Debating the Future of San Francisco
On Tuesday evening -- courtesy of the SF tech investment firm Jackson Square Ventures, which sometimes hosts book forums -- my book Season of the Witch made me the author of the moment. (Yes, the book was published 10 years ago, but it keeps finding new readers.) I shared the stage with billionaire tech investor and San Francisco power broker Ron Conway. The evening was not organized as a debate -- but given the fact that Conway and I have very different visions for the city, how could our "conversation" not have turned into that -- even without the welcome involvement of the 100-plus audience, which was divided between tech industry types and local activists?
I accepted the Jackson Square invitation because, like any author, I was touched by how forum members still felt moved by my book -- which is a valentine to resilient San Francisco, despite its wild and bloody history. I also wanted to engage with Conway -- whom I'd never met -- because he's been the bete noir of city progressives for years.
Conway was the kingmaker behind the elections of Mayor Ed Lee and Mayor London Breed, as well as a key funder of the recall campaign against District Attorney Chesa Boudin and the crusades against a host of other progressive officials and ballot measures.
After more than a decade of big spending, Ron Conway and his tech elite now own San Francisco. They control City Hall and much of the city's political affairs. And how's that worked out for the city?
As I pointed out on Tuesday, San Francisco is in terrible shape. Most working people can no longer afford to live in the city -- nurses, schoolteachers, Muni drivers, waiters, shop workers, craftspeople like my Facebook friend Nancy McNally’s son (who did the beautiful glasswork in Conway's homes), my son filmmaker Joe Talbot and actor Jimmie Fails (who've reluctantly joined the creative exodus to LA), etc. These are the types of people who make a city worth living in --- who add richness and diversity to a city. And they're mostly gone.
Meanwhile, evictions are rising in SF -- and residents bitterly complain about the homelessness, crime and squalor on the streets. And the tech boom -- that Breed and Conway cheered on -- has gone bust. Elon Musk has begun slashing away at Twitter, and many tech companies have fled the city altogether.
Faced with this swarm of problems, the city's leaders -- people like Mayor Breed and the new DA Brooke Jenkins -- can only talk tough. They don't seem to have a clue about how to bring people together and lead this great city into the future. According to a recent poll by the San Francisco Standard (which is quickly eclipsing the Chronicle as the must-read of the day), Mayor Breed's disapproval rating is now up to 64% -- a number that will likely go higher as the next election approaches. She can't blame Boudin anymore for the city's glaring problems -- it's all on her. And voters are turning against her.
So, yes, the sad state of the city is on Breed -- and it's also on the billionaires who put her in office and turned SF into a dystopian poster, with a widening gap between rich and poor and our vaunted San Francisco values -- which I celebrated in Season of the Witch -- fading away.
I politely but firmly pointed all this out to Conway the other night -- how the fall of SF is on him. He's clearly not a man who's used to hearing criticism and he didn't take it well. (He blamed the progressive Supervisors, now a minority on the board, for our urban ills.)
Yes, the hard truth is that San Francisco now belongs to Conway and his crowd. With their endless supply of money and with the city's changing demographics, they win nearly every local election. That's the unavoidable bad news for SF progressives. We can sometimes block their agenda -- their luxury housing projects and their simplistic law & order policies. But we find it harder and harder to prevail at election time.
So here's what I proposed the other night: for the good of San Francisco, centrists should sit down with progressives, hash out our strong differences, and find out where we can agree. Conway, who defines himself as a lifelong San Francisco Democrat -- a man who hates Trump -- floated some ideas that sounded pretty good to me. Like reviving SF's downtown -- which has become a ghost town during the pandemic -- by converting the empty office space into residential units. He said he wants to live in a city where the person who serves him coffee In the morning can afford to live. He hates the tech industry "traitors" who've decamped to Texas and Florida.
Will Conway and members of his political machine sit down at the same table with progressive leaders like Hillary Ronen and Dean Preston for the good of San Francisco? Who knows? But I'm glad I used the opportunity on Tuesday to float the idea.
Once again, San Francisco finds itself at a momentous turning point. SF, like many cities staggering through the variations of Covid and the plague's attendant social problems, doesn't know what it is -- or what it could be -- anymore. We urgently need visionary leaders and thinkers and movers & shakers now.
Let's elevate the conversation.
Ron Conway
God Bless Bernie Sanders
As Barbara Ehrenreich used to say (about then working-class hero Bruce Springsteen), Bernie's the only thing standing between us and fascism. Worried about weak Democratic turnout (especially among progressives and young people), Bernie is going on a midterm blitz of Wisconsin, Oregon, California, Texas and other states, campaigning for progressive House and local candidates.
Like the rest of us, Bernie is gobsmacked that Democrats have so blown it that many (most?) American voters now think that REPUBLICANS(!) are the best pols to manage the economy. Bernie plans to school the Trumpies on the campaign trail: "They're going to have to respond to why they don't want to raise the minimum wage, why they want to give tax breaks to billionaires, why they want to cut Social Security. Those are the questions I think those guys do not want to answer. And those are the questions I'm going to be raising."
Barack Obama and Loretta Lynn
“Transformational Politics”... That's what we desperately need today. And that was the title of a 250-page treatise that young Barack Obama co-wrote in the early 1990s when he was a student at Harvard Law School. Thanks to a forthcoming book by historian Timothy Sherik (excerpted in the Sunday New York Times), we know that young Obama had a radical vision for transforming the Democratic Party and American politics, inspired by the gay, ex-Communist, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.
Rustin had a class-based vision for reviving the New Deal coalition of working-class whites and racial minorities, calling it "the March on Washington coalition," even though the other organizers of that legendary 1963 protest (which featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have Dream" speech) shunted Rustin to the side because of his radical and sexual politics.
Like Rustin, young Obama believed that America's racial and cultural fractures were exploited by Republicans. The way around this was to put class interest first, uniting working people against the power elite rather than dividing them. Today, as Sherik points out, taxes aimed at the super wealthy, labor unions and a livable minimum wage are hugely popular issues with the American people. While phony Trumpian populists cling to cutting the capital gains tax, a revived March on Washington coalition would eat the rich -- and thereby undercut Trump's white nationalist appeal.
But instead of taking the political path to solid majority rule that he laid out as a law student, President Obama sold out working people of all colors, continuing Bill Clinton's disastrous Wall Street tilt and filling his administration with banksters like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama said later that he also learned about "the intricacies of power" at Harvard.
Too bad that Obama, who was so good at quoting 1960s revolutionaries like King, didn't take to heart a line from Italian novelist Ignazio Silone that Tom Hayden was fond of quoting: "What would happen if men remained loyal to the ideals of their youth?"
Today Obama and his wife, Michelle, are bringing a biopic on Bayard Rustin to the Netflix screen. But they are doing nothing to advance Rustin's working-class vision within the Democratic Party.
Last week, the media celebrated the life of country singer Loretta Lynn, who died at age 90. I know nothing about Lynn's politics. But she was a strong woman, a coal miner's daughter. The Democratic Party should be attracting her hard-scrabble fans, too, in a March on Washington coalition that brings together working people of all colors.
“Because Our Fathers Lied”
On Saturday October 15 at 7 pm in the evening, I will have the great pleasure of conversing onstage at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, CA with Craig McNamara, author of Because Our Fathers Lied, the searing memoir about his father, the late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. I have not seen Craig, an organic farmer, since I interviewed him in 1984 for a Mother Jones cover story about his father's reincarnation as a peace advocate during the nuclear freeze movement. That article drove a wedge between father and son, but later Craig acknowledged it was true. (He writes about the family fallout from my article in his book.)
Like Craig himself, I had a complicated relationship with Robert McNamara. I interviewed him again for my 2007 book Brothers, zeroing in on the Kennedy presidency and JFK's plans to completely withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 election. McNamara, who became a Vietnam hawk under President Johnson, could have easily evaded the truth. But instead he strongly confirmed JFK's peace intentions.
In my book, I portrayed McNamara as a tragic, complex, haunted public official. If President Kennedy had lived, McNamara would've gone down in history as a hero -- one of the men who helped Kennedy keep the peace. As it was, he became a war criminal with a conscience, a man so racked with guilt that LBJ shunted him to the World Bank. After Brothers was published, McNamara had the courage to call me and tell me "you got it right."
Late in his life, McNamara's efforts to explain himself -- as in Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary Fog of War -- were both convoluted and moving. As far as I know, Robert McNamara is the ONLY high U. S. national security official to express any guilt for what he did.
I'm looking forward to speaking with Craig again -- not just about his father, but our own deeply and bitterly divided national family.
Get tickets to the Litquake event here:
Robert McNamara (left), Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor and President Kennedy
The Man with the Hat
Whenever my son Joe visits home, he brings with him movies that he wants to see or enjoys seeing again -- in the makeshift theater he built years ago in our basement. The other night, Joe and I -- along with my wife Camille and Joe's partner Olivia Gatwood -- watched (or rewatched, in Joe's and my case) the Coen Brothers 1990 masterpiece, Miller's Crossing. Yes, perhaps The Big Lebowski is a superior Coen movie. And yes, The Godfather remans the Great American Movie. But Miller's Crossing -- on the fourth or fifth watching -- is truly one of the all-time greats. A dark comedy about male honor and betrayal. About the ruthlessness of love.
And oh what a gorgeous musical score by Carter Burwell. By far his best work. It drenches the film in epic splendor, in Celtic-tinged, minor-key wistfulness and longing.
Afterwards, we watched the Criterion "extra" interview with the Coens. They're older and grayer now (after looking impossibly young and shaggy when they shot their film, on the back streets of New Orleans, it turns out). The Coens, led by a rather clueless interviewer, spent most of the time talking about their influences (Hammett, Chandler, Cain). But the the truth is they went beyond these literary masters with Miller's Crossing. It reminds you of how ambitious moviemaking once was.
And oh Gabriel Byrne! The biggest lingering mystery of the film is why he didn't become a superstar. He commands the camera with his intelligence and his crooked-nose beauty. I've read Byrne's two memoirs (he's also a deeply gifted writer) -- and I'm still mystified why he rose only so high in the movie pantheon.
But Miller's Crossing was his -- and maybe the Coens' -- greatest moment. If you haven't seen it, treat yourself. Or if you've already watched it, view it again. You'll be swept away once more.
Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing
Free the Free Press
“Tyranny is Never Invincible” So said the Hong Kong protest sign... except it often (usually) is. That's the melancholy realization that hangs over Lawrence Osborne's new novel, On Java Road, set in Hong Kong during the recent, ill-fated, pro-democracy protests there. What chance do young demonstrators have against the authoritarian Goliath of China? What openings for free speech do dissidents have in Putin's Russia? How much diversity of opinion is there in the U.S. corporate media world, where moguls like WB-Discovery's David Zaslav (and his billionaire sponsor John Malone) now decides that CNN must get rid of outspoken hosts like Brian Stelter and replace him with more Republican talking heads?
This is not a review of Osborne's new novel -- I've read only about 100 pages so far (which I like a lot). Readers know that I'm a fan of Osborne's writing, and as usual I hurried to read his latest.
But I do want to share with you the following screed against the uniformity of information and opinion as delivered by Osborne's main character, Adrian Gyle (love the name), a disillusioned, alcoholic British correspondent in Hong Kong, who -- when not covering the street protests -- finds himself gravitating to the cynical world of old wealth personified by his college chum Jimmy Tang.
Osborne's rant mirrors my own bitter feelings about the "free press." Here goes:
We lied like everyone else. But we were absolutely certain that we didn't lie and we despised those whom we thought did.
The Chinese Communists at least understood that very clearly. Hence their contempt for journalism. I could never explain to them what the romance of it was. They had never seen "His Girl Friday." Even if they had seen it, what sense would thy make of it? But for us, the dinosaurs of my generation, who among us didn't want to be Walter Burns buzzing amid the clacking machines of The Morning Post?
As Jimmy had suggested, the once great romance of it was what made its current degradation so disillusioning. When I was forced to defend the same press to Jimmy's pro-Beijing friends, for example, I found myself sounding vague and uncertain about my own claims, my own purpose. "But Rachel Maddow and Brian Stelter are comical lunatics," they would say, looking at me wth merry eyes and waiting calmly for some sort of rebuttal on my part, having of course no idea who Cary Grant had been. And what was I supposed to say? No they aren't and all is well with the Republic?
From afar, in fact, I had watched the strange deterioration and debauching of the American media. It struck me that television journalists in particular no longer relayed anything of integrity. But print journalists were following the same downward trajectory as they sat under the table of the powerful in Washington and sucked up the crumbs, the leaks from "unnamed sources" thrown to them by the intelligence agencies that actually ran the show. It was how they monetized their product.
I had lost count of the number of retired spooks manning the desks of CNN,MSNBC, and NBC and talking in place of journalists, setting the terms of discourse until the two groups were curiously indistinguishable. Very few talked disrespectfully about the national security state. None gave off any whiff of actual courage.
The gap between ourselves and the Communists had narrowed and the journalist, after a period of being a romantic hero, had become what he had been all along, a hack, a hustler, a propagandist. Of course, as I knew only too well, Walter Burns had been all of those things.
... Thank you, Mr. Osborne, for the unflattering mirror.
“
The Salman Rushdie Assault
Free speech is in a crisis. Authors and artists are afraid of cancellation on the left and right. Authoritarianism and thought control are on the rise throughout the globe. And on Friday author Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked onstage at the Chautauqua Institution – a forum that has stood for free speech since the 1800s.
Let’s reflect a moment about the lack of security at Chautauqua. Michael Hill, president of the institution, indignantly told the New York Times that he did not want to turn the forum into a “police state.” I understand that worthy sentiment. After all, speakers as provocative as Susan B. Anthony and Mark Twain have held forth historically there. Former President Theodore Roosevelt once stated that Chautauqua is "the most American thing in America.”
But where the hell has Michael Hill been in the last decade or so? Doesn’t he know that words are now fiery arrows, that speech has been weaponized? That America is teetering on the brink of civil conflagration? Stationing three or four armed cops at the foot of the stage would’ve probably prevented the knife attack on Rushdie. And no, Mr. Hill, the presence of these cops wouldn’t have amounted to a “police state.” Just an acknowledgment that Rushdie has been – and obviously still is --the target of Islamic fanaticism.
Rushdie himself should’ve taken more security precautions. Countless authors and editors and fans can tell you that they have rubbed elbows with Rushdie over the years since he was released – at least officially – from his fatwa lockdown. I myself chatted with Rushdie at a Manhattan cocktail party not long after his release. (He was a charming conversationalist.) I understand the drive to live one’s life freely. But Rushdie knew when he published The Satanic Verses”in 1989 that he would have a target on his back. That was the lamentable price of this kind of free speech. And by blithely appearing at public forums without security, Rushdie also put others in harm’s way. On Friday, Chautauqua moderator Henry Reese – an activist for authors who’ve been forced into political exile – was also injured in the knife attack.
But the main culprit in the Chautauqua outrage is the 24-year-old man from New Jersey named Hadi Matar who tried to silence Rushdie with a knife. Like dozens of other assailants in the U.S. who act each year on behalf of some religious or political cause, Matar decided that violence is a righteous path.
He was wrong. Shedding blood only leads to more fear, hatred and further bloodshed. Will America come to this realization before it’s too late? Before we plunge into a civil war fueled by righteous fury?
Yesterday, I chose to be a guest on a conservative radio show hosted by a Florida lawyer named John Gordon. We disagreed – civilly – about the 2020 presidential election. (He’s convinced it was stolen from Trump and he claims he has the facts to support it.) But we spent most the hour-long program talking about my book The Devil’s Chessboard and the assassination of President Kennedy. I said that the American people have been lied to by our government in Washington and the corporate media about a series of defining moments in my lifetime – from the Warren Report to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that got us into the Vietnam War to the Iran-Contra scandal to 9/11 to the WMD propaganda the triggered the invasion of Iraq. Gordon agreed with much of what I said – including the fact that President Trump caved to the “deep state” when he approved the CIA’s continued coverup of relevant JFK documents.
Gordon also made a strong appeal for the exchange of ideas across the political divide. I agree that dialogue sometime brings us closer. It did yesterday when the radio host and I agreed that the erosion of belief in authority began during our lifetimes with the official lies told about the murder of JFK. Federal officials, the New York Times etc. are STILL lying about the assassination.
Do I believe that our bitterly divided country can come together, or at least talk to each other enough to avoid a national meltdown? Despite what happened in Chautauqua, I remain optimistic. Ask me again next week.
Salman Rushdie
A Master Class in Screenwriting
We've been discussing good writing lately -- specifically, the dearth of it in modern fiction. But that's also true (though less so) about contemporary screenwriting. I was reminded of how precious skillful screenwriting is when I saw the final episode of the The Last Movie Stars, Ethan Hawke's HBO documentary series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The documentary features Newman's brilliant summation to the jury in the 1982 movie The Verdict. In the Hollywood way, director Sidney Lumet (and star Newman ) get nearly all of the credit for the great film, about a broken-down, alcoholic lawyer named Frank Galvin (Newman) who takes on the regal power of the Boston Catholic Church and its elite corporate counsel.
I think it's the best acting that Newman ever did -- and Lumet talks about why in the HBO series. But he fails to mention that the screenplay was written by the stellar David Mamet.
Now I get why people don't want to highlight Mamet these days. Because he's, well, gone fucking crazy. But God in heaven could that man write.
Yes, Newman hit new heights as an actor in The Verdict, thanks partly to his own latent resources and to Lumet. But David Mamet wrote the words. And words matter.
Here is Newman's summation to the jury in the film. It should be read and viewed by everyone who cares about cinema:
Frank Galvin : You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true." And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law.
But today you are the law. You ARE the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer.
In my religion, they say, "Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you." IF... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And ACT with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.
(You can watch the iconic scene here: )
Give War a Chance
The people of the world desperately need action on the growing hunger, pandemic, and climate crises. So what do global leaders double down on? War, nationalistic tensions. Sometimes you have to wonder if our species is meant to survive.
Why did Nancy Pelosi go to Taiwan? Not to "defend democracy." It's because the U.S. government has decided that China is now a threat to our global hegemony. The U.S. empire takes China's economic and diplomatic competition very seriously. But Saudi Arabia -- a totalitarian state as murderous and repressive as Beijing? President Biden fist-bumps those despots' bloodstained hands.
I wouldn't want to live under Chinese authoritarian rule. Like Putin's Russia, it's a noxious society and a free-thinker like me would last one day. But most of the world staggers under one iron-fisted regime or another -- many of them (most) are U.S allies. So let's be honest -- China's authoritarianism is not our problem. It's China's surging global power, which now rivals our own.
I take this personally because Nancy Pelosi is MY congressional representative. Like all San Francisco political leaders, Pelosi postures as a progressive -- and sometimes she actually is. But when it comes to imperial aggressiveness or military prowess, Pelosi is in the tank, just like the rest of the liberal elite, including our national media.
When's the last time that the United States had a real debate about our belligerent foreign policy or grotesque military spending? I'll give you a hint. It was long ago, when we got bogged down in the Vietnam War. Will it take another bloody catastrophe for this country to wake the hell up?
The Speaker of the House arrives in Taiwan.
Grow Up, America
While the European entertainment industry treats its adult audience like, well, adults, making challenging films and TV shows about human relationships, Hollywood continues to churn out simplistic, formulaic, feel-good fare about men and women. Even PBS's long-running Masterpiece Theatre, which relies on products from the UK, censors images of breasts and bums and language the network deems offensive to American ears. (Shh, don't wake the children!)
Is it any wonder that when it comes to the emotional and sexual terrain (a BIG part of the human condition), American culture remains trapped in a puerile state?
I was thinking of this unpleasant subject yet again, while enjoying French director Olivier Assayas's wonderful, talky 2019 film, Non-Fiction. Yes, I've been searching out the work of Assayas (turns out he also directed another of my favorites, Clouds of Sils Maria, starring Juliette Binoche) and actor Vincent Macaigne since they entertained me with the TV series Irma Vep.
Non-Fiction (available on demand) hits the spot. Not only does it star both Binoche and Macaigne, it features LOTS of smart talk about the dilemmas of book publishing in the digital age, the dumbed-down demands of entertainment culture, progressive politics in the age of social media narcissism -- yes, and love, lust and adultery.
Non-Fiction is a comedy, so there are plenty of laughs along the way. But it's also filled with provocative social commentary. And it's loaded with dialogue, so Assayas assumes a level of patience and maturity in his audience. What a relief!
What comes close to this sophistication in Hollywood films lately? Instead we're treated to predictable rom-coms and greeting card-like lessons about love and life. God spare me any more of this dreck.
Or am I missing something? Are there American films about love and sex that I SHOULD be watching?
Binoche and Macaigne in Non-Fiction
Finally, Something to Celebrate
We wallow in so much sorrow. So let's feel joy whenever we can. This week, Senator Joe Manchin, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the coal and gas industry, pulled a 180 again and endorsed President Biden's linchpin $369 billion climate and tax reform bill. Yes, Manchin had to be paid off with gas pipelines and other fossil fuel subsidies -- and there's still a chance that Senator Sinema will not overcome her narcissism and corporate servitude and blow up the deal -- but it looks like the sweeping Biden bill will pass the Senate as early as next week.
If it does, the U.S. will rejoin the fight to save the planet. And Biden and his party just might survive the midterm crucible.
I've given old Joe a hard time lately -- and I still think he should deftly step aside after the midterms for a younger, more aggressive 2024 Democratic presidential candidate. But I applaud his likely legislative victory -- and all the hard negotiating accomplished by Democratic centrists in the Senate like Chuck Schumer, John Hickenlooper and Chris Coons. The Capitol Hill breakthrough might not simply salvage Biden's presidency -- it might help save the world.
Here's how Biden put it yesterday at the White House -- and yes, this is the slow, tortured way that human progress is generally made:
"The work of the government can be slow and frustrating and sometimes even infuriating. Then the hard work of hours and days and months from people who refuse to give up pays off. History is made. Lives are changed."
Amen.
Senators Manchin (left) and Schumer
Censorship at the New York Times
That was a mighty fine broadside against self-censorship in the book industry by New York Times columnist Pamela Paul yesterday. The columnist bemoaned the imposition of politically correct thought on publishing from both the left and right. Book publishers, wrote Paul, have even begun subjecting authors to "sensitivity reads," which sounds truly Orwellian.
As an author of unconventional -- some would deem my books politically unacceptable -- history, I applaud Paul's column. But her words would've carried a lot more weight if she herself had practiced what she preaches. Until she recently became one of the Times's influential opinion writers, Paul was the editor in charge of the Sunday Book Review section. Paul ran the important book section with an authoritarian hand, making sure that when it came to nonfiction books, neoliberal thought ruled the day. Whether she was listening to her editorial masters' voice or simply following her own politically narrow guidelines, Paul NEVER used the writing services of sharp, wise commentators on the left like Robert Scheer, Naomi Klein, Matt Taibbi, Noam Chomsky or former NYT correspondent Chris Hedges. Never would regular contributors to The Nation or Jacobin magazine be published in her section. Eclectic but provocative thinkers like Glenn Greenwald were similarly banned from her pages.
Paul also made sure that my books --- even my most important work, The Devil's Chessboard -- were never reviewed, even though the Times covered my earlier work. Under her command, many other significant, well-written books were also disappeared, including Oliver Stone's 2020 memoir, Chasing the Light.
Instead of writers who would make NYT readers deeply question U.S. policy, Paul subjected us to a steady stream of neoliberals and even outright imperialists like George Packer and Robert D. Kaplan. The contributors to her section and the books they reviewed subscribed to a Council on Foreign Relations view of the country and the world. Under her editorship, the NYT's Sunday Book Review never veered far from the corporate mainstream.
So, yes, Pamela Paul is a hypocrite. When she was a powerful gatekeeper, she practiced political censorship on a weekly basis. Physician, heal thyself.
Pamela Paul
On Writing
I read a fair amount of new literature, along with current nonfiction, and I miss writing. Don't get me wrong -- there are plenty of good stories and readable biographies. But today's writers, by and large, just type -- they don't write. They communicate prosaically, not poetically -- in everyday, colloquial language, like we're doing here on FB. Blame social media -- God knows we always do -- but every contemporary author sounds the same, with no literary flair or distinction.
I miss writers like Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison and William Styron. Writers who thought hard about every sentence, who carefully crafted each word.
"Never use the first word that comes to mind -- use the second or third -- even though it takes more time," Steve Chapple once counseled me. He was one of the best writers I knew -- still is. (I'm glad to hear he's returning to fiction.)
My wife, Camille Peri, is weeks away from finishing a joint biography of the bohemian literary couple Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. I had long been a fan of RLS's writing (Treasure Island, The Suicide Club, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), but Camille encouraged me to read works he wrote back in the late 1800s that I hadn't read before. I was stunned and delighted to read some of Stevenson's sensual, descriptive passages -- of nature and people.
Read this passage from Catriona, Stevenson's intriguing (but not altogether successful) sequel to his masterpiece Kidnapped:
"There began to fall a greyness on the face of the sea; little dabs of pink and red, like coals of slow fire, came in the east.... With the growing of the dawn I could see it clearer and clearer, the straight crags painted with sea-birds' droppings like morning frost, the sloping top of it green with grass, the clan of white geese that cried about the sides, and the black, broken buildings of the prison sitting close on the sea's edge."
Stevenson conjures such a vivid impression in the mind's eye -- that's the magic of brilliant writing. What comes close to this evocative prose today?
Here's a tip for modern writers. Before you sit down at your laptop, seek inspiration from poetry or lyricists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Let their words dazzle and inflame your imagination. Dare to use words like each one matters.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Run, Gavin, Run (cont.)
Our California governor has adopted a new line of attack against likely 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis and other GOP anti-abortion crusaders. If you're truly "pro-life," argues Gavin Newsom, you should embrace sensible gun controls, childcare and environmental protection etc. Newsom's linguistic/political strategy of turning their own language against Republican hypocrites is smart -- and just what we need right now. We need to take the fight to our political enemies, not just dither and moan like Old Joe Biden. (And whatever happened to Kamala Harris anyway? She's become the incredible, vanishing VP.)
If we're going to win in 2024 -- and we must -- we need a Democratic presidential candidate who knows how to go on the offensive.
California Governor Gavin Newsom
Capitalism: A Novel
It's the sea we swim in, but as fishes we have little of great depth to say about capitalism. Movies and TV seem more inquisitive about the corporate world, starting with Greed (yes, based on the Frank Norris novel) and Citizen Kane and stretching to Wall Street, Billions and Succession.
Of course, there's Edith Wharton to remind us of greed and human cruelty in the Gilded Age, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to remind us of the depravities of wealth in the early part of the 20th Century.
And those of you who’ve been forced to grind for a living, especially writers, must read George Gissing’s great novel about the publishing racket, set in Victorian London, New Grub Street.
Now we have Hernan Diaz's new novel, Trust, which I've just finished reading. Told from various perspectives, the story revolves around financier Andrew Bevel, a man so wealthy and powerful he is said to have singlehandedly caused (and profited from) the Crash of '29 -- and his artistic wife Mildred, the true genius behind his success.
Trust is a fine novel. I particularly enjoyed the section about Bevel's private secretary, Ida Partenza, the young daughter of an Italian anarchist whom he hires to ghostwrite his memoir. Writing the reminiscences of a rich and powerful person like Bevel is all about "aligning" reality, Ida discovers. "His fortune bent reality around it," she writes.
But Trust, which is set in the 1920s and '30s, is a historical novel. Is there any great work of fiction about the age of Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla? Dave Eggers's The Circle -- a dystopian look at a Silicon Valley behemoth like Google -- was chillingly funny. But there must be others too.
Please suggest some good novels about modern capitalism.
Novelist Hernan Diaz
Your Happiest Place on Earth
We've had enough bad news. It's summer. Some of us are locked in, locked down, locked up. Let's revive my Happy Places feature -- post a photo and a few words about your happiest place on earth.
Here's one of mine -- the walled garden of the Four Seasons Hotel Firenze, with a view of the majestic Duomo. For years, this serenely beautiful estate -- renovated from a 15th Century palazzo -- was presided over by general manager Patrizio Cipollini, who sadly died too young (of cancer) in 2019. Patrizio was the consummate host. He had sparkling eyes and an impeccable sense of fashion. Constantly on the run, he always seemed to be watching every aspect of the hotel's operations. (He started out in the hospitality business as a bus boy in Germany.) But Patrizio always made time when he saw that you desired his company, sitting at lunch or cocktail hour with my colleague Karen Croft and me and her Italian friends. He had a special affection for writers, and he spoke with great feeling about Firenze. I didn't know him well, but I associate his unfailing magnanimity, courtesy and warmth with my travels to Italy.
And the hotel garden! My walks through this paradise, with the city bustling outside its ancient walls, always calmed my nerves. When I need solace in my life, no matter where I am, I conjure this quiet retreat. (I can see why friends want to be buried there.)
Tell us about YOUR happy place.
Read All About It — Daily Journalism Makes a Comeback
Daily journalism, at least in many cities, seems to be enjoying a revival. Here in San Francisco, there are at least four dailies now challenging the hegemony of the Hearst-owned SF Chronicle. Two of them are scrappy, independent nonprofits -- 48 Hills and Mission Local. And two were launched by wealthy men -- the San Francisco Standard, bankrolled by billionaire investor Michael Moritz (who interviewed me about my memoir for the Bay Area Book Festival) and the San Francisco Examiner, which is owned by local media mogul and real estate player Clint Reilly.
I love that the tired, corporate-leaning Chronicle finally has some competition. It's suddenly like the "Front Page" days of city journalism, when multiple newspapers fought it out for readers and ad dollars. Will the Chronicle respond by suddenly livening up its pages? Don't bet on it. The leading daily seems content with its current dull, middle-of-the-road approach. Its only fire-breathing columnist is Heather Knight, who crusades for corporate power and conventional civic values. They must love her in the suburbs.
The Chron's competitors all have something better to offer. The Examiner has the colorful, locally informed editor and writer Al Saracevic and sharp editorialist Gil Duran (why don't I see his byline more often?) Mission Local has the very good reporter Joe Eskenazi. 48 Hills is run by my friend Tim Redmond, and it's not biased to say nobody has a better grasp of our city than he does.
The San Francisco Standard boasts a relatively big newsroom. It's loaded with solid local journalism. And it claims to be independent of its wealthy ownership. But it looks -- and too often reads -- like a corporate annual report. I'm rarely shocked or even surprised by anything I read in the Standard. (Though I was amused to hear Mayor-for-Life Willie Brown -- who helped impose the corrupt rules of Ed Lee and London Breed on us -- urge Chesa Boudin to run again for DA, even though the Breed machine loathes him.)
As I've argued on this page before, there is no secret to good daily journalism -- which I practiced for years at Salon and, yes, the Examiner and Chronicle. You need to break big stories (like the investigative reporting that Salon did on the Clinton impeachment machine, the Bush-Cheney "victory," Abu Ghraib etc) and to feature compelling writers (like fearless Salon Iraq War correspondent Phillip Robertson and columnists/reporters/critics as diverse as Camille Paglia, Rebecca Traister, Anne Lamott, Laura Miller, Joan Walsh, Jake Tapper, Glenn Greenwald, Gary Kamiya, Stanley Crouch, Arianna Huffington, Joe Conason, David Horowitz, Michelle Goldberg, James Poniewozik, Cintra Wilson, Dwight Garner, Christopher Hitchens etc.)
The Examiner obviously believes in distinctive writing, but still has a way to go before they boast a full stable of good writers. The nonprofits have feisty spirit and a commitment to covering life on the city streets and City Hall malfeasance. But where are the big exposés that get the whole city talking?
When I first started out in journalism, the "Who Rules" reports were the bread and butter of countless New Left pamphlets (Who Rules Columbia University, Who Rules Congress etc.) This would STILL be an eye-catching way to capture readers' attention. Here in SF, we have a vague sense of the corporate powers and special interests behind Mayor Breed's reign at City Hall, but we don't know for sure -- because the local media won't go there.
Don't expect the Chronicle or the Standard to expose Big Money in SF -- their overlords are too cozy with these powers. I'm sure that 48 Hills and Mission Local would do more investigative reporting if they had the resources.
This is the Catch-22 for the truly independent press in America. Philanthropic billionaires like Moritz generally have the best First Amendment intentions. They're genuinely concerned, as we all are, about the decline of democracy in the U.S. But their money always comes with strings attached -- even when they insist it doesn't. Their influence on these media startups begins right away -- when they start hiring the editorial staffs.
So if you believe in a truly free press -- right here in Bay City -- you'll subscribe to 48 Hills and Mission Local. A free press is NEVER free.
Inside Trump’s “Unhinged” Bunker
As I wrote in The Devil's Chessboard, democracy is as fragile as an "eggshell" in the tumult of history. This has been glaringly evident throughout the riveting January 6 hearings, especially during yesterday's session when the Congressional committee displayed testimony about the "unhinged" White House meeting, where for more than six hours the "crazies" -- like convicted General Michael Flynn and attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell -- ranted at cooler-headed White House staff and nearly convinced our stable genius of a president to order a military coup. (Trump finally opted instead to inflame a mob of armed followers to overrun the Capitol.)
Listen to former White House counsel Pat Cipollone's chilling testimony about the meeting.(He's pictured below.) His recollections of the frenzy in the bunker rank up there with Cassidy Hutchinson's. Here's a piece:
“I opened the door and I walked in. I saw General Flynn,” he said in a videotaped interview the committee played at the hearing on Tuesday. “I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy to see the people who were in the Oval Office.”
Asked to explain why, Mr. Cipollone said, “First of all, the Overstock person, I’ve never met, I never knew who this guy was.” The first thing he did, Mr. Cipollone said, was say to Mr. Byrne, “Who are you?” “And he told me,” Mr. Cipollone said. “I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice.”
Then things got really weird...
The U.S. has a dismal record of holding high criminals accountable. Yes, as we keep getting reminded this Watergate anniversary season, Nixon fell. But no high official responsible for the bloody debacle of Vietnam was ever found guilty. The assassinations of the 1960s? No. Bush-Cheney's illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq? Ditto. The CIA's post-9/11 reign of torture and drone mayhem? Are you kidding?
The U.S. has such a strong aversion to ever being held accountable for its murderous actions that our government defies the war crimes and human rights tribunals that it set up! And we keep people like Julian Assange in black holes for the temerity of exposing the truth about our war crimes.
But this shouldn't prevent you from watching the January 6 hearings, where smart, progressive legislators like Jamie Raskin -- and, yes, Republican Liz Cheney, the loving daughter of a war criminal -- have distinguished themselves. In the end, Trump and his co-conspirators who tried to overthrow democracy will probably remain free. That's sadly the American Way. But we still must bear witness. And most of us can still vote in November.
CIA Agonistes
The last time the USA tried to make sense of the CIA -- and even rein in its more violent and tyrannical urges -- were the Congressional hearings of the 1970s. The Senate bleated again -- briefly -- when Dianne Feinstein's torture-probing committee discovered it was being spied on by the CIA. But since 9/11 the CIA --- and the entire metastasizing national security complex -- has pretty much had its way, from drone assassinations to black sites. Just ask Julian Assange.
And so it's left to the dream factory to deal with our recurrent national nightmares. Most recently, FX (and Hulu) offer us The Old Man, starring the wonderful Jeff Bridges as an ex-CIA agent on the run and the equally superb John Lithgow as his FBI nemesis.
And from British TV (available on AMC), we have a remake of The Ipcress File, starring Joe Roth, instead of Michael Caine, who unfortunately sleepwalks through his role as a working-class hustler caught up in a maze of Cold War intrigue.
Both TV shows shed a weird light on the clandestine exertions of the spy world. In The Old Man, the CIA's machinations during the Soviet war in Afghanistan seem to backfire and Bridges is pitted against his former national security colleagues. So we're supposed to root for him against the current CIA and FBI overlords, I guess. (Only five of seven episodes in Season One have been shown so far.)
In the one-and-done Ipcress File series, which is set in 1963, the bad guys are a far-right, fundamentalist U.S. general and his military clique, who inveigle a patriotic CIA official into their plot to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of a U.S.- beguiled British espionage official. So it's on the right track. Sort of.
The best part about the entertainment industry telling us dark stories about our official history is that at least it's TRYING to get at the truth. But the plots of these two shows are both twisted and simplistic. They succeed in disturbing us, but they also confuse us.
The truth is STILL out there.
The Top Ten Liars
I made this list quickly and honestly. These are the biggest disseminators of bullshit about "exceptional" America (and its discontents). Most are bestselling writers (alive and dead) -- though Steven Spielberg stands for decades of Hollywood propaganda about the "greatness" of our leaders and how (with swelling music) the arc of history bends inevitably toward justice blah, blah blah. All lies.
These hacks are often beloved by liberals and progressives. They gather plaudits in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times -- proof of their conventional (establishment) "wisdom" and mendacity. (Ken Auletta stands for all the limited hangout, half truths and pabulum about corporate media.)
What happened to the angry truth-tellers of yesteryear? The searing prophets like Gore Vidal, William Appleman Williams , Gabriel Kolko, C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon, etc. Noam Chomsky is still around and mostly, unnervingly right. But they are blacklisted from the mainstream media in our "free" country, so all most Americans see and hear are the following prevaricators. God help us all.
Top Ten Liars (in no special order):
1. Ken Burns
2. Walter Isaacson
3. Doris Kearns Goodwin
4. Michael Beschloss
5. Jon Meacham
6. Christopher Hitchens
7. Joan Didion
8. Robert Caro
9. Steven Spielberg
10. Ken Auletta
