The Lost City
This afternoon I took the below photo of public art in downtown San Francisco. A toddler with a gun. What's it mean? Who knows? What's the city mean these days? Who the hell knows.
I ate at a restaurant on Market Street. The owner said that Mayor London Breed has to go. His customers hurry home as soon as night falls. His employees are afraid to walk home in the dark. Business is still suffering.
Breed doesn't have a clue how to revive this once great city.
After lunch, I ventured deeper downtown. The rush-hour streets, crowded with people before the pandemic, are still nearly empty. Those stores that aren't boarded up have few customers or none at all. The tourists piling out of their car in front of a hotel looked dazed and confused: why is there nobody here?
But San Francisco is not in a "doom loop," insists the city's top economist. Tell it to the downtown retailers that have fled, the office building landlords that report less than 50 percent occupancy, or the tech conference organizers that have canceled their San Francisco gatherings and moved them to other cities.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, the other face of power in San Francisco, was also declared a failure this week by none other than the San Francisco Standard, the billionaire-owned news startup that has bemoaned the city's decline. According to the Standard, during her first year in office, law-and-order Jenkins has convicted fewer drug dealers than Chesa Boudin, the progressive DA she ousted, during his final year in office. Meanwhile, fentanyl overdose deaths are soaring to a record high. So much for her tough-on-crime approach.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. San Francisco desperately needs new leadership.
London Breed is up for reelection next year. Who will take her on? Who will pull the sword from the stone? Who will bring back the sunshine to our everlasting gloom?
His Master’s Voice
That was the old advertising slogan of RCA, showing a dog listening attentively to his owner's voice on a gramophone. It's also the phrase that best describes the obedient way that staff journalists do their corporate owners' bidding. Even if they're not always aware of it -- even when they are convinced they are speaking their own minds -- reporters (some of the most timid conformists in the world, despite their hard-nosed reputations) tailor their articles to fit the prevailing "wisdom" of their editors and publishers.
I know this butt-licking, wolfpack behavior because I worked for years in newsrooms and magazine offices.
Journalists very seldom stick out their necks, because they're deathly afraid (for good reason) that they'll be lopped off. Look at the San Jose Mercury's Gary Webb. Look at the New York Times' Chris Hedges. Look at Julian Assange, whose courageous whistleblowing reports on U.S. war crimes were used by the Times and other leading media outlets.
Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor of the Washington Post, was President Kennedy's best friend in the Washington press corps. Bradlee and his wife Tony were frequent social guests at the Kennedy White House. The Bradlees visited the Kennedy family at Wexford, their Virginia horse country estate, on a weekend shortly before JFK was assassinated in Dallas. HBO made a documentary about the special friendship between Bradlee and Kennedy. Bradlee wrote a book about their relationship, Conversations with Kennedy.
If anyone could have solved the Kennedy assassination, the epic crime against U.S. democracy that still bedevils the nation, it was Ben Bradlee and his investigative team at the Washington Post.
Bradlee didn't devote these news resources to the Kennedy case. Instead, his newspaper belittled those brave citizens who tried.
In the 1970s, Bradlee and the Post could've followed up their Watergate enterprise by pursuing the revelations dug up by former journalist Gaeton Fonzi and other investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- which concluded there was indeed a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Instead, the Post and the New York Times demeaned the Congressional committee's work and editorialized that the panel had spent too much of the public's time and money to solve a crime and cover-up that began the process of eroding the public's trust in authority.
I interviewed Bradlee for my 2007 book about John and Robert Kennedy, Brothers. At the time, he still occupied a small office at the Post, as a respected "emeritus" figure. I asked Bradlee directly why his newspaper failed to break the Kennedy case. He was honest with me, I'll grant him that. Because he had been close friends with Kennedy, the Post's investigative zeal would have been portrayed as personal bias, Bradlee told me. Investigating the JFK assassination would've damaged his career, he said. As I said, at least Ben Bradlee was honest.
(Don Hewitt, the founder of 60 Minutes, was equally frustrating during my interview with him. Like everyone who looked into the case, Hewitt -- who produced the famous TV debates between presidential candidates Kennedy and Nixon -- said he concluded the CIA and the Mafia were involved, but he claimed his reporters could never nail it down.)
President Biden, a captive of the national security state, just delayed (again!) the Congressionally-mandated release of the JFK documents still kept secret by the CIA and other federal agencies.
The American people are STILL being treated like children by the federal government. This is our history, and we have a right to it.
But that's not why I'm bringing up this dark crime yet again.
In the past few days, my friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been targeted by ex-Salon staffers Joan Walsh, Rebecca Traister and Michelle Goldberg. I won't repeat the smears and distortions directed at Kennedy, because he's the daily target of a corporate media pile-on, and you've heard it before. I know that some of you share these opinions.
But for a moment put aside RFK Jr.’s comments about Big Pharma, vaccine policy, the over-medicating of America, and our poor public health. I have my opinions about these issues, but like most of you I'm not a medical expert.
But I do know a lot about the country's political agonies and the dangerous rise of the national security state. And I support RFK Jr.'s run for president because he alone is making a major issue of the corporate stranglehold on our country (including our regulatory agencies) and the disastrous U.S. addiction to "forever wars" which are destroying our democracy and benefit only the military-industrial complex.
Yes, writers Traister and Goldberg now work for the corporate media -- which we at Salon once tilted against. (Traister's New York magazine employer -- along with the rest of Vox Media -- was bought earlier this year by the Penske Media Corporation, whose vacuuming up of media properties like Rolling Stone was financed by investments from the Saudi royalty and hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb, who has used former CIA agents to train his staff. Penske Media properties are especially vehement opponents of the RFK Jr. campaign.)
But there is still a Salon gene at work in these two journalists. I disagree strongly with their views about Bobby Kennedy Jr. -- and with those of their current employers -- but they both conducted thoughtful interviews with me and quoted me accurately.
Ever since the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the New York Times has lied and evaded the truth. For over six decades, the "newspaper of record" has embraced the increasingly threadbare conclusion that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That strategic disinformation has metastasized over the years, and led to the age of "fake news" that haunts us today. But the Times and the rest of the media elite refuse to acknowledge this and other disturbing truths about the country.
No, the RFK Jr. campaign is not my "spiritual" cause, as Goldberg suggests. The effort to speak truth to power is a noble political struggle. It can, at long last, put our country on the right track.
Goldberg did this -- perhaps haltingly, perhaps grudgingly -- when she quoted me accurately. Finally, these words appeared in the New York Times:
"For Talbot, a friend of Kennedy and the author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, that truth is that the American government killed JFK and RFK, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared JFK's assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart.' 'It's the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that's stinking up our house of democracy.' Being honest about it, he believes, 'would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who's willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.'"
Ben Bradlee (far left), with his wife Tony and JFK at the Kennedy family estate in Virginia
Submerged
I was making a list in my head of the Top TV Shows of the last five years (because that’s what guys do). I thought of The Bear (because I’m watching the second season now), Succession, C. B. Strike, Gentleman Jack, Detectorists, W1A, White Lotus, Mrs. Maisel (the final season), Slow Horses, Veep, The Crown (the first two seasons), Babylon Berlin… then my mind jumped to other subjects. Like the recent wedding party that a friend told me about. All the young people there – most of whom were straight – danced only with someone of their own sex. Weird and sad. In MY day, we weren’t afraid to dance with everyone, sometimes in groups, sometimes in, yes, heterosexual couples.
There’s a theme here, I think.
We’re afraid to feel or to express our emotions. None of the best-written, best-acted TV shows I’ve named are deeply political. Except maybe Babylon Berlin. Somehow, that’s not allowed. But what’s equally disturbing, none of the shows I’ve named are deeply moving. Yes, they’re cleverly done, especially the British ones (which tend to dominate). But they don’t shake you profoundly.
Some recent movies have. The closing scenes of The Last Black Man in San Francisco moved me to tears. (I’m not saying that because my son made the movie.)
C. B. Strike, by contrast, is smart entertainment. But I’m so tired of the detective who is too emotionally damaged to show his true feelings. What a worn-out cliché that’s become. Tom Burke is a superb actor. But, for god’s sake, at long last kiss Holliday Grainger! J. K. Rowland, the author of the novels on which the TV series is based, is supposed to be all about REAL men and women. So let her lead characters act that way.
Yes, the British are not good at being expressive. But it’s become cool throughout the entertainment industry --- maybe throughout the world – for people to be shut down. In Hollywood, you can only show your true passion when you’re killing someone. It’s more in vogue there to blow someone away, instead of blowing them.
I’m for feeling. I’m for fucking. Call me old-fashioned.
Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger in C. B. Strike
A Brief Shining Moment
Sometimes, most of the time, the world is too much with us. We yell and shout, but we have no real power to change the course of events. Then suddenly history speeds up, with no warning, and we do, for awhile. And so it goes.
Then there are Sundays like this, when I retreat from the sound and fury.
When I was a kid, I often was swept along with my family as my father acted in touring versions of plays like Camelot, My Fair Lady, and The Odd Couple. I watched endless rehearsals, I knew the musicals' songs by heart, I hung out with the other kids of cast members and the young chorus boys and girls. I was a backstage brat, at least during those endless summers.
When the 1967 film version of Camelot was released, I regarded it with teenage disdain. I was sick of the play and the music and I had no interest in the movie, even though it starred two of my favorite actors, Ricard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave.
Even then, I also thought there was something kitschy about the way Jacqueline Kennedy and the media had turned her dead husband's presidency into a Camelot-like myth. ("I know, I know, I know," Jackie dismissed satirist Mort Sahl when she encountered him on a upper Manhattan street in the 1960s. Sahl had sacrificed his once-lucrative show business career to volunteer for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in a futile effort to bring JFK's powerful killers to justice.)
But now, enough time has gone by. I'm curious about Camelot. I'm going to watch the old movie. That's what Sundays are for.
Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Harris in Camelot
Fear Factor
What is Joe Biden so afraid of? Why is Dr. Peter Hotez, the face of the Covid establishment, also running from a debate with Robert Kennedy Jr.? Sadly, the Democratic Party has become a bastion of endless war, neocon-think and, yes, censorship.
Joe Rogan, the popular host who himself has been the target of liberal censorship, offered Hotez (a frequent guest on his show) $100,000, to be donated to the charity of the good doctor's choice. Elon Musk upped the Hotez offer to $1 million. As of this writing, Hotez is still dodging the debate, with the liberal media urging him to stay mum.
While the liberal media loudly cheer Hotez's decision to duck a debate with RFK Jr. about Covid policy, Glenn Greenwald rightly asks why these "journalists" have tried to shut up Kennedy and shut down vital discussions in this country.
This is what Greenwald had to say today on Rumble about RFK Jr.'s liberal censors:
"One would think that a debate between a highly informed environmental lawyer who spent decades suing corporate polluters and health agencies — RFK Jr. — and one of the most influential and beloved COVID preachers in liberal media, Professor Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., would be of great value for the country. It would be. Yet immediately people who call themselves journalists – those who should most seek debate on the most consequential policy debates – instead intervened and began demanding that Hotez not lower himself to debating RFK. They published articles and cable monologues on why Hotez should not put himself in a position where his views would face critical scrutiny and accountability, even though those views have long been intended to influence American public opinion and foreign policy.
"Watching journalists try to stop debates is like watching them become the leading advocates for censorship, which, in turn, is like watching a cardiologist extol the virtues of cigarette smoking. It is completely contrary to the values that are supposed to define journalism. Yet it is as unsurprising as it is repugnant to watch these employees of media corporations do exactly that."
Amen. Shame on the liberal censors. Shame on those who call themselves "journalists."
Dr. Peter Hotez
War as Weather
It's just always there. Safely and patriotically packaged, of course. It plays, in the background, on the news. It entertains us in movies and video games. It takes a big bite of our taxes. But we never seem to complain about the weaponry or the waste.
Now a new book is forcing us to see. The "shock and awe" that burns and maims and kills real people. The mayhem carried out every day in our name.
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine should be read by every American citizen. Author Norman Solomon forces us to confront what our bombs and missiles and bullets do to fellow men, women and children.
As President Kennedy put it 60 years ago, in an incredible gesture of empathy with the "enemy," "We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we're all mortal."
At one point in the book, Solomon visits Daniel Ellsberg -- who we've been memorializing this week. On his deck overlooking the San Francisco Bay, the long-time peace activist had this sobering thing to say:
"It's fair to say that the public doesn't show any effective concern for the number of people we kill in these wars. At most, they are concerned about American casualties, especially if they're too many."
What is concealed from Americans Ellsberg went on, "is that they are citizens of an empire, they are in the core of an empire that feels itself as having the right to determine who governs other countries, and if we don't approve of them because of their effect on corporate interests, or their refusal to give us bases, or (oil) pipelines we need, we feel absolutely right and capable of removing them, of regime change."
Ellsberg added, "Virtually every president tells us, or reassures us, that we are a very peace-loving people, very slow to go to war... That of course does go against the fact that we've been at war almost continuously."
Norman Solomon
My City Should Not Be Just a Shooting Gallery
San Francisco, like many cities and towns across America, has become a shooting gallery. Last week it was my Bernal Heights neighborhood's turn. While it was still light, two men fired some 20 shots at each other, then got in cars and sped off. Bullets flew everywhere. There were still kids in the playground just feet away. The next day, an elderly neighbor was vacuuming out the shattered glass from her car windows. She showed me the bullet holes in her car.
The shootout followed closely behind a drive-by shooting into a crowd partying outside a nearby skateboard store. Our sons used to hang out at that store.
Over the holiday weekend, the occupants of two cars engaged in a mile-long shootout along the Embarcadero that ended at Fisherman's Wharf, a bustling tourist spot.
San Francisco has been ruled by a mayor and a district attorney and a police chief who got rid of progressive DA Chesa Boudin and promoted vocal law-and-order policies. How's that working out for us? Violent crime in the city is up "only" 4 percent so far this year. Only. That comes as scant reassurance when your neighborhood park is turned into a crime scene.
I will keep saying it until the voters cast her out next year. Mayor London Breed is an utter failure. She has no vision, no leadership for this once great, now terribly wounded city.
Breed talks tough on drug dealing in the streets and closes down the safe-use drug centers. Fentanyl overdoses in San Francisco have spiked this year. She vows to throw more cops at social problems, and the dystopia grows even worse.
Downtown San Francisco is a ghost town. Every week brings new announcements of store closings, including former linchpins of the district like Nordstrom's department store. Breed throws up her hands. Saving downtown is not in her job description.
She's good at thinking small. But San Francisco needs big solutions.
Breed was installed at City Hall by tech billionaires like Ron Conway. He and his wealthy cronies were supposed to make San Francisco a tech haven, a shining city of global capitalism on a hill. Instead, they looted and wrecked the place -- evicting thousands and exploding the wealth gap -- and then deserted it during the pandemic.
They ruined it. But we own it. We still live in what's left of San Francisco.
Now the AI creators are trickling back to San Francisco. Great. Just what we need -- even more robotic techies who live in an artificial world.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 40 years. I knew what it was like when it was affordable, when it was diverse, when artists and writers and teachers and social workers and nurses and waiters and shop keepers could live and work here. When the city had LIFE -- yes, the downtown, too.
My wife Camille and I used to throw big parties in our North Beach apartment (3 bedrooms, plus a deck that overlooked the Bay: $800/month). Poets and painters and musicians and filmmakers and photographers and fashion designers and magazine freelancers would crowd into our rooms. They're nearly all gone now -- pushed out by a city that changed drearily on them.
Before I die, I want to make San Francisco fun — and safe — again. To make it matter.
My neighborhood crime scene
The Most Dangerous Man in America
There have been lots of tributes to the late Pentagon Papers whistleblower and truth activist Daniel Ellsberg, as there should. Dan was a heroic and exemplary man. I had the opportunity to interview Dan and to hang out with him -- mostly through his close friendship with my own friend and wise man Peter Dale Scott. I found Dan open-hearted and easy to talk with -- but he was not warm and cuddly. He had a sharp intellect, and when I knew him, he aimed it at those in power, the (mostly) men he had worked with in the national security establishment.
Dan, who was a military adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was bluntly honest about the treasonous passions in uniformed circles against President Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. When I interviewed him for my 2007 book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Ellsberg told me: "There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup -- I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous."
Dan thought long and hard about signing his name to a powerful public letter that Adam Walinsky, a close aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and I wrote and unveiled in January 2019. The public statement declared that John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X -- the four leaders whose assassinations tragically changed the course of American history in the 1960s -- were victims of the national security state. The letter called on Congress to force the CIA and other security agencies to abide by the 1992 JFK Act and release all relevant documents and to open a new assassinations inquest by an independent commission modeled on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
The public letter was signed by an impressive list of prominent public figures, including family members and close advisors of the Kennedy brothers, King and Malcolm X ; Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the surgeons who worked on the mortally wounded President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital and saw with his own expert eyes that he had been shot from the front and back; and G. Robert Blakey, the former chief counsel for the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations, who for a long time had pinned the JFK assassination solely on organized crime. (Mob figures like Jack Ruby did play important support roles in the crime, under the direction of their CIA handlers.)
The public letter and its noteworthy signatories was a big news event. Only the Washington Post, among major news outlets, covered it.
Soon the letter disappeared into the dark void where all convulsive revelations about our violent country are buried.
You should read the public letter and all those who signed it. As David Crosby, one of the letter signers, told the audience at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival between songs, You should know the truth as American citizens.
As I said, Dan Ellsberg thought long and hard about signing his name to the letter about the violent deaths of the Kennedys, King and Malcolm X. He knew painfully well what those assassinations had done to the heart and soul of his country. But he also knew how important his name had become, and how it would add to the gravity of the topic, which the corporate media still hides from.
But Dan Ellsberg -- who for years had read and listened to esteemed Kennedy researchers like his friend Peter Dale Scott -- in the end told the truth. Dan told me that I could add his name to the letter.
To the end, Daniel Ellsberg stood for the truth, no matter what.
Daniel Ellsberg
Reader Beware
Once upon a time, Rolling Stone was the voice of its generation. Sure, founder Jann Wenner got lots of shit from radicals who thought he had sold out. He did. He became a millionaire off the counterculture's music. But Wenner was also kind of one of us. In the early years, Rolling Stone covered traumatic events like the violent Altamont concert, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and Watergate, as well as the deep thoughts of musical icons like John Lennon and Bob Dylan and Pete Townshend. Wenner published writers like Hunter Thompson, Joe Eszterhas, Richard Goodwin and Tom Hayden. He made photographer Annie Leibovitz a star. Rolling Stone, for all its creeping commercialism, was important.
That’s why I was honored when Jann Wenner agreed to serve on my board at Salon. By then, he had moved RS to New York, but Salon had the feisty, early spirit of the San Francisco-era Rolling Stone.
One afternoon in the early 2000s, I was meeting with Wenner in his sunny New York office on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, when he wheeled around to the computer on his desk and said, “I’ve got to come up with a headline for this article by Bobby Kennedy.” RFK Jr. – one of the country’s leading environmental lawyers at the time – had written a scathing essay for the magazine about how polluters and other corporations had captured Washington’s regulatory system, the network of federal agencies that are supposed to protect the American worker and consumer.
“Call it ‘Crimes Against Nature,’” I suggested. And that became not only the title of Kennedy’s story, but also his 2005 book.
As I said, Rolling Stone used to be important. But no more. In 2017, an aging Wenner finally cashed out and sold his media creation to Jay Penske, son of billionaire Roger Penske, the former racecar driver who built a transportation empire. The young Penske added Rolling Stone to his fledgling media empire – formerly prosperous brands that were now distressed, like Variety, Hollywood Reporter and even the once alternative SXSW festival in Austin. The overnight media mogul was suddenly hailed as “the Rupert Murdoch of the entertainment world.”
Did Jay Penske turn to his rich daddy to crown himself king of the entertainment media? No, Penske went to hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb, a financial backer of the charter school movement, conservative Democrats like New York Mayor Eric Adams and some Republican politicians too. In other words, public officials who advance Loeb’s corporatist agenda.
Penske also took blood money from Saudi Arabia’s royalty.
That’s how he built a media empire that includes Rolling Stone.
Instead of advancing alternative viewpoints, Penske has given the CIA a platform at the annual SXSW conference to recruit young techies and hungry artists.
That’s what the Rupert Murdoch of entertainment media stands for.
And instead of featuring Robert Kennedy Jr. as a regular contributor, as Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone used to, Penske now uses the magazine to smear RFK Jr.
As for Salon, the online publication I founded in 1995, it too has fallen into sketchy hands. Salon now regularly attacks RFK Jr. when in my day we would’ve welcomed his presidential candidacy as one of the most important political insurgencies in many years. For the record, I don’t even know who owns Salon at this point. I never held the financial reins of the publication and I certainly didn’t profit handsomely from its sale as Wenner did with Rolling Stone.
RFK Jr. is reportedly using podcasts as his alternative media platform. Rising quicky in the polls to some 20% of Democratic voters, and boasting a favorability rating that beats Biden and Trump, whatever media strategy he’s pursuing seems to be working.
Whatever it is, Kennedy realizes that publications like Rolling Stone and Salon are no longer part of the solution – they’re part of the problem.
PS CIA officials did kill JFK. Somebody break it gently to Rolling Stone.
Entertainment media mogul Jay Penske
Political Martyrs
The U.S. government has now targeted Donald Trump as a dangerous national security threat. Washington has also concluded that Julian Assange, who is now close to being extradited to this country, is an even bigger threat to our security. The repellent Espionage Act is being invoked against both men.
The first man I regard as a demagogue and buffoon who hijacked this country's already tattered democracy, and instead of draining the Washington swamp, made it even more foul. The second man I regard as a human rights hero who has been victimized by a national security colossus that now reigns supreme (with the corporate media's collusion), surveilling all of us and managing dissent.
Both men are now political martyrs.
This essay in the New York Times convincingly argues that Trump will emerge politically stronger after his indictment on national security charges, just like he jumped in the polls after the New York district attorney indicted him for paying hush money to a porn actress.
Trump was actually sinking in the polls until the prosecutors got into the act. So, as this essay points out, Trump-haters have no reason to gloat about his legal travails, which he and his supporters believe (with some cause) is political persecution.
Trump should be tried by the voters, not by the courts. Is he "above the law." Yes, in our bitterly divided country, he should be. There are many people deemed too big to prosecute. Trump, as much I loath him, is one of those.
Assange, by contrast, is a genuine martyr. A man who had the courage to reveal the dark side of the U.S. empire -- what our weapons do to people every day somewhere on the globe. Norman Solomon calls this "War Made Invisible" -- the title of his excellent new book, which I'll have more to say about. Our taxes make this invisible war possible -- so does our silence.
Assange is Australian. Yet he's being dragged into the frightening U.S. criminal justice system by our long imperial reach. Will the U.S. media establishment -- which has long played a propagandistic role when it comes to "national security" -- allow this direct attack on its journalistic freedom to go forward? Maybe American journalists will finally do the right thing.
Maybe we all will.
Julian Assange, martyr
All the News Fit to Print
The New York Times likes to get on its high horse about the recent wave of book banning in America. And it IS outrageous that classic books like Toni Morrison's Beloved, Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, and Art Spiegelman's Maus -- as well as many books about black empowerment, women's rights and LGBTQ liberation -- have been banned by school officials and other censors. But the growing reign of liberal PC orthodoxy in the media and publishing industries is also a major problem. The NYT -- heal thyself.
As I've pointed out before, one of the worst liberal censors at the Times is columnist Pamela Paul, who regularly inveighs against the "woke" clampdown. But when Paul was the editor of the NYT Sunday Book Review, she regularly ghosted books that were deemed too radical or outside of the newspaper of record's safe political margins. Among the books that Paul and the Times have refused to even acknowledge are those by authors Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and yours truly.
Similarly, the NYT and the liberal corporate media in general won't offer a platform to critique the fundamental tenets of War Inc. -- the national security regime that produces constant wars and obscene profits for the military-industrial complex. The Pentagon was the only financial beneficiary of the recent debt agreement, which cuts funding for poverty programs and other essential domestic priorities. To keep War Inc. bloated and happy, the U.S. has chosen to crush what's left of the middle class with huge debts.
War and peace have not been seriously debated in this country since the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the NYT rattles its sabers about Ukraine, Taiwan and other hot spots. The Democrats have become the war party. And MSNBC and CNN feature a parade of national security talking heads each night.
It's past time to debate the militarization of America. And it's past time for the New York Times and other corporate media gatekeepers to air voices that they themselves have marginalized.
Oh, fuck it -- as Robert F. Kennedy said to his Senate staff after another frustrating White House meeting with President Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam, "Let's go start a country of our own."
PS Speaking of corporate media cluelessness, let's hear it for the Netflix shareholders who just voted to reject the grotesque $40 million annual compensation package for CEO Ted Sarandos. Sarandos is trying to award himself a huge raise at the same time Writers Guild members are striking for a total of about $20 million more than Netflix wants to pay Sarandos each year.
And what is Sarandos being rewarded so lavishly for? Netflix subscribers are fleeing the streaming giant, the service offers a flood of pabulum, and now the badly treated writers are finally crying "Enough"!
There is something seriously out of whack in corporate America.
Dangerous Days
"These are dangerous days/
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.../
Remember what I told you/
If they hated me they will hate you"
-- Sinead O'Connor "Black Boys on Mopeds"
Last Friday, I had the honor of being interviewed on-camera by TCM's Noir Alley host Eddie Muller for his independent documentary on the late blacklisted filmmaker Abraham Polonsky.
I interviewed Abe in the late 1970s, along with my co-author Barbara Zheutlin, for our book on Hollywood dissidents, Creative Differences. Polonsky was one of my favorite people in my life -- wry, funny, keenly observant and whip-smart. It was a joy to learn about the Communist Party in Hollywood from him -- especially for two New Left radicals like Barbara and I, who were too quick to dismiss the experience and wisdom of our political elders.
In any case, toward the end of Eddie's interview with me, he asked whether we might endure another repressive spasm like the blacklist period -- the Cold War era when thousands of radicals and liberals were purged not just from Hollywood (with disastrous results for the quality of movies in the 1950s), but from schools and universities, government agencies, labor unions and elsewhere. In fact, the United States remains the fucked-up country it is -- with a weak progressive political bloc and labor movement -- largely because of the lingering legacy of this "scoundrel time."
I told Eddie that a new wave of repression is already sweeping across our country -- mainly from the right, but also from the left. Restrictions on voting rights, abortion bans, book censorship, the cancellation of public figures for saying controversial things.
These are dangerous times indeed -- particularly for those who have the courage of their convictions.
Abe Polonsky, who wrote the film classic Body and Soul and co-wrote and directed the even darker film on the brutal capitalist ethic, Force of Evil, could've sat out the blacklist with his family in the south of France, where was he was happily writing novels. But, after discussing it with his wife Sylvia, he came home to face his inquisitors -- he refused to name names, refused to grovel before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he was immediately blacklisted, as expected.
A rightwing congressman called Polonsky "the most dangerous man in America." "I was," Abe told us with a twinkle in his eye. "But only to myself."
Watch Abe's movies -- including the hard-hitting film he wrote under the table during the blacklist for Harry Belafonte, Odds Against Tomorrow.
See why I say that the outcasts, troublemakers and freaks create all the real beauty in the world.
John Garfield — also a Hollywood blacklist victim — in Polonsky’s Force of Evil
Hello, I Must Be Going
I’ve been gone for a while. Did you miss me? I was on a deadline, writing a story for a magazine, a piece of historical fiction. (A CIA critic called The Devil’s Chessboard, my book about the nefarious spy agency, a splendid work of fiction, bless him.) The magazine paid me good money for my creative work. Squarespace does not. Guess who comes first? Like you, I have bills to pay.
This brings up the current Writers Guild of America strike. I don’t belong to the entertainment union, but I feel I have a dog in this fight, as a professional writer. Not just because my father, Lyle Talbot, was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild. Then, too, the studios tried to crush the union and took vengeful measures against the labor activists. I was glad to hear that actors like Maya Rudolph and Jeff Bridges suspended production of their hit series, in solidarity with the writers’ union. The Hollywood unit of the Teamsters has also sometimes honored the WGA picket lines.
Among the goals of the striking writers is better-crafted movies and TV shows. And that’s something that all of us entertainment consumers can get behind. Streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and Apple don’t give a damn about creativity. If they could replace the writers with robots to churn out their increasingly banal and formulaic “entertainment,” they gladly would. Big Tech is taking over Hollywood, and let me tell you from the wasteland of San Francisco, it won’t be pretty if the forces of profits and “progress” defeat the humanoids, I mean the writers.
I was thinking about the plight of the Hollywood writers a lot this weekend, because two well-written TV shows I watch came to an end, Succession and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We know a lot about the talented actors who play the leads in those shows, but we know little or nothing about the writers who dream up their lines and made the shows so compelling in their very different ways. (Btw, the Succession finale got all the ink, but I found this last season of Mrs. Maisel surprisingly funny -- and bittersweet – including the final episode.)
So, let’s hear it for the unsung heroes, the writers. Without their imagination, our lives would be dreary.
Speaking of which, didn’t you miss me?
Alex Borstein (left) and Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Wanted: A Mayor Who Can Fix San Francisco
Somebody tell the national (and local) media: San Francisco has not been governed by a progressive administration since Mayor Art Agnos was ousted by Chauncey Gardner -- I mean ex-Police Chief Frank Jordan and his handlers – in 1992. Since Agnos, San Francisco has been cursed with a long line of corporate Democrats – leaders who love the gays and marijuana but mostly serve business interests. But our current mayor, London Breed, who has ruled City Hall since 2017, is the worst. At least Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom were personalities. At least Ed Lee was a nice guy – way over his head, but he meant well. Breed, on the other hand, is a nasty piece of work. But worse than that, she’s been a complete failure as mayor.
San Francisco is a fucking mess, as its residents know all too well – and, as I told billionaire tech investor and power broker Ron Conway last fall during a public forum, that’s on him and the politicians he and his wealthy clique have installed in office, starting with Mayor Breed. In a recent survey, SF residents gave local government its lowest rating in over 20 years.
Downtown San Francisco is a boarded-up ghost town, with Nordstrom’s -- the anchor department store in the neighborhood -- being the latest to announce its departure. The homeless crisis is out of control and has tanked the once booming tourist trade. The grotesque wealth gap in the city has reached Third World proportions. There is no there there anymore in this once vital city, no sense of where we’re heading, only downwards.
Mayor Breed has no vision, no sense of how to lead or inspire people. She looks out only for herself and her loyal circle. Like her clueless predecessor, Ed Lee, she put all her eggs in the Big Tech basket, hoping that Twitter and the other selfish companies would make SF a city of the future. Now, the tech industry is fleeing SF, after laying waste to the city, making it less affordable, evicting thousands of residents and driving out other once-thriving businesses.
Good work, Conway and Breed!
But wait… Supervisor Ahsha Safai has announced he will run against Mayor Breed next year! Great, just what San Francisco needs – a challenge from the right... or somewhere. Safai, who defeated progressive John Avalos to become a supervisor, was once a close ally of Breed. The same tech and real estate interests behind her helped elect Safai. He advocated the same unaffordable housing strategy she supported – until he didn’t. Now he’s kind of progressive, I guess. Hey, he’s whatever you want him to be!
What San Francisco really needs at long last is a truly progressive Mr. or Ms. (or none of the above) Fix-It, somebody who has a strong vision for how to revive this broken city and can get the key groups and communities to share it and work for it. Fortunately, we don’t have to look too far for a leader who can do this. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin is termed out of office next year. He should challenge London Breed. He knows how to fix this city. He can get buy-in from its varied constituencies. He has a colorful, commanding personality and has seemed to conquer his demons. He’s just what San Francisco needs now.
If Peskin decides not to run, then progressive Supervisors Dean Preston OR Hillary Ronen should jump into the race. Each of them knows how to inspire people, can lead us forward.
I’d work hard for a Peskin, Preston or Ronen campaign. We need to defeat Breed and Conway. We need to get this beautiful city back on its feet.
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin
Where Have You Gone, Sinead O’Connor?
Where Have You Gone, Sinead O'Connor? I just stumbled on last year's powerful documentary, Nothing Compares, about the surprising rise and sudden fall of Irish singer Sinead O'Connor. I was always a fan of her music, but was only vaguely aware of the controversies that began to swirl madly around her when she publicly questioned blind American patriotism during the Gulf War and later very publicly -- and ahead of her time -- ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live to protest the Catholic Church coverup of priests' sexual assaults on children. Sinead could have learned from John Lennon how the angry U.S. media beast can quickly tear apart the most beloved, but outspoken, pop stars.
Anyway, I urge you all to watch this riveting movie (now streaming on Showtime), particularly if you're a fan of Sinead O'Connor's music. She was -- and is -- a fearless Irish woman, the saints preserve her. Here's a snippet of what she has to say today, looking back at the the furor around her:
"They all thought I should be made a mockery of and I'd thrown my career down the drain. I never set out to be a pop star, so I never threw away a career I wanted. I didn't regret it -- it was the proudest thing I'd ever done as an artist.
"They broke my heart and tried to kill me. But I didn't die. They tried to bury me. They didn't realize I was a seed."
The Vitriol of the Democratic Establishment
The New York Times and Washington Post ran multiple stories a day, some disguised as objective news articles, against Senator Bernie Sanders when the newspapers feared Bernie would win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. Back in 1984 and 1988, it was civil rights leader Jesse Jackson who drew the corporate liberal establishment's wrath when he challenged former Vice President Walter Mondale and later Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for the Democratic nomination. The mainstream media smeared Jackson every way they knew how (occasionally with his unwitting help).
In 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy came out against the Vietnam War and threw down the gantlet against a sitting president in his own party, RFK was pilloried by the New York Times and the rest of the press as a political traitor and worse.
Now it's RFK Jr.'s turn.
No, Bobby is not "anti-vax." As he told me, he vaccinated himself and his kids against many diseases. But he is an opponent of Big Pharma, the industry that took Covid tax dollars and profiteered from the world's suffering, like it generally does. He is an opponent of the chemical industry, whose products have sickened and killed countless people. He is an opponent of the military-industrial complex, another industry that has grown as fat as a tick off the blood of the world -- namely the wars that have become a permanent feature of the U.S. empire. He is an opponent of the banks that are too big to fail, wondering why the federal government can't show as much generosity to our working people as it does to wealthy depositors and investors.
In other words, RFK Jr. is out of the political margins in this heavily policed, surveilled country -- and that makes him a political target.
That much is predictable. What is head-scratching is when progressive journalists distort and disparage RFK Jr. and his supporters.
The latest example of this unhinged hostility comes from David Masciotra, a Facebook friend of mine, but a friend who lacked the courage or civility to communicate with me before he published his screed against RFK Jr. backers like me in the New Republic.
Masciotra wants to portray the Kennedy campaign as a suicide bomb mission against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. But Kennedy -- whose very name is synonymous with the Democratic Party -- chose to run not as an independent but as a Democratic candidate in the party's primaries. This is the season when clashing views about the country SHOULD be aired. It's only the Democratic establishment that wants us all to fall in line now and keep whatever misgivings we have about the Biden-Harris reelection ticket to ourselves.
But, as too many of us fear, it is the creaky and unpopular Biden-Harris ticket that is the real suicide pact. Many of us Democratic voters fear that 82-year-old Joe (who his handlers didn't even trust to deliver a live campaign kickoff speech) will deliver the country to Trump or DeSantis in 2024, a truly terrifying prospect.
Should another progressive challenger to Biden have emerged from the Democratic bench? Of course! Bobby was probably hoping they would, so he wouldn't have to run. But no elected official had his courage. He deserves our admiration for standing up when no one else would.
One other comment about Masciotra. He authored a very favorable book -- some would say fawning -- about Jesse Jackson, I AM Somebody. Yes, THAT Jesse Jackson. The one who was widely vilified in his day for being a Democratic Party disruptor.
Masciotra chose to publish his screed in the New Republic, a magazine that's the voice of the Democratic establishment. Magazine owner Win McCormack, who inherited a fortune and went to Richie-Rich prep school Andover and then Harvard, has regularly donated to establishment Democratic candidates.. McCormack briefly hired the independent-thinking Chris Lehmann to edit the magazine, but quickly replaced him with the hack Michael Tomasky. NR now reads predictably and boringly like a house organ, Democrats-good- Republicans-bad. I still subscribe to the magazine (I guess I'm a creature of habit when it comes to periodicals), but I quickly flip through its party-line pages.
New Republic would never run the 2020 article that Masciotra wrote for Salon, praising the Bob Dylan song "Murder Most Foul," questioning the official line on the JFK assassination and even quoting me. That Masciotra article was too far out of the political margins, too skeptical of authority, for NR.
Speaking of Salon, didn't it recently run another hysterical anti-RFK Jr. article? I guess. I don't read the daily I founded anymore. I don't know anyone who does. We tried to make Salon surprising and provocative -- not formulaic click-bait. It was a must-read in its day. I don't know who owns Salon or edits it these days. I vaguely care.
A final word about the New Republic. McCormack allows himself to write a windy column each issue -- the privilege of ownership, I suppose. Among his favorite topics is the need to pull together the country, to unite our bitterly divided civitas. Memo to Win: Old Joe, who's stuck at 42% approval rating in the polls, or Kamala, who's even lower, will NEVER heal the country.
Someone like RFK Jr. -- with his following in both Red and Blue America -- could do that. He's already at 20 points and rising in the polls. Will they ever allow Biden to debate him? Don't hold your breath.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Live Onstage - Me!
On the evening of Sunday May 21 -- at 5:45 pm (strange time), I'll be in conversation with the erudite and charming Michael Krasny, who for many years expertly hosted the morning talk show on KQED-FM. I'll be talking of cabbages and kings, and many other things -- including my books, my love/hate relationship with Hollywood, the new wave of censorship (from the left and right), San Francisco (tech) politics, you name it -- many of the subjects we discuss here.
I don't venture out often these days -- I've been on a stage only once in the last few months. So this will be a good opportunity for us to meet and air our views.
I'm told this Author Series, which is sponsored by the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center, has featured the likes of Adam Hochschild, Isabel Allende and Michael Pollan in the past. And the proceeds from tickets -- which are on sale at seb.org -- go to a good cause.
If you're in the Russian River-Wine Country area of Northern California (or you're planning a weekend getaway), I hope to see you there.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
It turns out everything, when it comes to artificial intelligence. The media is filled with dire warnings that the dystopian future is here now. Here in San Francisco, human car drivers, pedestrians, firefighters and even police officers are forced to dodge errant automated vehicles operated by Waymo, a subsidiary of tech giant Google (company motto: "Don't be evil.").
Meanwhile, today's New York Times is awash in terrifying AI stories. Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, the 75-year-old "godfather" of AI, just quit Google, saying the company is, well, dong evil by frantically trying to stay up with Microsoft -- which recently unveiled its new AI-enhanced search engine -- in the new scientific arms race. Hinton, who was driven to explore technology's brave, new frontier like the sophisticated physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was decades ago, now believes that AI could be even more destructive than nuclear weapons.
International treaties and wise diplomacy have so far prevented a nuclear world war. But robotic research, Hinton points out, can be secretly undertaken by companies or individual scientists. According to Hinton, AI, which is progressing at a truly chilling speed, can eliminate human jobs -- even high-end, creative ones (an artificially-produced song imitating Drake and The Weeknd just went viral, the NYT reported); exponentially escalate surveillance of human activity; and even someday start world wars.
According to today's NYT, that scary future is partly here now: the authoritarian Israeli government is using AI technology to "automate apartheid" and track Palestinians. Scientists at the University of Texas just disclosed they found a a way -- with the help of AI -- to read minds, analyzing the flow of blood to regions of the brain.
What's the solution? Dr. Hinton says socially-minded scientists around the world -- like him -- should place controls on AI research. Right. That self-regulation has worked so well. Hinton himself refused to sign two recent letters of protest against AI research by fellow computer scientists because he didn't want to publicly shame Google.
Self-regulation -- or shame -- doesn't work on tech giants. Their research is driven by capitalist imperatives and overseen by men who are already on the robotic evolutionary scale to universal automation.
Recently, the New York Review of Books covered a spate of new books that urge the elimination of the human race for the good of the planet. These books, which propose that we not reproduce among other "solutions," did make me think. Climate catastrophes, wars that threaten to go nuclear, now the rapid advance of AI... it does seem that we humans are on a death trip and we're determined to take the rest of Earth with us.
But maybe, just maybe, we can still save ourselves?
The AI future: Be scared, very scared
Why “Succession” Succceeds
The HBO show is driven by great writing -- yes, even without the riveting Brian Cox. So as the 11,000-members strong Writers Guild of America gets ready to go on strike against Hollywood producers on Tuesday, let's hear it for the writers of film and TV. As Gore Vidal once observed, the auteur theory of filmmaking -- which gave the director all the creative credit --is a lot of hooey. Without well-written scripts, even the most talented directors -- and actors -- would be lost.
Of course, I'm biased. I'm a book author who just wrote my first screenplay -- and soon will write a fictional serial that was commissioned by a magazine (and I hope will become a movie). Even though I'm not a member of the WGA, I was paid union rates for the script -- and I'm being well paid by the magazine too. I wouldn't be able to keep a roof over my wife's and my head -- or help pay for our younger son's college expenses -- without this money.
Can the streaming giants afford to pay their writers a long-overdue raise? Of course they can. Netflix is now paying its co-chief executive Ted Sarandos over $50 million a year -- a leap of more than 30 percent over his compensation last year.
But I'm also writing this as an avid fan. I watch a lot of movies and TV. And, by the way, I led you astray on the Netflix show The Diplomat -- after a relatively strong beginning, the series has jumped several sharks. Never mind that Keri Russell -- playing the U.S. ambassador to England -- uttered the unforgivably stupid line, "The CIA did not kill Kennedy," the show has veered wildly off-course in a number of ways. And no, Netflix (and Amazon) didn't kill the espionage thriller. But they sure have tried.
Yes, most of what Hollywood (even the UK) churns out each year is brain-dead -- and for that you can partly blame the mediocre or bad screenwriting. But there is recent TV like Succession, C B Strike, Detectorists, W1A, White Lotus, Slow Horses etc --- and all the classic movies you can think of, even a few of the newer ones.
(Btw, if you're looking for a somber UK police procedural, I recommend the new season of Dalgliesh, starrIng the wonderful Bertie Carvel. Streaming on Brit Box/Prime Video.)
Those shows and movies all began with good -- or great -- writing. Share the wealth, Hollywood.
The Roy siblings confer on Succession
Land for the Landless, Houses for the Unhoused
I read two front-page newspaper articles this Sunday morning -- one in the San Francisco Chronicle, the other in the New York Times -- that got me thinking (again) about the outrageous disconnect between the wealthy elite and the poor. In Brazil, the surging Landless Workers Movement -- an organization closely aligned with the leftist president Lula -- has spearheaded the occupation of unused land owned by the rich. Poor farmworkers led by the group plow the land and grow organic produce -- most of Brazil's rice is now grown by such squatters. The landless movement in Brazil has become a beacon to the world's poor and dispossessed.
Meanwhile, here in SF, the Chronicle reports that nearly 1,000 supportive housing units sat empty last year while homeless people were forced to live on the streets. I'll give you another statistic recently cited in Harpers magazine -- there are over 4,000 people without shelter each day in SF, while there are over 60,000 empty housing units in the city. (This does not include all the empty office space in downtown SF.) These empty housing units are owned by wealthy speculators and government agencies.
It's time for the unhoused in San Francisco to rise up like the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil and occupy this unused property. The Moms 4 Housing activist group in Oakland, which has met with some success, has led the way. Housing occupation campaigns have also sprung up in cities like Philadelphia, challenging local governments' sell-off of dilapidated housing property to private developers.
Shelter is a fundamental right, like decent food, healthcare and education. It's a scandal that San Francisco -- a city with more billionaires per capita than any other city in the world -- allows thousands of its citizens to sleep on the streets when they could be housed. Meanwhile, the local media targets the poor and defenseless -- even when recent sensational crimes have turned out to be committed by the privileged, even when the homeless are victims.
It's time for the unhoused in the U.S. to take direct action.
Rising up in Oakland, CA.