“Wendell Berry is the Sargeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s-land of ecology. Conveying the same limber innocence of young Gary Cooper, Wendell advances on the current crop of Krauts armed with naught but his pen and his mythic ridgerunner righteousness. One after the other he picks them off, from the flying bridges of their pleasure boats as they roar through his native Kentucky rivers, from beneath the hard hats in the Hazard county strip mines, from the swivel chairs in the Pentagon where they weigh the various ways to wage war on all forms of enemy life beyond the end of their own friendly chin. He’s a crackshot essayist and, for those given to capture, a genial and captivating poet. He boasts a formidable arsenal of novels, speeches, articles, stories and poems from his outpost in one of the world’s most ravaged battlefields where he writes the good fight and tends his family and his honeybees. Consider him an ally.”

The thing is, Kesey said this in 1971.

That was nearly forty years ago. And I realized, after reading another Berry essay collection a couple of weeks ago (in this case, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays), that Berry has been pounding away at the same themes for at least that long. And nothing that he has expressed concerns, not to mention deep dismay, about—the increasing power of agribusiness, our increased disconnection from the land, the abandonment of local economies and communities, our collective disregard of the concept of stewardship—has gotten better. In fact, one could argue that everything of concern to Berry has gotten worse. And this is tragic, because current trends, particularly in agriculture, but also in the relentless suburbanization of American life, where no one actually really knows how to do anything, are probably unsustainable. The result will be, well, who knows what, but it might not be pleasant. And who will have the kind of wisdom and local knowledge that is central to Berry’s worldview then?

Berry is fond of throwing out nuggets like the following:

Nobody has a right to destroy anything, and everybody has an obligation to defend as much as he or she possibly can. But sooner or later you’ll have to choose. You can’t defend everything, even though everybody has an obligation to be as aware as possible, and as effective as possible, in preserving the things that need to be preserved everywhere. But I’ve argued over and over again that the fullest responsibility has to be exercised at home, where you have some chance to come to a competent and just understanding of what’s involved, and where you have some chance of being really effective.

And:

Rome destroyed itself by undervaluing the country people, too.

And:

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.

And:

There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven’t produced stable communities well adapted to their places.

What I’m talking about in my work is the hope that it might be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities in America, even though we haven’t done it. The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you’re a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can’t operate without it.

Berry is the philosopher of the local and what, specifically, being local entails. America has inflicted a number of wounds on itself the past several decades in the name of “free markets,” still clinging to the myth that there is actually such a thing. Berry isn’t much of a fan of these, actually. What he is a fan of is the dignity of work (remember that?), and the notion that we should take care of ourselves, particularly how we care for the land that supports us. And that we should have local knowledge–about the land, of course, but also about how to do the things we need to do to occupy the land–how to maintain and sustain it in particular. Well, at a time when externalities are catching up with us rapidly in any number of areas (global warming being the most obvious), we really need to pay more attention to what Berry is saying. And that means a return to the local. Berry has a number of mantras—the most recent is “Eat responsibly.” And by this means not just know what your food is, and whether it’s good for you or not—but where it comes from, how it was produced, under what conditions, and subsidized by whom? Sounds easy, but in modern America, and increasingly here in the UK, this is getting harder and harder to do.

I’ve been reading Berry for decades now, and his place in modern American thought is still a bit of a mystery. He’s written one of the best American novels of the century (A Place on Earth) and a number of volumes of pretty good poetry (particularly Farming: A Hand Book). He honed his craft at the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where he hung out with Kesey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry. Most importantly, he has produced a series of essays over the years that stand as a testament to sound judgment. In many ways, conservative judgment as well—because Berry wants to conserve things.

This has led to many fun and enlightening exchanges within the conservative and libertarian blogging community. When did Berry, the arch-Luddite opponent of modern agribusiness, militarism and word processors, become a crunchy-conservative icon? Pretty recently, judging by some of the commentary I see occasionally on blogs like the ones cited above. And hardly a week goes by over at Front Porch Republic that someone doesn’t make a specific reference to Berry. I think this is great.

And where are the liberals on Berry? Generally, not to be found, which is a pity. Have liberals become so entwined on the wrong side of the globalization debate that they’ve lost all perspective? I’m way over-generalizing here, of course, but still, I seldom see anyone on the Democratic side speaking up for localism. Instead, we get Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, and Obama, for all his many virtues, still behaving like a farm state senator. But if liberals really want to pursue a more just society, the place to do it as at the local level. The far right understands this better than the left—hence the attacks on ACORN, which is essentially local political action. Look, you want better schools? Run for the school board. You want better food? Get on the planning board and make sure that the last local farmland isn’t being ploughed under for yet another housing development. You want better communities? Run for the city council, or whatever it is you’ve got. That Think Globally, Act Locally bumper sticker that we seldom see any more had it about right.

As Bill Kauffman has noted, “Among the tragedies of contemporary politics is that Wendell Berry, as a man of place, has no place in a national political discussion that is framed by Gannett and Clear Channel.” This may be changing. For one thing, Berry is still writing, and more and more people keep reading. I don’t think there’s a single book in his back catalogue that has ever gone out of print—pretty impressive for a writing career than spans over four decades. For another, Berry, bless his heart, just won’t shut up. Here’s Berry and long time co-author Wes Jackson in The New York Times earlier this year:

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

And then the kicker—we don’t get a bunch of starry-eyed idealism, but a bunch of necessary, practical and achievable measures to take to redress these problems:

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

No wonder most Reagan conservatives can’t stand the guy. A 50-year farm bill? But that may be how long it takes to re-capture the kind of localism that will provide us with a sustainable agricultural system. But Russell Kirk would probably take a look around at the mess we’ve made, and agree.

Did I mention Berry is a poet as well? The Mad Farmer poems in particular are worth a look. Let’s close with “The Farmer and the Sea” (initially published in Farming: A Hand Book):

The sea always arriving,
hissing in pebbles, is breaking
its edge where the landsman
squats on his rock. The dark
of the earth is familiar to him,
close mystery of his source
and end, always flowering
in the light and always
fading. But the dark of the sea
is perfect and strange, the absence of any place, immensity on the loose.
Still, he sees it as another
keeper of he land, caretaker
shaking the earth, breaking it, clicking the pieces, but somewhere
holding deep fields yet to rise,
shedding its richness on them
silently as snow, keeper and maker
of places wholly dark. And in him
Something dark applauds.

To learn more, this is a pretty good place to start.

Star Wars doesn’t exactly fit in any film genre. It has action and romance, but it isn’t an action or  a romance film. It isn’t sci-fi either, though for lack of a better classification it often gets put in the genre. Star Wars is a myth. It reveals itself in the opening scroll, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” From the beginning we’re separated from the mundane by a thin line of imagination, but the line is so thin that seeing the fantastic in our own existence is nearly impossible to miss. Campbell was fond of saying that, “Myth is a public dream and dreams are private myths.” Lucas managed to draw the line between them with precision and grace. And in doing so gave Campbell his life-long dream: a modern myth. That is, the psychological motifs present in all mythology dressed in metaphors accessible to modern man.

With the predictive powers of hindsight it’s easy to see Campbell becoming the scholar he was. His middle class childhood in New York state was dominated by an intense fascination with all things Native American. The auto-didactic streak that would characterize his life was evident in a young man reading through whole library collections for pleasure. His early biography is punctuated by profound moments that clearly shape the man he would become. On the return from a European vacation with his family, Campbell befriended Jiddu Krishnamutri. The trans-Atlantic length conversation they shared prompted Campbell to forsake his native Catholicism and ignited his curiosity for the beliefs beyond his personal context.

In 1927, he left for Europe again, this time as a post-graduate student at Columbia University. He was to study Old French, German and Provencal as part of his Medieval Literature studies. He found far more than he expected. He began a life-long love affair with the Cathedral at Chartres; discovered Joyce and Mann; wondered at post-impressionists like Picasso and Klee; and began making sense of the world under the influence of Freud and, especially, Jung. Upon his return to America, he proposed adding Sanskrit and modern art to his course of studies at Columbia. His advisers felt that neither was appropriate to the study of Medieval Literature, and so Campbell left formal, higher education for good.

But he did not leave education. With little hope for gainful employment – it was 1929 – Campbell commenced five years of self-education and travel. He broke each day into four, four-hour blocks, three of which were spent reading. To his impressive foreign language abilities he added Russian, because he wanted to read War and Peace and assumed that much would be necessarily lost in translation. He traveled the U.S. extensively during those years, befriending John Steinbeck and living next door to Ed Ricketts. He spent a year as the headmaster at The Canterbury School and published a short story. And he spent another year living in a rustic, tourist cabin in Woodstock, NY; he simply asked publishers for books, and since no one was purchasing them, they obliged.

A 1932 journal entry shows a man deep in thought and points the way to his ultimate destination:

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere–but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is–but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books. — It isn’t in travel. — It isn’t in California. — It isn’t in New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all?

Creepy as it may have been, Campbell eventually took a position in the literature department of Sarah Lawrence College. He retired from the same position 38 years later, still without his doctorate. He spent the rest of his life examining, pondering, discussing and sharing the questions he asked himself in 1932.

Some claim that Campbell was not a great scholar of myth and religion, and to some extent this is true. He never claimed to be one. He was, however, a brilliant synthesizer, able to take in the big picture and tease out the similarities in prima facia dissimilar traditions. He saw context where others saw only details. He shared with Jung a vision concerning the common psycho-spiritual context of humankind. Like Jung, he he saw myth as a means for man to describe the context that was simultaneously internal and external, the present and the eternal. But foremost, Campbell was an educator. He had the gift of the story-teller, and it allowed him to share scholarly thoughts in a way that engaged the not-so-scholarly.

The long conversation with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth) recorded shortly before his death is a staple of public library AV sections. He’s best known for efforts of that sort because they are so accessible. But his writing is hardly confined to popularizations of myth. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a deep and complex work exploring the hero monomyth as it has been retold countless times around the world and throughout history. The four volumes of The Masks of God are a heavily footnoted history of man’s spiritual journey from the deepest mists of prehistory to expressions of mythology in modern art and culture. They could easily constitute a fine lay education in comparative myth and religion.

Campbell may be one of the handful of people who understood Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, co-authoring an explanatory tome. And he edited the collected works of Heinrich Zimmer and Carl Jung. And all of this was done in the context of a long marriage, a distinguished teaching career, and a host of deeply intellectual friendships that spanned the globe.

Myth, in Campbell’s view, is metaphor. It is a means of accessing truth and wisdom, and it forms a context in which to integrate the boon into life. He liked to point out that “happily ever after” in fairly tales did not mean “without care or worry”, but rather “knowing and integrating wisdom into daily life.” It troubled him that modern man has little connection to myth, and he rightfully wondered if our sorry state of affairs is the result of too little mythic understanding. For Campbell, this situation did not exclude the throngs of devoutly religious people the world over. He often pointed out that these people are regularly guilty of mistaking the metaphor for the truth that it describes.

His work is a testament to the thought and belief of all humanity, and to the idea that knowledge is understanding, rather than power. He was an erudite scholar, but the rogue’s glint in his eye was impossible to hide. And he spent a life time imparting knowledge that came with the roguish and mildly subversive instructions that we should follow our bliss.

Image credit: The Joseph Campbell Foundation (click for further bio, complete works, etc.)

The reading list given for Campbell’s “Introduction to Mythology” course at Sarah Lawrence.

In thinking about technological change, and our relative inability to often recognize the transformational technologies at the time they come along, consider the electric guitar. Particularly the solid-body electric guitar invented by Les Paul, who passed away Thursday at the age of 94. The NY Times story does him justice – he was just messing around and came up with this thing because he couldn’t find it anywhere. And I don’t imagine that in his wildest dreams he could have foreseen the impact it would have; certainly no one else did at the time.

But in retrospect, it’s clear that the electric guitar is one of those things that changed everything. First came rock and roll, which led to the sixties, when led to the breakdown of everything…. No, wait, first came rock and roll, which led to drugs, which led to the breakdown of everything…. No, darnit, let’s see, first came rock and roll, then came… I can’t remember.

But it’s true. The electric guitar changed everything. It made music more interesting, certainly, and the cultural landscape has never recovered. Actually, the US culture wars of much of the second half of the 20th century focus on rock and roll as much as anything else, perhaps more so. I remember my first (and only) visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We were on The Older Daughter’s college tour, which took us out to the Midwest – Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa – and it was a great holiday, one of the great family trips we took. And I remember insisting, over the bemused objections of everyone else in the family, that we should make a visit. Everyone was a pretty good sport about it, as I recall.

And it was worth the trip. For the rock and roll audience, it was interesting – most of the people we saw there would have looked completely at home in your standard Indianapolis 500 crowd. And the upstairs part, where the inductees have been enshrined, is a bit weird and over the top, actually. Of course, since so many of them are dead, maybe it’s a not inappropriate venue. (Les Paul was inducted in 1988.) But the really interesting part of the museum is the actual museum itself, which lays out, in a very serious but undeniably clever way, the history of rock and roll in America. And you realize, in a way that I’ve seen crystallized nowhere else, that the history of rock and roll in America is inextricably bound up with two other aspects of American life – race and censorship.

And both are still with us. The race thing is obvious – think of the South, changed on the surface but perhaps not underneath (given the racists they repeatedly elect to Congress and their local legislatures), and the outrage among a substantial part of the US population against Obama that is currently driving the tea party and healthcare protest lunacy. If America does permanently schism, as it shows every intention of doing, it will be over race. Which will be tragic, but perhaps nonetheless unavoidable. The censorship thing, too, is still around – fundamentalists of all stripes (who in the US are primarily, but not exclusively, Christian) will never stop trying to ban stuff, and if they can’t, they’ll burn stuff, and if they can’t do that, they’ll think of something else instead – as recently as a couple of years ago Dixie Chicks CDs were being bulldozed. The overlap between these two sets would make an interesting Venn diagram.

And rock and roll, for as long as it’s been around, has epitomized both of these conflicts. Early radio stations refused to play “Negro Music.” While it was on separate stations, that was fine – but as soon as white teenagers started listening in, civilization started to collapse, or something. But people really believed it then, and they still believe it now. Rock and roll in the US is inevitably political, in a way that it’s not in, say, Holland (which brought us one of the best rock guitarists, Jan Akkerman, who plays a Les Paul guitar too). Even in this day of corporate rock and roll, it’s still a principal outlet for the other, in Fanon’s framework, and always will be. Anyone can pick up an electric guitar and a bass and a drumkit and go to town. So the censorship thing will always be there. And who knows how long the race thing will still be around for – it may need for my generation to finally die out before America is mature enough to come to grips with it. Rock and roll has historically been one of the principal modes of attack on racism, ever since white boys like Carl Perkins first picked up his Les Paul Gold Top and came out with “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956. And without Les Paul, no rock and roll as we know it.

So let’s all hope that Les Paul was greeted by a heavenly choir wearing sunglasses, all strumming away on their Gibson Les Pauls to “How High the Moon.”

Wufnik is an American who lives in London, has too many advanced degrees for what he does for a living, and has strong feelings about rock and roll.

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The words are those of Francis Crick and James Watson who, in their seminal 1953 Nature paper, correctly identified the structure of DNA and placed it at the centre of genetically inherited characteristics.

In “On the Origin of Species” published almost 100 years before, in 1859, Charles Darwin had first expounded his theories of natural selection. On February 12, it will be 200 years since the birth of possibly one of the greatest scientists of all time.

Darwin was well-aware that his theories would challenge the prevailing views about man’s place in the scheme of things. It took him more than 20 years before he could, eventually, be persuaded to put his work together and publish. Then it unleashed the storm he had been expecting.

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form

Gravity, special relativity, quantum theory, thermodynamics … all of these scientific theories are intimately bound with specific people. All have changed the world out of all imagining. Yet only Darwin has challenged the fundamental way in which we view ourselves as human beings.

150 years on from the publication of “On the Origin of Species” – 200 years since Darwin’s birth – natural selection is still controversial. Scientifically, it is now beyond doubt that Darwin was correct. All the building blocks that are required to reinforce his original hypothesis are now in place: continental drift explains how creatures that were once identical were physically separated and continued their evolution independently, DNA shows how the trick is done, and DNA itself has allowed accurate time-frames to be developed to match observation and physical research.

Yet that is not sufficient for many. Arguing that it is a theory, many religious people declare that it doesn’t need to be taken seriously.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring…. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection

Well, gravity is a theory too. Worse, gravity requires a graviton to exist before the theory will be considered proved and the graviton has yet to be found. In fact, few of the supporting sub-atomic particles in the standard model have been found. We’re still out on the Higg’s Bosun which is required to prove mass.

Natural selection, and its basis in evolutionary theory, are infinitely more tangible.

But how, it may be asked, can any analogous principle apply in nature? I believe it can and does apply most efficiently, from the simple circumstance that the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers

What Darwin taught us is sometimes counter-intuitive. That life-forms spread out to take advantage of every available niche that can support life. We find living things in undersea volcanic vents; in sulphurous pools, in the coldest and hottest environments, in the driest and most remote areas.

“Fittest” does not always mean the most admirable creatures survive. “Fittest” means relative to the environment in which the life-forms find themselves. If the entire planet became suddenly dry, then creatures that once survived only at the fringes of life would suddenly be fittest.

And, suddenly, human beings are not at the centre of creation. We have become successful under circumstances that are random. Individuals continue to become successful at random even within the broad expanse of humanity.

For many, it is intolerable that there is no higher judge of order than random distribution, heritable characteristics and environmental chance. Even the non-religious find much that is uncomfortable and antagonising in the theory of natural selection.

Much of modern political theory is an attempt to get away from the battle of natural selection. Economics is a study of the adaptation of markets, individual- and collective behaviour to scarcity. Nothing is so “natural” as business and economic cycles where the strongest, and the lucky, survive.

What Darwin has taught us is that survival goes to those most determined and capable of adaptation; not the most moral, or the most noble, or the most deserving.

During this most tumultuous of historical moments, Darwin still has much to teach us. For those who would listen.

George Denis Patrick Carlin was a goddamned hypocrite, and I loved him for it.

In the latter part of his long and storied life and career, the late standup comedy legend came off as a crusty, irate, disappointed, extremely cynical bastard who freely admitted he’d given up on the hopeless human race and reveled in its plentiful fuckups and contradictions.

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. This country is finished.” – GC

Offstage though, Carlin was a kind-hearted, selfless, encouraging friend to myriad pluggers on the comedy circuit. His daughter and colleagues say he was nothing like the persona he developed in the face of advancing age and frustration with the agonizing lack of progress in the nation he loved as much as he lampooned.

“Some people see a glass that’s half full. Some see a glass that’s half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” – GC

Though he insisted that he didn’t give a shit about America anymore, he sure kept up with it. In his last HBO show, It’s Bad for Ya, he opened with an astounding rapid-fire monologue loaded with all the latest buzzwords to show how tuned in and mentally shipshape he still was, despite having endured heart surgery and hitting the big 7-0.

Plus, he read more blogs than you do.

“The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.” – GC

I saw Carlin perform three times, the last here in Denver a few years ago in which he scoffed at the obsessively precautionary society America had become. He bragged about having swum in New York City’s filthy rivers as a kid.

“I was tempered in shit!” – GC

But he could never shake that bad ticker…

“As it stands right now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks, two to one. However, Richard still leads me, one to nothing, in burning yourself up.” – GC, 1982

George was honored in November with the Mark Twain Prize, apparently the only award he saw as “legitimate.” I wish he’d a made it to the ceremony, but he was undoubtedly there in spirit. Ah, who’m I kidding…

“What’s this favoritism toward the dead? FUCK the dead!” – GC

Ivins – populist wisecracker, incorrigible riler of conservatives, feisty foe of George Dubya Bush – was an ardent defender of democracy. And surely with the historic election of an African-American president outside the conventional boxes, she would have concurred that we were witnessing the democracy she cherished struggling back onto its wounded feet. For if Obama’s victory is anything, it is an achievement that happened from the bottom up, from grassroots volunteerism and $25 donations (though Ivins would have castigated him for flip-flopping on public financing), from the willingness of a populace to embrace words that they – like Ivins — refused to see as hollow, like hope, and change.

But it helped that Obama had a little extra moxie to him, too: shortly before she died, when Ivins was asked in December 2006 whether Obama should run for president, she said, “Yes, he should run. He’s the only Democrat with any ‘Elvis’ to him.”

Obama’s inner Elvis may have been muted at times beneath his steady, cool campaign exterior, but Ivins recognized leadership mojo when she saw it. And it was a new kind of leadership, the kind Barack Obama embodied to the American public as it went to vote Tuesday, that Ivins yearned for along with the rest of the electorate. In a January 2006 column she opposed a Hillary Clinton candidacy as more of the same, tired Washington, saying, “Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone.”

What the country needed was someone shaped in a different mold, even a mold-breaker. How prescient her words seem now, reflecting on the death of Eugene McCarthy:

“The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It’s about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief. If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it.”

McCarthy’s bid for the presidency wasn’t successful, but the junior senator’s from Illinois was. And in that, Ms. Ivins would have almost certainly seen further encouragement for her call to democratic renewal.

Her liberal populism and glee in flouting propriety developed in the most unlikely of circumstances.  A Texan through and through, Mary Tyler Ivins was born and raised in privilege in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, daughter of a powerful Republican oil man.  At a friend’s house she discovered The Texas Observer, a muckraking periodical that fueled angry arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War. She carried her independent thinking into journalism, which she pursued with a master’s degree at Columbia University, following studies at Smith College and the Institute of Political Science in Paris.

In 1970, Ivins leapt at an offer to become co-editor of The Texas Observer after starting out at the Houston Chronicle and the Minneapolis Tribune. Here, she honed the irreverence for which she became (in)famous, finding in the Texas legislature endless political hilarity to lampoon. Her renegade style didn’t fit in so well at the New York Times, which wooed her away in 1976: she often showed up to the newsroom barefoot, in blue jeans, accompanied by her dog named Shit. The Times obituary for Ivins said she complained the paper’s traditional editors “drained the life from her prose. ‘Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,’ she later wrote. ‘The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.’”

Ivins returned to Texas in 1982 when the Dallas Times Herald offered her a column in which she could write whatever she damn well pleased. She did, to the consternation of politicians, industry executives, advertisers, and plenty of conservative Texas readers. Ten years later her column was nationally syndicated, leaving more than Texans to ask, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” — the title of her first book.

Her career grew as big as her personality, with more books, magazine articles in all the big-league intellectual periodicals, TV appearances, and speaking tours. I laughed till I cried every time I heard Molly address the annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she was a beloved raconteur. In 2005 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

It’s a shame Ivins hasn’t been here to opine on the campaigns, to share in the magnitude of what American voters did last Tuesday, and to skewer what’s left of the Bush Administration as it skulks out, leaving a swath of financial and environmental wreckage on its way.  But the model she left behind exemplifies the potency of being both scholar and rogue.  While her wit and style were uniquely her own, she grounded her opinions with the solid reporting of an old-school journalist. She was never a blowhard, shouting obnoxiously about things she didn’t understand. Her knowledge of politics and culture was both broad and deep. Yet she wasn’t afraid to push and challenge, to irritate and enervate, to speak truth to power wrapped in humor that could dupe and delight even the targets of her invectives (she would have relished Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin).

Molly, iconic Scrogue, we miss you. May our humble efforts here at S&R pay a smidge of earnest homage to the example you have set. And may our new president help democracy bloom, now that we’re finally getting a chance to whack back the bushes. I hope that somehow you can see it.

The worst that a prince may expect from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them; but from hostile nobles he has not only to fear abandonment, but also that they will rise against him;

In 1513, early into the Great Wars of Italy, an Italian politician, ambassador, soldier, and political philosopher was on the losing end of one of the many internal conflicts that followed the Reniassance. After being tortured and eventually released, he moved to his beloved Florence and settled down on a farm to write what is probably one of the most important treatises on politics written – Il Principe, The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli.

In The Prince, Machiavelli lays out different kinds of principalities that exist, their various strengths and weaknesses, how to become a prince, and how to most effectively rule a principality. In so doing, Machiavelli gives us an eminently practical and pragmatic book about political leadership as well as a detailed look at the political and military history of his precious Italy.

[T]his country was under the dominion of the Pope, the Venetians, the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan, and the Florentines. These potentates had two principal anxieties: the one, that no foreigner should enter Italy under arms; the other, that none of themselves should seize more territory. Those about whom there was the most anxiety were the Pope and the Venetians.

However, the modern reader shouldn’t just read The Prince for its historical insights, fascinating as they are. Instead, the examples that Machiavelli scatters throughout the book are highly valuable for their parallels to modern politics, especially politics in parliamentary and federal systems a la the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan, etc. Given that the governance of republics is specifically not addressed in The Prince, that Machiavelli’s insights nonetheless apply should give all of us pause.

If we look at the United States, we find that the country has a long history of political dynasties – the Bushes, the Udalls, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, just to name a few. In many respects (although certainly not all), these families qualify as “hereditary principalities” according to Machiavelli’s definition. And as such, it’s easy to understand how they maintain their influence over a political system that is supposedly a republic.

I say at once there are fewer difficulties in holding hereditary states, and those long accustomed to the family of their prince, than new ones; for it is sufficient only not to transgress the customs of his ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise, for a prince of average powers to maintain himself in his state, unless he be deprived of it by some extraordinary and excessive force; and if he should be so deprived of it, whenever anything sinister happens to the usurper, he will regain it.

In other words, once you’re in with the help of Mommy or Daddy’s money and contacts, unless you suck badly, you’re in for good.

Our system approximates a “civic principality” as Machiavelli defines it, especially the Presidency. Given what Machiavelli says about civic principalities, and civic princes, it’s hardly a surprise that Presidents have sought to expand their power, generally successfully:

He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can neither rule nor manage them to his liking. But he who reaches sovereignty by popular favour finds himself alone, and has none around him, or few, who are not prepared to obey him.

As the quote that opened this post illustrates, Presidents civic princes who are installed via a public vote are largely insulated against the power of Congress their fellow nobles because the nobles cannot effectively resist the mass of the public. The only problems come when the prince visits upon his subjects (both the people and the nobles) sufficient indignities that he becomes hated and despised.

…I consider that a prince ought to reckon conspiracies of little account when his people hold him in esteem; but when it is hostile to him, and bears hatred towards him, he ought to fear everything and everybody. And well-ordered states and wise princes have taken every care not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to keep the people satisfied and contented, for this is one of the most important objects a prince can have.

Unfortunately for this excellent little book, The Prince has too often been considered a template for personal power. While there is certainly truth to that opinion, there’s a great deal more going on in The Prince than the quest for, and the maintenance of, personal power. In many respects, Machiavelli holds flexibility in the face of setbacks and various forms of opposition to be the single greatest asset any leader could have, and he points out that truly effective leadership essentially boils down to knowing the best approach to dealing with a problem and then implementing that approach. And Machiavelli clearly implies that only a truly effective prince can keep his principality safe from invasion, civil war, and even self-destruction.

Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood to be justifying any actions so long as those actions are effective at keeping the prince in power, when in fact he’s an agitator for princes to temper their basest tendencies in favor of the health of their very subjects and nations.

This is not to say that Machiavelli doesn’t justify cruelty, or lying, or the invasion of other nations – he does. But he points out that princes must limit their cruelty to situations where it’s absolutely necessary, and even then to quick cruelties that affect the fewest people, lest the princes be at risk losing their positions. He points out that lying and going back on your promises is sometimes necessary, but that doing so all the time gives the nobility and public reason to hate and oppose you. He points out that, if invasion is either necessary or desired, then there are ways to do it that will not destroy your own nation via overextension in the process.

The ends may justify the means, but for Machiavelli, the ends being justified are at least as much the security and prosperity of the nation as a whole as they are the personal power of the nation’s prince or princes. The Prince is a book of sufficient subtlety that the differences between personal power and national authority are not necessarily obvious, something that too many readers and reviewers over the centuries have failed to grasp.

Our leaders would do well to study again their Machiavelli and to re-learn what they believe they understand so well.

To read The Prince in its entirety on-line, please visit Project Gutenberg.

Acosta’s name is not one that rings many bells today, and if it does, most people remember him as being the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo, the character immortalized in Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Fear, the character of Dr. Gonzo—a man with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs and dangerous living—is the perfect complement to Thompson’s journalist alter ego, Raoul Duke, who uses his assignment to cover an off-road race as an excuse to overindulge in booze and drugs in Vegas.

Oscar, however, is more than simply an inspiration for a character, albeit an important one. Acosta was a gifted writer and storyteller, an activist, a civil rights attorney, and is considered the Malcolm X of the Chicano/a community. He wrote two of the most important novels of the Chicano Protest Movement; his books were precedent-setting works and in the literary style of Gonzo journalism were pseudo-documentaries of California’s Latino movement; they set the writer/attorney at the front lines of literary Chicanismo.

His mysterious disappearance happened three years after the notorious drug-fueled bacchanalia in Vegas – the “mythical journey to the heart of the American Dream.” Oscar has twice been portrayed on-screen in film adaptations of Thompson’s work; first in an Anglo characterization by the late Peter Boyle in Where the Buffalo Roam, and more recently, by Benicio del Toro in a memorable performance that hews closer to the characterization in the book.

Thompson’s book and the subsequent films provided but a small glimpse into Acosta’s real story, not the true essence of the Brown Buffalo.

Oscar was born in El Paso, Texas, and was raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. According to Acosta in an unpublished essay in Ilan Stavans’ Oscar ‘Zeta’ Acosta: The Uncollected Works, his family left El Paso during the Depression and moved to California so his family “could work as migrant field workers.” Acosta writes about his father, Manuel Mercado Acosta, who was naturalized after he served in the US Navy during World War II:

My father was a little different than the other people where we lived. He wanted me to compete more than anything else, so he pushed me into competition with himself. When I was five he encouraged me to argue and fight with him, which is unusual in a Mexican family. I guess that is where I became as nasty as I am.

Elsewhere, Oscar describes his father as “an indio from the mountains of Durango” who “operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out.” He credits his mother, Juana Fierro Acosta, for his love of music. In his autobiography, he writes that he inherited her passion for music, becoming a clarinet player and always nurturing a love for jazz. As an adolescent, he would often play in bands. He was so good he even got a music scholarship to the University of Southern California, but for romantic reasons decided to join the Air Force Band.

Oscar had fallen in love with a Caucasian girl. In Brown Buffalo, the character Jane Addison is the girl who broke his heart because her parents rejected him over his ethnic background:

I got a music scholarship … but I was going with this Anglo girl whose parents didn’t like me so I decided to get out of the way by going into the Air Force Band. We planned to get married when I came out. After a year of her visiting me and hiding around, she split and I was stuck in the service.

The scar of the racial division between lovers would haunt him forever and played a key role in his development of brown pride, so named because of the color of the buffalo.

It was not until adulthood that Acosta saw racism and injustice through a new lens and made his transformation from Oscar Zeta Acosta to Buffalo Z. Brown, Chicano lawyer. His entrance to the theater of Chicano history was extremely timely.

Having exited the service, he completed college and went on to graduate from San Francisco Law School in 1965 and passed the California Bar exam in 1966. Acosta worked as an attorney for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society in Oakland, CA, for a year. He left frustrated with the inequalities his clients faced before the legal system and his inability to make significant change. After Acosta left his position, he traveled to Colorado where he met Hunter Thompson and picked up odd jobs in construction and restaurants. He had long wanted to write a novel and recognized the activism arising from the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles as a way to get back before the bar and as a source of literary inspiration. Soon he began sharing the stage with Angela Davis and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, the militant poet who wrote I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín.

Reenergized, he became an anti-poverty, civil rights, people’s lawyer who represented activists such as the Saint Basil 21 (Católicos por La Raza), Brown Berets member Carlos Montes, Corky Gonzales, the Biltmore Six, and East L.A. Chicanos. He was an outspoken critic of racism and anti-Mexican sentiment, and he further saw himself as the Robin Hood of the Chicano poor in the Southwest, taking something away from the rich: power and authority. From Revolt:

All through law school, my secret dream had been to work with [César] Chávez and the campesinos… My fantasies ran to the vineyards and orchards at César’s side, a union organizer rather than a courtroom attorney.

Both cases – East L.A. Thirteen (Carlos Montes et al. v. Los Angeles County) and Biltmore Six (Carlos Montes et al. v. Los Angeles County) – were among the first civil disobedience and protest actions in Los Angeles to gain national media attention. The cases would later server as a basis for activists to articulate discrimination against Mexican-Americans, as well as to express their Chicano identity.

The first trial case he took was the defense of thirteen Chicano militants (East L.A. Thirteen) who were indicted by a Los Angeles County grand jury on charges of conspiracy to disrupt public schools. In 1967, under the guidance of civics teacher Sal Castro and members of the United Mexican American Students (UMAS), professors, professionals, clergy, and the Brown Berets, a group of high school students began organizing to protest conditions in the schools. Demonstrations took place in support of the East L.A 13, and the Los Angeles Police Department responded with violence. The trial revealed that the LAPD, in cooperation with other law enforcement agencies, informants and undercover officers, were planted in communities and student organizations identifying with the Chicano Movement. As a lawyer, he argued and won the case on the grounds that the LAPD violated the defendants’ First Amendment rights of free association and free speech.

There was more at stake in the Biltmore case. On April 24, 1969, the California Department of Education invited then-Governor Ronald Reagan as the keynote speaker at the banquet held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. An attempt was made by Chicano demonstrators to drown out Regan’s speech with shouting, stomping, and clapping. However, a fire broke out in a linen closet on the tenth floor. Firefighters arrived immediately, yet no public attention was drawn to the fire. Later, a grand jury responded by indicting ten people—six for arson, burglary, malicious destruction, and conspiracy to commit felonies. Three of the six were formerly defendants in the East L.A. Thirteen case: Moctezuma Esparza, Carlos Montes, and Ralph Ramírez. The defendants in this particular case became known as the Biltmore Six. However, because Esparza and Montes had been previously indicted, both were now facing possible life sentences. As the lead defense attorney for the Biltmore Six, Acosta fought to show that Mexican-American citizens, particularly those with clear Spanish surnames, had been excluded from participating in the Los Angeles County grand jury. This move by authorities compromised fairness and the pursuit of justice, he argued. Oscar would twice be jailed for contempt of court before the Biltmore Six finally walked free after several years of legal wrangling.

Then in 1970, Buffalo Z. Brown ran for sheriff of Los Angeles County under the La Raza Unida Party. From his candidacy statement:

Neither the expenditure of huge sums of money nor an increase in the personnel of all the law enforcement agencies throughout the county has diminished the decay inherent in our communities. On the contrary, history is replete with examples to prove that the privilege of bearing guns and their use under color of law has in all probability increased the incidence of violence. There can therefore be no justification for the continued waste of millions of taxpayers dollars in the maintenance of the militia within the confines of the county. Because the forces of oppression and suppression—the law enforcement agencies— continue to harass, brutalize, illegally confine and psychologically damage the Chicano, the black, the poor and the unrepresented, I hereby declare my candidacy for the office of Sheriff of Los Angeles County.

When he entered the race, he knew that his chances of winning were nil. Still, he ran a spirited campaign promising to disband the Los Angeles police force. According to Ilan Stavans in Bandido: Oscar Zeta Acosta and the Chicano Experience:

He pledged the ultimate dissolution of the sheriffs department; the interim actual and symbolic demilitarization of deputies; the immediate withdrawal of concentrated forces in the barrios and ghettos ; the immediate investigation into criminal activities of law enforcement officers; the implementation of community review boards from the various areas; the immediate use of personnel, equipment, and facilities for utilitarian and socially beneficial programs as recommended and approved by community review boards; and equality of treatment and justice for all.

Oscar ultimately lost by a wide margin, but he still received more than 100,000 votes. Hunter Thompson captured the excitement level Acosta engendered even in defeat:

[I]n defeat, Oscar managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles- where even the most conservative of the old-line “Mexican-Americans” were suddenly calling themselves “Chicanos” and getting their first taste of tear gas at “La Raza” demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire and brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming “Brown Power” movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.

But rather than capitalize politically on the momentum of his campaign, Oscar underwent another major existential change. By spring of 1972, he had given up practicing law and decided to go back to his first love, writing, which cemented his place in American literary and counterculture history.

In 1974, Acosta disappeared while traveling in Mexico. Nobody knows what exactly happened to him, except that witnesses say they saw him board a boat and head out into the ocean. To this day, his disappearance is still unresolved. No death certificate, no letters home, no clues, no body. Some believe the civil rights attorney was shot during a dope deal gone bad. Others believe he suffered a final nervous breakdown, succumbing to the damnation of all the years of drugs and debauchery, as famously depicted in Thompson’s book.

Perhaps it’s best to invoke Hunter’s raw, moving obituary of Oscar. Thompson wrote, in the exaggerated language and rough camaraderie of crazy, heroic giants:

The weird grapevine will not wither for the lack of bulletins, warnings, and other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings. He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying girls out of cages on the White Slave Market … and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main that was once the Blue Fox … or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini: standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs…

Yeah, that’s him, folks – my boy, my brother, my partner in too many crimes. Oscar Zeta Acosta. Stand back. He is gone now, but even his memory stirs up winds that will blow heavy cars off the road. He was a monster, a true child of the century – faster than Bo Jackson and crazier than Neal Cassady…When the Brown Buffalo disappeared, we all lost one of those high notes that we will never hear again. Oscar was one of God’s own prototypes—a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die…

Goodbye, ese. And welcome back.

At one time we ducked the topic out of stark, raving fear. Whether Russia or the US started it, we were all going to be blown up. But today we tune out because we believe that the Cold War is over and that civilization is safe from total annihilation.

What’s more, we’d like to keep it that way. Which may explain why, according to a recent Zogby poll, more than half of us support a strike against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

But it will take more than that to keep us safe. In truth, the United States and Russia still keep one-third of their strategic arsenals on launch-ready alert. Also, the US plans to franchise Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative) to Poland and the Czech Republic as if it were just another latte hut.

In retaliation, Russia is considering scrapping the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and upgrading its nuclear missile arsenal. Just like a Broadway revival of an old warhorse of a show, the Cold War is back.

What made us think it ended in the first place was the Reykjavik Summit of 1986. When Soviet President Gorbachev boldly suggested abolishing all nuclear weapons and found that Ronald Reagan was sympathetic, nuclear weapons had a near-death experience. But, clinging to his beloved Star Wars, Reagan backed off.

While the summit adjourned without a treaty, it set the scene for ratification of the INF in 1987. By the treaty’s deadline in 1991, the Soviet Union and the US had destroyed over 2,500 missiles between them.

Deterrence in the form of Mutual Assured Destruction had been the foundation of national security to political realists. What punctured realpolitik and let a little imagination in?

Gorbachev, as he demonstrated with perestroika, was accustomed to thinking big. Since Russia couldn’t afford to keep up with the US in the arms race, it was to the benefit of both his country’s security and its economy to end the nuclear program. But what made noted hawk Reagan go all sentimental on us?

The 1983 TV movie “The Day After,” which he watched along with 100 million Americans, was said to have upset him. But the movie was arguably a manifestation of the national mood, which, to some extent, had been shaped by the Nuclear Freeze. This movement, barely three years old, was supported by 75% of the public at the time the movie aired.

You might have noticed the freeze mentioned in the news lately because its founder, Randall Forsberg, died on October 19. Then again, you might not — coverage of her passing was threadbare, not only in the mainstream, but the alternative press.

The most moving eulogy in the media was delivered by John Tirman of the MIT Center for International Studies. In turn, it inspired a commenter who goes by the user name Waxwings. Professing to have worked with Ms. Forsberg, she called her not only “among the most elegant ladies we ever met,” but “a champion of reason and sanity in a world gone crazy with militarism.”

As a young woman Forsberg followed her husband to Sweden, where she found work as a secretary at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. She lost a husband (to divorce) but gained a cause. Later, she became an editor at the institute before returning to the US to study disarmament at MIT.

In April 1980, now a full-fledged disarmament wonk, Forsberg presented her “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” in pamphlet form. It proposed a “mutual freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and of missiles and new aircraft designed primarily to deliver nuclear weapons.”

She proceeded to promote it to policy makers, national security analysts, and reporters in Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as the US, where she also prevailed upon town and cities to include the freeze in ballot initiatives. The hundreds of meetings at which she spoke culminated in the legendary 1982 Central Park rally. With 700,000 in attendance, it was the largest political demonstration in American history.

Forsberg also founded the Institute for Defence and Disarmament Studies, dedicated to reducing not only the likelihood of war, but military spending. Its efforts included maintaining a database that kept track of the ownership, production and trade of world arms.

When Reagan was elected in 1984, the freeze movement had its legs cut out from under it. In his book, A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics, David S. Meyer quotes Forsberg: “The grassroots people who poured in thousands of hours over the last four years through their work on the freeze are tremendously disappointed and frustrated. . . . the shock of what happened in the 1984 elections left us reeling.”

Yet, since the freeze was absorbed by arms control groups, educational institutions, and even politicians, its after-effects lingered.

Did you ever hear anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott tell how Patti Reagan arranged for her to meet her father? The president was cordial, but when she invoked the specter of the nuclear freeze, he pulled some handwritten notes out of his pocket. Those promoting the freeze, he read, were either Soviet agents or dupes of the K.G.B.

“I said, that’s from last month’s Reader’s Digest,” Dr. Caldicott told Amy Goodman at Democracy Now. He replied that they were from his “intelligence files. Patty reassured me later that that was virtually one and the same thing.”

Nevertheless, the Reagan administration announced its intention to resume arms control negotiation with the Soviets. Hence Reykjavik.

“For Forsberg, the nuclear freeze was always a first step,” freeze chronicler Meyer writes. Were it implemented, the movement “would push the superpowers to agree to end intervention in the Third World and then cut standing nuclear and conventional forces by half. . . . Eventually all nuclear weapons and then all national military forces could be abolished.”

While that obviously never came to pass — dys-, not utopia, was soon to become the rage — at least Forsberg became recognized in official channels. Before the first President Bush met with Gorbachev, she briefed him and his people on arms control. Then President Clinton appointed her as an advisor to the directors of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Despite our reluctance to face nuclear issues, the freeze seems to have permeated our national subconscious. The University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies and its Program on International Policy Attitudes recently released a poll of American and Russian attitudes toward nuclear weapons.

It discovered that large majorities in both countries support a wide range of disarmament measures. These include: taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; cutting nuclear arsenals; ratifying, once and for all, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (presumably after it was explained to those polled); and controlling nuclear weapons materials and nuclear fuel.

Finally, both publics favor eventual total nuclear disarmament, if accompanied by full verification.

It’s unfortunate that Ms. Forsberg couldn’t have seen the results of that poll before her passing. For she died during a time fraught with renewed nuclear peril at every turn — from the Bush administration’s nuclear “posture” advocating first use, to possession of nuclear weapons by volatile states like Pakistan, to nuclear aspiration by the likes of India and Iran, to nuclear terrorism.

But Randall Forsberg has passed us the torch. As John Tirman wrote, “Above all, her exemplary life is a tribute to the power of an individual’s capacity to change history.”

Taibbi: They’ve done some good things. In the 109th and the other Republican Congresses the two-day work week was standard, and even those two days were often half-days. This Congress has brought back the five-day week. They’ve eliminated for the most part the “vampire congress” late-night sessions and phased out the holding open of votes to intimidate recalcitrant members and that sort of thing. But on the other hand… the Democrats came in amid much fanfare and announced that they were reforming the system, eliminating earmarks, etc. After the first Continuing Resolution they passed (I think it was on January 31), Rahm Emanuel was bragging about how it was an “earmark-free bill.” But there are all sorts of earmarks in it. A guy I know named Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate aide, found many millions worth of earmarks (including a cancer-research handout on page 30 of the bill) within minutes. Same with the Iraq Supplemental — it had all sorts of military handouts in it, despite the fact that they were claiming otherwise. It even says that in the Supplemental: “Pursuant to clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of Representatives, this conference report contains no congressional earmarks…” But if you look in the report, there is, among other things, $192 million earmarked for new FA-18 airplanes in there, just wedged in quietly, probably by Murtha’s people.

Along with the Congress’s failure to do anything substantive in terms of ending the war — despite the fact that they’d been elected to do so — this sort of purely cosmetic reform is very disappointing. On the other hand… the difference between a “business as usual” congress and the Belarus-style rubber stamp that Tom DeLay had put together is pretty stark.

S&R: Some big-name progressive bloggers are pissed at what they perceive as the betrayal of newly elected “moderate” Democrats who tend to vote with the Republicans. Is their outrage justified?

Taibbi: A lot of people were upset with the Blue Dog coalition — the “moderate” Democrats who advocate mainly for fiscal conservatism in congressional spending — for defecting from the party to pass a temporary fix of the FISA law that continued to allow warrantless searches. But I don’t know… there were a lot of Blue Dogs and other moderates who won districts that had voted for Bush in ‘04, and who have really outraged Republicans for passing what they call a “tax hike” (actually a budget that envisions the end of the Bush tax cuts) this year, as well as some ambiguous votes on embryonic research, Iraq, and so on. You can look at these moderates as traitors to the Democratic side or you could say that the Democrats are lucky they ran as Democrats at all. I think the country is still a lot more conservative than is reflected in the Congressional makeup.

S&R: You said of the debate over blogs versus newspapers, “As long as men keep shitting on Sunday mornings, the print newspaper will thrive.” Should print media care about the rise of mobile communication such as texting, or are trees still screwed?

Taibbi: Sure print media has to worry. Especially financially. Things like Craigslist have basically put the alternative newspaper out of business. I believe people will always want to read actual paper, but the issue is what paper media can offer than electronic media can’t, from a revenue perspective. And that’s not much. The net offers so much more in terms of multimedia and click-throughs and links to shopping sites and so on that, from an advertiser’s perspective, it’s just a much safer bet. It’s also much more quantifiable in terms of finding out exactly how many readers there are and how many respond to the ads. So this is all bad for print media. The only papers that are going to survive are going to be the ones that are actually sold at newsstands, i.e., don’t rely on advertising for all their revenue. And I think some will. Just like HBO, people are going to find that the quality increases if they pay for their media product directly.

S&R: Steve Rosenbaum wrote recently in The Huffington Post that Jon Stewart “isn’t funny anymore,” meaning that the joke of the Bush years is on us and Democrats can’t and won’t do jack to change things. Your recent RS piece ‘The War Party‘ blasted the GOP presidential candidates as “fourth-rate buffoons.” Is this a good time for a major third party to formulate?

Taibbi: There’s never been a better time. Both mainstream parties are looking likely to nominate deeply flawed candidates. If the race comes down to Hillary and Giuliani, the Green Party could nominate Big Bird and win 28% of the vote. And a third party is definitely needed, since the Democrats have become captives of the money wing of their party.

S&R: It seems like every day Reps. Waxman, Conyers, et al. are conducting hearings on the malfeasance of the Bush administration, yet impeachment remains officially “off the table.” Are there practical reasons for the pushback on impeachment?

Taibbi: I’m on the fence on that one. Ironically, the reason impeachment might not be a good idea is that we had such a recent experience with it under Clinton. It would be a terrible, destabilizing thing if opposition political parties began to regularly appeal to the impeachment process as a weapon against sitting presidents, and I think this is part of Waxman’s thinking there. That said, Bush certainly qualifies for impeachment — there’s no question he’s committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and that he would be vulnerable to such a prosecution, especially in the area of lying to Congress. But I don’t think anyone wants to go there, after the Ken Starr debacle.

S&R: You wrote in ‘Spanking the Donkey‘ that the ‘04 race for the White House was “one of the greatest and most prolonged insults to human dignity the world has ever seen.” Yet you’re subjecting yourself again to the mind-numbing tedium of another campaign in your new RS blog, ‘Year of the Rat.’ How do you keep the horror from getting to you?

Taibbi: I don’t. The horror gets to me. What worries me is that I have this sneaking suspicion that I deserve this assignment somehow, like I’m paying some kind of large karmic bill by going out there again. I can’t say why I feel that way, but I do. But I certainly hate it. I’ve reached the point now where when I interview “men on the street” and they give me the same crazy answers over and over again (like “We have to fight them over there so they won’t come over here”). I really have to struggle to keep from grabbing them by the neck, screaming “What the fuck!!!”, etc.

S&R: Are you going to volunteer for any campaigns this election cycle, like you did for Bush in ‘04?

Taibbi: Um, there’s going to be something along those lines, but I can’t say exactly what, for obvious reasons. I have a book coming out next year called ‘The Great Derangement‘ that includes a pretty lengthy undercover job, but I can’t say exactly what it was yet.

S&R: Why do you think the traditional political press has avoided discussion of the Constitution and rule of law in presidential debates and discourse? Do they presume that Americans don’t care about the Constitution?

Taibbi: Well, they certainly do care. I’ve run into more Ron Paul supporters this year than I have supporters of any other candidate, and by and large they support Paul because they believe the Constitution is being misinterpreted/ignored by modern politicians. People are upset that presidents can declare war without Congressional approval, they’re upset by things like FISA, they’re upset by certain varieties of taxes… The press and the candidates have mostly ignored these issues, but I believe these questions of “process” are going to move front and center in the near future, because people are more and more concerned not with specific issues like abortion but with wider questions of how our government works now, how money influences lawmaking, and how unaccountable elected leaders are, etc.

S&R: You expressed pity for Cindy Sheehan, who seemed overwhelmed by the anti-war movement she triggered in ‘05. After quitting activism earlier this year in disgust, she’s come back, saying she’ll run for Pelosi’s seat. Is she still a force?

Taibbi: I don’t know. Cindy Sheehan lost me when she started backing the 9/11 Truth Movement. I liked her personally when I met her — I guess more than anything I felt sorry for her — but my sense of her is that she is cracking a little under the stress of having to play the role of a grassroots leader, that this is maybe a little too much responsibility for her.

S&R: Under what circumstances would you ever run for office?

Taibbi: Jesus. Me? I could never run for office. I once wrote an article called “God Can Suck My Dick.” I once threw a pie made of horse sperm at a New York Times reporter. I’m an unmarried drug addict with bad teeth. I think these things pretty much disqualify me. There are times when I wish I could work for someone like Bernie Sanders, but I’d probably want to go back to writing pretty fast.

S&R: ‘Smells Like Dead Elephants‘ is your latest compilation of writings, and the much-anticipated ‘Great Derangement,’ a non-fiction political narrative, will be out next year. You have a few books under your belt but whither the novel you always dreamed of writing? Do you still think your fiction sucks?

Taibbi: Yes, my fiction indeed sucks. While in Russia I wrote a sort of parody of a Sherlock Holmes novel called ‘The Great Popkin’ that actually wasn’t bad, but I lost it at some point during a breakup three years ago. Masha, if you find it on your computer, please send it to me. But I don’t think fiction’s really my thing and the great thing about that novel I always wanted to write is that I don’t want to write it anymore. I’d like to try to write a good non-fiction book first.

S&R: Scuttlebutt is that your first book, ‘The eXile,’ which details your time at that paper, will be turned into a movie. Any details on that?

Taibbi: I haven’t heard that. We optioned it years ago and it never got made. There were some close calls, but thankfully it’s retired for good, or at least that’s the last I heard. The script was horrifying. They turned me into the earnest, goody-two-shoes reporter opposite Mark Ames’s oversexed bad-boy character. I hated both of us in the script and I’m sure audiences would have, too.

S&R: Hunter Thompson once wrote that the Book of Revelation was his biggest literary inspiration. Does the Bible do anything for you?

Taibbi: I’ve had to read the Bible a lot lately, for reasons that will become clear when ‘The Great Derangement’ comes out. I find it to mostly be hilarious horseshit. I was laughing so hard reading the Old Testament last year that I started writing a sort of CliffsNotes version of it for fun. I love the part where the two angels come to Sodom and the Sodomites start banging on Lot’s door, because they want to bone the angels so badly, and Lot, being a good Dad, starts offering the men his two virgin daughters, so as to spare the angels… I think if someone were to write a truly deadpan version of these stories, it would be the greatest comedy ever printed.

S&R: You’re often compared to Thompson, but you make no secret of your admiration of H.L. Mencken, who was eerily prescient when he wrote in 1920, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Ben Franklin also warned that the nation would eventually devolve into despotism, and the subtitle of your forthcoming book calls this the “twilight of the American Empire.” Have we really reached our nadir at last?

Taibbi: America is a very strong country still, but there are elements of corruption in our system of government that run so deep now that we have to really be concerned, I think. The thievery that we saw in Iraq during this war by our contracting community is something that even the Russians would be hard-pressed to match. Right now we have a government that lacks even enough civic instinct to take care of pressing emergencies like Katrina and Iraq. When the level of public confidence in the government begins to correspond to the reality of its low performance, we’re going to be in trouble.

There’s also the matter of our economy. Right now America’s international strength is based almost entirely on its military power. Our manufacturing base is disappearing daily. It’s tough to maintain a world empire with a service-based economy.

S&R: You spent your formative years in Russia; what insight can you bring to the whole Litvinenko poisoning fiasco? Do Russians enjoy political intrigue as much as Americans seem to?

Taibbi: I’ve heard varying interpretations of the Litvinenko scandal, but none that really make sense to me. It seems to me that it had something to do with the issue of the succession and Putin’s upcoming decision about whether or not to step down, with Litvinenko and the information he reportedly had on Putin presenting itself as a kind of wild card here. I know Litvinenko was very outspoken about the Putin-and-little-boys thing, an issue that I heard rumors about as far back as 2001. I remember the Russian reporters I used to hang out with talking about these rumors that Putin was “in pocket” because of some shameful sexual thing in his past. But who knows. There are so many angles here that it’s almost impossible to decipher. Trying to decipher the meaning of the parade of hits in Russia is certainly challenging. I think Russians would be more entertained by it if it didn’t have such grave consequences for their daily existence.

S&R: Related to that, what do you make of presidential brother Neil Bush’s tight relationship with Boris Berezovsky?

Taibbi: Berezovsky is hilarious. In political terms, he’ll fuck anything that moves. I almost admire him. As for Neil… I wrote an article about Neil Bush once and was bowled over by his assertion that it was normal for women to show up at his hotel room and simply propose sex with him (this happened overseas; apparently he was being compensated by certain employers wanting to curry favor with the Bush family). I keep waiting for his ex to go public with the more explosive material everyone says she has on the family.

S&R: You’ve said you were having a “lot more fun in Russia” and might head back overseas somewhere. Still feel that way, is that still in the cards?

Taibbi: I was also doing a lot more drugs back then. I may go back sometime, but it depends on some personal factors. Nine months of winter and eleven time zones of bad food is a tough sell to a lot of women, let’s put it that way.

S&R: Any fond memories of Uzbekistan?

Taibbi: I was thrown out of the country there, and there is a very funny story about that. One of the funniest of my life. I had just written something for the AP about the Uzbek independence day and mentioned something about Karimov suppressing political parties. So naturally the next day agents of the former KGB (I think was the NSS; I’m not sure what it is now) came to my apartment. They were actually already inside when I came back from baseball practice (I was playing with the national baseball team). There was one middle-aged blonde woman who was interrogating me and two goons who were turning all my stuff over. The woman is asking me questions and suddenly one of the goons comes over, carrying my laptop. “What’s this?” he says. “A computer,” I say. “What do you use it for?” he asks. Now, I was there on a student visa — illegally — so I had to make something up. “I’m a student,” I say. “I write all sorts of things.” He looks at it and says, “Do you write poetry?” I shrug and say, “Well, sure, sometimes.” He frowns. “Do you have any talent?” he asks. I looked at him kind of sadly and said, “No, I don’t have any talent.” That’s when he handed the computer back to me. “Well, then,” he said. “You shouldn’t write poetry.” Five minutes later they were handing me a train ticket and telling me to get the fuck out of Uzbekistan. I thought that was beautiful, that they did it with real class. One side note: on the way out of the country, I tried to send a telegram to my mother. The note said, “KGB KICKING ME OUT EVERYTHING OK MATT.” But the note she got read “KGB KICKING ME GUT EVERYTHING O MATT.” She nearly had a heart attack. It wasn’t until I reached Moscow three days later that she found out I was okay.

S&R: Does Pope Benedict give you the same warm fuzzy that John Paul did?

Taibbi: I’m going to decline comment on Popes for a while. That last effort didn’t work out too well for me.

S&R: On to something you probably enjoy talking about more than politics: sports. Did Michael Vick get the shaft? Does Barry Bonds deserve to be asterisked? Bill Belichick – shameless fraud, misunderstood genius, lucky bastard?

Taibbi: Vick: an idiot. Being a sports star is like being in a murder conspiracy. If you think anything you do is going to remain a secret, you’re a moron. All this guy had to do was not commit major felonies on his property and he was going to be rich for the rest of his life. Now he’s going to end up doing celebrity boxing with the Fridge and Star Jones and stuff like that to pay off his reclaimed signing bonus. I will say, however, that it blows my mind that he can be banned from the NFL while Leonard Little gets to play, even after killing an actual human being.

Bonds: I’m less interested in seeing Bonds punished than I am in seeing McGwire reduced to the Bonds level of public disgrace. Bonds at least stands up and takes the heat publicly. McGwire has been hiding like a little bitch. He always grossed me out the way he used to shake his head and talk about how even he is amazed by how great he is, yada yada.

Belichick: I’m a Patriots fan, so I’m biased. But I thought the whole scandal was idiotic. I mean, all the coaches in the league send out dummy signals. Why? Because everyone knows someone on the other team is trying to read their signals. I’m glad it happened, though, because the Pats seem like they’re pissed enough about it that they want to stomp the brains and teeth out of every team they play. So thanks a lot, Eric Mangini. How’d that move turn out for you, by the way?

S&R: If you were Jesus, would you use your divine powers to meddle in the outcome of sporting events, as teams like the Rockies believe he does?

Taibbi: If and when I ever get to be Interior Minister, one of my first acts is going to be the putting to death of anyone who thinks God interferes in the outcome of things like sporting events and elections. I’d want to have a giant shark tank built expressly for this purpose. Just throw them in there and then dump a couple of barrels of cow blood in the water.

S&R: You smeared a reporter’s face with horse-spunk pie, you dropped acid and wore a Viking helmet to a campaign interview, you followed John Kerry around in a gorilla suit… Is there anything left on the to-do list?

Taibbi: The punchline answer would be “Grow up,” I guess. Beyond that, I’m not going to explain what the circumstances would be exactly, but I will say that I have a recurring fantasy about chainsawing a certain person’s desk in half on live television. But I’m getting a little old for all of that stuff, unfortunately. ∞

(Special props to Beth Jacobson and Matt Browner-Hamlin.)

It’s not clear, though, that Yeats ever dreamed of being a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” of an overtly political cast. In fact, Yeats the politician looks longingly back on the day when he was Yeats the romantic:

Politics

HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

Yeats didn’t go looking for war, but as has been the case with so many of history’s greatest heroes, conflict and the necessity of a public life came looking for him, and he answered the challenge as best he could. Perhaps he lamented that he wasn’t in the Post Office himself, that instead of being a hero of the revolution his task was merely to chronicle it (”our part / To murmur name upon name”). Perhaps he thought that if he’d been a “true” warrior the woman he loved, Maud Gonne, would have married him instead of John MacBride, the “drunken, vainglorious lout” who was one of the Rising’s martyrs.

Maybe these kinds of insecurities are fated to plague artists and intellectuals until the end of time. The truth, though, is that without Yeats there may never have been an Easter Rising, and without his chronicle the course of Irish independence might have been set back indefinitely. He was the muse of the renaissance, the man who set before the people a vision of their lost greatness and who helped them hope that one day they might escape the oppression of Imperial Britain.

Maybe the lesson is that the soul of the warrior hero is not defined by the enthusiasm with which he seeks out battle, but instead by the courage with which he answers the unbearable challenges set before him and those he loves.

Easter, 1916

I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Scholars & Rogues are proud to honor the legacy of our latest Scrogue, Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats, perhaps the greatest poet in the English language and a man who changed the course of Irish history…with a pen.

As a contemplative, expressive man, Baldwin would be pleased with the myriad questions this photo of him engenders; doubtless, he would revel in answering them and going off on the thoughtful, frank tangents that were his trademark throughout decades of novels, poems, plays, and essays.

Baldwin, who died in 1987 at age 63, felt the sting of discrimination and isolation in more than one way. He was black, gay, provocative, and unpredictable in an era of stubborn intolerance. He was also unafraid to wield pen as sword, slicing through hypocrisy, ignorance, conformity, all the enemies of art and enlightenment:

I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. – from Autobiographical Notes

Northerners indulge in an extremely dangerous luxury [of feeling] that because they fought on the right side during the Civil War, and won, they have earned the right merely to deplore what is going on in the South, without taking any responsibility for it; and that they can ignore what is happening in Northern cities because what is happening [in the South] is worse. – from Nobody Knows My Name

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. – from a 1961 interview

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. – from No Name in the Street

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality. – attributed

Though he marched with civil rights activists and counted Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X among his friends, he came under attack himself for his sexuality and, later, by literary critics for supposedly being self-absorbed, unimaginative, bitter, resentful at being forgotten. The truth is that, till the end, his wit and geniality never left him; and his voice, prophetic and profound, is being reheard, reassessed by a world that failed to appreciate it while he lived, as he expected: “Any real artist will never be judged in the time of his time; whatever judgment is delivered in the time of his time cannot be trusted.”

James Baldwin remains a giant, a speaker (and seeker) of truth who, despite his contrariness, his complexities, his compulsions and foibles, is clear on his mission: to right injustice and demand assessment and accountability, while tempering that passion with a search for common ground and a vision of hope and reconciliation for all peoples. “There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation,” he wrote. “The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

The UK was especially fertile ground during this period, as scores of punk and New Wave acts emerged (many from the “pub rock” scene) in the most dynamic explosion of music since the British Invasion. One of the most outstanding of these was Graham Parker, who in 1976 released not one, but two instant five-star classics – Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment.

While some of his contemporaries (most notably Elvis Costello) became wildly famous, arguably nobody in rock history has posted a more enduring legacy of critical success. In the three-plus decades since Howlin’ Wind Parker has released over 25 records, and you have to be a pure hater not to give 10-15 of them at least four stars. That’s a remarkable accomplishment, especially when you add to the legacy this year’s Don’t Tell Columbus, which is currently in the mix for a lot of best CD of the year nods (including mine), and which some reviewers have gone so far as to call his greatest CD ever.

While I’m not 100% sold on that particular argument (In addition to the two iconic ‘76 releases, there’s Squeezing Out Sparks to consider, as well as a couple of my personal favorites, Struck by Lightning and the badly underrated Mona Lisa’s Sister) I see where it comes from, and there’s no question that Don’t Tell Columbus deserves every rave it gets. All of which means that Graham Parker has now produced landmark efforts over 30 years apart, something I’m not sure has ever been done before. If it has, it’s an awfully short list.

So while Parker has not amassed tremendous fame in his career, he nonetheless stands as one of the greatest artists in rock’s storied history (as well as its somewhat troubled present). He has also, in the past few years, launched a second career as a writer of fiction. Carp Fishing on Valium, a collection of short stories, had some surprisingly wonderful moments (I say “surprisingly” because we don’t often expect much in the way of literary talent from our rock stars), and he’s also penned a novel called The Other Life of Brian, which I haven’t gotten my hands on yet (both books are available from his Web site).

Parker recently consented to become the first Scholars & Rogues interview subject, and we’re taking this occasion to also honor him as our latest “Scrogue” (and following Jane Austen is no mean feat, to be sure). In addition to being our first interview, we should also note that he’s also our first living Scrogue.

We hope you enjoy reading his answers as much as I enjoyed asking the questions.

———-

Sam: Some artists have done great work early and faded with age. Others came into their greatness as they matured. But there’s only the rarest handful who start great and get better. You’ve now done five-star records over 30 years apart, a feat I’m not sure anybody else has ever accomplished. How have you managed to remain vital and relevant over such a long period of time?

Graham: Well, that’s some recommendation. Thanks.

All can think of is it’s a lucky balance of brain chemistry and pure desperation to not look like an idiot. I shudder at the thought of being a writer who has lost the plot, although I’ve been accused of that many times. So I dump the bad ideas as they come and keep on going until this almost mystical brain chemistry kicks in like a drug and voila! There’s another good one just popped out.

I don’t understand it, but as I get older, I do sometimes feel a certain tiredness creeping in – not that it’s surfacing in the songs yet, as Don’t Tell Columbus will testify – but it’s trying to, and age is gonna get me sooner or later.

Writing songs is emotionally and physically draining work. It would be a relief to just stop. I hope you’ll be forgiving when I do.

SS: The word “ego” has such negative connotations, often being taken as synonymous with arrogance, but show me an artist with no ego and I’ll show you a bad artist. Tell us about your ego – which is big enough that it wants to be a serious writer as well as a rock star.

GP: You’re right, it’s all about ego. There would be no point in working this hard without the idea that you might impress the heck out of other people by doing so. It does border on arrogance, but you gotta get the job done.

SS: Your new writing career indicates that you feel a pretty strong artistic calling. What is it that writing fiction fulfills in you that music doesn’t?

GP: When I was writing the short stories and the novel, I was on another brain chemistry high, and it was really stimulating to see this stuff coming out. I think that any kind of creative writing makes a person more intelligent as they are doing it. Then, if you’re like me, you go back to being a slug again not long after you’ve finished.

The great thing I found about story writing as opposed to song writing is that it doesn’t have to rhyme! That’s very liberating.

SS: Even past “Stick to the Plan,” your brilliant riff on “Highway 61 Revisited,” you strike an unusually Dylan-esque pose on Don’t Tell Columbus. Given that you do so as you’re “discovering” an “ambiguous” America during Bush’s debacle in Iraq, it’s easy to read the CD as a subtle critique of all the American artists who didn’t step up like Dylan did during Vietnam. It’s almost like you said “well, dammit, somebody needs to be Dylan here – guess it’ll have to be me.” Is this a fair conclusion or am I reading too much into things?

GP: I’d say the last thing I had on my mind whilst writing these songs is the failings of other artists. Both “Stick to the Plan” and “Ambiguous” seemed to write themselves, and I can’t claim to have made any really original statements here. The phoniness and venality of the Bush administration is so utterly transparent, songs like “Stick to the Plan” can’t help but write themselves!

But if these tunes were solely about this one subject, they would just be bad folk music, and to simplify them as that would be to short change them. They’re loaded with stuff detailing the foibles of humanity.

SS: So here you are, a smart-assed Brit pop star harpooning American culture and politics. Some Americans believe that artists should stick to entertaining and leave political commentary to people with political credentials of some sort – especially foreign artists. This is an opinion you evidently do not share. So, why do you believe that an artist’s opinion on politics should matter?

GP: Well, hang on a minute here, I don’t exactly turn up for freedom marches! I don’t participate actively in expressing political views and always turn down the offer of appearing on bills for political causes.

Surely, everybody’s opinions on politics matter, apart from very stupid people, who should shut the fuck up.

SS: You’ve never been shy about flogging the media. In “Don’t Let It Break You Down” you wrote: “Some people are in charge of pens who shouldn’t be in charge of brooms.” In “Stick to the Plan” the press is complicit in all manner of political and religious hypocrisy. But a couple of Reagan’s FCC folks once wrote, in a very important policy paper, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” Do you think there’s a way to get to a more enlightened media than we have now without getting elitist and heavy-handed?

GP: It was shocking and disturbing to watch the American media buckle under in the phony patriotism frenzy that preceded and followed the Iraq invasion.

It’s good to see the trend has reversed considerably due to the utter arrogance of an administration that thought they had it all tied up. They continued to push their luck until even the thickest brickhead began to get it.

But the fact that the media fell into that frenzy so hard and utterly in the first place is truly worrying in a democracy. Even elitism is better than that…anything’s better than that.

SS: “England’s Latest Clown,” a song that’s either skewering Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty or someone a lot like him, notes that your homeland has something of a tradition of public clowns. Latest clown aside, who do you think was England’s greatest clown?

GP: The rotation of clowns, from any part of the world, is too long and varied to list.

But it’s true that this song was inspired by a New York Times article about Doherty, who I’d never heard of, but his antics inspired the idea that we need characters like him for our entertainment. We live vicariously through them, and then we want them to die badly, as the final verse suggests.

SS: Speaking of clowns, what do you think of shows like Pop Idol and American Idol?

GP: The people who appear on these shows for the most part are third-string hacks who in a more intelligent era would perhaps make a modest living singing jingles.

SS: But there’s some great music out there, too. What bands and artists are you listening to these days?

GP: Amy Winehouse. Back to Black is the best album made by anyone in a very long time.

SS: It is wonderful to see somebody as talented as Winehouse getting her due, but it seems like people who really care about music always have a favorite artist who never “made it.” Who’s the best artist or band you ever heard that the rest of us probably don’t know?

GP: I did a singers-in-the-round type tour sometime in the early ’80’s and this guy Tom Freund, who I’d previously never heard of, was one of the acts. He was, and still is, one of the great singer/songwriters there is. North American Long Weekend and Sympatico are way above much more highly rated and successful stuff.

I haven’t heard anyone that good who is on the fringes since then.

SS: The recording industry has changed a lot since the mid-’70s, to the point where a guy with your legacy is releasing masterpieces on indie labels and getting zero airplay. Obviously the music industry as we have known it is in deep, deep trouble. How do you see the future of music shaping up? What will drive it in the future? How will serious artists make a living? Or will they?

GP: Well, I’ve heard a few tracks from Columbus a number of times on a few different stations, so the word zero isn’t quite true.

SS: That’s good to hear. I haven’t heard the first note out here, so you must have a better radio station than I do.

GP: Of course, that airplay may have sold zero copies!

As far as making any serious money, the only thing most of us can hope for is cover versions, adverts, TV and movies. Otherwise, get your guitar and play live, solo. There’s nothing else shaking but the leaves on the trees.

SS: In “The Sheld-Duck of the Basingstoke Canal,” your wonderful story from Carp Fishing on Valium, your protagonist pursues something passionately, but when he finds it he discovers that he’s been betrayed. Up close, life and death pose a reality that he’d not anticipated. I’m not sure to what extent you’ve realized the dreams you might have had as a boy or as a young man, but have you had moments in your career where you captured the egg you’d been pursuing, only to come away disappointed?

GP: I found myself in a reasonably high level of popularity very quickly. I was a gas station attendant one year, the next I was all over the music press (in the UK) and then headlining theaters and appearing on Top of the Pops. (You do not appear on Top of the Pops unless you have a hit.) People write about me as someone who didn’t “make it,” but I made it the first year of my career. And although I was not and have never been anywhere near superstar level, as soon as the craziness began in my first year, I found it tiresome.

I’d do an appearance on TotPs or a sold-out concert in London then drive back to my parents for the night, then the next night, hang out with some old mates in a village pub. It seemed much more like humanity to me.

SS: Some craziness inhabits your fiction, too, especially when you start working the rock and roll fantasy vein. “Me and the Stones” is hysterical beginning to end, and there has to be an interesting Little Steven story behind what your protagonist does to “Small Billy.” How do these ideas come to you and how do you go about developing them?

GP: That would be telling, and my sources should remain secure to a certain extent. But I’ve lived a very interesting life, and the most interesting part of it was before I had a record deal.

My stories that use the rock world as a backdrop are more fantasy than the ones like “Aub” and “Bad Nose,” from Carp Fishing on Valium. The characters in those stories are real! I grew up with them, and, along with where they came from – the working class environs of the south of England – have not been thoroughly explored.

SS: I’ve known people who lived very exciting or dangerous lives. Once you’ve lived a certain way, they tell me, nothing else is ever going to be exciting again. Do you find yourself wishing that life these days were occasionally a little more … weird?

GP: I find that even normality is weird to me these days, so I’m pretty constantly entertained.

SS: Let’s talk about music a little more. The Rumour. The Shot. The Figgs. The Latest Clowns. What is/was the best thing about working with each?

GP: You’re not gonna top the intensity of the first band, The Rumour, and some nights on stage with them were quite awesome. But that should not be the only yardstick for music as varied as mine, and some of the other bands also hit areas of sublime intensity, albeit a different kind if intensity.

The Latest Clowns are a big favorite, ‘cos they’re the funniest and arrive at the soundcheck all crammed into a Mini Cooper from which they tumble most expertly right through the front door of the venue and onto the stage. It’s truly a thing to behold.

SS: It seems to me that you’re one of those performers whose live show has a certain something that’s impossible to capture in the studio – and I say this with all due respect to your studio work, which is marvelous. But there’s just an extra gear live. What it is about that live dynamic that’s so special?

GP: The audience. I’ve done shows with a rockin’ band and whether they’re packed out or there’s only 30 people in the house, if they put out a good vibe you can really feel it and the gears just crank up. They’re not in the studio with you, and that’s the difference.

SS: Let’s talk about some of your greatest moments. What do you see as your greatest record? What was the greatest live show you ever played? What are the best lines you’ve ever written?

GP: These things live and these things die. I couldn’t pick one show out for you because I’m consistently good at it.

There’s too many best lines, but I guess I would favor some of the more surreal and ominous, with good internal rhyming like “They’re pumping iron down in the village / They’re locking lions up in the zoo / I don’t know what I’m thinkin’ / I don’t know where I’m sinkin’ / Down there/Down there,” from “Lunatic Fringe.” Stuff like that.

Greatest record? You can choose.

SS: You capped off The Mona Lisa’s Sister with a wonderful cover of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid.” It seems that Cooke is an influence who’s frequently present in your work. I’m thinking about songs like “Tough on Clothes,” for instance – I can easily imagine Cooke doing that one. Can you tell us a little about how you discovered his music and how it came to shape your own?

GP: I was never fully aware of Sam Cooke until later in my career, actually.

Around 1965 my cousin gave me a copy of Otis Redding’s album Otis Blue, which included both “Change Is Gonna Come” and “Wonderful World.”

I’d probably heard “Wonderful World” on the radio but don’t recall hearing “Change Is Gonna Come.” Either way, I was not really up on Sam Cooke as much more than the guy who was credited as writing these songs that Otis was doing. I don’t remember hearing the Temptations hit “My Girl,” either, and thought that the version on Otis Blue was the original.

I was always much more into the hard-edged soul singers like Otis, Arthur Conley, Sam and Dave, as my early singing will testify. It wasn’t until I actually covered “Cupid” in 1988 that I came to appreciate Cooke more, but I still don’t own one of his albums, although I think I borrowed a cassette of his hits to learn “Cupid.”

I did it I guess because I was finding other things in my voice, falsetto and stuff, rather than throat yelling, which is what I’d been doing before The Mona Lisa’s Sister, and that might have inspired me to record it. And if you listen to my take on “A Change Is Gonna Come” on Live Alone in America, you’ll find it’s Otis’s version I’m doing, not Cooke’s.

But hey, you’ve got to imagine a 14 year-old boy, sitting alone in the spare room in his parents’ house, listening to Otis Redding, crying and moaning with emotion. Weird. But it was Otis that got me.

SS: Two-part question: First, was there music playing your “first time?” If so, what was it? Second, what do you think is the greatest make-out record ever recorded?

GP: If there was, I wasn’t hearing it!

I don’t know what the best music is to make out to, but I know that asking a girl if she wants to come back to your place and listen to some Beefheart will kill your chances stone dead.

SS: And now, a very non-musical question. Apparently you are – or were? – something of a footballer. You’re from East London, right? So you’d have been a Hammers supporter growing up? Or maybe Leyton Orient, who had some good years when you were younger? Or perhaps you followed the more fashionable Spurs during Danny Blanchflower’s golden years? How much did football matter to you growing up and were you ever good enough that you thought maybe you’d be a sports star instead of a rock & roll icon?

GP: Spurs! Well done!

I was actually born in Hackney and spent the first four years of my life in Stoke Newington, North Central London, not East. When I was four, we moved to a village in Surrey and I’m really a country boy. I could step out my door and in seconds be in empty woodlands. Fantastic.

As for football, all the kids I knew seemed to be Spurs fans, even though we were about 40 miles south of London, and I guess I was, too. I think we liked Spurs because of the silly, rather childish name, Tottenham Hotspurs. Something about the word “Hotspurs” gets a 10 year-old salivating. But, you’re right, they were very good back then.

I was never good enough as a player, though. I lost interest at about age 13, when the Beatles and the Stones and all the rest arrived. Suddenly you realized you could have hair over your ears, wear cool clothes, smoke cigarettes, and attract more “birds” than any football player. The game became lost to me then, until the age of 45 when some bastard noticed my accent and said, “You’re English, you can be a soccer coach!” So I became a coach of the school team my 10 year-old daughter was in.

And then I kicked a ball. Wow, that felt good, I thought.

When I was kid, the balls were made out of pig stomach or some such foul stuff, and they had this big string on them that held them together. When you headed one, it hurt like hell and left the imprint of the string on your head. It was always raining, as well, so the ball seemed to fill with water and was too heavy for a little guy like me to handle. And you got filthy and covered with mud.

When I kicked that modern soccer ball I became obsessed and pulled every muscle known to man in my legs for the first year of playing. But I stuck at it and still play in a team. I’m pushing the envelope, though, and at my age it’s getting frustrating. Time to start thinking about shuffleboard, I guess.

SS: Last one. I imagine that when you were a young artist there was a time when an older, more experienced artist gave you some good advice. If so, what was that advice, and what advice would you now give to somebody trying to make his or her own mark?

GP: No one gave me any advice and I wouldn’t have taken it if they did. My advice to any artist is: don’t take advice! (Unless it’s business advice, which you might want to consider, ‘cos you’re a flaky artist.)

SS: Thanks for your time, Graham. It’s been an honor. I’ll be looking forward to your next trip through Denver, which will hopefully be soon…

[Thanks to Jim Booth, Mike Sheehan, Pat Vecchio and Paul Barrow, who offered advice on the questions. And a huge thanks to Don Dixon for putting us in touch with Graham - without his friendship this wouldn't have happened.]

Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted. – Jane Austen, Letters

Jane Austen might not have completely approved of Scholars and Rogues. But she would have liked us, nonetheless. And she’s certainly one of us.

Austen believed herself a deeply conservative member of her society – the landed gentry of Regency England. She approved of marriage, the monarchy, and Samuel Richardson’s novels. She disapproved of love affairs (whether casual or serious), rebellions (whether political or social), and Byron’s poetry….

Yet in her six completed novels, she explored the plight of women in that society which she claimed to admire – and critiqued both the unjust treatment women received and the men who had created a system where women had to marry in order to have any status in society.

She approved of marriage as a way for women to gain power and footing in her society, yet she believed marriage should be based on mutual affection and she never married herself because she never found that affection with a man.

She portrayed women forced to take on careers as creatures to be pitied and feared for, yet she ferociously pursued a career as a writer – and a fearless one – who chose to attack the foibles of her society so brilliantly that the two most lionized writers of her time – Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron himself – admired her genius.

She disapproved of social rebellion, yet, in her greatest novel, Persuasion, her heroine, an “aging spinster” (of 27!) who believes she has missed her chance for happiness because she refused the man she loved, a Navy captain, because he was “beneath” her, rebels against her family and her closest friend and adviser and her society when given a second chance at personal happiness and marries the man she loves.

So Austen is, like all Scrogues, interestingly inconsistent and challengingly complex.

Perhaps the novel that best reveals Austen is not one of the “light, bright and sparkling” ones like Pride and Prejudice or Emma or one of the those with “shade” like Mansfield Park or even Persuasion. Sense and Sensibility offers us perhaps the best insight into Jane Austen’s character – and her Scrogue-ishness….

Sense and Sensibility has two main characters, sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. The sisters could not be more different from each other:

Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother…. She had an excellent heart;–her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters (Marianne) had resolved never to be taught….

Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent….

As Austen weaves the narrative of the two sisters, it would seem reasonable to assume that she favors Elinor’s world view over Marianne’s. That would be a mistake. For Austen, while consciously approving of Elinor, often unconsciously approves of Marianne’s passion and joie de vivre:

. . . and yet there is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions. – Sense and Sensibility

What Austen reveals to us in Sense and Sensibility is the dual nature of her own character – she is Elinor, the thoughtful, careful sister/aunt/friend who provides wise council and good judgment:

There are such beings in the world — perhaps one in a thousand — as the creature you and I should think perfection; where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend, and belonging to your own county. – Austen’s Letters

But she is also Marianne, a passionate, feeling woman capable of sharp opinions and occasional wilding:

I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error. – Austen Letters

And above all, she’s Jane Austen, Dickens’s greatest rival as the best English novelist – and a writer who knows what her genius is:

I could no more write a [historical] romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. – Austen Letters

As her successors note, she is that complex, brilliant, and difficult to pin down:

Of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness. – Virginia Woolf

She is a worthy addition to our pantheon of scholar rogues….

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our newest scholar/rogue is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Most Americans, no matter what they think of him, know King’s story well. The son of a Baptist minister, King attended segregated schools (graduating high school at 15), then attended Morehouse College in Atlanta. From there he went to seminary and then to Boston University from which he received his PhD in theology. Barely more than a year after accepting his first pulpit, King accepted the leadership of the first great civil rights “direct action” campaign, the bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, in 1955. In 1957 King became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a new organization founded to offer leadership and guidance to the burgeoning civil rights movement and a group that took its ideals from Christianity and its operating procedures from those of Gandhi. Over the next eleven years he “traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.”

King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He was assassinated in 1968. He was 39….

King fought against forces that used history as justification for the repression of people and violence, intimidation, and oppression as tools. King’s response, as he noted in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was to oppose violence with passive resistance – as one of his heroes, Mahatma Gandhi, had done:

…nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.

King lived up to this principle. Those who opposed him – forces that used arrest, assault, and finally assassination to try to stop the movement he led – failed. Although they continue to try to reverse his work….

But this doesn’t entirely explain King’s “scholar rogue” status….

Since Dr. King’s death there have been systematic attempts to discredit him – accusations ranging from plagiarism in his academic work (true) to womanizing (probable although still disputed) and consorting with communists (dubious) intent on overthrow of the United States government.

He’d feel honored to know that his hero Gandhi has been trashed equally as vociferously. He’d be perhaps shocked, perhaps amused to know of the trashing of his harasser J. Edgar Hoover.

One thing we know about King – he’d have prayed for forgiveness for himself and asked for forgiveness of – and for – his enemies. That puts him into roguish company, indeed.

And finally, there’s King’s desire for freedom and equal treatment for every man:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character….

And this will be the day – this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

“My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true….

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Those are the words of our kind of scholar and a rogue….

Click here to view the embedded video.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. … We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. … This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job — armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

Thompson would be dead by his own hand less than four years later, leaving us at a time when a voice like his was needed badly. But Thompson was tired… and perhaps unwilling to endure a repeat of the corrupt and cynical Nixon era, with some of the very same goddamned characters involved and a new cast of rat bastards even more pernicious than John Mitchell and Bob Haldeman. How hellishly sad it is to realize your beloved country cannot help but repeat its same miserable mistakes generation after generation. I wouldn’t want to stick around for long, either. Somehow, Hunter made it to 61.

Though he is now probably most associated in the public mind with his druggy nightmare ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ Thompson was the finest political writer of his time, or perhaps any time, in American history. His classic On the Campaign Trail ‘72 is required reading for any serious student of political science. He had a wonderful knack for deconstructing the motivations and machinations of politicians, cutting right through the bullshit, boiling away the platitudes and disingenuity, dressing down larger-than-life personalities with refreshing glee.

Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream. — Rolling Stone, 1994

It was his maddening independence that set him apart from all other writers of his age. No one told Hunter Thompson how to do his job, and the Deadline — the looming, terrifying spectre that strikes fear and loathing in all writers — was something to be toyed with till the last second. Paradoxically, though, he became trapped by his own reckless image, to the point where he was a recluse for years and trusted few people. When he did allow himself to make public appearances, he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to appear as.

Fortunately, in his later years, he became more productive, and with new friends in a younger generation, stopped giving a damn about the gangbang eunuchs and his own dark doubts. Then along came George W. Bush, 9/11, ill health and old age, enough to fell even the staunchest of souls. He left us on February 20, 2005. Though we knew it was coming and wondered how he persevered for as long as he did, his departure still hit us hard, and for some of us the empty feeling still lingers.

The title of this piece was the final sentence of our latest scholarly rogue’s suicide note.

-=+=-

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested… Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll. — Generation of Swine, 1988

Dorothy Parker is best known for her caustic wit as a writer, poet, critic, and a founding member of The Algonquin Round Table.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

Parker’s critiques, short stories, poems, and screenplays make up the majority of her life’s work. Her acerbic wit as drama critic for Vanity Fair eventually led to her dismissal as readers became more and more offended. She landed at The New Yorker as a literary critic writing under the by-line “Constant Reader,” where some of her most infamous, vicious critiques were penned. She won the O Henry Most Outstanding Short Story Award for “Big Blonde” in 1929. Of the handful of screenplays she helped write, A Star is Born brought the most acclaim, winning an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Later in life, she contributed to Esquire as a literary critic but her alcoholism made for erratic writing.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
РR̩sum̩

Parker’s seven volumes of short stories and poetry, compiled into The Portable Dorothy Parker, are considered by some to be a mini-autobiography of her failed relationships and suicidal thoughts.

A longtime civil libertarian and civil rights advocate, she helped found the Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood in 1936. At one point she declared herself a Communist but never joined the Communist Party. Regardless, she fell victim to to McCarthyism, was investigated by the FBI, and was blacklisted in Hollywood as a Communist sympathizer.

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested “Excuse My Dust.” This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.

Parker died in 1967, bequeathing her small estate to Dr. Martin Luther King. Upon his death, her estate was rolled over the NAACP, which retains rights to her works to this day. Sadly, the executor of her will, Lillian Hellman, allowed her cremains to languish in various places, including her lawyer’s filing cabinet, for 21 years until the NAACP stepped in and took possession of them. On Oct. 20, 1988, the president of the NAACP, Benjamin Hooks, dedicated a memorial garden to her on the office property with a bronze plaque with the above quote.

Her written works can be found at Gutenberg Project.

In battle, if you make your opponent flinch, you have already won.

If you have ever been involved in business negotiations with Japanese businessmen, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with this situation: you walk into the conference room and, almost inevitably, the most senior businessman is seated furthest from the door. If you’re lucky, there will be several chairs located away from the door for your senior negotiators, but if you’re a lowly aide, you’re either sitting behind your senior person (and not at the table at all) or you’re sitting down at the far end of the table with your back to the door. And it’ll be obvious that you’re the low man in this particular pecking order.

Generally speaking, this is a modern outgrowth of the medieval Japanese samurai code of conduct, Bushido. But another big piece of this is the Way, codified in The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho) in 1645 by our latest scholar and/or rogue, Miyamoto Musashi.

All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this.

Musashi Miyamoto was a swordsman and samurai during Japan’s unification period (early 1600’s) and the author of one of the founding books on swordsmanship, Go Rin No Sho. In the book, Musashi claims to have fought and won over 60 duels, and it is known that he fought several battles on the losing side against forces of the unifier of Japan and eventual Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu.

In addition to writing The Book of Five Rings and being a master swordsman, Musashi is known for being a master of not less than nine different weapons and multiple samurai art forms, including calligraphy and ink painting.

Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.

While The Book of Five Rings is known as a book of swordsmanship, it was written so broadly that the Way described within it is directly applicable, as I alluded to above, to both business and politics. Just as Sun-Tzu’s Art of War may be directly applied outside of military strategy and tactics (the idea of taking the high road vs. the low road comes directly from the Art of War), so to has The Book of Five Rings been absorbed by the general culture, especially in Japan.

As an example, Musashi commands that followers of the Way understand when different weapons are best employed and to use the best weapons called for under the circumstances, that timing attacks for greatest effect and striking when the enemy is down are sure ways to victory, to always be prepared for battle for it may come at any time and any place, and to use your postion to best effect (among a great many other things). Each of these commands may be directly applied to politics or business, where your weapons are linguistic frames, money, networks or political parties, and dirty tricks instead of swords and spears. The weapons change, but the tactics and strategies remain constant.

Aspire to be like Mt. Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.

Hi Ho.

Most of you know Vonnegut as the author of the beloved counter culture sort of sci-fi/sort of philosophical/sort of satirical/inarguably great novels Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slapstick. This is true.

It is also foma.*

Vonnegut was also more. He was a failed army scout, failed chemist, failed automobile mechanic, and failed anthropologist – by his own admission.

He was also:

- a survivor of one of the most horrific massacres of World War II – the incendiary bombing of the unarmed city of Dresden, Germany who believed “only one person benefited from the raid” – himself ;

- a writer who believed that English departments were probably the worst places to discover and develop writers because he felt “literature should not disappear up its own asshole”;

- a lover of jokes that most people don’t appreciate:

VONNEGUT

Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?

INTERVIEWER

No.

VONNEGUT

Because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles. See, you didn’t laugh again, but I give you my sacred word of honor that those are splendid jokes. Exquisite craftsmanship.

- the best American humorist since Mark Twain;

Vonnegut was a fervent smoker of plain end cigarettes who lived to be 84 and died, not from lung or heart disease, but from a head injury caused by a fall – kind of a joke in itself – but a cruel example of pool-pah* for those of us left waiting for the punch line.

So it goes.

*foma – harmless untruths

*pool-pah – the wrath of God – “a shit storm”