
As Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland, has written about our book: “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.”
I hope to see all of you at our book party. It promises to be another special “gathering of the tribes.” All of us who never stopped believing in “Power to the People.”
PS And a special thank you to Peter Maravelis, the tireless, visionary events director for City Lights.
The late, great Ferlinghetti
You Want the REAL Aretha? Watch This
Forget the Genius: Aretha biopic series that debuted Sunday night on the National Geographic channel. What a hot mess — and not in a good way. Laughably corny; chopped into head-spinning, back-and-forth flashbacks; dominated by the annoying men in her life (namely father C. L. Franklin and husband Ted White); and starring a British actress (Cynthia Erivo) who pales in comparison to the true Queen of Soul, the Nat Geo series just leaves you yearning for the real deal.
So you need to watch a video to get the awful Genius: Aretha out of your head. The live performance of “I Never Loved a Man” (her greatest song, in my book) — sweaty, sultry sex-drenched — in an Amsterdam concert hall in 1968 is PURE Aretha Franklin. All the rest is pale imitation. For some reason, Square Space won’t allow me to link to it (how square) — but you can find it on YouTube.
A final note on the barrage of TV commercials on Nat Geo programs. They kill any dramatic momentum that the network’s shows begin to build (even shows a lot better than Genius: Aretha). A few years ago, I met with the top executives at Nat Geo to discuss turning one of my books into a docudrama series. An A-list Hollywood director was attached to the project and at our meeting in the cable channel’s New York offices, the deal seemed a certainty. Then the director blew up the meeting with a series of misgivings — chief among them his concern about the commercial interruptions that he feared would sabotage his work. The sure-thing meeting quickly turned into a disaster and Nat Geo nixed the project. At the time, I was furious at the director — he had just torched a half-million dollars that were headed my way. But I’ve since decided he was right. The National Geographic channel is incapable of presenting shows of any real quality. The director was right not to attach his name to a Nat Geo series.
But the real Aretha soars above anything that basic cable can do to her.
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,”
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.