Good Friday and the Salvation of America

It was truly a Good Friday. Major League Baseball joined the corporate exodus from Georgia to protest state Republicans’ legislative attack on voting rights (are you listening Texas, Florida, Arizona etc?) America passed the 100 million mark in Covid vaccinations, nearly 40 precent of the eligible adult population, with authorities widening the net to all adults and adolescents in coming weeks. And perhaps most important, Lt. Richard Zimmerman – the longest serving officer in the Minneapolis Police Department—testified that Derek Chauvin’s brutal treatment of George Floyd was “uncalled for.” Since police almost always close ranks in cases like this, Zimmerman’s frank testimony was “extraordinary” in the words of the New York Times correspondents covering the trial. The Minneapolis police chief -- who has called the killing of Floyd “murder”-- is expected to go even further on the witness stand.

The George Floyd trial is as an accounting for America’s soul as well as a reckoning for Chauvin. Will the country finally declare that the police war on Black citizens must come to an end? The street protests that swept the nation after Floyd’s shocking killing last year did feel like a turning point, that enough people were finally so disgusted by the rampant violence against African Americans to truly change policing in the U.S. It wasn’t just Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who recorded the suffocation of Floyd, who was traumatized by his murder – it was all Americans with a heart and soul.

So we’ll now see whether at long last America has a sense of decency. Will the honest testimony of Chauvin’s colleagues and eyewitnesses lead to his conviction?

The meaning of “Good Friday” puzzles many people, even devout Christians. What’s so good about the day when Jesus was horribly executed by officials of the Roman Empire? “Good” in this historical context meant “holy,” scholars will tell you. The suffering and death of Christ was meant to save humankind. And the martyrdom of George Floyd is another test of our nation’s soul.

Watergate: The Myth and Reality

Following the death earlier this week of neofascist militant G. Gordon Liddy, the independent British scholar John Simkin emailed his backgrounder on Watergate to a group of Kennedy researchers. I find Simkin’s primer on the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon to be one of the most insightful commentaries I’ve read on the subject. So I’m posting Simkin’s analysis, which he originally published on his educational web site, for all interested readers:

Richard Nixon believed that Watergate was a conspiracy organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to remove him from power. It is one of the few things that I think Nixon was right about. It is not a coincidence that all those involved in Watergate were either officers or assets of the intelligence services - McCord and Liddy (FBI) - McCord, Hunt, Barker, Gonzalez and Martinez (CIA).

Before he became president, Nixon received information from a source within the intelligence services that both the CIA and the FBI were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its cover-up. Nixon told his key aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman about this as early as 1969. Nixon said that he would use this information to exert pressure on these organizations. (1)

Nixon also decided to create his own intelligence agency. After his election he appointed Jack Caulfield, as Staff Assistant to the President. In March 1969, Caulfield met with Anthony Ulasewicz, a former member of the NYPD's Bureau of Special Service and Investigation. "Caulfield outlined the big secret. He said the White House wanted to set up its own investigative resource which would be quite separate from the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service... The new administration, Caulfield said, was finding government intelligence methods to be deficient... Caulfield claimed that Ehrlichman, Nixon's Counsel at the White House, had assigned him to check out what it would cost to set up an off the books, secret intelligence operation." (2)

Nixon had been told the Bay of Pigs operation held the key to understanding the assassination. Haldeman claims in his book The Ends of Power (1978): "Ehrlichman had found himself in the middle of this feud as far back as 1969, immediately after Nixon assumed office. Nixon had called Ehrlichman into his office and said he wanted all the facts and documents the CIA had on the Bay of Pigs, a complete report on the whole project. About six months after that 1969 conversations, Ehrlichman had stopped in my office. 'Those bastards in Langley are holding back something. They just dig in their heels and say the President can't have it. Period. Imagine that! The Commander-in-Chief wants to see a document relating to a military operation, and the spooks say he can't have it.' ". (3)

Although he had his own secret intelligence operation (Operation Sandwedge) Nixon still wanted to get more control over the intelligence services. In 1970 Nixon commissioned one of his aides, Tom Charles Huston, the former leader of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, to write a report on how the different agencies could work together against the threat from the "New Left". Huston's 43-page document called for six activities, some of which were clearly illegal. They included electronic surveillance of persons and groups "who pose a major threat to internal security"; monitoring of American citizens by international communications facilities; the relaxation of restrictions on the covert opening of mail by federal agents; surreptitious entries and burglaries to gain information on the groups and the recruitment of more campus informants. The most controversial aspect of the recommendations was the creation of a new interagency intelligence command responsible for internal security. (4)

The Huston Plan was presented at a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover (FBI), Richard Helms (CIA), Lieutenant General Donald V. Bennett (Defense Intelligence Agency) and Noel Gayler (National Security Agency) in early June 1970. Hoover and Helms saw this as an attempt by Nixon to gain more control over their agencies. In his memoirs Nixon argued that "Hoover's dissent... was primarily a case of his inability to overcome his natural resistance to cooperating with the CIA or the other intelligence agencies... I knew that if Hoover had decided not to cooperate, it would matter little what I decided or approved... On July 28, five days later, before the plan could be implemented, I withdrew my approval." (5)

On 17th June, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord were arrested at 2.30 am during a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Soon afterwards E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy were also arrested. John Dean, counsel to the president, reported to H. R. Haldeman that the FBI believed that the Watergate break-in was a CIA operation: "The FBI is convinced it’s the CIA. McCord and the Cubans are all ex-CIA people. Practically everyone who went in there was connected to the agency. And now the FBI finds a Mexican bank involved which also sounds like the CIA." Dean added that L. Patrick Gray (acting FBI director) was "looking for a way out of this mess" and suggested that he should ask Vernon Walters (Deputy Director of CIA) to "turn off" the investigation in Mexico. (7)

John Dean contacted Jack Caulfield to discover what had happened. He confirmed that G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had been involved in the operation. Jeb Magruder, special assistant to the president, then rang Dean on behalf of John N. Mitchell, the Attorney General. "Listen, John, this is all that dumb... Liddy's fault. He blew it. The stupid bastard. He should have never used McCord. He never told us he was using McCord. It was stupid. The mess is all his fault." When Dean contacted Liddy he admitted organizing the break-in but claimed that E. Howard Hunt "was the guy who got me the Cubans." (8)

Dean managed to persuade Gray, the acting FBI director, to take part in the cover up by destroying documents in Hunt's White House safe. This included notebooks that Hunt had used as an operational diary during his CIA years. "These reportedly contained the names of CIA agents and officers, their telephone numbers, code words and operational details that collectively amounted to a diary of E. Howard Hunt's clandestine career" and details of CIA's illegal activities during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. (9)

Nixon told H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, before their meeting with Richard Helms, the director of CIA, on 23rd June 1972, that they should insist on talking about the involvement of Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation as a lever to get the CIA to help in the cover-up. "Hunt... will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there's a hell of a lot of things... tell them we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further... Tell them it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA." (10)

In his account of the meeting, The Ends of Power (1978) Haldeman claimed that after Helms refused to help with the cover-up he "played Nixon's trump card". Haldeman said: "The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown." In response to this: "Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, 'The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.' Silence. I just sat there, I was absolutely shocked by Helm's violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story?" (11)

This account, published in 1978, proved to be very embarrassing for Helms. When he wrote his own interpretation of the meeting in 2003 he admitted that Haldeman raised the issue of the Bay of Pigs, but denied that he got angry with him and said "I did not shout in the White House, and cannot even remember ever having shouted in my own office." Helms claims all he said was "The Bay of Pigs hasn't got a damned thing to do with this. And, what's more, there's nothing about the Bay of Pigs that's not already in the public domain." (12)

The best person to know the connection between the Bay of Pigs and Watergate Scandal was E. Howard Hunt as he was involved in both events. He remained silent although his wife Dorothy Hunt threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in. On 8th December, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had a meeting with Michelle Clark, a journalist working for CBS. According to Sherman Skolnick, Clark was working on a story on the Watergate case: "Ms Clark had lots of insight into the bugging and cover-up through her boyfriend, a CIA operative." (13)

As Peter Dale Scott pointed out: "Of the more than a dozen suspicious deaths in the case of Watergate... perhaps the most significant death was that of Dorothy Hunt in the crash of United Air Lines in December 1972. The crash was investigated for possible sabotage by both the FBI and a congressional committee, but sabotage was never proven. Nevertheless, some people assumed that Dorothy Hunt was murdered (along with the dozens of others in the plane)... Howard Hunt, who dropped all further demands on the White House and agreed to plead guilty (to the Watergate burglary in January 1973)." (14)

Hunt died of pneumonia on 23rd January, 2007. His memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published a few months later. In the book he admitted being paid "hush money" to keep quiet about what he knew about the background details of Watergate. He also felt guilty that he received $250,000 as a result of his wife’s death: "She waved, I waved back, and she entered the doors of the airline ticket office. Once inside, she did her shopping, and, apparently as an afterthought, she bought $250,000 in accident insurance from an airport vending machine." However, he did not believe his wife had been murdered. (15)

Despite attempts to hide the connections between the Nixon administration and Watergate break-in, most of the details reached the public domain and Nixon was forced to resign and several of his close associates were sent to prison. This was mainly due to articles written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward later revealed that on 19th June 1972 he telephoned a man who he called "an old friend" for information about the burglars. This man, who Woodward claims was a high-ranking federal employee, was willing to help him as long as he was never named as a source. Instead he became known as Deep Throat. (16)

Most of the information that brought down Nixon came from Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein refused to identify their source but in May 2005 a lawyer working for Mark Felt, the former Associate Director of the FBI, told Vanity Fair magazine that his client was Deep Throat. On 3rd June 2005, Bob Woodward wrote an article in The Guardian confirming that Felt was Deep Throat and that he had provided him with important information during the Watergate investigation. (17)

Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post at the time of Watergate, also said that Felt was Deep Throat. However, Carl Bernstein was quick to add that Felt was only one of several important sources. Bernstein is clearly right about this. Some of the information leaked to the journalists could only have come from someone in the higher echelons of the CIA. Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) also believes that Deep Throat was a former senior official of the CIA. Her candidate is Richard Ober, who worked under James Jesus Angleton at the CIA. Ober, as head of Operation CHAOS (domestic espionage project targeting the American people from 1967 to 1974 whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements), was given an office in the White House and worked closely with Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman during this period. (18)

The claims that Davis became even more convincing when the book was originally published in 1979, Katharine Graham (probably under instructions from the CIA) persuaded the publishers William Jovanovich, to pulp the 20,000 printed copies of the book. It was not only revealing Ober as one of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sources that got her into trouble. It was also the fact that she exposed Ben Bradlee as a CIA asset as far back as 1952 when he was serving as a press attaché in the American embassy in Paris. (19) Bradlee was also a childhood friend of Richard Helms and was at Harvard with Ober. Both men left in 1944 to serve in the war: Ober (Office of Strategic Services) and Bradlee (Office of Naval Intelligence). (20)

In their autobiographies both Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt say they are puzzled by Nixon's belief that the CIA, the Bay of Pigs Operation and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy were in some way connected. It has to be remembered that Nixon first made this claim in 1969, three years before Watergate. It was a time when few JFK researchers were making this link. This only became mainstream conspiracy thinking after the publication of The Last Investigation in 1993. The book's author, Gaeton Fonzi, the staff investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, pointed out, this was not just about recruiting angry Cubans from the failed operation, but the way Kennedy reacted to the disaster by threatening to "splinter" the CIA into "a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds". (21)

There are two important questions that need to be asked about the Watergate break-in. The first is what were the motives behind the break-in. As Richard Helms later pointed out in his autobiography: "Press reports soon indicated that Hunt and McCord and their confederates were attempting to photograph files, bug the telephones, and arrange electronic monitoring of the Democratic Committee. I could not understand why anyone would think there was anything to be gained from such a half-baked and technically difficult operation that would possibly warrant the risks involved." (22)

Helms is correct, the operation does not make any sense at all. The second question is even more important. Why was it done so badly? The operation involved several people who had carried out other successful intelligence operations. It was also in direct contrast to other Nixon dirty tricks campaigns. Why did the burglars leave so many clues behind that made it inevitable that they would be caught and at the same time provide links to the Nixon administration? Why did James W. McCord at the preliminary hearing confess to being a former member of the CIA? Bob Woodward admits that this was the reason why he decided this was an important story. (23)

Here is a list of some of the mistakes they made in the Watergate operation that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon:

(1) The money to pay for the Watergate operation came from CREEP. It would have been possible to have found a way of transferring this money to the Watergate burglars without it being traceable back to CREEP. For example, see how Anthony Ulasewicz got his money from Nixon. As counsel for the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President, G. Gordon Liddy, acquired two cheques that amounted to $114,000. This money came from an illegal U.S. corporate contribution laundered in Mexico and Dwayne Andreas, a Democrat who was a secret Nixon supporter. Liddy handed these cheques to E. Howard Hunt. He then gave these cheques to Bernard L. Barker who paid them into his own bank account. In this way it was possible to link Nixon with a Watergate burglar.

(2) On 22nd May, 1972, James W. McCord booked Alfred C. Baldwin and himself into the Howard Johnson Motor Inn opposite the Watergate building (room 419). The room was booked in the name of McCord’s company. During his stay in this room Baldwin made several long-distance phone calls to his parents. This information was later used during the trial of the Watergate burglars.

(3) On the eve of the first Watergate break-in the team had a meeting in the Howard Johnson Motor Inn’s Continental Room. The booking was made on the stationary of a Miami firm that included Bernard L. Barker among its directors. Again, this was easily traceable.

(4) In the first Watergate break-in the target was Larry O'Brien’s office. In fact, they actually entered the office of R. Spencer Oliver, the chairman of the association of Democratic state chairman. Two bugs were placed in two phones in order to record the telephone conversations of O’Brien. In fact, O’Brien never used this office telephone.

(5) E. Howard Hunt was in charge of photographing documents found in the DNC offices. The two rolls of film were supposed to be developed by a friend of James McCord. This did not happen and eventually Hunt took the film to Miami for Bernard Barker to deal with. Barker had them developed by Rich’s Camera Shop. Once again the conspirators were providing evidence of being involved in the Watergate break-in.

(6) The developed prints showed gloved hands holding them down and a shag rug in the background. There was no shag rug in the DNC offices. Therefore it seems the Democratic Party documents must have been taken away from the office to be photographed. McCord later claimed that he cannot remember details of the photographing of the documents. Liddy and Jeb Magruder saw them before being put in John Mitchell’s desk (they were shredded during the cover-up operation).

(7) After the break-in Alfred Baldwin and James McCord moved to room 723 of the Howard Johnson Motor Inn in order to get a better view of the DNC offices. It became Baldwin’s job to eavesdrop the phone calls. Over the next 20 days Baldwin listened to over 200 phone calls. These were not recorded. Baldwin made notes and typed up summaries. Nor did Baldwin listen to all phone calls coming in. For example, he took his meals outside his room. Any phone calls taking place at this time would have been missed.

(8) It soon became clear that the bug on one of the phones installed by McCord was not working. As a result of the defective bug, McCord decided that they would have to break-in to the Watergate office. He also heard that a representative of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War had a desk at the DNC. McCord argued that it was worth going in to see what they could discover about the anti-war activists. Liddy later claimed that the real reason for the second break-in was “to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him.”

(9) Liddy drove his distinctive Buick-powered green Jeep into Washington on the night of the second Watergate break-in. He was stopped by a policeman after jumping a yellow light. He was let off with a warning. He parked his car right outside the Watergate building.

(10) The burglars then met up in room 214 before the break-in. Liddy gave each man between $200 and $800 in $100 bills with serial numbers close in sequence. McCord gave out six walkie-talkies. Two of these did not work (dead batteries).

(11) McCord taped the 6th, 8th and 9th floor stairwell doors and the garage level door. Later it was reported that the tape on the garage - level lock was gone. Hunt argued that a guard must have done this and suggested the operation should be aborted. Liddy and McCord argued that the operation must continue. McCord then went back an re-taped the garage-level door. Later the police pointed out that there was no need to tape the door as it opened from that side without a key. The tape served only as a sign to the police that there had been a break-in.

(12) McCord later claimed that after the break-in he removed the tape on all the doors. This was not true and soon after midnight the security guard, Frank Wills, discovered that several doors had been taped to stay unlocked. He told his superior about this but it was not until 1.47 a.m. that he notified the police.

(13) The burglars heard footsteps coming up the stairwell. Bernard Barker turned off the walkie-talkie (it was making a slight noise). Alfred Baldwin was watching events from his hotel room. When he saw the police walking up the stairwell steps he radioed a warning. However, as the walkie-talkie was turned off, the burglars remained unaware of the arrival of the police.

(14) When arrested Bernard Barker had his hotel key in his pocket (314). This enabled the police to find traceable material in Barker’s hotel room.

(15) When Hunt and Liddy realized that the burglars had been arrested, they attempted to remove traceable material from their hotel room (214). However, they left a briefcase containing $4,600. The money was in hundred dollar bills in sequential serial numbers that linked to the money found on the Watergate burglars.

(16) When Hunt arrived at Baldwin’s hotel room he made a phone call to Douglas Caddy, a lawyer who had worked with him at Mullen Company (a CIA front organization). Baldwin heard him discussing money, bail and bonds.

(17) Hunt told Baldwin to load McCord’s van with the listening post equipment and the Gemstone file and drive it to McCord’s house in Rockville. Surprisingly, the FBI did not order a search of McCord’s home and so they did not discover the contents of the van.

(18) It was vitally important to get McCord’s release from prison before it was discovered his links with the CIA. However, Hunt or Liddy made no attempt to contact people like Mitchell who could have organized this via Robert Mardian or Richard Kleindienst. Hunt later blamed Liddy for this as he assumed he would have phoned the White House or the Justice Department who would in turn have contacted the D.C. police chief in order to get the men released.

(19) Hunt went to his White House office where he placed a collection of incriminating materials (McCord’s electronic gear, address books, notebooks, etc.) in his safe. The safe also contained a revolver and documents on Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Kennedy and State Department memos. Hunt once again phoned Caddy from his office.

(20) Liddy eventually contacts Magruder via the White House switchboard. This was later used to link Liddy and Magruder to the break-in.

(21) Later that day Jeb Magruder told Hugh Sloan, the FCRP treasurer, that: “Our boys got caught last night. It was my mistake and I used someone from here, something I told them I’d never do.”

(22) Police took an address book from Bernard Barker. It contained the notation “WH HH” and Howard Hunt’s telephone number.

(23) Police took an address book from Eugenio Martinez. It contained the notation “H. Hunt WH” and Howard Hunt’s telephone number. He also had cheque for $6.36 signed by E. Howard Hunt.

(24) Alfred Baldwin told his story to a lawyer called John Cassidento, a strong supporter of the Democratic Party. He did not tell the authorities but did pass this information onto Larry O’Brien. The Democrats now knew that people like E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy were involved in the Watergate break-in.

References

(1) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) page 49

(2) Anthony Ulasewicz, The President's Private Eye (1990) page 177

(3) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) page 49

(4) Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (1984) page 99

(5) Richard Nixon, Memoirs (1978) page 474

(7) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) page 54

(8) John Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (1976) pages 92-97

(9) Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (1984) page 225

(10) Richard Nixon, Memoirs (1978) page 474

(10) H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978) pages 640-641

(12) Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (2003) pages 8-10

(13) Sherman Skolnick, The Secret History of Airplane Sabotage (8th June, 2001)

(14) Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) page 306

(15) E.Howard Hunt, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond (2007) page 264

(16) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men (1974) pages 71-74

(17) Bob Woodward, The Guardian (3rd June, 2005)

(18) Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979) pages 266-267

(19) Deborah Davis, interviewed by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press (1992)

(20) Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979) page 225

(21) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993) page 44

(22) Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (2003) pages 7-8

(23) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men (1974) page 18

Roast in Hell, G. Gordon Liddy, Dark Foe of Democracy

He lived long enough to become a perversely beloved American character, sharing a stage at one point with onetime target Timothy Leary, the LSD guru, and hosting his own right-wing radio show. But G. Gordon Liddy, who died on Tuesday, was not just a “dirty trickster” for President Richard Nixon and “mastermind” of the Watergate break-in. He was a thug, a deep-state gargoyle. And I’m glad that I lived long enough to spit (metaphorically) on his grave.

Among the many felonies that Liddy proposed or actually carried out was an assassination plot against syndicated Washington columnist Jack Anderson, who was seen as a security threat by the Nixon administration (which meant Nixon and his men didn’t like the scoops that Anderson was publishing). Liddy seriously proposed that he and his fellow hit men kill the journalist with a drug overdose or by engineering a car crash. Liddy confessed the planned murder – which was rejected as too extreme even by Nixon’s standards – in a face-to-face meeting with Anderson that was filmed for a 1991 CNBC show.

Anderson escaped unscathed during Nixon’s reign of terror. But how many others fell victim to Liddy and other Nixon henchmen? Dorothy Hunt – the wife of CIA spook and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt – was among those who died mysterious deaths during these dark times, killed in a 1972 plane crash along with a CBS newswoman who was working with her on a Watergate tell-all.

And Jacobin magazine just ran a lengthy report on the 1969 assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton based on over 400 newly obtained pages of secret FBI documents. According to Jacobin, the FBI and Nixon officials were alarmed by young, charismatic Hampton’s efforts at uniting radical groups across racial lines. It’s important to fully understand the covert violence against radical leaders and others who were deemed national security threats in the 1960s and ‘70s, Jacobin stated, because “a fuller understanding of this thinking and methodology matters for a new left aiming to avoid the bureau’s efforts at disruption in the twenty-first century.”

I’ve been making this case for many years now. The assassination of Hampton, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and many other known and unknown government targets is not only of historical importance. Full disclosure about these traumatic events will also protect future progressive leaders.

Power always resents dissent. It always acts to silence oppositional figures seen as threats. It always seeks to cloak its violence in darkness. So I’m not one of those who note the passing of G. Gordon Liddy with an ironic chuckle. He was a vicious enemy of American democracy – and he had a lot more official stature and muscle than the violent protesters who overran the Capitol on January 6.

So roast in hell, G. Gordon Liddy. Enjoy your eternal barbecue.

Liddy took aim at American democracy

Joe Biden’s Big (But Not Big Enough) Bet on America

Can America join the modern world, rebuilding its decaying bridges and highways and creating a climate-crisis infrastructure of electric car stations and renewable energy facilities – while energizing a diverse, unionized workforce as the “backbone” of national prosperity? Joe Biden’s $2 trillion plan is truly transformative. And, of course, the Republican Party and its corporate masters have already denounced the plan, since it would be subsidized by a partial rollback of the huge Trump corporate tax cut. Republicans have already formed a group called the Coalition to Protect American Workers to fight Biden’s Build Back Better bill. (Don’t you love the Republican use of Orwellian language? They’re always naming things the exact opposite of what they truly are – in this case an organization to protect the wealthiest Americans.)

In our new Alice in Wonderland world, Washington Democrats have actually grown spines. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer -- who used to slink through Capitol halls with a “kick me” sign on his back affixed by slithery Mitch McConnell – is already exploring the same fast-track reconciliation process used to pass Biden’s big Covid relief bill without a single Republican vote. Go, Chuck, go.

When Washington Democrats act boldly, you know the country is in desperate shape. Everything is broken, and we’re woefully unprepared for the stormy future. Even corporate America knows we urgently need to upgrade our 1950s-era infrastructure – with business executives themselves as primary benefactors. They just don’t want to pay for this big investment in our future. But fuck the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce. For too long their members have been looting the national treasury. Now it’s payback time.

As progressive members of Congress have pointed out, Biden’s $2 trillion price tag – as breathtaking as it sounds to the Mitch McConnell crowd – is actually far too low. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laid out a persuasive case for much higher pubic investment on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, calling for $10 trillion in spending over the next 10 years. As AOC pointed out, Biden’s current Build Back Better bill includes $40 billion for public housing renewal across the nation after years of Republican defunding – but New York City’s decrepit public housing alone requires that amount.

So, yes, if America is truly to join the modern world, Joe Biden’s bill is a great beginning. But it’s only a beginning.

The WHO Report’s Biggest Critic? WHO’s Director, That’s Who

While this week’s WHO report insisted it’s “extremely unlikely” that a Wuhan lab leaks caused the pandemic that is ravaging the world, many scientific experts say not so fast. Among those casting doubt on the WHO team’s findings is none other than the director-general of the health organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said bluntly, “I don’t believe this assessment was extensive enough.” Dr. Tedros criticized the Chinese government for blocking researchers’ inquiries.

The WHO chief joins a growing chorus of scientists and health officials who want more information about the research and security practices at the Virology Institute in Wuhan. A U.S. State Department paper issued in the waning days of the Trump administration — and not retracted by Biden officials — alleged that “several researchers” at the lab became sick in the fall of 2019 with COVID-like symptoms, before the first identified case of the disease, and claimed that the lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

Even members of the WHO research team acknowledged that the Wuhan lab — where they spent only a few hours gathering unsurprising denials from Chinese scientists under the watchful eyes of government monitors — was not a principal target of the investigation.

According to the Washington Post, “The international team’s level of interest in exploring the lab theory seemed low, either because they saw it as a politically motivated hoax, thought the evidence pointed in other directions, or did not believe the team had a mandate — or the appropriate staffing — to investigate a Chinese lab.”

The Post quoted Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist and infectious-disease expert on the mission, who said he didn’t think the possibility of a lab accident could be ruled out but stressed that the team wasn’t equipped to investigate the hypothesis.

“So, I mean, yes, we did a three-hour visit, and it was sort of managed in the sense that there’s a lot of people there and we did a tour,” he said. “But we did get to ask questions and so on.”

So was the WHO team “equipped” to declare a Wuhan lab leak “extremely unlikely”? No — and by doing so, these researchers only undermined the already shaky image of the global health organization.

Dr. Tedros, the WHO chief

I Smell a Rat – I Mean a Rewired Bat: Inside the Dark Cave of COVID-19’s Origins

 “Extremely unlikely” – that’s what the WHO report released today calls the possibility of a lab leak as the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 3 million people worldwide and devastated the global economy. But that dark scenario is looming larger according to many scientific experts. By their own admission, the WHO team was largely blocked by Chinese  authorities and Secretary of State Antony Blinken even charged that the report was partly written by the Chinese government.

British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a New York-based project called EcoHealth Alliance, has emerged as a spokesman for the WHO team, batting away speculation that the plague originated in a high-security government lab in Wuhan as “conspiracy theory” and “political from the start.” And it’s true that the Trump administration so hopelessly politicized the “kung flu” pandemic that even the former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield’s fairly restrained comments yesterday about a possible Wuhan lab leak immediately caused a public uproar. But Daszak, whose group has funneled millions of dollars to dangerous virology research in Wuhan over the years, is also a highly suspect player in the coronavirus origin story. The arena is rife with conflicts of interest – and Daszak must be seen as one of the worst offenders.

Dr. Peter Daszak

If the COVID-19 nightmare does turn out to have begun with a leak from a lab, where a bat virus was engineered to go viral in the human population, there will be many villains. It was the Frankenstein syndrome at work – in the name of protecting the human race from a future pandemic that jumped from bats to people, scientists might have indeed caused the unthinkable. While many scientists have been warning for years against this laboratory hubris -- one called it “looking for a gas leak in the dark with a lit match” – others plunged ahead.

One of these is Shi Zhengli, director of virology research at one of the major Wuhan labs. The other is Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, the world’s other top expert on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses. Shi and Baric, who have collaborated since 2015, have received millions in funding from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health. Following 9/11, Fauci energetically took up the federal government’s crusade against “bioterrorism,” showering money on dangerous research projects like Shi’s and Baric’s – even though the only known bioterrorist in the U.S. was a Fort Detrick anthrax scientist who was intent on escalating fear along with his research budget – and who later killed himself.

Shi Zhengli

The U.S.-funded research on biochemical warfare and weaponized disease actually began mushrooming during the Cold War. Along with this proliferation of deadly research came scores of lab accidents and leaks. “By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize,” wrote Nicholson Baker in a must-read, eye-popping investigation of COVID-19’s origins in the January 4 issue of New York magazine. Some researchers died horrible deaths.

Baker’s lengthy article has become an indispensable part of the coronavirus canon. He concludes his heavily researched feature with these ominous words: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.” Until there was one.

Dr Ralph Baric

The other article you must read to begin to understand this viral catastrophe that has changed everything on Earth is by Alison Young, an investigative reporter for USA Today. Young’s alarming March 22 report discloses the high-risk world of laboratory research at U.S. government facilities, where accidents and leaks are common occurrences.

 It is imperative that we learn from the COVID-19 apocalypse. Scientific inquiry is spinning out of control, and either we find rational ways to regulate it or the human race will become lab rats.

Who Owns the Free Press? Meet the Moguls Who Control Liberal Thought

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” The late, great A. J. Liebling wrote that in The New Yorker back in 1960. And, over six decades later, Liebling’s wisdom still pertains. This was driven home for me by today’s insider piece on Harper’s magazine by the New York Times savvy media columnist, Ben Smith. In his weekly column, Smith declares Harper’s “media’s oddest workplace” – and as he makes plain, that oddness flows directly from the magazine’s long-time publisher, John R. MacArthur. Among his many “odd” moves, MacArthur ordered his 17-member staff back to their Manhattan office during the height of the Covid-19 contagion because he felt “happiest” there; crushed a union movement; and has insisted on keeping staff pay lower than New York’s cost of living (and not paying interns at all) – a financial policy that ensures Harpers is edited by a disproportionately white and well-to-do team. MacArthur also flips his top editors at whim, and imposes his opinions on the publication when he feels passionately about an issue (the so-called cancel culture is a major irritant of his).

MacArthur can do what he wants with Harpers because he owns it – or to be more precise, he keeps it afloat as a nonprofit entity with multimillion infusions of cash each year from his family foundation. The family fortune, which is based on the insurance empire built by MacArthur’s grandfather, also bankrolls the annual MacArthur genius awards.

Laurene Powell Jobs

Harper’s is not the only leading liberal thought publication held in hostage by one or two wealthy owners. In fact, that’s the rule in this sector of the media industry. The Atlantic is owned mostly by Laurene Powell Jobs -- the widow of the late Apple mogul Steve Jobs, who is worth $20 billion -- with a large minority stake held  by David Bradley, a Harvard Business School-educated corporate consultant.

Even The New Republic – the scrappiest, most left-wing of the three -- has been owned in recent years by wealthy publishers, most recently Win McCormack, a Democratic Party fundraiser. McCormack, who fancies himself a man of letters, recently got excited by Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam’s new book, Upswing, which bashes 1960s radicalism for fragmenting America. McCormack could jump on Putnam’s weirdly reactionary bandwagon in his progressive publication – because he can!

Win McCormack

 I subscribe to all three thought magazines of the left – because there’s usually some deep reporting if not thinking in them that’s worth reading. The New Republic under top editor Chris Lehman is particularly intellectually lively these days. But I’m always aware of these publications’ ownership structures, and the editorial hires and policies imposed thereby on these magazines.

I know from personal experience what it’s like to work in the editorial fields of plantation owners. My first major editorial staff job was in the 1980s at Mother Jones magazine, which although also structured as a nonprofit, was essentially owned by Adam Hochschild, an heir to his family’s African mining fortune. Adam is a talented writer – and two of his best books (King Leopold’s Ghost, about the cruelty of the Belgian empire, and Half the Way Home, a family memoir) grapple, at least in part, with his troubled legacy. But, like all wealthy publishing moguls, Hochschild imposed his wishes and whims on the editorial direction of Mother Jones – sometimes against the better judgement of the staff and to the editorial detriment of the magazine.

Not to dwell on the past, but the magazine should have run Jason Berry’s stunning, well-researched expose of the Catholic Church’s coverup of widespread sexual abuse. If we had, Mother Jones would have scooped the Boston Globe’s award-winning Spotlight investigative series by well over a decade. And maybe Adam himself would agree today that I would’ve made a better Mother Jones editor-in-chief than the volatile and narcissistic Michael Moore, who quickly lost the staff’s support and was soon fired by Hochschild.

This is not to single out Hochschild, whom as I say later established himself as an accomplished, bestselling historian. He was one of the better owners of the liberal press. But the problem is bigger than any individual: no multimillionaire or billionaire should control the free press.

And, of course, this is not a problem only for struggling thought magazines, but also for the daily newspapers which are the bedrock of democracy. Jeff Bezos – the richest man in the whole fucking world – bought the Washington Post for pennies on the dollar from the Graham family in 2013. Bezos is credited with saving the Post, pumping much-needed capital into the newsroom. But the Post will never win any Pulitzers for hard-hitting exposes of Amazon labor conditions. Nor will the newspaper deeply question the aggressive tenets of the U.S. national security establishment, considering the political philosophy of Bezos – the son of a Cuban immigrant – and Amazon’s huge contracts with the CIA and other federal agencies.

We also learn from today’s New York Times that the Chicago Tribune chain – which includes the Baltimore Sun and New York Daily News – is now in a tug of war between a ruthless hedge fund and two billionaires who reportedly have a more expansive view of a free press. So once again American journalism is faced with a Hobson’s choice – the cold avarice of Wall Street or the benevolence of billionaires.

Who should the free press belong to? Why the American people of course. One of the billionaires bidding for the Tribune empire – Maryland hotelier Stewart Bainum Jr. – apparently wants to hand over the newspapers that he would control to nonprofit organizations in their communities. If this happens, it could be a game-changer for American journalism.

But, of course, even nonprofit ownership structures are not necessarily dreams come true. Just ask the fired editors and cowed staff at Harper’s magazine.

John R. MacArthur

P.S.  If you’ve read this far, you should donate to The David Talbot Show (if you haven’t already). And, by the way, if you’re asked by random popups on my page to take surveys or make other donations, it’s not me. Ignore these strange intrusions.

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.

1. 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

Nahawa Doumbia, “Blonda Yirini”

Zoe FitzGerald Carter, “I Wanna Be a Teenage Boy”