Media Merger Creates More of Same - But Here Are MY Hidden Gems
The press is all atwitter about the announced merger between Discovery and AT&T’s WarnerMedia division. Discovery’s Daniel Zaslav is up! WarnerMedia’s Jason Kilar is down! And who knew that wily old John “Cable Cowboy” Malone was still pulling the media industry’s strings from Colorado? In fact, who knew that he was still alive? Despite the media’s frenzy about the latest media shift, the proper response to all this sound and fury is a big yawn. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Like a lot of you, I’ve been watching too much cable network product during the pandemic lockdown. As I began tuning in more, I assumed that all the new streaming services had not only added volume to our entertainment menu, but elevated the quality of movies and TV shows. Wrong. My overall impression of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max and all the rest is how utterly formulaic that entertainment programming has become. If anything, the age of streaming has made creativity even MORE cookie-cutter. There are precious few shows and films that challenge viewers intellectually, artistically or politically. It seems that entertainment executives are all consulting the same apps to determine potential audience and market size. The seat-of-the-pants instincts and quirks that characterized some Old Hollywood barons have been replaced by stats-driven analysis. The result is a predictable stream of programming that hits the same shock-fear-desire nerve buttons in the audience.
As my regular readers know, to avoid boredom, I go spelunking deep and wide in the entertainment vaults to find the gems from yesterday, today and tomorrow that dazzle me. Here are a few of the shining artifacts that I’ve enjoyed recently.
The Talk of the Town. This 1942 movie directed by George Stevens and written by the great Irwin Shaw whipsaws you back and forth between comedy, romance and drama. It stars Cary Grant as an anarchist on the run from the law (yes, you read that right) and Ronald Coleman as the stuffy law professor with whom he forms an unusual bond. Caught between the two argumentative but increasingly close male buddies is the wonderful Jean Arthur. And you don’t know which man she’s going to pick until the final scene of this pleasingly long, weird movie (a scene which takes place in the dignified lobby of the Supreme Court building of all places).
That Damn Michael Che. Who knew that the co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update feature was capable of producing a show of vignettes and commentary so bitingly funny that it puts you in mind of other great black comedies that Che himself references (to mock his own efforts) — like In Living Color and The Chapelle Show. Yes, the six episodes of Che’s show are on HBO Max — but they’re the only fresh, laugh-out-loud pleasures I’ve had during the Covid era. And yes, Che is a lot funnier here than he is on SNL. In fact, the six episodes of That Damn Michael Che are a lot funnier than any SNL show during the past season.
Mr. Wilder and Me. This new novel by British author Jonathan Coe (Middle England) is not easily available yet in the U.S. But it’s worth the extra effort to get your hands on it. I can’t imagine a better summer read. Told from the perspective of a young Greek woman on her first tour of America in the mid-’70s, the novel dips you into the bittersweet final filmmaking days of Billy Wilder and his screenwriter Iz Diamond. Once the king of Hollywood, Wilder is now fighting to keep making movies — and in the process he and Diamond inspire young Calista Frangopoulou to pursue her own creative ambitions. As light and breezy as a day at the beach, but with a wistful and melancholy feeling as well. Utterly delightful — and it will make you go scrambling for Wilder movies you might have missed. For instance, I discovered Ace in the Hole, a scathing 1951 movie about the depravity of the media (and American culture) starring Kirk Douglas.
That’s all, folks!
The Republican Sabotage Machine vs Chesa Boudin: Where’s the Progressive Outrage?
The Republicans. They tell us they’re real Americans. They believe in truth, justice and the American way. Except they don’t really. They don’t truly believe in any of those values. All they really care about are power and self-interest. And the only way they can enforce their dominion over democracy is to sabotage it. Which they are doing in nearly every state – and even in so-called progressive capitals like San Francisco.
Here we see a sinister cabal of moderate Democrats (Republicans in any other city) and billionaire bullies targeting progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, launching TWO recall campaigns against him before he even got his seat warm at the Hall of Justice. This hit operation is right out of the Trump playbook – rig the system to get far-right fanatics elected, and if progressives slip into office, tie them up with endless disinformation barrages and even recall campaigns.
Who’s funding the Boudin recall campaigns? A rogue’s gallery of fat cats including Chicago investor David O’Keefe as well as Silicon Valley venture capitalists David O. Sacks and Cyan Banister. (It’s driven locally by figures like real estate lobbyist Mary Jung and police-affiliated attorney Harry Stern.) Who are these people and why are they targeting Boudin, who has emerged as a nationally prominent advocate of justice reform? Let’s look at Sacks, for example. He was a conservative wingman of notorious Trump ally Peter Thiel when they were Stanford students, later coauthoring a book with him titled The Diversity Myth, a Koch brother-published attack on “political correctness” which stated that racism in America is largely imaginary and that date rape is nothing more than “belated regret.” Besides funding the recall effort against Boudin, Sacks has also given wads of money to Republican candidates – including former Senator David Perdue, in a desperate attempt to keep Georgia (and the U.S.) in the red column.
The billionaire Republican attack on Boudin is being aided at the local level by Mayor London Breed’s political machine. Mayor Breed, who strongly backed Boudin’s opponent Suzy Loftus in the DA race, wants to eliminate a visionary future rival on her left. And Breed would much rather focus public attention on Boudin’s alleged mismanagement of the prosecutor’s office than her all-too-real leadership failures. Breed has benefited from Covid fatigue and a weak local press, but in any robust metro arena, she would have been on the ropes by now for her personal and political affiliations with disgraced Public Woks czar Mohammed Nuru and her rank inability to combat San Francisco’s homeless and housing crisis, urban blight and tech industry domination.
Boudin, by contrast, has offered a powerful example of what a public official can do to advance real justice in one city. But during his 17 months in office, he’s been forced to fight off a stream of fake news from his opponents and their useful tools in the media, like TV reporter Dion Lim of ABC7-KGO and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight. Boudin is charged with overseeing a rise in SF crime – it’s actually down overall by some 30 precent. Under his watch, violent crimes like rape and assault have significantly decreased. Homicide has ticked up, as it has in cities across the nation during the pandemic, but much less than other cities in the region. Boudin is also charged with taking a soft-on-crime approach, but while emphasizing alternatives to incarceration for non-serious offenses, Boudin has also increased the rates of prosecution for offenders with prior arrests.
The question that keeps nagging me is not why Republican billionaires and the Breed machine are targeting Boudin, but why San Francisco progressives have not rallied around him more aggressively. If his opponents succeed in knocking off a nationally prominent progressive prosecutor like Chesa Boudin, it will not only be a blow against the rising social justice movement – it will further disempower the San Francisco Left and embolden the forces of greed that have taken over the city.
Stay tuned to this space, as I campaign one more time for Chesa Boudin. It might be my last hurrah as a citizen advocate (more on that later).
For the People: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin
“Exhilarating, inspiring”… The Advance Reviews Continue to Shine for Our New Book
A starred review in Booklist… a rave review in Publishers Weekly. (That’s where the “exhilarating” blurb comes from.) By the Light of Burning Dreams, the new book by my sister Margaret Talbot (of The New Yorker magazine) and I, is off to a wonderful start, in advance of its June 8 publication by HarperCollins.
The book chronicles dramatic turning points in the lives of revolutionary heroes from the 1960s and ‘70s — including Bobby Seale and Huey Newton of the Black Panthers; Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda of the Vietnam antiwar movement; Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta if the United Farm Workers crusade; John Lennon and Yoko Ono and their anti-Nixon peace campaign; Heather Booth and the women of Jane, the underground feminist abortion clinic; and Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk and Russell Means of the American Indian Movement.
We interviewed many of these iconic radical leaders. (Dennis Banks died shortly after I spoke with him — look for my forthcoming article about that interview and Banks’s startling revelation about how President Nixon and Marlon Brando saved him and his fellow Native warriors from a second Wounded Knee massacre). In telling these men and women’s dramatic stories, we did not shy from evaluating their strengths and weaknesses as leaders. But, in the end, I came to feel the same way as novelist Robert Stone — another veteran of these wild times. The only thing he regretted, Stone wrote near the end of his life, was his movement’s failure to win.
Yes, these heroes of the “Second American Revolution,” as we call it, moved the country forward socially and culturally. But we failed to take political power. Our radical generation must fully understand our triumphs and tragedies and pass along this wisdom to the next generation of activists.
I think By the Light of Burning Dreams is a well-timed history lesson. It’s also a damn good read. The Talbots know how to write. Just saying…
You can pre-order the book from an independent bookstore here.
Big Pharma: Greed Is God
I’ve been reading Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe’s remarkable book about the Sackler dynasty and their pharmaceutical wasteland — including the opioid scourge. (What a writer and researcher! I had to leap into his latest book after just finishing his haunting book about the Irish Troubles, Say Nothing.) As I descend with Keefe into his page-turning book about the Sacklers, I’ve also been following the harrowing news from India and Latin America about the Covid killing fields in those tragic countries. Once again, the pharmaceutical giants are profiteering from pain, favoring the wealthy imperialist nations and blocking growing campaigns to transfer their vaccination technology to suffering nations. Drug giants like Pfizer and Moderna would rather get charity points, dispensing some additional shots to India — where more than 3,000 people a day are dying from Covid — than break their trade patents and share their life-saving secrets with foreign drug manufacturers.
Tulsa University was the first institution to strip the Sackler name from its buildings, in 2019.
To his credit, Dr. Anthony Fauci — the nation’s point man on the Covid crisis — has urged President Biden to break the international trade pact favoring Big Pharma. After all, Moderna developed its highly effective Covid vaccine with a huge assist from U.S. taxpayers. And the global coronavirus crisis has already ensured that vaccine makers will reap staggering profits this year. “I always respect the needs of the (drug) companies to protect their interests to keep them in business,” recently said Fauci, who as a long-term U.S. health official knows he must appease the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry. “But we can’t do it completely at the expense of not allowing vaccine that’s life-saving to get to the people who need it.”
Women in India mourn their dead loved ones, as hospitals there run out of oxygen supplies.
As Biden himself has noted, the U.S. is not a walled island. The virus respects no borders. So the suffering of people in India and Brazil and South Africa will soon be OUR suffering. Already medical workers in India’s Covid wards who have been fully inoculated are starting to be sickened with Covid variants. The more we allow Big Pharma greed to block the global distribution of vaccines, the more we risk new waves of infection, even among those who have been immunized in the West. We’re all in this together.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel
During earlier global health emergencies, like the AIDS crisis, foreign governments finally moved to break Big Pharma patents and manufacture life-saving drugs. In the 1980s, an Indian drug manufacturer broke a lock on hepatitis B vaccine held tightly by Merck and Glaxo-Smith-Kline, after the World Health Organization urgently recommended the vaccine for children. Big Pharma was charging $23 per shot; the Indian manufacturer offered it for $1 a dose.
It’s time for President Biden and other Western leaders to pick life over greed. If they read one book this month, it should be Empire of Pain.
The Fool on a Hill: A Stroll in My Vertical Neighborhood
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round
That about sums up my daily walks on San Francisco’s Bernal Hill. (There’s a Beatles tune for every occasion.) It’s not that I’ve become a guru, like the Mahirishi Mahesh Yogi, who briefly bedazzled John and George (who then both took wicked revenge on the giggling spiritual leader). But my head is constantly spinning around ever since my stroke in 2017, and my vision is off-kilter too. So taking an afternoon spin around my steep neighborhood is always a crazy kind of trek, and today it had me singing about that other fool on a hill.
My life is a daily strain. Who’s isn’t? Despite my “deficits” (I love those accounting terms), I still count myself lucky to be alive. So much has happened in my life in the past three-and-a-half years. So many wonderful (and occasionally terrifying) events in the lives of family and friends — not to mention America at large. I’m here, I’m alive — in fact I feel more fully alive than I was before my medical catastrophe.
It’s true, I can’t hop in a car (or plane) and take off somewhere fun or exotic. My physical damage (and the pandemic) has made me more house-bound. And so my neighborhood has become my domain. From the top of Bernal Heights, I can see the world (or at least most of my city). I contain multitudes, and so does my limited empire. Increasingly bold coyotes, dog wranglers herding packs of canines, young women with crowns of curls speaking a language I’ve never heard before, techies talking a language I wish I’d never understood, dancers rehearsing their spins and leaps.
And now, as I near 70, it’s time to reinvent myself, again. Am I retired? Not quite. I have one last history book coming out in June — another hill I’d have struggled to climb without the help of two co-authors, my sister Margaret Talbot and my brother-in-law Arthur Allen. By the Light of Burning Dreams should have been a casualty of my stroke — a bolt that struck my head just as I was about to start writing. Instead it will soon be published — a final statement on my activist generation and how we tried to move history forward.
Changing America — this beautiful, this monstrous beast of a country. For most of my life, it was something I thought we could actually accomplish — and we did, in ways major and minor we did. But we radicals never took power. Some will read our book and conclude it’s a good thing we didn’t. Perhaps, in some cases, we weren’t ready to lead. But we were never allowed the chance — even our best and brightest, like the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Seale, Bella Abzug, Tom Hayden, Fred Hampton, Shirley Chisholm. They never allowed these brave, visionary men and women to get close to the pinnacle of power. (Or when they briefly did, they violently removed them.)
Now we have a president who doesn’t just imitate our rhetoric. He actually seems to be trying to put our ideas (some of them) into action. (I would love to talk again with Tom, to hear the reaction of the Port Huron Statement author to President Biden’s Congressional address.) And so maybe, in our graying dotage, the beast is shuffling slowly in the right direction again.
What do I wish for my sons and their anxious generation? A sense of the euphoria we once felt, long ago, when we thought we could bend the U.S. Empire to our will. Failing that, I wish them the serenity I feel every day when I walk upon my hill. The spring flowers are blooming, the coyotes are running free. We’re alive in the world. And we can still imagine a better world.
Biden’s New Deal
In his State of the Union speech (I know — we’re not supposed to call it that, but whatever), President Joe Biden not only sought to bury the sneering chimera of Trump. but also the charming ghoulishness of Reagan. “Trickle down economics has never worked.” Biden declared. “It’s time to grow the economy from the ground and middle up.” It was the most unabashedly populist presidential address to Congress since FDR, and the long list of left-wing goals that he ticked off had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren jumping to their feet, along with other members of the Capitol Hill progressive caucus. Biden spoke softly for the most part, but his speech had the chamber rocking, even though his audience was Covid-limited to 200 legislators and dignitaries.
Can President Biden and his Democratic vanguard push through his ambitious agenda while he still holds a (slim) advantage in Congress? He certainly seems to have the mojo — and the public opinion polls — to do it. And the Republican opposition seems weirdly distracted and divided, still haunted by that ghost of Trump.
So go, Joe, go — you have nothing to lose but the chains of the past, with all those failed presidencies and American carnage (yes, that’s what it is — but Trump only made it worse). Maybe it’s his advanced age; maybe it’s his Irish Catholic soul; maybe it’s all the personal loss he’s suffered; maybe it’s the bitter lessons of the Obama years. But whatever it is, Old Joe seems like the great progressive hope these days. Whether America is really the great nation and the American people the grand visionaries he keeps calling us is a very different question. But we’ll soon find out whether democracy or autocracy — the great battle that Biden illuminated in his speech — will triumph.
Our Joe Manchin Problem: Time to Play Hardball
Let’s put aside for now that little West Virginia has no business in a democracy having the same number of senators as New York or Texas or California. Let’s just focus on Joe Manchin, the nominally Democratic senator from that small state who not only ardently defends the undemocratic nature of the Senate, but has become the key factor in President Joe Biden’s ambitious plans to revitalize America. .. or not. After much hemming and hawing, Manchin went along with Biden’s big pandemic relief bill — why he kept the nation in suspense when his own suffering state desperately needed the cash infusion is a question still worth pursuing. But now Manchin is doubling down on his role as Senate decider-in-chief, proclaiming he prefers the much smaller Republican infrastructure bill to Biden’s massive renewal plan, which incorporates climate retooling, job retraining and social justice reforms. Manchin also has made clear that he loves the filibuster — the Senate device also beloved by Mitch McConnell and all legislative defenders of elite interests.
So Joe Manchin, as a key Senate vote, is a problem. A big problem if America is to truly enter the 21st Century. And here’s what the Biden administration needs to do. Get rough. I don’t mean the kindly, old president himself — his poll numbers are sky high, in part because of his ambitious program but also because he is seen as a genial uniter. But Biden needs a pit bull. JFK had his brother, the “ruthless” Bobby Kennedy. LBJ was a pit bull himself. Clinton had Carville — and Hillary. Obama had Rahm Emanuel — for awhile. After Emanuel left the White House, Obama couldn’t even strong-arm aging Ruth Bader Ginsburg off the Supreme Court bench when the Democrats still controlled the Senate.
Now Biden needs some muscle. And Ron Klain doesn’t cut it. Biden’s chief of staff is too nice of a guy. Biden needs someone to play hardball with Joe Manchin. He needs someone who can sit down with the senator from little West Virginia and explain to him the facts of life.
OK, senator, what do you want? What does your state need? The Biden team can do this the easy way — or the hard way. If Manchin needs a little tougher approach, you can always escalate. I hear you had a little problem with your taxes…. or that young girl in Charleston… if you’re in a jam, maybe we can help you.
That’s called politics. It’s never been pretty, but that’s the way it’s played. The Democrats too often forget the basics of the game. But it’s time to relearn.
And now it’s time for me to play a little hardball… If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly hooked on my daily scribblings, and you should help keep me going. Please donate $25 today to the David Talbot Show — or $50 if you’re flush.
How to Inject Some Life Into the Oscars
Yes, god help me, I’ll be watching the Oscars show on Sunday evening. I’ve watched every year since I was a kid — it was a family ritual in my Hollywood home. And, like millions of other movie fans, I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with the annual spectacle as the years have gone by. (Academy Awards viewership has plummeted in recent years.) There were no screen masterpieces released in 2020 to propel an audience spike — no Godfather or Do the Right Thing or Lawrence of Arabia or On the Waterfront. I saw most of this year’s nominated films — and other than the execrable The Trial of the Chicago Seven (memo to Aaron Sorkin: there were EIGHT defendants — you left out the Black guy in your title) and the dull-as-dishwater Mank, the other films were all uniformly fine. They all had the same somber and sensitive tone, which I suppose was appropriate for movies made during the last gasp of Trump and released during a plague year.
So if the movies themselves can’t juice up the Oscars ceremony on Sunday, the show’s producers will have to rely on reimagining the festivities. Supposedly that’s what they’re going to do — but I doubt they actually will. What do I think would make the Academy Awards compelling again? I’m glad you asked (because the producers didn’t).
Here’s my short list of new rules that would breathe some life into what has sadly become a flat and formulaic event. The first one is for Oscar victors, the rest are for the Academy and the show’s producers:
Make victory speeches snappier! If you’re not planning on a wardrobe malfunction or a drunken rant, then please deliver a short, lively speech if you’re lucky enough to win a gold statuette. No one wants to hear your laundry list of agents, producers, therapists, dog groomers etc. Thank four and no more. I used to think political statements livened up the proceedings, but now they sound like they’ve been scripted by talent managers. (Mark Ruffalo’s recent long-winded sermons were the last straw for me.) Say something witty about the movie you worked on (politics is allowed if the film was actually political — but keep it succinct). If you need guidance, watch video of Brits accepting awards — like the short, smart speeches by Daniel Day-Lewis (NOT the sloppy ones by Olivia Coleman).
Don’t show the trailers from nominated movies — show actual scenes from the films, as was done in the old pre-marketing days.
Show more cinema magic, like filmed tributes to legendary stars and directors and composers.
Cast your hosts. You’re Hollywood — you should know how to pick your leading players for the evening. They should be amusing and sophisticated. (I realize you don’t have a lot to pick from these days, but try).
Throw your net wider for nominations. I know, I know — you’re all about diversity these days. But why did even the “Black movies” have the same conventional feeling as the rest of the Oscar pack? Yes, Judas and the Black Messiah dug deeper into America’s dark 1960s history than The Trial of the Chicago Seven. But Daniel Kaluuya was a weak choice for the charismatic Fred Hampton. (I mean I love my Brits, but we can’t cast them in every American role.)
A final (personal) squawk — Composer Emil Mosseri should have been nominated last year for his glorious score for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His nomination for this year’s Minari felt like a belated consolation prize, which the Academy does too often. In fact, this is the kind of “little” film that too often get overlooked by the Oscars. (And yes, The Last Black Man was directed by my son Joe Talbot— but I’m still being objective.)
Time to Turn Up the Heat on Climate Criminals
President Joe Biden’s vow to slash global-warming pollution by at least half by the end of the decade is very encouraging – especially after four years of Trumpian climate denial. But watching the Greta Thunberg special on PBS last night was a grim reminder of how daunting a task the world now faces, as glaciers melt, sea levels rise to flood levels, the oceans grow more acidic, forests and entire towns are torched by wildfires, freak storms devastate major cities, and on and on. Even the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – two defiant bulwarks of climate denial – had to duly applaud Biden’s climate battle cry yesterday at a global Zoom summit.
But there are still major obstacles to Biden’s transformative plan to save the planet. And, as usual with anything good and essential, the opposition begins with Mitch McConnell and his Republican Senate cabal. McConnell has already denounced Biden’s sweeping climate plan, charging that it amounts to surrender to China, which “shamelessly” keeps spewing greenhouse gas emissions. Put aside the fact that China’s leaders have also vowed to phase out coal burning and other major sources of global warming. McConnell denouncing China is rich. His wife, Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, is practically a Politburo member of the Chinese Communist Party, along with other members of her family, whose wealth comes from a shipping giant with close ties to the Chinese dictatorship. McConnell and Chao are among those who should be investigated for collusion with Beijing as well as climate obstructionism.
And speaking of climate criminals, it’s also time to prosecute Michael Wirth, the CEO of Chevron Corp., the second largest oil corporation in the U.S. and a former Trump supporter and major climate denier. Wirth’s Chevron is compounding its global crimes by leading a major lobbying effort in Washington to block sanctions against the military thugs who took over Myanmar in a bloody coup. The vicious Myanmar junta is propped up by millions of dollars in taxes and fees paid by Chevron, which pumps oil out of a large field in that benighted country. In the first three months of this year, Chevron has paid over $2 million for a lobby campaign on behalf of Myanmar’s bloody dictators, who have killed more than 700 men, women and children so far as they try to consolidate their power. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged U.S. corporations to stop colluding with Myanmar’s corrupt military, but Chevron has rebuffed all human rights appeals.
Wirth is the same California-based CEO who last year bemoaned the state’s utility blackouts and yearned for the economic stability of Texas. In his speech before a Houston business group, Wirth failed to mention Chevron’s own responsibility for the climate-driven wildfires that have devastated California. And, of course, not long after Wirth sang the praises of Texas, Houston itself was reduced to Third World status by a freak winter storm.
It’s time to criminalize men like Mitch McConnell and Michael Wirth. Either they go, or the planet does.
Driving While Tucker Carlson
Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s reaction to the Derek Chuavin verdict was utterly predictable. He blamed Black Lives Matter, claiming that the jury had caved to the racial justice movement. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, cops still are killing nonwhite people because… they feel like it.
Let’s just stay it: Tucker Carlson is a weenie. He’s always ben a weenie. A spoiled, rightwing brat who was given a seat at the big people’s table on Fox News after Bill O’Reilly finally got bounced for molesting the help — and little Tucker finally got all grown up and stuff and got rid of his bowtie. A WEENIE, in Carlson’s case, stands for White Extremely Entitled Nudnik (or Neo-Nazi, depending on his rant of the evening).
Carlson needs to get out of his posh bubble now and then. He needs a lesson about real life. He needs to be pulled over for a routine traffic violation by trigger-itchy Black cops. Police officers who regard him as suspicious, even dangerous — who think he fits the profile of an armed white nationalist (they’d be right in that conclusion). Then we’ll see how knee-jerk Carlson remains in defense of the police. After he’s been dragged from his luxury automobile, feels the business end of a police baton, has guns pointed at his head, is slapped in handcuffs and pinned face down to the ground.
I’m ready for the next step in the education of a weenie.
Bleeding America
I wanted to celebrate the historic conviction of Officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd. I wanted to sing the praises of President Joe Biden and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for showing that authority can do the right thing. I wanted to join the chorus who cheered for teenager Darnella Frazier and the “bouquet” of brave Minneapolis witnesses who recorded Floyd’s horrific murder and tried to stop his police executioners and refused to let the Minneapolis Police Department cover up another murder. And I wanted to honor the 12 men and women on the jury — six white, six nonwhite — who performed a “deep service,” returning a guilty verdict on all three counts, instead of letting even one holdout force a hung jury, which is what many observers of the Chauvin trial expected. Yes, I wanted to celebrate all this — the saving of America’s soul, which is not being too dramatic, considering what was at stake in this most publicized of all police violence trials.
And then the cops killed another Black person — this time a teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio named Ma’Khia Bryant. And the body of Daunte Wright — killed by another cop during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis during the Chauvin trial — is not even cold yet.
And so, even as Derek Chauvin was led out of courtroom in handcuffs, we still can’t breathe, waiting for a cop somewhere in America to shoot and kill another African American citizen for no good reason.
“We don’t get to celebrate nothing,” said KC Traynor, one of the demonstrators who gathered outside the Columbus Police Department last night. “In the end, you know what, you can’t be Black.”
Message to right-wing cancel culture: “Shut your mouth”
“ Respect the chair, and shut your mouth.” That’s what Rep. Maxine Waters, the feisty, 82-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles, told Trumpian loudmouth Rep. Jim Jordan when he tried disrupting Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before her Congressional committee. Now House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and Georgia nutjob Marilyn Taylor-Greene want to shut up Waters, urging Congressional punishment for Waters’s forthright remarks about police violence. As Minneapolis and the rest of America poised for the verdict in the police murder of George Floyd, Waters urged a Brooklyn Center audience to keep up the political pressure for police reform. Incendiary stuff. Right out of the Constitution. McCarthy and his wacky colleague tried comparing Waters’s rhetoric to Trump’s, when he whipped up a crowd to storm the Capitol on January 6. But sorry, Republican cancel czars, that’s apples and oranges.
Look, in these fractious times, there’s a lot of loose speech on the left and mostly the right that should be countered by facts — and in extreme cases by the law. But Maxine Waters urging the community to stay vigilant for justice as police violence continues unabated? That’s perfectly legitimate speech — even as Minneapolis clenches for the verdict.
Rep. Maxine Waters at protest against police brutality in suburban Minneapolis
It’s Spring… You’re Still Alive… Turn It Up
All around the world, people are dying from war and Covid and starvation. In America, we arm mass murderers with military weapons. But if you’re reading this, you’re still alive. So celebrate your resilient mortality. Here’s what I’m playing — loudly — this week to ward off the demons. To welcome the cherry blossoms and tulips and wild roses that are bursting forth all around me, heedless of the world’s violence. So dance your asses off, readers, while you still can.
Greta Van Fleet — Never heard of these three brothers (and a childhood friend drummer ) from small-town Michigan until a few days ago. Now I can’t stop playing “Heat Above,” the anthemic track from their new LP. I missed the band’s big debut last year on Saturday Night Live. And I missed all the hate-talk from critics… Lead singer Josh Kiszka sounds like the reincarnation of Freddie Mercury or a young Robert Plant. So? He’s short and gender-mysterious. So? I like the way that Greta Van Fleet things big — their sound is operatic. In a time of small-minded thinking and narrow marketing formulas, the Kiszka brothers reach for the heavens. The three brothers were raised by two bohemian parents, who encouraged them to dig through their eclectic record collection (Fairport Convention, Donovan, yes!) and library (Sartre and Nietzsche, oh my) — and most important — didn’t hover over them constantly.
Watch Greta Van Fleet’s “Heat Above” video. It’s loony and gorgeous. It will make you laugh and shake and feel again. If you like rock ‘n’ roll. Remember rock ‘n‘ roll? The song is also about something. Do you remember that, too? War and fire are consuming the earth, wails Riszka. But “Heat Above” lauds a peaceful army marching across the land. We do not fight for war/ But to save the lives of those who do so.
Here’s the rest of my playlist — a lucky dozen of the month:
“Quit Your Day Job” Rebecka Reinhard
“I Will Be Gone” Emily Rodgers
“All Bets Aside” Pageants
“Popshop” Courting
“Sunrise” (Live ) Norah Jones
“C’mon Be Cool” Fanclubwallet
“Californian Soil” London Grammar
“Kora” Ballake Sissoko
“Lady Rain” Roger Fahkr
“Place Names” Nick Waterhouse
“Howl” The Bones of JR Jones
“ Better Things to Do” Zoe Fitzgerald Carter
The Knife Edge of Samantha (Soft) Power
Samantha Power is an imperialist with a human face. She gets passionately angry, she sheds tears. She expresses the deepest regrets when U.S. power claims innocent lives abroad. But she knows who’s innocent, and who’s not. That was her prerogative as one of President Obama’s top national security advisors. In the Obama administration, Power could always be counted on to urge military intervention – in Libya, Syria, wherever she thought that U.S. might made right.
And now in the Biden administration, the president has named Samantha Power to oversee U.S.A.I.D. She is still a consummate imperialist – articulate, worldly, a relentless advocate for the U.S. as global watchdog, But now she will be in charge of the country’s “soft power” – foreign aid (with strings), diplomacy, cultural missions (propaganda). She’s always been a spokeswoman for empire with a human face. But now Power gets to wield the carrot instead of the stick.
“It’s not like U.S.A.I.D. is going to invade somebody,” remarked Gayle Smith, who ran the aid agency for President Obama and has also been retooled for the Biden administration.
But those of us who are veterans of the Vietnam antiwar movement remember the dark side of A.I.D. While U.S. soldiers were shooting and napalming Vietnamese, the aid agency was trying to win their hearts and minds. The propaganda efforts of U.S.A.I.D. were the flip side of the imperial coin. There was always a sinister symmetry between A.I.D. and the CIA.
In the topsy-turvy world of Washington politics, Senator Rand Paul – the libertarian nutjob from Kentucky – is what passes for a man of conscience, at least when it comes to America’s overseas follies. During Power’s Senate confirmation hearings last month, Paul grilled her about her past affection for U.S. military exploits. Wasn’t there a contradiction between Samantha Power the humanitarian and Samantha Power the imperialist? “If you’re talking about humanitarianism,” the senator pointed out, aside from natural causes “wars are the number one cause of famine around the world. Are you willing to admit that the Libyan and Syrian interventions you advocated for were mistakes?”
But Power batted away Paul’s efforts to re-set her. She saw nothing wrong with her military interventionism under Obama. And to bipartisan cheers from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Power made clear that she will use her soft power perch at U.S.A.I.D. to target China, framing that rising power’s global reach as a growing threat to America’s, well, global reach.
Rising to the flag-waving occasion before the Senate committee, Power roundly condemned China’s “coercive and predatory approach, which is so transactional” in its dealings with developing countries that ultimately become dependent on Beijing through what Power snortingly referred to as “debt-trap diplomacy.” Hmm, reminds me of another superpower.
I’m all for President Biden finally declaring an end to America’s 20-year Afghanistan expedition, which the press likes to call our country’s longest war. (Memo to news desks: Afghanistan is the longest OVERSEAS war. The longest war fought by the U.S. government was actually the 100-year crusade to exterminate Native peoples.)
But while ending the endless war in Afghanistan, President Biden is also making clear that the U.S. will maintain its permanent war status. Our enemies are now China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Biden’s intelligence apparatus just announced. And Samantha Power’s soft power will be part of the U.S. arsenal.
When it comes to U.S. imperial policy, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Samantha Power will wield her soft stick on the National Security Council
Climate News Is a Crime Beat, Not Just an “Emergency”
I’m all for the urgent new message from Covering Climate Now (CCNow), the media lobbying group: “the emergency is now” and news organizations need to cover the galloping crisis with increased urgency. (The front page of my hometown San Francisco Chronicle reports today that California’s drought has grown so severe that the looming fire season promises to be a nightmare.) The new message by CCNow (whose executive director is my friend Mark Hertsgaard) was signed by the Guardian, Scientific American, Al-Jazeera and other organizations (but glaringly not by big corporate outlets like the New York Times, CBS, CNN or the Wall Street Journal). I know that CCNow is focused heavily on getting these big news organizations to feel the heat. But I think that climate activists need to go beyond the red alert stage and push the media to start covering the climate meltdown as a crime beat.
Burn, baby, burn: Fossil fuel profiteers should be treated as terrorists
We need to start naming the men (almost always men) who are responsible for raising the planet’s temperature and wreaking deadly environmental havoc. Who are these energy industry CEOs, corporate propagandists and lobbyists, government officials, political leaders? Name them and cover them like the social pariahs they are. Every time these men block legislation to counter the climate emergency, every time they disseminate false information about the fossil fuel industry, every time they deny any connection between their catastrophic capitalism and the freak storms, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and unseasonably strange weather that increasingly bedevil the world… this is when the news media must tell the truth and treat these men as what they are. Criminals on a world-wide scale. Guilty of major crimes against nature and humanity.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods: This primary offender raked in over $16 million last year
Covering climate destruction and loss of life is no longer just a scientific story. It’s a crime beat. And until our society begins criminalizing these rapidly proliferating assaults, these powerful men will continue operating like ruthless gangsters. We need to lock them up, before we all burn in hell.
Bring out your dead: An Extinction Rebellion protest
The Dark Alliance Between the CIA and the Media
Gary Webb, the brashly independent investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News, famously fell afoul of the CIA and the elite press after writing “Dark Alliance,” the 1996 expose of how Nicaragua’s Contra rebels helped finance their dirty war in the Reagan era by cocaine trafficking in U.S. inner cities – while their CIA backers conveniently looked the other way. At first lionized as a brave truth-teller – particularly in Black communities that were most hard hit by the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and ‘90s – Webb was soon torn apart by the PR-sensitive CIA and its accomplices at the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Webb and his editors made some minor errors – as all investigative reporters do. Like Watergate heroes Woodward and Bernstein, they are generally able to refine their work as they pursue their prey along the investigative trail. But under ferocious attack from their big media competitors, the Mercury quickly folded and made Webb a scapegoat. With his career in ruins, Webb ended up killing himself in 2004.
This sad story came back to me this weekend when I screened Kill the Messenger the dramatic film about Webb, for my son Nat, who was outraged by the corporate media’s role in Webb’s destruction. Meanwhile I made my own link between the CIA’s targeting of Webb and the FBI’s role in Ernest Hemingway’s mental dissolution (see below).
As Nicholas Schou told The Intercept back in 2014, soon before the film about Webb was released, “Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have. He was never able to recover from that.”
The CIA, added Schou, “didn’t really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb’s credibility. They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas. They must have been delighted over at Langley, the way this all unfolded.”
I feel some residual guilt of my own about Webb’s professional and emotional decline. I was running Salon at the time – and looking back years later, I felt I should’ve hired Webb. Maybe my life raft would’ve saved him.
After Webb’s death, I did the next best thing I could think of – I hired Nick Schou to write Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, one of the titles in the Hot Books investigative series I was editing at the time for independent publisher Skyhorse. Schou had written the book on which Kill the Messenger was based. It was hard to find a Washington-savvy journalist to do Spooked. All the reporters on the national security beat whom I could think of were too, well, spooked to take on the CIA.
But Schou knew something about the dark labyrinth of national security and how its tentacles reached into newsrooms and studios. And, like Webb himself, he worked for a West Coast newspaper that was off the radar of Langley – the OC (Orange County) Weekly. Schou now works for a Santa Barbara newspaper.
As the Webb tragedy starkly demonstrated, the top national security reporters for the leading newspapers are embedded in the intelligence complex. These reporters are all beholden to the CIA, NSA, FBI etc. for access and even legitimacy. (And some are even secret intelligence assets.) When a journalist with stubborn integrity does emerge on this beat, they are soon forced out – as James Risen was at the New York Times in 2017, after years of butting heads with his editors and publisher over his aggressive coverage of surveillance of U.S. citizens and other dicey subjects. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Risen now works as a national security reporter for The Intercept.
These days you can energetically report on racial injustice, the climate emergency, voting rights, the immigration crisis, right-wing thuggery, gun industry lobbying, labor rights and a vast array of other burning domestic topics. Even the conservative, Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is trying to be more woke on these issues. But national security? Forget about it. It’s still the black hole down which the elite media throws the likes of Gary Webb and Julian Assange.
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Ken Burns, the JFK Library and the Pretty Packaging of American History
What the hell is wrong with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum? Operated by a federal agency -- the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration – the JFK Library is aimed more at covering up the truth about the Kennedy presidency than revealing it. The latest JFK Library whitewash is tied to the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary series about Ernest Hemingway, which aired this week on PBS. I liked the televised biography enough to watch all six hours of it, particularly admiring the insights into Hemingway’s literary innovations by fellow writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Tobias Wolff and Edna O’Brien. But Burns (sponsored by the Bank of America and a host of PBS corporate underwriters) has an institutional talent for packaging American history in intriguing (to a point) but ultimately safe ways. The Burns-Novick Hemingway series was another good example of this canned Americana.
Where, for instance, was the explosive material about the FBI’s long surveillance of Hemingway, which ran for decades, until he finally took his own life in 1961? The FBI’s top commissar, J. Edgar Hoover, became suspicious of Hemingway’s anti-Franco writing and fundraising during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s — and Hemingway latter extended his anti-fascist activism through World War II, even attempting to set up a spy network to catch Nazi agents called the Crook Factory.
During the Cold War, Hoover’s FBI continued snooping on Hemingway because of his growing sympathies for Fidel Castro’s revolution. (Hemingway said the revolution “was the best thing that ever happened to Cuba.”) The great writer, who lived outside Havana in a manor he called Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), met the revolutionary leader only once, at a 1960 fishing competition. But that was enough for secret policeman Hoover to conclude that Hemingway was a dangerous Fidelista.
The Burn-Novick documentary presents Hemingway in his final years descending into a well of mental and physical anguish before finally making his inevitable rendezvous with death at his own hand. It’s true that Hemingway was always haunted by death – particularly after the suicide of his father – and struggled with alcoholism and other demons for most of his life. But his final suffering was undeniably aggravated by the relentless snooping of FBI agents – deepening fears of surveillance that Burns and Novick simply dismiss as the feverish paranoia of a man descending into madness.
Near the end of their epic biography, the filmmakers do put A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s friend and travel companion, on camera. Before he died, Hotchner wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, stating he believed that the FBI's surveillance "substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide,” and adding that he had "regretfully misjudged" his friend's fear of the security organization. None of this is in PBS’s Hemingway.
Now back to the JFK Library. Through a quirk, many of the Hemingway papers are housed there. I know from personal experience, researching both Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard, in which I made the case that Allen Dulles’s CIA carried out the assassination of JFK and its coverup, that the library’s directors stand in the way of researchers who are exploring uncomfortable historical truths. And so, once again, we have the JFK Library merrily promoting the Burns-Novick documentary of Hemingway, giving the filmmakers a platform to honor winners of the PEN/Hemingway Awards. Instead, the JFK Library should be filling in the gaps of the documentary, examining why the FBI considered Hemingway a national security threat and discussing the over 100 pages of FBI surveillance documents on the writer. But like Ken Burns, the JFK Library exists mainly to sugarcoat history not expose its disturbing truths.
One final howl about the JFK Library. Its curators just announced this year’s winner of the Profile in Courage Award. What brave freedom fighter did the library choose to honor after this year of living dangerously? None other than Senator Mitt Romney, because he voted to impeach Donald Trump. Romney also embarrassingly groveled before Trump in an unsuccessful effort to be named his secretary of state. And he voted against President Biden’s pandemic relief bill and opposed Biden’s efforts to expand Obamacare (despite his own extensive public health program when he was Massachusetts governor), raise the minimum wage to $15, rebuild U.S. infrastructure to join the 21st Century, protect voting rights for Black Americans, and other progressive initiatives.
This…this is the winner of the 2021 Profile in Courage Award? John F. Kennedy is again spinning in his Arlington grave because of the useful idiots at the JFK Library.
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Know Hope — And Demand Freedom for Navalny and Assange
“Know Hope.” That’s the graffiti spraypainted on some scruffy steps in my neighborhood. (And no, they weren’t written there by the millionaire Israeli street artist of the same name.) The words are scrawled in a way they can be easily overlooked, but they make me smile when I descend unsteadily on my cane.
We were devoid of hope throughout the Trump regime. And Obama (and Bansky) tried to market it during his presidency. But now hope feels like a long gulp of spring water after a throat-parching drought.
I argue with a young radical I know about Biden. He feels guilty about voting for him. Maybe Americans needed to feel even more immiserated under Trump before they finally took revolutionary action. No, I tell him – in my experience, despair only leads to more despair. People take action when they sense there is possibility.
In my aging lefty estimation, President Biden is better than I expected – more ambitious in his domestic goals and more defiant of Republican opposition than President Obama. Biden’s surprising expansiveness allows radicals and progressives to think bigger.
And when it comes to national security and foreign policy, the U.S. DOES need to think bigger – much bigger. Our government remains mired in Cold War think – endless wars against endless enemies, a grossly bloated military budget, and a dangerous global policing mentality.
Take the case of Julian Assange. Two years after being dragged out of the Ecuador Embassy in London, the Wikileaks critic of U.S. empire is still rotting in a British high-security prison. And even worse, the Biden administration is appealing the ruling of a UK magistrate that prevented Assange from being extradited to the U.S. (because our prisons are widely regarded as inhumane).
Meanwhile, the Western press is celebrating Russian dissident Alexei Navalny as a hero. He is and so are his supporters – like Anastasia Vasilyeva, the doctor just arrested outside of his bleak dungeon for speaking out about his deteriorating medical condition.
But so is Julian Assange. The continued incarceration of these two political prisoners reveals the continuing moral bankruptcy of the East and the West.
Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva being arrested outside of Alexei Navalny’s prison
Yes, the Pope should publicly demand the freeing of both Assange and Navalny, as their supporters have recently urged. But more important, we need mass movements on their behalf.
Know hope. We feel it now. And we need to demand more. We need to free our heroes.
The Five Nonfiction Masterpieces That Changed My Life (Plus a Bonus)
I’m reading (belatedly) Say Nothing, Patrick Raddan Keefe’s 2019 epic narrative about the Irish Troubles, and halfway through the book I’m utterly gobsmacked. As an Irish-American, I’ve long taken an interest in the bloody turmoil of my native land, was deeply moved by the films In the Name of the Father, The Boxer and The Crying Game. But I’ve never read anything as intricately plotted, emotionally intense and compulsively page-turning on the subject as Say Nothing.
It got me thinking. What are the other deeply researched and brilliantly written nonfiction books on BIG subjects? I’m not talking about exceptional memoirs or essay collections or investigative treatises – those books belong in entirely different categories. Think instead about the ambitious works of nonfiction narrative that are as complex, haunting and revealing as the best modern fiction you’ve read – or better.
Here’s my short, randomly-ordered, admittedly off-the-top of my head list. What are YOUR selections?
· Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. By Patrick Radden Keefe
Say Nothing: IRA militant Dolours Price
· The Best and the Brightest (about the architects of the Vietnam War). By David Halberstam
· And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic. By Randy Shilts
And the Band Played On: San Francisco’s Castro district in the 1970s
· How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. By Sarah Bakewell
· The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. By Philippe Sands
The Ratline: Otto Wachter and son
OK, and no false modesty here, I must add:
· The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. By David Talbot
I aimed at changing readers’ perceptions of power, politics and the U.S. nation state. And I wrote it with the dreamlike sorcery of a movie. That’s what these other nonfiction masterpieces did to me, for me – changed me forever.
The Devil’s Chessboard: President Kennedy and nemesis Gen. Curtis LeMay
Now Hear This — Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s “Waterlines”
Don’t you love it when songs suddenly uplift you? That’s the feeling I had with the very first song on Zoe Fitzgerald Carter’s new LP, “Waterlines.” The song is called “Better Things to Do” and right away it establishes the beautiful melancholy of this extraordinary new album. Carter is steeped in the folk-rock-country music of the 1970s, when she grew up, and her new album has the heart-tugging, tightly produced feel of Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Randy Newman, Lowell George and Little Feat and the other great LPs of that decade.
In her liner notes, Carter ( who’s also a fine writer) comments that the album was mostly recorded (at legendary Fantasy Studios in Berkeley) in the “before times” when musicians could actually crowd into recording rooms. After we descended into the long plague year, we’re now emerging in a new era filled with “hope and sanity and expectation,” she writes, and a few of the songs on “Waterlines” are indeed playful and funky. But even though Carter wrote the songs on her new album before the pandemic, “Waterlines” somehow captures the strange mood of the time — somber, bittersweet, soulful. Like the opening tune, the LP seems mostly a reckoning with the past with all its lost joys and sorrows. The requiem feeling is perhaps even stronger because Fantasy, where a stellar group of studio musicians came together for Carter, has since shut down.
But if music like the songs on “Waterlines” can make you weep, it also makes you feel more alive. I’ve played the LP all the way through several times now — and when was the last time you listened to an album as an album?
OK, now time for full disclosure. I know Carter, I count her as a friend. I’ve watched her play live (in those good old days). In fact, she once took out her guitar after a little dinner party at my house and treated us to a few tunes (including John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.”) But I would never sing the praises of a friend’s LP, film or book unless I genuinely was moved to do so.
When you hear something as beautiful as this album, you just feel lucky that you know the artist. Do yourself a favor and listen for yourself.
Zoe Fitzgerald Carter