What IS San Francisco?

What IS San Francisco? I've lived here for 40 years, and suddenly I've lost its thread. I wrote a book about the city's tumultuous history -- Season of the Witch -- when it underwent a bloody civil war to define its "San Francisco values." More recently, my son Joe Talbot and my "honorary" son Jimmie Fails (the honor is all mine) collaborated on the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which took a more tragic view of how they lost the city they grew up in. But still, none of us can quit SF. Jimmie still lives here, and just made a heartfelt video about the city for the San Francisco Giants that evoked the beautiful melancholy of the film. Joe resides mostly in LA these days but dreams of returning to a Victorian castle, like the one in his movie. Our youngest son Nat still lives in our basement, where he cooks up cool street fashion ideas while pursuing a college degree. A longtime friend of his quit his boring tech sales job and is about to move in with us so he can pursue his promising rap career with more diligence. And my wife Camille Peri is completing a book about the suffering -- but loving and creative -- marriage of bohemians Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, a subject she knows something about.

Camille and I will live in SF until the day we die. And we will continue to preside over the ramshackle, chipped-paint Bernal Heights bungalow that has been a creative hothouse for the making of books, music and movies for many years. In fact, our family has even bigger plans. Last week, ten of my extended family (all vaxxed) crowded into our Bernal digs for a kind of vacation/summit meeting. We decided to find a big pile somewhere in the city and collectively buy it (no small task). This future bastion will be our family studio, where two generations of family members, friends and lovers will take our communal creativity to new heights.

My sister Margaret Talbot and I, and her husband Arthur Allen, just collaborated on By the Light of Burning Dreams -- a Season of the Witch-type history about the revolutionary heroes of the 1960s and '70s who tried to liberate America. Now Margaret (who has a day job as a New Yorker magazine writer) and I are mulling over working together on a novel -- our first foray into fiction -- based on a true story from our father Lyle Talbot's wild life in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

So my family has a stake in this lost paradise by the Bay.

Our San Francisco creative factory would also be a haven from a city that has grown increasingly cold and soulless. This gets us back to my opening question. What IS San Francisco these days?

In recent years, the "city of love" seemed to be overrun by tech robots and billionaires -- and by the homeless people they pushed onto the streets and stepped over while talking loudly on their Bluetooths. Then the pandemic hit and SF became a ghost town, with many techies fleeing to the suburbs or wherever else they felt safer. And now? We seem to hover in a twilight mist, somewhere between Covid catastrophe and boomtown 3.0. The odd bubble effect seems reinforced by the climate-crazy weather. Here we are, shivering in the wind and fog while the rest of our Golden State is ablaze. At least the skies aren't fiery orange like last wildfire season. Like I said, strange times.

Still, there is no better time for San Francisco to redefine itself. To reclaim its soul.

Once upon a time, SF grew its identity from city leaders, activists, rock musicians and impresarios, poets, eccentrics, newspaper columnists and community crusaders. There are no giants anymore on the city scene. So it's up to all of us to begin having the conversations about our civic future. What kind of city do we want to live in?

Let's start that public conversation here. I'm especially interested in hearing from public school teachers (the ones who haven't abandoned the SFUSD), healthcare workers, restaurant and bar employees, small retailers and all those "frontline" people who put their lives on the line for the city.

Let's take back our city. It begins by talking amongst ourselves.

An Oasis From the Plague

The Zuni Cafe in San Francisco has been one of my havens from the heartless world ever since it was opened by the irrepressible Billy West in 1979. Even after Billy succumbed to AIDS, and the restaurant was taken over by my friend Vincent Calcagno, and then by Gilbert Pilgram — who runs it today — Zuni continued to attract the city’s best and brightest. Back in the day, you’d bump into Mick Jagger and Rudolf Nureyev — along with fellow ink-stained wretches spending their last dollars on a gourmet hamburger and glass of nice French red. After my unforgettable book party for Season of the Witch in 2012 at the McRoskey Mattress Factory, a group of us straggled across Market Street for a late dinner at Zuni, including my friend Oliver Stone. As we sat in the balcony section, hunched over Zuni’s famous roast chicken, a troupe of half-naked new-generation Cockettes followed us into the restaurant from the party and performed one of their bawdy drag numbers. The restaurant staff didn’t flinch during the impromptu performance, going about their business with typical professional aplomb. Later, waiting for an empty bathroom, a gentleman from Texas marveled at the spontaneous floor show and wondered aloud if it happened every night there.

Well, not every night. But the Zuni has been my magic place for over four decades. And it has recently reopened, after surviving the lockdown. One of the restaurant’s long-time waiters (there are still a good number of them) told me that he burst into tears on the day when the heavy wooden boards were finally taken off the restaurant’s iconic plate-glass windows.

But doing business as Covid-19 again surges in the form of the Delta variant is not easy. Even for durable city institutions like the Zuni Cafe. Certainly you have your own such sacred places in your city. If they disappear, your city will be tangibly diminished. The Zuni, City Lights Books, Green Arcade Books (just down the street from Zuni), the Castro Theatre, Swan’s Oyster Depot, Yank Sing’s dim sum heaven… if these businesses ever fold, I want to also disappear. To me, they are San Francisco.

Now, for survival, Zuni is asking patrons to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination, in order to sit inside. (Those who can’t provide proof of vaccination are seated outside.) Zuni hosts are also seating people inside at every other table, and their waiters are masked, giving diners further sense of security.

This new health policy relies on a compliant customer base. My friend and I were only too happy to show proof of vaccination on our phones when we arrived at Zuni yesterday. We then enjoyed a lunch of gourmet (tuna) fish sticks and a buttery pasta dish with fresh summer corn niblets and filigreed spinach leaves. (The post-lockdown food is better than ever at Zuni.)

But all it takes is one angry, vaccine-resistant customer to cause an unpleasant scene at the restaurant door. All restaurants and stores that implement new vax rules are girding themselves for customer explosions.

It would greatly relieve the pressure on frontline workers like restaurant hosts if city governments would mandate in-door vaccination policies. Then the proprietors of Zuni and other establishments could simply inform customers that showing proof of vaccination is the law, and not simply wise restaurant policy.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has already issued such an edict. It’s time for Mayor London Breed and city supervisors to implement a similar law in San Francisco. Let’s protect our frontline workers — and ourselves. And let’s keep open the urban sanctuaries that make our cities worth living in.

The magical Zuni Cafe

The Coup Plot That Was

There's an interesting essay (for a change) in the Review section of the Sunday New York Times. In the column, conservative (but anti-Trump) opinion writer Christopher Caldwell argues that Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley overstepped his duties during the nerve-wracking post-election period when he prepared his top command to stand fast against a Trump coup attempt. "They might try" to engineer a coup, Gen. Milley reportedly told his aides at the time, but they would fail. "You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns." Caldwell accuses the top general of overreacting -- of embracing "a grandiose conception of his place in government."

But was Milley being overly dramatic? After all, a deeply aggrieved and aggressive Trump whipped up an armed mob who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6. He pressured his own attorney general and Republican officials across the country to overturn the results of the election. His former national security advisor called for the military to intervene on his side and reinstate him -- which he himself vowed to do by August. He regularly encouraged armed militias and militant white nationalists throughout his tumultuous presidency. He still rules the Republican Party as well as the loyalty of countless millions of America, even after his neofascist reign.

I sympathize with Caldwell's nervousness about military intervention in our democracy. But it doesn't help to simply whistle past the graveyard.

General Milley's grim statement of fact -- "We're the guys with the guns" -- and his resolve to use those guns if necessary should make us all anxious about the precarious state of our democracy.

Caldwell's conservative ideology won't allow him to say this, but I will. The answer to Trumpian despotism is not deep state intervention. It's a woke and vigilant populace, willing to defend democracy by any means necessary.

General Milley and his then commander-in-chief

The Revolution That Was

Here's the first serious review from the academic left of By the Light of Burning Dreams -- the new book by Margaret Talbot and me. The New Republic review is by Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian with roots (like me) in the Bay Area New Left. Let me just engage with Michael on one of his critical points. He disputes our contention that the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s amounted to a "second American Revolution," pointing out the New Left's neglect of class oppression (except on the sectarian fringes and the doomed United Farm Workers).

It's true that the radical movements of this era failed to take control of "the means of production." As Michael himself admits, he's a traditional social democrat, with Marxist inclinations (he served on the board of the Berkeley journal Socialist Review -- formerly Socialist Revolution -- in his youth). But my sister and I have a much broader view of "revolution." That's why, as Michael acknowledges, we tell a wide array of stories -- including those of gay leader Craig Rodwell, feminist activist Heather Booth, Black power militants Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and Native American warriors Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk and Russell Means. What these courageous -- if sometimes deeply flawed -- leaders accomplished was nothing short of revolutionary. They spearheaded movements that radically transformed America, even if we didn't seize control of Wall Street and Washington.

I'm old enough to remember America in the late 1950s. That country was a different planet than the one we live on today -- largely because of the radical activists of the '60s and '70s.

But I agree with Michael on another major point. As he concludes his review, we need another American revolution to compel the country to live up to its shining founding ideals, for working people of all descriptions.

The Young Lords on the march in 1971

Buy This Banned Book

By the Light of Burning Dreams continues to pile up glowing reviews -- this one in the National Book Review (an online journal founded by former New York Times editorial board member Adam Cohen and former National Book Critics Circle president Elizabeth Taylor) calls the book by my sister Margaret and me "an inspiring chronicle." The review then adds: "No hagiographers here; the Talbots point to the failures and imperfections in their characters, making their legacies human and real."

Our book also just received enthusiastic reviews (A+, 5 stars) in Berkeleyside, the leading online journal in SF's East Bay, and the Seattle Book Review. The San Francisco Chronicle and all the primary book industry trade publications also gushed over the book.

But still no reviews in the leading East Coast publications.

What is going on with the New York Times? I understand the blackout of my book The Devil's Chessboard, which had the temerity to name the Times as a key part of the U.S. propaganda machine during the Cold War. Am I still being punished for crossing acceptable ideological lines?

You'd think that the corporate liberal press would embrace By the Light of Burning Dreams, with its unflinching assessment of radical leaders of the 1960s and '70s. But the book also endorses their revolutionary mission, while probing their flaws.

Perhaps most disturbing to the cultural gatekeepers, By the Light of Burning Dreams advances the notion that we need another American Revolution to pick up the fallen flag of the last one.

Dare to be inspired. Dare to be provoked. Make By the Light of Burning Dreams a New York Times bestseller (like the banned Devil's Chessboard) -- even if the Times won't acknowledge the book's existence.

The Viral War on the Vaccinated

The civil war in America is now also raging on the Covid front. With the delta variant flaring throughout the country, everyone is now again at risk — even the fully immunized. And who is to blame for this new surge? The unvaccinated, many of them politically motivated and medically ignorant, who account for over 90 percent of new coronavirus infections — and virtually all of the recent hospitalizations.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reflects the growing rage and confusion about the plague’s comeback. “Should restaurants become vaccine cops?” asks the headline of one front-page story. At the same time, another lead story insists, “Affixing blame won’t fix the surge.” But people forced to work with the public on the frontlines, like restaurant workers, know that the unvaccinated are threatening reopenings of their businesses — and their livelihoods. Whom exactly are they to blame, if not the selfish men and women who are putting us all at risk, especially children, the aged and immunocompromised?

Some Bay Area restaurant owners quoted in the Chronicle are seriously considering vaccination proof before they seat customers. But others worry about losing business — or even about explosive reactions from the unvaccinated. Oakland restaurateur Matt Reagan compared the ominous vibe to March 2020: “You can see the storm is coming and no one has the courage to sound the alarm.”

I feel the fear and isolation returning — but this time there is also anger and bitterness. And it’s not just among restaurant workers. The owner of a bookstore and I recently agreed to cancel a party for my new book because of the variant breakthrough. Like all small retail businesses, independent bookstores were just getting back on their feet when the delta strain exploded.

Then there are the fatigued healthcare workers who are again being forced to work round the clock to save lives — this time of the willfully stupid.

California Governor Gavin Newsom is right to let his temper flare about the new coronavirus resurgence — and those who are responsible for it, like the safely vaccinated Donald Trump and cynical right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson. “With all due respect,” stated Governor Newsom yesterday, “you don’t have a choice to go out and drink and drive and put everyone else’s lives at risk. That’s the equivalent of this moment with the deadliness and efficiency of the delta virus. You’re putting other people’s, innocent people’s, lives at risk.”

There is no other way to put it. If you’re an adult who has decided not to get immunized, you’re a public enemy.

The Death of a Quiet Civil Rights Hero

Bob Moses — “the Martin Luther King Jr. of Mississippi” — has died at age 86. Nobody did more, or risked more, to register Black Americans to vote in the Deep South in the early 1960s. Moses was shot at, assaulted and jailed numerous times, but he kept his eyes on the prize “with an aura of almost saintly calm,” in the words of my sister Margaret Talbot.

Margaret wrote about Moses — the bespectacled son of a Harlem janitor who became a philosophy graduate student at Harvard before joining the civil rights struggle — in our new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams. After the traumatic murders in rural Mississippi of civil rights workers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in June 1964, many leaders of Freedom Summer expected other young volunteers from Northern college campuses to cancel their plans to go South. As Margaret writes, Moses — one of the architects of the movement to galvanize civil rights action by placing middle-class students in harm’s way — addressed one such group (including future legendary organizer Heather Booth) with a heavy heart. Allow me to quote from this chapter in our book:

Bob Moses spoke to Heather’s group of Freedom Summer volunteers before they departed for Mississippi. He invoked the need to counter corrupt power with an unflagging commitment to advancing the good. He referred to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings -- in 1964, more of a cultish obscurity, but one that resonated with some of the students -- to describe how a hero “gains a means of ultimate power he does not want,” but can’t give up. Dressed, as he habitually was, in denim overalls, Moses looked down at his feet, and spoke in a voice so quiet the group had to listen intently to hear it. He told the students he felt terrible asking them to go. “Looking at us sitting in the same room where the 3 missing men had been last week,” one volunteer wrote to his father, “Moses seemed almost to be wanting all of us to go home.” Indeed, Moses stressed, anyone who wanted to should feel free to leave, and not be ashamed. They should know, though, that he wasn’t asking them to risk anything he himself wasn’t risking.

From the back of the room, a young woman began to sing: “They say that freedom is a constant sorrow.” And gradually, voice after voice joined in until everyone in the room was singing, their arms wrapped around one another. No one left.

Rest in peace, Bob Moses.

“ -

Crimes Against Nature: Chevron and the Fisherwomen of Nigeria

You must read this front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to understand what we're up against, as we try to fight for human survival against the forces of greed and destruction. The fisherwomen of the Niger Delta in Nigeria were finally forced to occupy a Chevron facility after the Big Oil company refused to fix a leaking pipe that was spewing oil into their waters, killing fish and the entire food chain that kept alive their families and communities. Since the 1950s, when Big Oil giants like Chevron, Shell and Eni began drilling in the region -- once booming with aquatic life -- millions of gallons of oil have been spilled into its water, quadruple the volume of oil spilled in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Now that they've made billions of dollars off the Niger Delta, Chevron and the other Big Oil despoilers want to cut and run. The fisherwomen and their villages did not share in the oil bounty, but now they're being left with cleaning up one of the most polluted areas on the globe. "Chevron's a very rich company," says a village elder quoted in the article, "but they're very wicked to us." Chevron has promised a formal investigation of the leaking oil pipe, but so far (of course ) the investigation hasn't started -- and nobody expects it to produce any real results.

We need to build an international coalition against despoilers of the planet like Chevron, which is headquartered right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, whom I've written about before, is a true corporate villain. While Chevron is contributing heavily to the climate crisis that is wreaking havoc in California -- including drought and wildfires -- Wirth had the nerve to complain about the PG&E blackouts that have been made necessary by the environmental destruction. If that's not enough to make you gag, he's also been a major financial supporter of Donald Trump.

Clearly all of us have a common enemy in men like this. We need to treat them like the criminal outlaws that they are.

Women protest the despoiling of the Niger Delta by Big Oil giants like Chevron

We All Live in Paradise (California) Now

We all live in Paradise now. Paradise, California. With over 80 wildfires currently raging in California and the West, the plumes of smoke have blown over 2,000 miles to the Eastern seaboard, blanketing NYC and other cities in a toxic haze. New York authorities are warning people to stay indoors and avoid outdoor activity -- public health restrictions which residents of California and the Pacific Northwest have been forced to live under for several fire seasons in a row.

This is the new abnormal now for people all over planet Earth. And it did not have to come to this dire place. As I've been banging on about for a LONG time, the climate crisis -- which is now displacing and killing millions of people around the world -- must be criminalized. The executives and politicians who knowingly lied about the growing climate emergency for decades must be prosecuted for their crimes against nature and humanity. And the energy industry must be brought under public control. The energy industry is too essential -- and too dangerous to public health -- to be allowed to operate solely on the profit motive in the private sector. Fortunately, led by Covering Climate Now and the Guardian, an international consortium of media organizations is now covering the climate crisis like crime beat, naming the corporations and power players who are responsible for this global disaster.

Now we need to take the next step and bring legal action against these criminals, to prevent further damage to our suffering environment.

The conversion to clean energy is now an existential imperative for the human race. At current rates of global warming, a significant percentage of the world's population will be exterminated. There is no way to sugarcoat this mass die-off, which has been set in motion by Exxon, Chevron and other energy giants, even though their top executives were warned long ago by their own scientists of the dire consequences of increasing the carbon load in the environment.

Even now, with the world on fire, and plagued by drought and and poisonous smoke, our leaders continue to dither and take half measures because of the continued sway of the energy sector. Enough. For the sake of our own lives -- and those of our children and grandchildren -- we need to take emergency action today.

Julian Assange and the Silence of the Lambs

The Biden administration is making a big show of supporting "independent journalists" around the globe -- particularly in hostile countries like Iran. But that magnanimous sentiment does not apply to journalists like Julian Assange, who had the temerity to publish corrosive information about the U.S. war machine. Because of U.S. pressure, Assange has remained in a maximum security prison in England for over two years, after lengthy house arrest in London's Ecuador embassy. The Western press -- including the New York Times, which used the services of Assange's Wikileaks and then dumped him -- has largely ignored Assange's plight. The recent retraction by a key witness in the Assange case has received no corporate media attention.

Washington's continuing, cruel vendetta against Assange -- with the complicity of the U.S. media establishment -- is an outrage. And it demonstrates the utter hypocrisy of those Biden officials and Fourth Estate spokespeople who are now crusading for press freedom. Actions speak louder than words. Free Julian Assange NOW.

The Truth vs. Anti-Kennedy Propaganda

The history wars in America don’t just relate to race. They’re also heating up about President Kennedy — including his legacy as well as his assassination. The ideological attacks on Kennedy — as a “lightweight” who did nothing about civil rights, stumbled into a near nuclear apocalypse over Cuba, and paved the way to the Vietnam debacle — predictably escalate whenever someone like Oliver Stone revisits this fraught history. Well, Oliver is back — and so are the inevitable attacks on Kennedy. These attacks serve the interests of the national security establishment. Because if he was an insignificant president, JFK’s violent death has little meaning.

Fortunately for historical accuracy, we have aggressive truth-tellers like James DiEugenio, who has used his blog Kennedys and King recently to rigorously dissect deeply uninformed broadsides against JFK from historian Michael Kazin in The New York Review of Books and, more recently, by journalist Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. I won’t repeat DiEugenio’s lengthy correction of the record about President Kennedy — you should read his critiques yourself. But let me add one vital piece about Kennedy’s bold civil rights stand — a stand, by the way, that he knew was alienating white Southern Democrats and would result in a more difficult reelection battle in 1964.

In late September 1962, when Air Force veteran James Meredith became the first African-American to integrate the University of Mississippi student body, all hell broke loose on the campus. And President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, first dispatched federal agents to protect Meredith from being lynched, and when they too were threatened with being overrun by armed rioters, the Kennedys ordered U.S. Army troops to secure the Ole Miss campus.

But, as I relate in my book Brothers, those Army units were so slow to move to Oxford, Mississippi that the Kennedys and their White House aides wondered aloud if military leaders were being insubordinate. The White House tapes that recorded the increasingly worried comments of President Kennedy and his top deputies are still chilling to hear. Finally, Army troops did reach the campus — and the show of force was enough to quell the violent protests (led, in part, by the far-right, recently discharged General Edwin Walker, who would later play a strange role in the creation of the Lee Harvey Oswald legend).

The liberal commentators who’ve declared an open season on President Kennedy have usually read a couple of critical books about JFK. (One such popular book — Seymour Hersh’s hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot — was largely based on interviews with professional Kennedy haters like CIA mouthpiece Sam Halpern.) But the truth about the Kennedy presidency, and why JFK was killed, is out there — in other books.

In addition to my own Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard, you can find the real story in books such as:

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglass

The JFK Assassination, by James DiEugenio and Oliver Stone

Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, by Gerald McKnight

The Last Investigation (about the House Assassinations Committee probe in the 1970s), by Gaeton Fonzi

James Meredith had to be rescued by the Kennedy administration when he integrated Ole Miss in 1962.

Getting Away with Murder: How the Sacklers Did It

Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist I greatly admire, lays it out in a Sunday Review essay in today’s New York Times. The billionaire Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, hooked millions of people on their killer opioid OxyContin — laying waste to entire swaths of America — and are about to go scot-free, thanks to a pliant bankruptcy judge with the Dickensian name Robert Drain. That’s how the justice system works in America, as Keefe reminds us — street drug dealers do hard prison time, while the biggest pushers in the country escape justice. Thanks to U.S. Justice Department officials, the Sacklers evaded criminal prosecution. And now, thanks to Judge Drain, the family soon will be granted “a sweeping grant of immunity from all litigation relating to their role in precipitating the opioid crisis.”

David Sackler — worried that one of the countless lawsuits against Purdue Pharma might “get through to the family” — began draining the company of its wealth with other family members and securing it in their private accounts years ago. That’s how the looted opioid manufacturer ended up in Judge Drain’s White Plains, NY bankruptcy court even though its dangerous painkiller reaped a staggering $35 billion in revenue. Now, thanks to Drain, the bulk of the Sacklers’ wealth will be protected from the families and communities devastated by OxyContin.

This is a primary reason that revolutionary rage is growing in America. “No justice, no peace” goes the street chant of Black Lives Matter after killer cops claim another victim. But it must apply to corporate criminals as well.

Corporate profiteers have hooked us on their deadly drugs. They’ve trashed the environment and triggered a climate crisis that’s now taking a heavy toll in every region of the earth. They’ve flooded countries with military weaponry and grown rich off the blood of war. They’ve looted newspapers and other essential businesses of their value, turning them into shells of their former selves.

These profiteers are deadly criminals. The justice system must begin to act against them — or people will take justice into their own hands. And that’s revolutionary anarchy that will spell the end of U.S. civil society. “No justice, no peace.”

The Widening Crack in the Kennedy Case

There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in (cont.)… Oliver Stone, whose new documentary on the JFK assassination premiered to standing-ovation audiences at Cannes this week, has again opened wide the crack on the long-shut Kennedy case. The U.S. intelligence establishment, trying desperately to uphold the mythology that sustains the rapidly declining American empire, is again distraught about Stone. But the filmmaker, whose 1991 dramatic film JFK began the process of national awakening about the violent overthrow of President Kennedy, is again capturing the media and public’s attention. Stone deserves a national medal.

The new zeitgeist of Kennedy truth-telling has also resulted in a sudden spike in sales for my book The Devil’s Chessboard. I must thank Joe Rogan and other podcasters for this renewal of interest in my book, which places the principal blame for the Kennedy assassination and coverup on Allen Dulles, the hardline CIA director whom Kennedy forced out of office. My book became a New York Times bestseller — despite a media blackout led by the Times. I take great satisfaction in that.

Here are some other books that I am reading this summer, to learn more about the dark side of U.S. power:

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O’Neill

A Drop of Treason: Philip Agee and His Exposure of the CIA, by Jonathan Stevenson

Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business and the Corruption of American Democracy, by Jonathan Marshall

John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles

Priscilla McMillan and the JFK Disinformation Campaign (cont.)

The death of Pricilla McMillan — one of the chief architects of the Lee Harvey Oswald legend as a deranged lone assassin — has given the willfully ignorant U.S. media another excuse to parrot its lies about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The McMillan obituary in the New York Times — by a useful idiot named Sam Roberts — is a classic example of this continuing coverup. Oswald, who was never prosecuted and insisted on his innocence to the moment he was gunned down by a Mafia thug, is referred to in the Times’s lead as the “assassin” of President Kennedy. Not “alleged assassin” — or, more accurately, the young man with the “fingerprints of intelligence” all over him (according to Senator Richard Schweiker, who investigated the Kennedy murder in the 1970s) who was set up to be a fall guy — or “patsy,” in Oswald’s own word. The New York Times, like the rest of America’s head-in-the-sand corporate media, has convicted Oswald on its own, without a trial and without ever actually investigating the crime of the 20th century.

Nowhere in the Times’s obit is there any mention of the cozy relationship between McMillan and the CIA. (Just like you will never see any honest introspection in its pages about the newspaper’s own long relationship with the intelligence establishment.) McMillan, who kept traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1950s as a journalist, was described by the CIA as a “witting source.” Try as they might, members of the Warren Commission — under the sway of former CIA director Allen Dulles and other fixtures of the power elite — could find no convincing motive for Oswald’s alleged murderous act. In fact, he was said to be fond of the president, as McMillan who interviewed the so-called defector (but likely a U.S. spy) discovered. But later, in her book Marina and Lee — lavishly praised by another intelligence-friendly journalist, Thomas Powers, in the Times — McMillan framed Oswald as a deeply aggrieved, violence-prone man “with a desperate desire to transcend the obscurity and impotence to which fate was inexorably confining him.”

McMillan’s dark portrait of Oswald bore no relation to the real young man, who was an idealistic and liberal patriot from a humble background — and in way over his head in the labyrinth of U.S. Cold War espionage, as his widow Marina later described him.

Fortunately, for those who want the truth, and can handle the truth about the Kennedy assassination — that milestone event that has warped the rest of American history — there is still courageous filmmaker Oliver Stone, whose new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, just premiered at the Cannes festival. Watch this rapturous reception of Stone at Cannes and his opening remarks before a screening of the film. And reflect on why you as Americans are still being kept in the dark by the newspaper of record and the other bastions of truth.

And Now It’s Ken Starr’s Turn To Be Exposed

When I was running Salon back in the 1990s, our little media startup decided to turn our investigative guns, such as they were, on the special prosecution apparatus of Kenneth Starr, who was trying to bring down the Clinton presidency over a consensual, if sleazy, affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The editors of Salon, including me, had no great affection for Bill Clinton, whom we regarded as too centrist and too slick. But we knew that Starr’s endless inquisition was deeply politicized and that the Republican alternatives to Clinton — Newt Gingrich (!) — would’ve been far worse for the country.

Ever since then, I’ve loosely followed Ken Starr’s professional trajectory. I was not surprised when he got fired as president of Baylor University for protecting sexual predators on the football team. Nor was I shocked when Starr popped again as a character witness for Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination battle. (As a young aide to Starr during the Clinton investigation, Kavanaugh had devised some of the most sexually humiliating questions for the president.) Then there was Starr’s legal work on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious rapist and trafficker of underage girls. I always suspected that Starr was a moral hypocrite and Republican attack dog… and the creepy details just kept piling up as the years went by.

And now there’s this. I must admit that this latest expose of Starr by former deputy and mistress Judi Hershman made even my eyes pop. “Judge” Starr — the man who set himself up as the moral arbiter of the immoral Clinton presidency — turns out to to be an even bigger scumbag than I thought.

It took Hershman much too long to figure this out. But now, as Starr maneuvers to put his man — Mike Pence — in the White House, she is at last telling all. Can the pillars of the Republican Party get any more debased? Or, as President Biden just put it, have they “no shame?”

Clearly not.

Kennet Starr and Judi Hershman in happier days

“The Last Black Man’s” Ongoing Legacy

It's been over two years since the premiere of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the independent movie that was the creative love child of two San Francisco native sons -- director/screenwriter Joe Talbot and co-star Jimmie Fails. But the film continues to have ripple effects. I stopped clicking on the Google Alerts about the film that continue to pop up on my screen each week. But this week -- maybe because my son Joe just celebrated his 31st birthday -- I did click on two stories related to the film.

My neighborhood news outlet, Mission Local, tells the sad story of local muralist Sirron Norris, who has been so harassed by gentrifiers that he made a poster inspired by the film.

Meanwhile, an entertainment magazine calls TLBMISF one of the top 15 saddest movies on Amazon Prime. As I told Joe, he's in good company -- with directors like Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard), John Cassavetes (Husbands) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight). Here's what the magazine says about Joe and Jimmie's film: "'The Last Black Man in San Francisco is sad as hell, and also proof that originality in filmmaking is not quite as dead as some claim. If you haven’t seen this, make it a point to change that."

Meanwhile, this beautiful and, yes, sad film has launched several careers. Composer Emile Mosseri went on to write the music for Minari, winning an Academy Award nomination and getting invited to join the Academy. Co-star Jonathan Majors has blasted to the Hollywood heights, with leading roles in the HBO series Lovecraft Country and other releases, while Jimmie's acting career is also taking off. And Joe has just written an entirely different movie with his partner Olivia Gatwood -- one not quite so sad but equally beautiful and even magical. He will direct the feature next year in Europe.

Here’s to the next wave of independent filmmakers. May they hold onto the artistic values that ignited them from the beginning.

Sirron Norris’s protest poster (right) and the original

The Whole World Is Watching: Who Makes History?

Finally… a smart critique of By the Light of Burning Dreams from the left. Jonah Raskin’s review of the new book about the radical upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s by my sister Margaret and me is well worth reading — even if I strongly disagree with its major thrust. Raskin — a fellow veteran of the New Left — insists on calling the book’s focus on radical leaders a “celebrity” fixation. He would rather focus on the street soldiers who made the “second American Revolution,” as Margaret and I call it. Raskin does concede that we also tell the stories of relative unknowns like Heather Booth, Bill Zimmerman, Craig Rodwell and Madonna Thunder Hawk. But it’s true that we mostly focused on the celebrated — and targeted — leaders of the Black Panthers, United Farm Workers, American Indian Movement and other radical organizations. Because, as we write in the book, while Margaret and I don’t subscribe to the “great man” theory of history, we do believe in the essential role of visionary, brave leadership.

Yes, the leaders we write about could not have made history without the countless foot soldiers who followed them. But the political and social advances of the ‘60s and ‘70s would also never have been possible without the galvanizing effect of courageous leaders. Yes, they were flawed human beings — and we don’t ignore their manifold imperfections and mistakes. And yet, as we write, the “legacy” of leaders like Bobby Seale, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Dennis Banks, Russell Means etc. is “immense.” To make deep and lasting change, we need the intricate interplay between mass movements and brilliant, accountable leaders. Today’s activists ignore this lesson at their own peril.

Rep. Katie Porter 1, Trumpies 0

Democracy -- it's not for the faint of heart. It's a district-by-district fight for the soul of America. Progressive Congress member Katie Porter found that out this weekend when her town hall meeting in her Southern California district was invaded by Trump stormtroopers led by a Republican challenger. Porter did the right thing -- wading into the melee to protect an elderly constituent and then vowing to keep holding public meetings. Porter is just the kind of gutsy, smart progressive we need in Congress. I donated money for her first Congressional run in 2020. when she flipped her Republican district. And I'm definitely going to give her more money for her 2022 reelection battle.

Everyone Loves Bernie… Even the New York Times

When Senator Bernie Sanders was a threat to the Democratic establishment, and actually looked like he could win the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, leading voices of corporate liberalism like the New York Times were apoplectic. During last year’s primary season, the Times sometimes ran two or three news stories and opinion pieces a day against Bernie. That’s right — even the Times’s supposedly “objective” news pages became a platform for anti- Bernie animus. But now that he’s become a Joe Biden loyalist — working hard to advance the president’s progressive legislative agenda — Bernie has become lovable again. Henry Louis Gates recently sat down with him for his Roots program on PBS, And now Maureen Dowd gives him a big wet kiss in her Sunday Times column.

To his credit, Senator Sanders wouldn’t allow himself to be diverted from his talking points about the national renewal program that America desperately needs. As Dowd noted, she wanted to talk to Bernie about Britney and “the absurd price of a Birkin bag.” But the senator — who, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee and an old comrade of Biden’s, suddenly finds himself in the middle of Washington action — stayed studiously on message during his interview with Dowd in a Burlington diner. Sanders did offer opinions about the suspension of Olympic track star Sha’Carri Richardson for using marijuana, whom he saw as a victim of America’s warped war on drugs, and the grotesque space race of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

“You have the richest guys in the world who are not particularly worried about earth anymore," Sanders observed. “They’re off in outer space” while people are sleeping on the streets. That’s why we need President Biden’s tax-the-rich legislation, the senator stated, steering the conversation back to his serious talking points.

Berne is now surrounded by a younger generation of democratic socialists and militant progressives on Capitol Hill, whom he has inspired and who have inspired him. But they sometimes part company with Sanders over his legislative alliance with the White House. But at age 79, Sanders has every right to use his political influence to win as much as possible for the American people. If Biden’s infrastructure legislation gets passed at close to the levels that he and Sanders want, it will be the biggest federal infusion in social spending since FDR’s New Deal.

If the Democrats fail to use their slight margin to deliver relief for the American people, Sanders is sharp enough to see the dark consequences — a further descent into Republican “delusion,” “authoritarianism” and even “violence.”

At the end of Dowd’s column, Senator Sanders offers a lesson on the difference between liberals and progressives — and it can be read as blunt message to the Times editorial board that helped block his “ascension” to the White House. “Liberals want to do nice things,” Bernie remarked. “And progressives understand that you have to take on powerful special interests to make it happen.”

Right on.

Bernie and his talking points

Turning Out the Lights on the U.S. Empire

A big cheer for Joe Biden, who strongly defended his decision to pull out U.S. troops from Afghanistan after our 20-year war there. Could this be the beginning of long-delayed national reckoning about the U.S. Empire? Here's what President Biden said yesterday: "Let me ask those who want us to stay: How many more? How many thousands more American daughters and sons are you willing to risk? And how long would you have them stay... Just one more year of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution, but a recipe for being there indefinitely... No nation has ever unified Afghanistan, no nation. Empires have gone there and not done it." And now to the long line of failures in the graveyard of empires, we must add the United States.

I deeply sympathize with those many Afghan men and women -- perhaps a majority of the country -- who deeply fear a Taliban takeover, with its hardline Islamist and misogynistic beliefs. But it's up the people of Afghanistan to forcefully resist a Taliban victory. In some provinces, women have reportedly taken up arms to show that they are willing to fight and die to prevent a Taliban victory -- even if the men in the Afghan Army are not willing to do so.

Empires can't impose solutions on foreign countries -- that's been the bloody, tragic lesson that America refuses to learn, from Vietnam to Central America to the Middle East. But now, hopefully, President Biden has begun this much-needed process of national introspection. Of course, the president is still authorizing drone strikes all over the world and flooding client states with military hardware. So the process of demilitarizing America will be a long one.