Like most of the people who aspire to write for newspapers, the column has always been my favorite mode of expression. For too many writers though, it offers an easy way to merely document, continually, their interests and obsessions. More often than not, they repeat the same basic thoughts over and over again. What’s essential for my kind of column is an agile mind -- kept active by constant discussion and reading. Otherwise you run out of original thoughts fairly quickly.

I have been a columnist for more than half my life and as I’m still producing a weekly column today, it’s how I define myself. Apart from my years with Penthouse magazine, the most I have ever been paid for my column is $30, this from the Montecito Journal for which initially I wrote free, at the invitation of publisher Jim Buckley.

As I have always been a newspaperman, my type of column is rarely opinion, almost always a series of facts, even the travel essays. I peruse around 40 magazines a month to extract items that appear prophetic in some way, stories that have legs or indicate trends or even recount something so unlikely that the reader hopes that it might happen (or not happen) here.

      For examples of these columns from two years ago click here

 

My favorite genre is what’s always been known as the three-dot column pioneered by Walter Winchell and other New York scribes --such as Jack O’Brien, Louis Sobol, Hy Gardner, Dorothy Kilgallen ,Earl Wilson-- back in the 40’s and 50’s. Many of them wrote “gossip” columns about showbiz figures, but better columns eschew trivia in favor of real news. The three dot-column is a wonderful way to convey vast amounts of material in a very short space.  We’re talking about something about 600 words long, with items only a sentence and a half at the most, and two words at the least; all arranged in an order that has some rhythm to it, not just random things all thrown together. 

The rhythm is choreographed, it’s like if you were standing at the side of a river with somebody and you suddenly grabbed them and pulled them into this boat and then you go charging down the river to the white water rapids and it goes up and down and levels out, and up and down, and so on.  So choreograph your 20 or so items to make some sort of sense in the order they’re in. One of the tricks, of course, is that if you have something inflammatory to say, sandwich it between a couple of calmer items.  And disguise items, tuck them away, hide them so that people notice them only subliminally. In my early Voice columns, whenever mentioning something I would give the address to which to write for it. This was more or less banned elsewhere, on the grounds it would be ‘free advertising.”

My three-dot column started as a one-subject column. The early Voice was a new kind of paper, the first in America that was unlike the conventional small town weekly newspaper which mostly covered women’s institute and local weddings.  People started to send my column nuggets of sometimes improbable information and soon there was so much stuff it had to be accommodated as tersely as possible.

Items for a three-dot column must excise every extraneous word, yet always remembering that one colorful word in a sentence can bring the whole thing to life. Whenever the obvious word comes to mind go to the Thesaurus and find a really good replacement. My aim has always been for my writing to be interesting.  That’s the foremost thing that drives me when I write stuff.  I want it to be interesting, preferably to be totally new to the reader.

collected Voice columns, 1961

There is never a shortage of material. A medical journal or psychiatric publication or other trade magazine left in the post office or a coffee shop. I retrieve it and explore it minutely in search of something offering new insights. Advertising Age and Publisher’s Weekly are two of the best sources of news about what’s going to happen next. (Neither will comp me and I  can’t afford subscriptions).

Most of the time I try to quote sources that the average reader will not have read. An admirer of the late Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle,  I’ve always made a practice of reading everything I could find. On a press tour to somewhere such as Eastern Montana, I would peruse the local papers, free papers, the alternative papers. The letters columns always get my attention. Letter writers offer impractically imaginative ideas which are never heard from again. One man  writes: “All this fuss about trying to get rid of nuclear waste, why don’t we put it on rockets and send it out into space?”  That’s a neat one-sentence item.

My column, magazine and the cable show  all are a column an extended journal with a succession of different items.  At the Voice, I didn’t want my readers to have the faintest idea of what the next column would be about, the reverse of columnists who rework their favorite subject ad infinitum.

My career began on a paper with five million circulation and has gone down and down and down over the years. Now there are 400 intelligent readers who read and hopefully appreciate my magazine, the Ojai Orange. I never print more than 300 copies of my personal journal that I can cope with on my color copying machine.

Many readers assume that by reading the daily newspapers they’ll always learn the latest about everything, but the truth is that many scoops emanate from magazines, the Atlantic or Harper’s. These devote time and money to exploring some story in depth which then turns up as a front page newspaper piece weeks later. With the help of the magazines, my column can scoop the papers often.

During the years I have been writing my column, I have quoted from a wide array of magazines. Some have been free (media comps) from the beginning, others have responded in recent years, although many more simply ignored my request to be placed on their mailing lists. The courtesy of William Buckley brought me the National Review from the beginning.  After quoting it for many years I wrote him a note to say that although I had not become a Republican after reading hundreds of issues of his magazine, I was certainly more sympatico to the Conservative viewpoint than I had been originally. 

“People of many political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form” said Buckley’s obituary in the New York Times, which described him as the “liberals’ favorite conservative” and certainly he gained many admirers when he advocated  the decriminalization of marihuana. It might be presumptious to guess that he was a smoker himself, but his tolerant attitude towards this and so many other things pointed that way.

Fame and fortune have never been my aim. What I have sought is validation, my argument being that at my own expense and perseverance I have reported faithfully and reasonably objectively on the sociological zeitgeist as I have passed through it. My only needs were enough financial support to pay my way. In return I believe I have laid out a great deal of useful information.

From the very first thing I published, I’ve been in the habit of sending copies to all nearby (and some distant) editors, as much a fraternal acknowledgment as anything else. There is no ulterior motive, and if there was it wouldn’t be very successful seeing as less than 1% of my recipients ever respond. I don’t know where most people find friends and like-minded acquaintances if, like myself, they don’t work in an office, but where I seek them is among literate folk. If I like what somebody writes I often send them the latest issue of my magazine.

My career, at least so far as my income is concerned, has been that of a travel writer.  I have written 38 books—hack works full of helpful facts soon out of date—invariably aimed at making it as easy as possible for visitors to quickly orient themselves in some foreign place as easily and cheaply as possible.

But the main love if my life has been writing a column which I have been doing on and off for 54 years, never making a living from it and rarely finding anybody willing to pay for it. The major mismatch of my life is my belief the column is interesting vs. the actuality that nobody wants to reprint it.

No newspaper seems to want a column of factual briefs today. What became defined as a column was somebody’s personal feelings or comments, stretched out for 1000 words. Pre-blogs.

A rare exception was the short-lived Bold-Face Names that Joyce Wadler wrote for the New York Times. It was exclusively about celebrities, whereas my 3-Dot segment is about ideas and often not-famous people.

A few years ago, I put together a selection of recent columns concentrating on ones that contained exclusive items that  hadn’t yet surfaced in daily papers in the West. Consulting the masthead of the Los Angeles Times, I found 13 editors listed. So I made up packages which I sent to each of them, with the suggestion that they start running a column like this, although not necessarily mine.

Newspapers get so much stuff sent to them. I used to know an editor on the Observer in London and I’d see stuff on her shelves and I’d say, “Wow, this is fascinating, you ought to write about it.” She’d say, “No it’s not worth an item.” And I’d say, “Well, can I have it?” “Sure, you can have it.”  It made a noteworthy 30-word item.

Editors are still hung up on the idea that if something is not worth a story, how can you write about it? Even though the essence of “the story” would stand out in a column of a dozen similar items. But newspapers can’t be made to see that, so I sent this package and explained this theory to LA Times editors and within 24 hours I got a call from the executive editor’s secretary, a very condescending call, saying “the editor told me to tell you we don’t use this kind of thing.”

When I told this tale to Sasha, he gasped: “But that’s phenomenal that you would get a reply like the very next day, you must have pushed somebody’s buttons?”

Well, I said, what I think happened was that this editor realized that I’d sent it to all these other editors and cut me off at the pass immediately. I mean I got a call rejecting that idea probably even before two or three of the other 13 editors had received it from the mail room. No chance of it being discussed.

 

Before and after the dismal sell-out (an apt term) to Chicago’s Tribune Company and then the sale to real estate tycoon Sam Zell (who put up a mere $315 million of his own money, leaving the Times with $12.5billion of debt), a succession of internal conflicts and minor scandals saw editors and publishers playing musical chairs before leaving the sinking ship.

A former editorial page editor Andres Martinez who resigned over a conflict of interest matter involving his girlfriend’s pr work, sued her for allegedly causing him to lose his job. The woman, Kelly Mullens, responded that Martinez had harassed her, sending her “constant harassing, intimidating, obsessive, crude and vulgar emails and text messages”

Soon went David Hiller, the third publisher after Tribune took over. He was a show tune-singing former colleague of Rudy Giuliani at the Justice Dept under Reagan. His major achievement, it transpired, was when his request to sing the National Anthem at Dodger Stadium, was granted. Described by Tribune brass as an indecisive leader (just what the LAT needed),  Hiller resigned after 21 months, succeeding Jeffrey M. Johnson who had gone earlier after declining to make Tribune’s requested cuts. Hiller had kicked out editor Dean Baquet (who returned to the NYT) as well as his predecessor, and when his own turn came said: “Sam’s the boss and he gets to pick his own quarterback”.

After Zell took over (by which time the company’s annual debt payments had reached nearly $1billion) the paper eliminated 1,000 jobs, sold assets to raise capital and meet debt payments and had its credit downgraded. Tribune stock was turned over to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) but the employees were given no say on the deal, no seats on the board and no ability to sell shares in the foreseeable future.

A group of current and former LAT reporters sued Zell “accusing him of recklessness in the takeover an management of the newspaper’s parent, the Tribune Co." wrote Richard Pérez-Pëna in the New York Times.   

For a brief time, disgruntled employees opened a website, exchanging emails with their new boss

Zell: There is a difference between questioning authority or challenging the "business as usual attitude," and maligning the company in public. That's just bad judgment and does no one any good. It's a distraction that's unnecessary.  We are partners. We need to act like it.

Staffers: Sam, the time for "acting" like partners ended when you cursed at us; when you denigrated us; when you told us we were overhead; when you fired reporters; when you cut back news-hole; when you deprived our readers of information about their lives to make the payments on your over-leveraged debt.  Partner, in case your dictionary knowledge is as lacking as your lackey's grammatical knowledge, is a word which implies equality. But you have never acted as an equal.

“We have no power. We have no say. We have never been consulted in a single action that you or any of your cronies have taken in dismantling the Tribune Co. So stop fucking call me your partner. It's patronizing. It's demeaning. And it's wrong”.

Zell has expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of space the paper devotes to national and international news and his cuts suggest that 82 pages of editorial pages per week were about to be cut. Maybe the Times will no longer be able to waste precious space on

• A lengthy story about a pair of lawless brothers, obsessed with getting video of police pursuits, after which a reader asked the paper why it would “glorify” such “dangerous and illegal stunts”?
• 32 inches devoted to couples obsessed with playing video games
• 15 inches to a man searching for a perfect ring tone for his cell phone.
• 23 inches devoted to a staffer’s attempt to watch (via Tivo) a commercial-free Olympics.

And only a paper with space to burn would have devoted not only a full page but two additional duplicate half pages in the same issue, ads peddling their IT’S OBAMA front page. Followed by full-page ads for days later.

At one point, the Times invited readers to submit essays appraising its content. It was an experiment that didn’t last long, probably due to the negative input; my own essay was neither used nor acknowledged. I had brought up once more the paper’s need for a fact-filled column, but I also had some other thoughts.

Apart from noting that the pathetic Sunday magazine rated about a 1 out of 10 compared with almost any of its London Sunday paper counterparts, I noted the paper’s over-addiction to showbiz at the expense of everything else. It had always been so much in thrall to the Hollywood buzz, that whole issues went by in which pieces about movies and TV shows, stars of the same movies and TV stars, secondary players in those same movies and TV stars, dominated most of the pages. Oh well, those full-page ads had to be rewarded, I suppose, but it was as though nothing ever happened in southern California, except show business. Surely there had to be other feature stories worthy of attention, but how many of the still-remaining 700 editorial staff were working on them?

In the Sixties, the paper was known as “the velvet coffin”, a reference to the writers who loafed there in slothful comfort, untroubled by having to do much work. When Zell bought the paper in 2007, he knew so little about journalism that he evaluated the reporting staff by how many stories each scribe turned out per year.

Obviously this was ridiculous because some stories required months of work. On the other hand, he did have a point. A huge number of writers were producing little more than one story a week and even many of those failed to make it into print, a prima facie case for the fact that the paper really didn’t need one thousand plus on its editorial staff. Circulation having dropped from one million plus to 700,000 or so, the staff has been reduced accordingly.

Much as most of the writers I know loathe Rupert Murdoch, the best thing that could have happened to the Times (short of its overlords putting in enough money to run it properly) is if the Ozzie oligarch had bought it and turned it into a 'serious' (resembling his London Times) tabloid. At least, then, the showbiz pieces would have been presented in a more attractive and beguiling manner.

Recent attempts to jazz up the layout of the Los Angeles Times only remind readers of how the paper lacks the guts to transform itself into a real tabloid. And how could the paper believe that devoting several pages a day, for a full week, to a serial about gangsters in Los Angeles of the 1940s, was serving their readers today? Nothing wrong with the story itself; just that it doesn’t belong in a daily paper with less and less space available for actual news.

With declining circulation, advertising and staff, you’d think it might have occurred to the paper that one place where savings could be affected would be in better use of editorial space. Most stories are TOO LONG and could be edited down to allow more of them to fit into the diminishing space. The first daily paper I worked on in England (editorial staff: seven) was suffering from a newsprint shortage and we were instructed to keep stories short. But very few American journalists, with the exception of the wizards who produce the Internatinal Herald Tribune (probably the best newspaper in the English language) have ever learned to be brief and they might take a lesson from tabloids which invariably get all the facts of a story into half the space of their broadsheet rivals.

Several months after dropping its feeble magazine, the Times appeared with a new version, clearly taking a lesson from its New York counterpart by concentrating on fashion and the high life. Even its cover was a straight-out copy, with a stylized at the top left hand corner and a dopey-looking cover girl in grey coat and black boots with DREAM superimposed across her chest. Inside was an interesting interview with Michelle Obama; otherwise batting zero.

The inevitable demise of the Book Review, following the death of the wretched weekly magazine by six months, was announced in July/08. The book review was never a moneymaker, possibly due to the surely-silly assumption by its bosses that Angelenos were not interested in literature.

The Book Review never made any attempt to be interesting much less significant, devoting most of its pages to boring reviews of novels,  no commentary on writers or writing itself, or indeed publishing in general. The Times appears unaware that these subjects are of considerable fascination to millions who’ve never cracked a novel and probably never will.

“Backstage” news of the newspaper and publishing worlds have always engrossed literate people and the Book Review missed a golden opportunity—when the paper was relatively flush—to turn itself into a loss-leader that nevertheless could have become must-reading for thousands of readers. Seeing as it was obvious from the beginning that even California publishers couldn’t be enticed or strong-armed into advertising, what other route could possibly be open but attempting to transform the Review into the best literary magazine outside New York?

The paper’s unbelievable short-sightedness about eschewing columns (except for one-subject essays) applies here, too. Comb through any issue of Publisher’s Weekly or London’s just-folded Publishing News and you could come across at least a score of items that any astute reporter could mould into an irresistible 600-word read. Anyway they dropped the Book Review, slotting a review or three onto other pages.

In an editorial the Times wrote that its collective editorial opinions, “written after debate and disagreement…. that seek intellectual honesty and consistency” were a rare voice in today’s national culture and politics. “They are the product of a Socratic enterprise, guided by the idea that debate produces wisdom”.

They’re invariably the best thing in the paper.

There are many times when we might think of the Times as the Daily Donald, so speckled it is with hideous ads by the lawyer, real estate magnate, NBA (Clippers) owner and self-described “humanitarian” Donald T. Sterling, who must be the biggest ego in the West. And that’s some achievement in the land of the movies.

Donald T. Sterling

In addition to full page ads for his properties for sale and rent, the Daily Donald loves to run huge color pictures of himself flanked by satellite photos of minor local celebrities, all extolling some charity to which he has presumably donated and on whose board he is usually chairman. Sometimes there are two or three different ones in the same paper, but all are dominated by his picture. Heaven only knows how much money is spent on these ads, hundreds of thousands of dollars that might otherwise have enriched the charities. Or helped the have-nots in his so-far-fictitious homeless shelter. But then, of course, people wouldn’t have known about the generosity of Daily Donald.

Of course, all my comments are a mere pinprick, because I’ll be judged unworthy of criticizing such an established and respected giant of journalism. The Times is indubitably one of country’s best papers--partly because so few others devote such thorough coverage to national and international affairs. Its Column One essay is on a par with the Wall Street Journal’s, the industry touchstone.

INSIDE THE PAPER, chaos often reigned, the feuds sometimes jumping to the outside world. Long-time columnist Al Martinez, victim of one set of cuts,  promptly starting blogging. He called the man who fired him from the paper “a graceless little man…an anomaly on a staff of otherwise good, qualified people”.

But that’s mild compared with some of the other comments tossed around about his nemesis, John Montorio, a former  LATimes m/e who was subsequently himself fired, a decision greeted with joy by Montorio’s former colleagues. They accused him of “ruling with arrogance, secretiveness and closed-door clubbiness” adding that he had a “toxic personality”  and was “loathed”. They called him “deceitful, anarchistic and charming like a snake”.

Martinez had his column restored by Montorio’s successor, Russ Stanton, a 14-year veteran, who took over as new editor from what he termed “a Groundhog-Day nightmare”.

“Some of Mr. Stanton’s colleagues have taken the extraordinary step of going to Mr. Hiller to ask him not to choose (Russ) Stanton as editor” wrote the NYT’s  Richard Pérez-Pëna. ”Reporters and editors have said that Mr. Stanton does not have the stature or broad experience to run one of the nation’s most important newspapers…but he is well-liked”. He has been credited, as innovations editor, with improving the paper’s website.

John M. Arthur

After three editors in three years, when the job had again become vacant m/e John M Arthur, 60, a Times veteran of 20 years, wanted the job, but he lost out to Stanton. I hopefully requested that Arthur give this book a mention and when he e-mailed to ask why, responded that entire chapters, thousands of words had been devoted to Southern California. I received no other reply to my entreaties for a par, nay a word, a line, informing readers of my book. I had become the invisible man.

I studied Arthur’s picture (left) and pondered long on the awe and majesty of his being. I imagined him sitting on his gilded newsroom throne, saying little while imperiously indicating, with up or down turned thumb, the fate of the poor wretches who sought his benison. With him lay the power of simple recognition or permanent banishment from the kingdom.

So there I was, an irrelevant speck on the paper’s world view. Sadly in these penurious times it is vital to a writer’s future, and his chance of being published, that he get some endorsement in print. Alas, it was not to be. Maybe if I had changed my name to Donald?

Circulation has been dropping so precipitously that the Times now offers one-year subscriptions (Thursday thru Sunday) for $39, including one of half dozen Conde Nast magazines. Hard to see how that could be anything but a money-loser.

“Analysts have warned in recent years that by offering steadily less in print, newspapers were inviting their readers to stop buying”, commented Pérez-Pëna.

 

In 2008, the Village Voice began re-running some of my 50-year-old columns in their weekly blog along with a note listing my website. It was of no benefit to me, of course, especially as I never received any comment from readers, but it did remind me that I had written more than half a million words for the paper during its first ten years, being paid little more than $1,000 a year. Roughly speaking then, at a rate of one or two cents a word.

As the inequity of this blog thing dawned on me, I wrote to editor Tony Ortega suggesting that it seemed a little exploitative that they were re-using this work at the same time as refusing to mention my book (this one) in their paper. It wasn’t money, I sought, merely a pointer to readers on where they could read my history of the Sixties which, obviously, included an early history of the Voice itself.

After ten and a half years I had quit the paper in 1965 to help Walter Bowart start the East Village Other, a decision greeted by Ed Fancher with the announcement that I would have to leave the Voice if I wanted to write for EVO.  The paper never forgave me for my choice and continually over the years vilified me for having the temerity to claim that I had been one of the founders. although how else one might describe somebody who helped carry in the furniture, acted as news editor and was bylined on the front page of the first issue it’s hard to say.

Over and over again I was expunged from the historical record. When Norman Mailer wrote his history of the paper he deliberately mentioned everybody but me. When Geoffrey Stokes ran a collection of Voice pieces he didn’t either mention me or use a single one of the 520 columns and scores of other pieces I had written for the paper.  It was obvious that fatwah  had been declared on my name. When, a few years later, the Voice was sold, Fancher and Dan Wolf shared $7million.

Flash forward to the Voice’s 50th anniversary issue in 2005. One of the stories they ran was my seminal piece about Andy Warhol’s moviemaking. Was I recompensed or otherwise mentioned? No, and no.

Thus my letter to Tony, requesting that the fatwah be lifted and that my name be mentioned in the paper itself, as they continued to use my 50-year-old 2c words. This was his response:

John, Got your letter. I have to assume that you’re not aware of the pinch that the print industry is in at the moment. We’re printing extremely tight paper versions right now as we struggle through the Bush economy, and there’s plenty of stuff happening right this minute that I don’t have room for. And that’s why I’m glad we have all the room in the world on-line, where I can do things like celebrate your old columns, which I very much enjoy.-- Tony O.

That current issue of the Voice, by the way, was more than 200 pages. I tried again a couple of months later, hinting that as they were unwilling to devote a paragraph to telling their readers about my book, maybe for old time’s sake they might give me a break on an ad. Sure, they replied, just send five hundred bucks. They were still re-using the old columns.

 

 

Nobody, as we know, has a monopoly on the truth or what’s the most sensible policy about almost anything. I have found myself agreeing occasionally even with the likes of Dr. Laura or Bill O’Reilly (but never with Rush Limbaugh).

It long ago became obvious that the difference between Republicans and Democrats was simply that between the haves and have-nots, the former were motivated almost entirely by the constant need for more, no matter how much they had already. They were totally insensitive to the fact that poor people are rarely poor by choice and that the solution for them is not—as Limbaugh might maintain—for them to get off their asses and work. When Bush first decided to ignore the need for money by schools, hospitals and the infrastructure, in favor of giving obscenely rich people yet another tax break, I asked the Montecito Journal’s Jim Buckley: “How could he do that?”

“Well they paid the money” blustered Jim indignantly, “why shouldn’t they get it back?”

Isn’t that a bit selfish?

“Oh don’t give me any more of that Socialist left wing garbage” Jim replied.

Jim’s approach to life and his politics were perfectly aligned. Fundamentally, he seemed to believe that anything you could acquire and hang onto was deserved. It was entirely legitimate, no matter how you acquired it. The sacred belief of Republicans is that nobody should then be allowed any part of it. With manipulation, indeed, more can be acquired. For Republicans, greed has no limits; they never have enough. The would-be sharer is a pariah.

People are poor? Tough luck, serves them right for not being as smart as I am. Taxes? Outrageous! Why should I give up any of my money for the common good?

For Republicans there is apparently no common good, only one’s personal avariciousness.  Note how often rich companies, rich people stash their money out of the U.S. so they won’t have to pay taxes to the country that made them rich. Taxes could help everyone. But greed heads don’t want to benefit anybody but themselves.  My idea of a classic Republican--apart from that blustering, bullying blowhard ElRushbo —is Rupert Murdoch. Watch how he changes his nationality to fit his business…how he changes political sides for the same reason…how he censors his newspapers and broadcast interests when and wherever true free speech could cost him money.

JIM HAD INVITED ME to write for his new paper, the Montecito Journal when it began back in the early ‘90s.  I was paid nothing at first, then $30 a column. After ten years I asked for a raise. He told me with some indignation that he was already being generous as he could buy material better than mine from a syndicate for less money.  Not long afterwards he turned his thriving paper over to his son who, surprisingly, turned out to be an even bigger fan of George Bush than his father The bullying son dropped my column after accusing me of being a hated liberal because I occasionally quoted the Nation (among 100 other sources). He sought to avoid paying for the last two—but Jim (my ‘friend’ of 35 years) said not a word in my defense.

Maybe I shouldn’t focus so much on Jim, who, after all, is a decent and likeable human being, but he seemed to me to epitomize everything that I hate about Republicans whose creed seems to be that virtue and merit is due only to those who have proved themselves financially successful. Anybody lacking such aims deserved all they (don’t) get.

But in many ways he epitomized the socially-ambitious style of so many persons of moderate talent who thought and voted Republican because they were so focused on their own interests that “the poor” were beyond their ken. I have no idea how much, if anything, Jim ever gave to charity and I never asked him how he felt about Franklin Delano Roosevelt but I can imagine his knee-jerk response to the concept of helping the under-privileged. He was, of course, a fan of that dittohead who persistently reiterates that anybody who isn’t rich has only himself to blame.

For most of my early life it was a given that we’re all in this together, and rich and poor both had a stake in creating a smooth-running and reasonably equitable society. But greed has increased exponentially in the past few years (William Greider described, in the Nation, the New Right’s agenda as “rolling back the 20th Century”). Now we have a society that has become largely acquiescent about inequality. These are the times when rich people establish their bases in other countries rather than be taxed in their own…who spend more on lawyers showing them how to evade taxes than many people earn in a lifetime. The latest estimate of executives’ pay, reveals it to be 179 times what their workers earn—almost double what it was a decade ago.

The titles of two books that appeared last spring say it all: Free Lunch; How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and stick you with the bill) by David Cay Johnston and The Politics of Inequality by Michael J. Thompson. The latter quotes Thomas Jefferson who was already beginning to see a trend: “I hope we shall crush in its birth” he declared, ”the aristocracy of our money corporations which dare already to challenge our government”. Substitute ‘tycoons’ for corporations, and ‘dominate’ for challenge, and you have a picture for today.

Virtually every member of the “haves” is totally out of touch with the rest of us. Some Republicans, for example, airily dismiss $200,000 as “a middle class income”. Apparently they’re totally unaware that multi-millions of people live on about one quarter of that. They’re the same elitists who lap up the words of food critics telling them about “bargain meals” that are under $50.

Why do the Democrats always allow the Republicans to demonize and define them? It’s sometimes with the same old trick—accusing your opponents of what you are yourself guilty of (the Nixon defense) and also a case of negatively emphasizing words like ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ often enough that people begin to accept them as negative.

And if the high octane speaker is always blustering and almost screaming, in Limbaugh fashion, it cows and overwhelms the audience, a naturally tendency to feel that anybody with such forceful emphasis must be right.

More than one (GOP) party chairman suggested Republicans had “lost their way” but opinions ranged widely on the reasons, from the suggestion that their policies had been too moderate (“compassionate conservatism was a disaster” said one). Phyllis Schafly said she’d spent much of her life trying to tell people that the Republican party was not the party of the rich and big business (but) “there just seem to be some people who are trying to make it that way”. Does this woman hear what she’s saying?

Thomas Frank went a long way to explaining in What’s the Matter With Kansas? why less privileged people vote for people who represent the opposite of their apparent interests. Because of so-called cultural prejudices. In his recent book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Frank argues that, “Fantastic misgovernment of the kind that we have seen, is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals”. It’s the very essence of conservative rule, “by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society”.

The right wing made much of how their election opponents were, or were supported by, people who weren’t “real Americans”, citizens who lacked patriotism,  “the me first-country second” crowd. Of course they weren’t referring to their rich patrons who believed it to be real American to invest one’s money out of the country to avoid paying real America any taxes.

click here to read "The Pre-Election Blues"

 

After 50 years in this country, I consider myself fortunate to still be alive to applaud the election of Barack Obama. An intelligent man as president! Who could have imagined it after eight years of that illiterate moron-in-chief? Election night 2008 was exciting and watching the joy around the world brought tears to my eyes.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a new president benefited from a grace period—the first 100 days, were often mentioned—to adapt to the office, to start getting things in shape, giving some indication of how he was going to operate. But this is no longer true.

The day following the election, the likes of Fox’s Sean Hannity and the blustering, bullying Rush Limbaugh were still sloshing out their poison, unable as many remarked, to let go of their hate. In another era their actions might have been regarded as treasonable. And if the right wing tried to make similar accusations about the 2004 critics of Bush, we should emphasize that his election was an illegitimate one. Nobody could sensibly could say that about the Obama victory.

NYT columnist David Brooks said that all the time he’d been watching Obama there hadn’t been a moment when the candidate had publicly lost his self-control. “(Some) candidates are propelled by what psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them”.

The concept of change didn’t originate with Obama. He was the latest to see its huge potential, tapping into its resources, the Internet and e-mails. That this country has enormous capabilities of change I realized when I returned here after leaving during the Nixon years. The mood, vibrant and optimistic, was totally different.

And so, this is a time when everybody I know seems wildly upbeat about the future; their expectations limitless. Inevitably many will become disappointed that their specific priorities have not been met. Unrealistic assumptions should be tamped down. Give the guy a break. Almost every decent human being wishes him well. (And a year from now, forecast the cynics, thousands of former dissenters will be claiming to have voted for him).

“No president should come into office having to face the almost impossible burdens confronting Obama” wrote Santa Barbara columnist Barney Brantingham. “Presidents are CEOs but we hang on their words as though from the guru on the mount. They are our rock stars…If they’re ‘our’ guy we rebel against anyone saying a word against them. They are wise beyond wisdom. We are starry-eyed. But when they falter and show their human failings, we lapse into bitter recrimination. We insist on perfection”.

Michael Moore says he’s actually hoping that some of Obama’s campaign promises will be broken, especially the ones relating to foreign policy which, people say, look little different from the ones that this Superpower has implemented for several generations. What are America’s intentions? Waging war has been very good for business. Will the U.S. decide it still has the right, and duty to police the world? Will it reach out to make some friends again, even earn the world’s admiration for offering a new global vision?

Meanwhile there’s the idiotic occupation of Iraq to deal with; the endless Palestine dilemma and the growing Afghanistan/Pakistan thing. Maybe we should just leave the situations to resolve themselves. We always realized that the Russians had to quit. The whole region is the Great Problem, or whatever history used to call it. Let’s just get out.

Countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe, both rank high as humanitarian priorities but there’s nearby Cuba and Haiti which could be dealt with immediately. A volunteer Peace Corps of some kind could do wonders for both. And how about this for a crazy idea—financing Cuban medical teams and other volunteers to go and help Haiti?

Leaving aside the argument of what values America stands for, the essence of what it really is, we note that Obama is no miracle man, just a brilliant and imaginative politician, perhaps no better, nor worse than yourself. Neither he, nor anyone else, could survive in the government of this country, or any other, without playing efficiently the kind of game that politicians play. And politics by its very nature is a flawed system, albeit the only one we’ve got.

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AFTERWORD

Now I have reached the end of my personal history, not having evoked interest from publishers or agents, Manhattan Memories must necessarily be of a transitory nature. It has cast me several thousand dollars to prepare and this post will soon disappear although maybe CDs will be available.

There will doubtless be people who resent my portrait of them, but I have written only with honesty, attempting to present both the good and bad parts of my life as accurately as I can remember.

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