A Worm Ate My Brain! Unmasking The Playbook
They did it to Bobby’s father in 1968 (“ruthless… a spoiler… an entitled rich kid… his own family doesn’t like him”). They did it to Jesse Jackson. They did it to Bernie Sanders. Now they’re doing it — again — to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And too many people are falling for it. Exposing The Playbook. My column in Kennedy Beacon.
The Weaponization of Sound
It's everywhere now: at the airport, restaurants, supermarkets, gas stations. Ambient noise masquerading as music. It's unavoidable, compulsory: you must listen, you must be happy, you must not think, you must buy. Resistance is futile.
But Pipedown, an obscure yet feisty British newsletter, does resist this sound invasion. Recently, my friend and colleague Karen Croft wrote this article for Pipedown about how the tech invaders in San Francisco have escalated the noise level in the city. It's true: We need to hear ourselves think. We need to actually talk and exchange ideas. We need to be human again.
The View From San Francisco
By Karen Croft
IN 1968 Philip K. Dick
published the novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? that inspired the 1982
film Blade Runner. The book’s hero,
Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter
stalking androids in a dystopian
San Francisco. His job is almost
impossible because androids look
like humans but are robots, unable
to feel human emotions.
The San Francisco of 2023 is now
Dick’s vision realized. The city
centre is filled with boarded-up
shops, empty luxury stores, vandals
and the homeless. The modern
androids are the tech workers who
have come from elsewhere and know
little about the city’s history. They
walk the streets staring at their
mobiles, earphones in place, unable
to hear or see what goes on around
them, not seeming to care. The tech
companies they work for have been
given the keys to the city, driving the
natives out. The true humans who
remain are outnumbered and have
the challenge, like our hero Rick, of
trying to figure out whether they are
speaking to another human or not.
They also have to live in a world
filled with unsettling sounds at all
times, even when they are sleeping
– some people sleep with their
randomly beeping mobiles on. All
of this is because one of the key
attributes of androids is that they
cannot tolerate quiet. They have to
be connected to a source of sound
the way humans need air. If they
aren’t distracted by piped music or a
podcast, they might have to look
at—and possibly talk to—humans,
and their inadequacies might
be discovered.
Business people,
knowing or sensing this need for
constant distraction, provide loud
distracting noises to attract their
android customers. One enlightened San Francisco
restaurant owner told me he feels he
has to play loud music in the bar of his
otherwise music-free oasis because
“The young people want to come to
drink, look at their phones and avoid
talking to each other, but they want
to feel like they’ve had a good time,
so I have to play music for them.”
There is also a myth, seemingly
accepted by the owners of most
stores and restaurants, that piped
music makes people spend more
money. What seems more likely is
what an enlightened manager of
a lovely, quiet hotel in Deauville,
France believes: “ Music makes
people aggressive.”
Go into any
restaurant in San Francisco and you
will likely find harsh, loud music-like sounds that make guests speak louder to be heard over the noise,
so escalating the din, making it
harder to hear your dining partner—
or yourself—think. It will leave
you perhaps feeling you’ve been
to a party but it will also leave
you feeling nervous and you might
have a headache not totally due to
alcohol.
No wonder the word noise
comes from the Greek word for
nausea.
Florence Nightingale
recognized noise pollution as a
health hazard in 1859 when she
wrote, “Unnecessary noise is the
most cruel abuse of
care which can be inflicted
on either the sick or the well.”
A study in 2017 on human health
and noise showed that noise
pollution is under-reported but can
cause not only hearing loss but
negative social behaviour, problems
with concentration, irritation and
stress reaction as well as sleep
and cardiovascular disturbances.
It was also found to accelerate
the development of latent mental
illnesses. No one seems to be
listening to this evidence—perhaps
because the music is too loud.
One bit of positive news suggests
that litigation may be part of the
solution. A couple in Italy sued their
city Brescia over the noise from
loud, drunk bar patrons that stopped
them sleeping night after night. They
won, the judge deciding that the
noise was “harmful to the couple’s
health” and infringed their right to
peace and quiet. Let’s hope that the
concept of a “right” to peace and
quiet is normalized.
If restaurateurs can’t stand quiet,
perhaps they can pipe Bach instead?
I suggested just that to the manager
of a high-end restaurant in San
Francisco. I’d been dining there
for years, and every time a jarring
tape of inexplicable music would
play on a loop. The mix of pseudo
rock-jazz and shrill, intermittent
bursts of off-key vocals would make
me and my friends jump. And it didn’t fit
the restaurant’s otherwise elegant
ambiance. I mentioned this to
several waiters and each time I did
they nodded, looked around to make
sure their boss wasn’t looking, and
said. “I agree. It’s awful. We have
to listen to it all day!” They told me
that the manager liked the music
and wouldn’t change it, even when
they warned him that guests didn’t
like it. I went to the restaurant
recently and the same old tape was
on. The manager happened to be on
the floor that day so I asked again if
things could be changed or turned
off. He said sorry, the CEO made the
decisions. After he left the room,
two of the staff came up and said
“We are so glad you did that. The
music is so distracting!” (Indeed, our
waitress had forgotten to put in our
order!)
Music distracted me recently when
I went to the supermarket, where
the piped-in noise sounded like a
computer-generated Mariachi band
with a strangled duck as its lead
singer. The piercing sounds made me
so nervous and anxious that I forgot
to buy several items on my list.
I drove across the street to my favorite
service station to fill up. Even when
I’m shopping across town I make the
trip there because the owner pipes
in classical music at the pumps.
Today it was Bach. I asked the young
man at the desk if people liked the
classical music. “Yes, most people
do like it,” he said, “They say it
makes them feel calm.”
When I emailed Dave, the owner of the
gas station, to thank him for playing classical
music, and to find out why he made the choice
to do so, he replied, “I am pleased you enjoy our
music…This neighborhood is very special and I
wanted to thank my customers, especially those
who wish a few minutes of calm."
Bless you, Dave.
Rutger Hauer plays a scary android in Blade Runner.
Adam Walinsky, Restless in Peace
I just heard that Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter and aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, died in November at age 87. The news came as a shock to me because the Adam I knew was forceful and sharp-witted and blunt-spoken and also full of feeling. I thought he would go on and on.
I guess the New York Times obituary writers thought so too, because they still haven’t published anything about Walinsky’s passing.
Adam is known, among many other things, for writing the famous “ripples of hope” speech with Dick Goodwin that Senator Kennedy delivered in June 1966 to students in apartheid South Africa. “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice,” Kennedy said. “He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.”
I met Adam at his home in suburban New York when I was interviewing people for my 2007 book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which documented RFK’s private search for the truth about the assassination of his brother. Adam was tough and smart and his eyes also welled up with tears at the memory of Bobby Kennedy. I liked him immensely.
Years later, in 2019, Adam and I collaborated on a public statement that incriminated national security officials, abetted by organized crime figures, in the violent deaths of both Kennedy brothers, as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X – the four killings of American leaders in the 1960s that tragically altered the course of U.S. history. The statement was signed by members of the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X families, as well as by doctors who worked on the mortally-wounded President Kennedy (and saw with their own eyes the medical evidence that he was struck by bullets from the front and back), as well as by G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the House Assassinations inquiry in the late 1970s and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Only the Washington Post deemed this major public statement, which called for a new investigation into the four assassinations, newsworthy.
When I first interviewed Adam about RFK’s hidden search for the truth about Dallas, I immediately knew that what he told me was historically important. It still is. Here’s what I wrote in Brothers:
Adam Walinsky was a young Yale Law graduate who had briefly served in RFK’s Justice Department before going to work in his Senate office as his legislative assistant. With his crusty demeanor, keen intelligence and soft heart, Walinsky quickly endeared himself to the senator, who relied on his sharp young aide to keep him current on the most important new books, articles and ideas. “I was his intellectual valet,” smiled Walinsky.
Walinsky shared Dick Goodwin’s skepticism about the Warren Report, whose ballistics theory he found “completely tortured and strange.” But, following his boss’s lead, he learned to keep his suspicions about Dallas to himself. Goodwin, on the other hand, “would talk openly about the assassination,” said Walinsky, launching into an imitation of his distinctive mumbling growl. “It was the CIA, the Mafia… The senator would be in the room or around. But he was always extremely guarded. One of the things you learned when you were around Kennedy, you learned what it was to be serious. Serious people, when faced with something like that – you don’t speculate out loud about it. You might ask a question. That’s all. It’s a matter of mental discipline.”
Until he could win the White House, Kennedy was convinced, there was nothing he could do to solve his brother’s assassination.
Adam Walinsky
A Gentleman and a Scholar
Once in awhile, a TV series comes along that captivates me -- Detectorists, W1A, Daisy Jones and the Six, The New Look. (After just one episode, I'm kind of hooked by Maryland.) Most of these TV shows are British -- because they're less predictable, less violent and more character-driven than U.S. shows, which are drenched with incident.
I've only seen six of eight episodes, but I look forward each week to Apple TV's A Gentleman in Moscow. Yes, it's a fairytale. Yes, the life depicted in the hotel is make-believe. But Count Rostow, the displaced and surveilled Russian aristocrat played so beautifully by Ewan McGregor, is such a wonderful soul -- so decent and courtly and empathetic -- that he makes me want to believe. (He and the exquisitely conflicted Stalinist secret policeman played by Johnny Harris.)
Each week, I believe.
Isn't the real world nasty and brutish?
We all need to escape.
Eleanor Coppola
Eleanor Coppola is dead at 87. Known as the wife of director Francis Coppola, Eleanor was a creative force in her own right -- as well as a mother and anchor to a volatile genius. I knew her slightly, because I'm a former tenant of the Zoetrope building, the copper-plated San Francisco landmark owned by Eleanor and her husband, who always kept the rents low for working authors and artists like me. And my wife Camille Peri interviewed her long ago for Salon -- an in-depth conversation that Eleanor later told Camille she particularly appreciated.
One time, when I pushed our first baby Joe in a stroller in North Beach, I recall that Eleanor and Francis looked at him from a restaurant window with warmth and sadness in their eyes. Their first-born son Gino had recently been killed in a boating accident.
Eleanor Coppola was quiet, dignified and intelligent. She wrote the revealing diaries about her turbulent married life -- including the inside story about the making of Apocalypse Now, one of her husband's masterpieces -- that later became her gripping 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness. In her 80s, she also made two dramatic films.
I like how she described the way she navigated her long marriage to Francis. They were "opposites in every way," she remarked, and they weathered "plenty of friction." But, she added, "it's good friction, it's a creative friction. You grow from it. You don't go to sleep at the wheel."
There are ghosts that loom large when I walk the streets of North Beach these days. Eleanor Coppola's spirit is now one of them.
Oh! What a Lovely War
As the war in the Middle East widens and the war in Ukraine drags bloodily on, here's to all of my former antiwar friends who've discovered their inner warrior (and will never die in battle). It's "Army Dreamers," the 1980 song by Kate Bush. Yes, but she's kind of nuts, you say. And that was before Putin invaded Ukraine and Hamas slaughtered innocent Israelis. Etc. etc. There's always an excuse for war. Once upon a time, my generation marched in the streets. Once upon a time, we sang "Give Peace a Chance." What happened to all of my brothers and sisters?
Here's the music video and lyrics to "Army Dreamers." (The BFPO is the postal service for the British military.)
Army Deeamers
B.F.P.O.
Army dreamers
Mammy's hero
B.F.P.O.
Mammy's hero
Our little army boy
Is coming home from B.F.P.O.
I've a bunch of purple flowers
To decorate mammy's hero
Mourning in the aerodrome
The weather warmer, he is colder
Four men in uniform
To carry home my little soldier
(He should have been a rock star)
But he didn't have the money for a guitar
(What could he do?)
(Should have been a politician)
But he never had a proper education
(What could he do?)
(Should have been a father)
But he never even made it to his twenties
What a waste
Army dreamers
Oh, what a waste of
Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)
Tears o'er a tin box
Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know
Like a chicken with a fox
He couldn't win the war with ego
Give the kid the pick of pips
And give him all your stripes and ribbons
Now he's sitting in his hole
He might as well have buttons and bows
(He should have been a rock star)
But he didn't have the money for a guitar
(What could he do?)
(Should have been a politician)
But he never had a proper education
(What could he do?)
(Should have been a father)
But he never even made it to his twenties
What a waste
Army dreamers
Ooh, what a waste of
Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)
Ooh, what a waste of all them
Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)
Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)
Army (army) dreamers (dreamers), oh
B.F.P.O.
Army dreamers
Mammy's hero
B.F.P.O.
Army dreamers
Mammy's hero
B.F.P.O.
No hard heroes
Mammy's hero
B.F.P.O.
Army dreamers
Mammy's hero
B.F.P.O.
All reactions:
6Pete Johnson, Sverre Haanes and 4 others
Taking Back San Francisco
It's official. Aaron Peskin -- the best person to run our city, the mayoral candidate whom every thinking progressive wanted desperately to run -- has entered the race.
At his kickoff rally yesterday in San Francisco Chinatown's Portsmouth Square, Peskin gave a lusty speech attacking the tech and real estate billionaires who've taken over the city and given us nothing but an obscene wealth gap, vacant storefronts, more homelessness, drug addiction and other misery. And now they promise that AI will fix everything.
If you believe that, there some shares in Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency company I'd like to sell you.
As Peskin predicted, the billionaires will try to tear him apart. In fact, there was a gaggle of obnoxious and loud anti-Aaron protesters yesterday on the fringes of Portsmouth Square, trying to drown out Peskin's speech. The raucous protesters were apparently paid by tech mogul Garry Tan, who issued death threats against both Peskin, who is president of the Board of Supervisors, and Dean Preston, another progressive board member (who was also at the rally yesterday with Supervisor Connie Chan and former mayor Art Agnos, the last progressive to occupy City Hall's Room 200).
The anti-Aaron protesters carried signs that weirdly compared Peskin to Donald Trump, his political opposite, and called for him to be squashed like an insect. Tech billionaires like Tan have injected a poisonous rhetoric into the city.
In contrast, Peskin's speech was upbeat and positive. He wants to make San Francisco affordable again. He wants to make the city a beacon once again for teachers and nurses and social workers and firefighters -- and also for the creative dreamers who put the city on the map. The writers, poets, artists, musicians and other cultural renegades who made San Francisco great.
"We won't destroy the city to save it," Peskin pledged in his speech on Saturday. "Let's save our city without sacrificing our values."
That's the inclusive, inspiring vision I wanted to hear in the San Francisco mayor's race, which has been dominated until now by corporate sock puppets, including incumbent London Breed.
I'll be honest. I was one of those urging Aaron to run. So I'm very excited today. We have a good chance to take back the city we love. The city that came to mean so much to us during the Season of the Witch era that I chronicled.
But it takes a lot of courage to run for public office these days. And money -- lots of it.
“I have no doubt that this is going to be a difficult campaign; most of my opponents have at least one billionaire on their side, if not more,” Peskin said yesterday. “This handful of billionaires pouring millions of dollars of dark money into ugly smear campaigns threatens to destroy what makes this a unique, vibrant and magical city. And while I thankfully don’t have any billionaires on my side, I have you.
"We'll run a grassroots campaign" in every district, in every neighborhood, Peskin vowed -- "just like Art (Agnos) did" in his winning mayoral campaign in 1987.
I can understand why Aaron thought long and hard before entering the race. Politics, especially here in San Francisco, has become a dirty and expensive game.
But now Aaron is finally in, we need to support him. Please go to his website and donate your time or money or both.
Let's take back San Francisco.
(And yes, that's me with the candidate today.)
The Final Trip
We don’t talk much about death, because the dark beyond we all face terrifies us so much we try to avoid the subject. Our terror of death is one reason – a big one – that humanity is so crazy. It unnerves me, too – and it doesn’t. I’ve been on its doorstep. It’s more overwhelming for those who don’t want you to leave.
That brings me to Mark Dowie’s new book, Judith Letting Go, the remarkable story of his unique, six-moth love affair with a woman who had chosen the day of her death. Judith Tannenbaum chose to “let go” even though she was still full of love for life, because she suffered from a rare medical condition accompanied by excruciating pain, a physical torment for which there was no treatment. The story of the two-person “Death Café” that Judith and Mark formed in the last months of her life – which ended on December 4, 2019 – and the intimate conversations they shared at her modest home in El Cerrito, California are truly unforgettable. The little paperback – just 118 pages – is the most moving thing Dowie has done as a writer. And he’s done a lot.
I met Mark Dowie in 1981, when he was the friendly (and handsome) investigative editor of Mother Jones magazine, and I was the new staff member on the block. Even then, Dowie was something of a legend, the author of the seminal investigative article on the Ford Pinto, the exploding car that Ford valued over its human victims, and the co-author of the Dalkon Shield exposé, the birth-control implant that ripped apart the insides of women. After Mother Jones, Dowie went on to author ten books, including a critical one on the toothless environmental movement (Losing Ground), as well as to teach at the University of California- Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Mark also has led a very full life, as a young Wyoming ranch hand, businessman and investigative guru. His stories over drinks are full of eyebrow-raising tales. Wait, you did what?
He just mentions these jaw-dropping anecdotes about himself in passing.
So, when Mark mentioned to me that he had helped a number of people in their final hours, I was not surprised. But Judith’s story got my attention, and I encouraged him – as a fellow journalist – to tell this memorable story.
Dowie remains happily married to the same woman he met back in the ‘80s, artist Wendy Schwartz. But his evolving relationship with Judith, though it was not sexual, surprised them both. His connection with Judith grew more emotionally intense as she drew closer to death.
Judith Tannenbaum was the mother and aunt of two grown, loving women when Dowie was introduced to her by a mutual friend. She was also the daughter of a 100-year-old woman who lived nearby. Judith wrote poetry and taught it to inmates at San Quentin, the maximum-security prison across the San Francisco Bay. The men she taught – including one lifer – loved and respected her. She also had taught in the Mendocino public school system.
She loved life. And she was determined to end it on a precise day.
The finality of their relationship gave it a special character, Dowie writes.
“Because my relationship with Judith was untrammeled by attachments, plans, secrets, fears of abandonment, and also free of complexity, commitment, duties, promises, and even the normative expectations of friendship, it became, as we both observed, ‘pure.’ I never thought before that there could actually be a relationship, a friendship that could be described as pure. But I was wrong, and here it was, kept so by the certainty and totality of its ending. We both knew, throughout, not only that it was going to end but also precisely when.
“To others in our lives, particularly my wife Wendy, it seemed at times ‘unfair… too easy.’ And in a way, Wendy was right. It was easy. Despite the looming heartbreak and constant profundity of our story’s inevitable ending.”
There is wonder and mystery and love and heartache in Judith Letting Go. As there is in life and death. I encourage all mortal people to read the book. It will live on in your thoughts.
The Silence of the Intellectuals
Would Gore Vidal (who was called antisemitic in his day) remain muffled? What is happening in Gaza right now is genocide in real time. U.S.-produced weapons are massacring and blockading starving Palestinians. And yet it takes an Indian-British intellectual -- Pankaj Mishra -- to call this Israeli atrocity what it is. A defamation of the Holocaust, the moral authority that Israel has increasingly wielded as a weapon against those who are weaker.
In "The Shoah After Gaza," his remarkable essay that London Review of Books emblazoned on its current cover, Mishra writes: "Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built. But these universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist."
Mishra goes on to invoke Jewish intellectuals like Primo Levi and Jean Amery -- both survivors of Auschwitz -- who began to question how Israel's militaristic leaders were exploiting the Shoah to slaughter Arabs and steal their land. Both men committed suicide. But before he died, Amery -- a strong defender of Israel -- pleaded with Israel's leaders to "acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him."
Levi, for his part, also felt an emotional bond with Israel, but warned that the Jewish state "is rapidly falling into total isolation... We must choke off the impulses toward emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel's current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class."
By 1969, Mishra notes, the Jewish theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz -- who won the Israel Prize in 1993 -- was already decrying the "Nazification" of Israel.
It's the duty of U.S. intellectuals and artists to speak out against this crime against humanity. But, besides a few, they have allowed themselves to be silenced. Speak up now, or forever hold your tongue.
Oscar Airheads
After winning the Best Director and Best Picture awards for Oppenheimer -- his epic movie about the father of the atomic bomb -- Christopher Nolan did not mention his subject once. He -- and his wife, producer Emma Thomas, who accepted the Best Picture statuette -- nattered on about all the show biz and family members they wanted to thank. But not once did Nolan or Thomas mention that their film is about the extinction of the human race.
Look, I get that the Academy Awards platform has been overused in the past by honorees with pet political issues to share with the world. But to go completely silent about Oppenheimer and his moral demons on this big stage strikes me as overly cautious or simply obtuse. I think Nolan is both. His overly praised films show it as well as his arrogant British reticence. Grow a spine (and a brain), man. Say something relevant when it's called for. At least Cillian Murphy, who won the Best Actor award for playing Oppenheimer, saluted "peacemakers everywhere" in his brief acceptance speech.
Other than that, the Oscars show was predictably dull. You didn't miss a thing.
Say nothing: Emma Thomas and husband Christopher Nolan accept the Best Picture award for Oppenheimer.
Dead Man Walking: The Zombie Candidacy of Joe Biden
That shuffling, clanking noise you’re hearing louder and louder? It’s not the ghost of Dickens’s Jacob Marley – it’s the creaking re-election campaign of President Joe Biden.
This weekend, the New York Times, in conjunction with Siena College, released a damning poll on the president’s 2024 run, headlined “Warming Polls Flash for Biden.” The Times poll found that Donald Trump is now beating Biden by five points, with only one in four thinking the country is going in the right direction and a majority of voters saying the economy is in poor condition. Biden is even losing support among women, black and Latino voters, the core groups of the Democratic Party.
A follow-up Times report was also dismal for Biden, with 61 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020 now saying he’s “just too old” to be president for a second term. This Times finding was backed up by other recent polls, including one conducted by Bloomberg News and another by NBC News, which found that a whopping 76 percent of those polled expressed concern about the president’s age and fitness.
Clearly, the anxiety about President Biden’s mental acuity, which started as a propaganda meme on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, is growing like kudzu.
Over the weekend, the opening skit of Saturday Night Live even featured the theme, with California Governor Gavin Newsom (a slick-haired Michael Longfellow) and others Biden supporters dutifully singing the praises of the aging commander-in-chief, including his remarkable physical prowess, stamina and even tech wizardry. Unfortunately, a clueless President Biden (Mikey Day) was then shown botching FaceTime on his cell phone.
The nervous chattering about the president’s advanced age grew louder last month when Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s retention of classified material, excused his behavior by stating he’s a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a double-edged sword if there ever was one.
If Biden is re-elected in November, he will beat his own record as the oldest sitting president, turning 86 at the end of his second term. Trump is only four years younger, but he comes off as pugnaciously energetic, and recent polls have been kinder to him. According to the Times poll, only 19 percent of voters think Trump’s age would prevent him from serving a second term.
The white knuckles among Biden supporters will be very evident on Thursday night when the president delivers his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress and a national TV audience. Will Biden project leadership and vitality? Will he seem mentally alert? Can he read his prepared text off the teleprompter?
The bar for Biden is strikingly low. And yet it’s very high. His opponents – and the general public – will not just be watching for his usual gaffes, but signs that he is losing it. That’s he’s not fit to be our chief executive.
As I’ve written here before, the Democratic establishment would be wise to replace Biden with a stronger candidate. The trouble is that the party has become a nexus of powerful corporate forces and is strongly opposed to any insurgent candidacy that can breathe new life into the presidential race. The Democratic status quo resisted the presidential challenge of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, as well as the campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr., who was forced to leave the party and become an independent candidate.
As political pundits generally agree, the Democratic Party has a Biden conundrum. They can’t turn to Vice President Kamala Harris because her poll numbers are even weaker than the president’s. Nor can she easily be replaced by her “good friend” Newsom or other Plan B favorites like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, because they are white and they lack national name recognition.
“Biden must save Biden from himself,” as progressive filmmaker Michael Moore recently commented on Rumble. “It’s the only way to ensure Trump never sets foot in the Oval Office again.”
The problem is that the doddering -- yet determined -- Biden is not going anywhere. And there are no “wise men” in the Democratic Party to tell him to step down.
“There is no council of elders and I’m not sure if there was that an incumbent president, no matter who it was, would listen to them,” David Plouffe, a former campaign strategist for Barack Obama, told Peter Baker, the White House correspondent for New York Times. “He thinks, ‘Hey, I won and I beat the guy who’s going to run against me and I can do it again.’”
Evan Osnos, a political correspondent for The New Yorker, reports the same Biden stubbornness: “I will tell you that my reporting really almost astonished me with how this man has no doubts… He believes he is the only one (who can beat Trump)…. (This) level of conviction is going to go down in history as either having been an extraordinary case of resisting all of what he would call the chattering class…or it will go down in history as having been a terrible miscalculation.”
Former President Barack Obama, you say – he can advise Joe it’s time to go. After all, Biden was his loyal wingman when he was vice president. The two men are said to have a good relationship. Maybe Barack can convince Biden that only, say, Michelle Obama can save the nation from Trump 2.
But Obama is not very persuasive. He couldn’t even get Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down as a Supreme Court justice when he invited her to a White House lunch in July 2013. Instead, the proud Ginsburg died at 87 during Trump’s reign and he promptly filled her lifelong seat with 48-year-old, right-wing, fundamentalist Amy Coney Barrett.
Come to think of it, Biden apparently resented it when President Obama told him it was Hillary Clinton’s turn to run for president in 2016. So maybe pushing his wife as a Biden replacement in 2024 would not be a good idea.
We’ve all seen this horror movie. The mummy is about to rise from its sarcophagus and strangle our hero. Look out, you want to scream! Nobody wants a Biden-Trump rematch. It’s a nightmare from which we can’t wake.
If only there was another presidential candidate out there. Somebody to inspire us, to awaken our better angels. Oh wait --- there is!
#
Oh, Goodie! ANOTHER Corporate Dullard Wants to Lead San Francisco!
Oh, goodie! Just what San Francisco needs! ANOTHER lackluster tech and real estate sock-puppet candidate for mayor! Only reporter Heather Knight of the New York Times (formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle) would call Mark Farrell's mayoral campaign a revolt from the right. What's cop-loving, tech-loving Mayor London Breed -- a fiery socialist?
Look: EVERYONE now in the campaign to run San Francisco is a hard-core, corporate-funded conservative, even if they call themselves Democrats or even progressives. Mark Farrell is a none-too-sharp venture capitalist who lives with his family in a swanky neighborhood. His wife was active in the campaign to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Do you think he has ANY visionary idea of how to revive this once great city --a city that's been TRASHED by the same corporate forces that are backing him and every other SF mayoral candidate?
I'll keep shouting until I'm hoarse: San Francisco desperately needs a visionary leader who knows how to turn around this city. Not another corporate hack like Farrell.
Mark Farrell announces his mayoral run, God help us.
Let’s Put on a Show!
Ever since they were published, my books The Devil's Chessboard and Season of the Witch have been optioned by various studios, producers and directors in Hollywood as dramas and documentaries, for TV and movies. But they have never made it to the screen. Write it off to business as usual in Hollywood. Or, in some cases, to political controversy and "catch and kill."
In any case, my patience has worn thin. Fuck the Hollywood gatekeepers. They're cheap and timid and ignorant. They never think big. That's why the current entertainment industry fare is so banal, so forgettable.
But maybe you have a John Cassavetes or Francis Coppola or Dorothy Arzner or Stanley Kubrick in you… Or yes, an Oliver Stone. Maybe you're willing to challenge the system or to go outside of it.
If you have a track record as a movie or TV maker and you have the money, I now own the the screen rights to all of my books. If you are serious about these stories and have a compelling way to translate them for an audience -- and frankly the money -- let's talk. You can reach me at: david@talbotplayers.com. Please don't waste my time unless you're a serious player.
As many readers know, The Devil's Chessboard (a New York Times bestseller, despite the NYT blackout) is the greatest spy story never told. One reviewer wrote John le Carre or Graham Greene could do no better. A son of Hollywood, I wrote the book cinematically. It cries out to be a movie or limited TV series.
Season of the Witch (a national bestseller) is also a grabber -- the story of how a unique American city was liberated in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. As I wrote, San Francisco was not born with flowers in its hair, but howling in blood and strife. The action in those years was wild and nonstop, the characters leapt off the page. The book wrote itself.
Dramatists of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Contact me.
Wanted: Brave Leaders
Cheers to Senator Bernie Sanders and San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston. Sanders sponsored a resolution that would have compelled the State Department to inspect Israel's dismal human rights record -- and the U.S. role in Israel's actions. (The U.S. is by far the largest funder of military assistance to Israel.) Sanders's resolution was voted down by the Senate. But with at least 25,000 Palestinians now killed by the IDF in Gaza -- most of them women and children -- the Israel lobby's stranglehold on Washington is starting to fray, with several Democratic senators voting for Sanders's proposal.
Here in San Francisco, Supervisor Dean Preston successfully engineered an 8-3 board vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid to the people there, and a return of the surviving hostages held by Hamas.
The fact that both Sanders and Preston are Jews and have Holocaust victims and survivors in their families give their actions moral strength.
According to a powerful essay in the Sunday Opinion section of the New York Times by Megan Stack, a former Middle East correspondent, South Africa's genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice "is strong." As Stack concludes, with Israeli attacks on civilians making nowhere in the Gaza Strip safe -- even hospitals and places of worship -- we are witnessing genocide in progress.
Considering Israel's ongoing atrocities, San Francisco Mayor London Breed's denunciation of the Board of Supervisors' ceasefire vote is shameful. In a rare condemnation of the board, Breed had the nerve to say the vote "did not reflect our values."
Excuse me? The failing mayor of a failing city gives herself the right to define our community values? To accuse the Board of Supervisors of being out of touch? (For the record, the San Francisco vote also condemned anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.)
In her six years as mayor, Breed has presided over the sharp decline of a once-great city. The downtown area is still boarded up after the Covid pandemic -- as well as many stores in the neighborhoods -- because she banked on the endless rise of the tech industry. Homeless camps still dot the city because there is no housing to put these people in. Breed is good at cleaning out city blocks for conventioneers who matter, and playing to the wealthy and powerful. But she has no people's touch. She cares only about her political career. Following the public outcry over George Floyd's murder, she was for police reform. Now she's against it. She was for safe injection sites -- the single quickest way to prevent drug deaths-- but now she opposes them. As a result, there has been a record number of drug overdoses on her watch.
Breed decides who she is from day to day by holding her finger in the political wind.
Who will rid us of this terrible mayor? To date the only political rivals to Breed in the November election are a supervisor to her RIGHT (yep) and a hapless rich kid who has raised money for charity or something. No serious candidate to Breed's left has emerged.
Are the heroic days of San Francisco that I wrote about in Season of the Witch -- the grit that my son Joe Talbot dramatized in The Last Black Man in San Francisco -- truly over?
I refuse to think so. Somewhere out there is a leader. Somewhere out there is a hero.
San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston
Let Us Now Praise Paul Cummins
The justly famed and revered Los Angeles educator saved my young life. After heading the English department at the then Harvard School for Boys (now Harvard-Westlake), Cummins fell afoul of the stern headmaster Father William Chalmers when he turned the department into a progressive oasis, and left for the more enlightened Oakwood School. The next year, after I was elected Harvard School's senior class president (against Chalmers's best efforts), I too crossed swords with the headmaster when I opposed the school's compulsory military program at the height of the Vietnam War. Chalmers forced me out midway through my senior high school year, writing to every college to which I applied that I should not be admitted because I was a "disciplinary risk." (Only UC-Santa Cruz, bless them, took a chance on me.)
Cummins, sympathizing with me, pulled strings to let me attend Oakwood the final months of the school year and graduate from high school. If he hadn't, I would've been drafted and fled to Canada -- or, more likely, gone underground.
Paul Cummins was -- and still is -- closer to my older brother Stephen Talbot and to my brother-in-law Dave Davis. In addition to teaching them English, he also coached them in varsity football. Cummins was a man's man in the old, best sense --- he was handsome, smart and believed in the life of the mind as well as sports. (He played football at Stanford.)
After serving as the vice principal at Oakwood, Cummins went on to found the legendary Crossroads School and New Roads School in Santa Monica, and became a leading educational advocate for at-risk and incarcerated youth.
At 86, Paul Cummins is still one of the good guys.
Every January, Cummins also sends a booklet of his poetry to his network of friends and admirers. He was moved to write the following poem because he took note, like many of us did, of the 60th anniversary of JFK's murder. I'm posting the poem's burning first stanza. The fire still burns in Paul -- so does the wisdom.
JFK Redux
"The sun allows you to see only what the sun
Falls upon: the surface."
-- Frank Bidart, "Against Silence"
Out the window care, tossed, no?
Yet did we not care before?
Care who did what and how and why?
And care when some plot uncloaked,
Did we not respond vigorously?
Say when a head of state assassinated?
The murder in public of the president --
Followed then by the periodic unraveling
Of an oafish conspiracy exposing treachery
Only to have it officially swept aside,
For how could the country abide
Knowing it was the country itself --
Its own elected and appointed caretakers
Who conspired to murder their own leader --
He too liberal for their oligarchic machinations,
He a threat to the ever-expanding industry
Of war -- now as we can clearly see --
Now the condition of perpetual war
So ingrained it simply must be.
Besides, who cares?
Paul Cummins and friend
My New Year Message
I turned 72 in September, which is a sort of achievement.
A couple of days ago, I watched the episode of The Crown featuring the wonderful Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret. I should have been more shaken up by Manville's portrayal of the devil-may-care princess's strokes and decline. After her initial stroke, Margaret chose to keep smoking and drinking and partying , and her lifestyle soon killed her.
I'm still here after my 2017 stroke. Probably because I don't smoke, I take my meds, and I cut back on my drinking and partying.
Since my medical calamity, I've written two books, a screenplay, a short story and now a weekly column (in addition to my musings here). I cheered my wife Camille Peri as she finished writing her greatest literary achievement, A Wilder Shore, the chronicle of the bohemian marriage between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, which will be released by Viking Penguin in August 2024. We watched our oldest son Joe Talbot win the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and other plaudits for his remarkable achievement The Last Black Man in San Francisco -- and we'll soon celebrate the college graduation of our youngest son Nathaniel (Nat). I'm so so grateful I lived to do and see all of that.
So it's true -- since my stroke, I've led a full life. I have fun. Yes, I'll always be physically fucked up -- I'm permanently wobbly, walk outdoors with a cane, can't drive etc. Life and its sorrowful news break my heart every day. But I'm glad I'm still alive.
These days, I spend as much time thinking about the past and close ones who've died. Hey, I'm old. But I'm still surrounded by family and friends. I look at flowers and trees with a new sense of wonder. I play old, favorites popular songs and classical pieces -- and I seek out new ones. Books and movies and TV shows too. I cry and laugh and FEEL more surprisingly. I find older women, women my age, interesting and erotic. They've led full lives, too. They have many stories -- and secrets -- to share.
Is that the best way to go out? Is it better to fade or implode? My (relatively) steady life ? Or that of Princess Margaret? We all die sooner or later.
I'm not looking forward to the New Year. The presidential race is already a shit-show. Yes, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is in the race, thank god. I welcome his candidacy despite what the NYT, NPR, MSNBC, AP etc tell you ad nauseam. RFK Jr. -- among the major presidential candidates -- is the only one who honestly articulates what is ailing America as it enters its turbulent period of imperial decline. He's the only candidate who talks about the rampant corporate corruption, political chaos, gluttony, environmental destruction and violence. Yes, and the monstrous rise of Big Pharma. But Bobby won't jump again in the polls until he tells the full truth about Israel and Palestine.
America desperately needs to have a national dialogue about its future -- one without acrimony and bitterness. We desperately need a new, national, citizens' movement for peace and justice. But I don't see that happening. Instead, we're fragmented and stupefied.
Are we old ones leaving something of worth behind, some guidance for the younger ones? I suppose that's why I practiced the oppositional journalism I did, why I wrote my books. I'm so glad when I hear that they have enlightened and inspired younger readers.
And so as the beast slouches toward Bethlehem, as we stumble into 2024, I'm not hopeful. But I'm still breathing. So are you.
What are we going to do about it?
(By the way, this illustration came from the Wonewoc (Wisconsin) Public Library. Support your local library.)
War Is the Health of the State
This essay by Jeffrey Sachs is the most acute dissection that I've read in a long time of War Inc., the United States's most booming industry. Why are we in Ukraine, why are we in Gaza, why are we everywhere blood flows? Read this and weep -- then work to overthrow this death system. Life in 2024! That's my New Year's wish.
Btw, speaking of our broken healthcare system, as we are below, Sachs also denounces Health Inc.
From Jeffrey Sachs's essay:
Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.
What gives?
The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money...
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.
Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.
On December 22, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstained from a watered-down UN resolution to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
Christmas in the ER
As Bill Simpich --a friend -- writes, the U.S. healthcare system is broken. He and his partner Joanne had the misfortune of rushing to various hospital emergency rooms in the San Francisco Bay Area during this holiday season. But their horrific experiences got him thinking: what if our medical system was actually, you know, healthy? What if the U.S. spent its vast wealth on helping people instead of killing them? It's the time of year to think big. Here are Bill's thoughts:
Merry Christmas to you, some of my favorite people in the world!
My present is a short brainstorm on health care in the USA during the winter solstice and how to deliver some of the simplest solutions in the right package. All feedback appreciated.
My partner Joanne was in six emergency rooms in eleven days this month, almost all with at least two hours time in the waiting room ...and that's how we got covid for the holidays...Pax Terra and Paxlovid!
These were all Sutter hospitals - Alta Bates Berkeley (the worst), Summit Medical Center (marginally better), and Sutter Novato (which we went to because we correctly figured it was less crowded - it was early morning in Marin County).
Joanne was really ill, for a variety of chronic and undiagnosed reasons - the most difficult for the emergency room to investigate. ERs are designed for a quick solution to keep people alive and whole. Not a place for someone suffering from unsolved miseries and not about to die - but convinced that would be the best way to go.
The very worst of it was that she was extraordinarily dizzy and nauseous, but the authorities wouldn't let her lie down. "There are no beds available and no place to lie down." Joanne is a former Sutter nurse herself, and let them know it, to adverse effect. When she almost fainted at Alta Bates, she was accused by the coordinator of faking it to get a bed. I wound up getting her prone between two chairs and had to advocate against the coordinator's demands for her to get up. I told them that we weren't mad but we weren't going to comply. They left her alone. The chairs at the other facilities were designed so that you couldn't even do that.
Which got me to thinking...my friend Katya shared with me this wonderful Latin phrase inscribed on Roman buildings - "Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex". The health of the people shall be the whole of the law.
What if there was a "Peoples' Emergency Room" - kind of "urgent care-plus", where no insurance plans were necessary? Where there was no waiting room, but dozens of spaces separated by curtains where people could lie down when ill while waiting for assistance for their physical, mental and emotional distress? Where they could get compassionate care - with solidarity and without blinking lights and whirring machines and alarms? De-emphasize without eliminating prescription medication, to reduce the need for a prescribing doctor? The facility could be run by the local health department. If the health department won't touch it, a big-time Kickstarter with the stakeholders could get it started - health care workers, techs, community members and more.
What if the cafeteria offered - as one example - burrito bowls with only-healthy local ingredients in reasonable quantities, better proportions (easy on the rice, amigo) and affordable prices?
What if a portion of the cafeteria had a jukebox with contemporary young people's music, vintage pinball machines, and looped videos about Medicare for All, College/Trade Schools for All, and all the other "nice things" we could have if we diverted half of the US military budget and imposed death knell taxes on fossil fuels?
What if a Sort-of-Socialist Supermarket adjacent to Peoples' Urgent Care was run as a nonprofit educational by the local health department - featuring not just local produce, but health care workers stocking healthy produce and educating consumers on the best food choices before they get to the registers? Wouldn't it be sweet to see blood sugar tests stationed by the bakery? How about blood pressure machines stationed by the meat department?
How about on-the-spot appointments with doctors after these sudden discoveries? An attractive venue with soft lights, designed for people to pursue their health goals rather than high-calorie purchases? A spot where people can learn about ways to shift their purchasing power to local farmers - again, with a lounge offering videos, music and art providing alternatives to the military budget and fossil fuels?
No matter how you feel about government or the lack of it - and I vacillate back and forth, as a confirmed big-government anarchist - there is no substitute for prefigurative politics - building the world we want to live in. There is nothing like the power of leading by example. Even Santa figured out that the way to get a package into the right hands is by going down the chimney.
The Israel Lobby and the Cancel Culture
It's not anti-Semitic to oppose Israel's slaughter of children and other innocent lives in Gaza. It's not anti-Semitic to call for an immediate ceasefire. You can advocate the downfall of Benjamin Netanyahu's extremist government (as thousands of brave Israeli protesters did earlier this year before the war conveniently saved him) and still support Israel's right to safely exist. You can oppose the massive flow of U. S. weapons to the IDF when Israel drops 2,000-pound bombs on civilians and commits war crimes.
In other words, you can love your Jewish brothers and sisters -- as I do -- and still stand for life and hope in Palestine, as many of them do.
But war fever has driven the Israel lobby in the U.S. to take militant (and fearful) positions. The AIPAC crowd has targeted Rep. Jamaal Bowman and other progressive (and in many cases non-white) political leaders. Why is Bowman being primaried? Because he had the nerve to speak out for a Gaza ceasefire. Likewise, university presidents (all women) have come under withering fire to resign because they dared to defend academic freedom.
The Israel lobby has become a loud and well-financed part of the cancel culture. Free speech -- especially about Palestinian human rights -- can silence you.
This weekend, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden raised millions of dollars at Hollywood events, co-hosted in many cases by Jewish executives and celebrities. Biden's poll numbers in the nation are rapidly sinking, but he remains very popular in the entertainment industry. In his remarks at the Hollywood fundraisers, President Biden did not mention Gaza once, though the issue is tearing apart his political party. Jill Biden did obliquely refer to it at one party, when the shouts and chants of pro-Palestinian protesters floated faintly from a nearby park, where the demonstrators had been corralled by the police.
“I’m so grateful Joe is our president during these uncertain times,” she ad-libbed, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd.
This is the very definition of elite, bubble-think.... the Bidens presiding over a Hollywood soiree where the tickets cost up to $500,000, while antiwar protesters are fenced in far away by the police. Meanwhile, President Biden vetoes a ceasefire resolution at the UN, thereby assuring there will be more bloodshed in Gaza.
And Democratic pundits wonder why more and more voters consider Biden out of touch.
The pro-war lobby is fracturing the Democratic Party and isolating the U.S. and Israel from most of the world.
Who benefits from this widening tragedy?
The Bidens are still hot in Hollywood.
Let Us Now Praise Norman Lear
Yes, Norman was a TV legend and all that. But thanks to former CBS president Jim Rosenfield, who was a Salon board member when my partner Mike O'Donnell and I were running the feisty media startup, Norman also joined our board -- and became my Jewish uncle, the avuncular, wise, unflappable, funny man I went to for guidance in Los Angeles.
Once I went to Norman's Beverly Hills office for Salon advice -- we were always on the verge of bankruptcy or some other disaster because of our rebellious politics and because, well, we were a dotcom business. "Norman," I said, "I need your advice."
"Go to her," he said without skipping a beat, "drop to your knees, beg her to forgive you."
"No, Norman," I smiled, "not that kind of advice."
He always made time for Mike and me. He always called on his many friends and contacts in Hollywood to help us. He was tickled that he was involved in a left-wing media enterprise with the son of Lyle Talbot, whom he thought of as a Reagan-like Hollywood conservative. (I explained that actually my father had swung to the left from his Midwestern Republican roots, and denounced Reagan, with whom he served on the Screen Actors Guild board, when "Ronnie" became president.)
Norman invited Mike and me and our wives to his 80th birthday gala celebration at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. My wife Camille and I sat at a table with the ebullient David Hyde Pierce, Ed Begley Jr. and a saturnine and silent Barry Levinson, and were charmed by Alec Baldwin. (I know, I know.) Warren Beatty went swanning by our table wearing actors' make-up. Yes, Hollywood is weird. But it was a fun night. Predictably, Norman turned it into a political event.
Salon's key investor John Warnock of Adobe just died. Now Norman. It's a passing of the guard who cared about progressive, fearless journalism. My crowd is next. Has the torch been passed?
Norman Lear