Part Three

The Corridors Of Power

i have neither trusted nor desired power. At its most honest, it seemed to require oversized Greek pillars and a hollow marble echo to sustain itself, and, when it was less than honest, it was capable of just about any atrocity. Routinely capa-ble—which made it all the worse. I was never particularly attracted to the concept of power. Being expected to tell others what to do and order them around on a whim or a theory held no appeal. Quite the reverse. I have no desire to issue orders and even less to receive them. To separate the two would be hypocrisy. Fame I might cop to. I wouldn’t have minded being famous, especially when I was young and had lungs, but the idea of wielding power was a complete anathema.

I would never argue with the oft-repeated remark by Niccolo Machiavelli that “it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” I have even less trouble with the even more frequently quoted remark by Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.” My position is that the desire to rule over others is rarely prompted by altruistic motives so the potential for corruption is present from the get-go. I have also noticed too many of the worst sons-of-bitches who come to power take Machi-avelli’s advice and employ the fear option early and often. I suspect this is maybe because the majority of power-seekers are most motivated by their own deep-seated fears. Which prompts me to suspect we live in an era of chickenhawks, of men and women of bellicose rhetoric, but who are terrified of all and any threat to their personal safety.

I’m well aware that the armed guards and Secret Service spooks with their Uzis and earpieces are now such a part of the territory that even corporate chieftains and rap stars have them, but I cannot shake the feeling that the powerful are, at the same time, also the fearful. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon we heard all the rumors about US Vice President Dick Cheney and his multiple bunkers, with their state of the art high-tech and maybe even high occult protection. Something in the nature of leaders and power had plainly changed over the two dozen centuries between Dick Cheney and Alexander the Great, who led his Macedonian forces into battle riding at the head of his cavalry.

And since we’ve already raised the spectre of Dick Cheney, let’s continue with a reaction to his handiwork.

NOW AIN’T THE TIME FOR YOUR TEARS

THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES BURN IN MY LIVING ROOM. There are killing fields by the rivers of Babylon, there’s war in the Garden of Eden. The history book cycles of death prove stubborn and eternal, and this is the third war in my life to which I feel at least a witness.

Born at the end of World War II, I lost my father to that one, and then I did my stoned and level best in the mass movement to halt the insanity in Vietnam, but now the tanks are rolling and the bombs falling all over again. Right now, I can think of no rock’n’roll tune, no CD or battered 45, that can reflect the combination of fear and fury that dogs my mind like the hellhound of a Robert Johnson nightmare, and the sure knowledge that this spurious conflict was never about democracy in Iraq—that it was merely a petrodollar payday, and a military industrial burn-off. The real battle for democracy—or the lack of it—will be fought back in the US. As the bombs grow smarter, and leaders more arrogantly stupid, I truly fear these sons-of-bitches actually do want to conquer the world.

On TV channels of managed news, finessed by the next Dr. Goebbels, I watch ruthless hollow-men playing crude, corrupt midwives to a New World Order, but I have yet to imagine a suitable musical score for the unfolding horror. Not Richard Strauss bombast, not ’Guns of Brixton,’ NWA nor Public Enemy, not even the youthful, ear-bleeding wrath of Pete Townshend, the spite of Lou Reed, the rolling thunder of the Stones in their prime; who among them is adequate to the task? Maybe Jimi, but Jimi is long gone and was ultimately a peaceful soul.

Long ago, I saw Bob Dylan perform ’Masters of War.’ Ol’ Bob was in a nasty mood that night, and had the band tuned to a wrathful howl. “And I’ll stand over your grave ’til I’m sure that you’re dead” That was closer to the noise in my head, because, as of now, I am nobody’s pacifist. A repressive horror bears down. The stench of the new McCarthyism streams from Fox and CNN at short attention-span speed, and accompanied by the theme from Gladiator. And damn me if all the night-vision pride and blitzkrieg glory isn’t punctuated by an older Bob, in new mode, singing how he’s sick of love in a Victoria’s Secret commercial.

Better look to the less compromised Hunter S. Thompson to confirm my fears. “This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown since 9/11. A nation of people suddenly broke, the market economy goes to shit, and they’re threatened on every side by an unknown, sinister enemy. These are not philosopher-kings we’re talking about. These are politicians.” The politicians of the fixed election—of power at any price—pose like the righteous of God, but I can only see an opportunist gang of greed-is-good, corporate crusaders, following the ancient and bloody eastward trail of Alexander the Great on their computer maps; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and the dark eminences Perle and Wolfowitz (who must have watched Rollerball far too many times when they were kids), plus, to my eternal shame, the dancing attendance of the leader of the British Labour Party.

These men are not only waging their war, but are conjuring an ugliness among the people, and opening the floodgates to a new brutality in which those timeworn other weapons of mass destruction; racism, misogyny, bigot-religion, homophobia, and the threat of poverty, are dragged out to divide and confuse, while the Bill of Rights is shredded, and neighbor is encouraged to rat out neighbor.

Yes, I would happily stand over their graves until I’m sure they are dead, and dance if I want to, because these men have yet again turned freedom into nothing left to lose. I would like to take comfort in Gandhi: “There have always been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.” But I don’t have the patience of the Mahatma. The time is for some fighting talk of our own.

And where is the fighting talk of rock’n’roll in this terrible twenty-first century? Well muffled, brothers and sisters, coming as it does by courtesy of the mighty Clear Channel and the like, who have seemingly warned the toomalleable tour talent about how they’ll pull the plugs on any antiwar talk.

Hell, I’ve had the plugs pulled on me more times than I can remember. The drummer refuses to stop and a riot starts. Did poor Jim Morrison die in vain? So far it has been the movie stars manning barricades; Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, and Janine Garafolo have been putting their futures on the line, being told by TV pundits to shut their ignorant mouths, as though an actor is not entitled to an opinion, and everyone has forgotten the resume of that old right wing cowboy Ronald Reagan.

It takes Michael Moore to “disgrace” the Oscars while Bono stands mute. Elvis Costello (God bless him) snarls his way through ’Peace, Love, And Understanding’ while guest-hosting the Letterman show. A Dixie Chick blurts her Texas shame for having Bush as a homeboy, but is then forced to recant like some twelfth century nun faced with the instruments and the fire. I hear Eddie Vedder has been sticking it to Bush on Pearl Jam’s Bush League tour, and this has resulted in everything from rousing cheers to mass walkouts depending on which managed news channel you’re watching, or what web page you’re reading. Thurston Moore has his website, and Steve Earle stands tall, but why is Bruce so damned quiet when the shot-and-beer boys from New Jersey, in the Motorhead T-shirts, are baying for the blood of towel-heads and peace-fags— “America, love it or leave it, motherfucker!”—and gung-ho for a crack at Syria or Iran.

But watch out, it moves too fast, the aftermath will be on us before we know it. JFK understood, and so did Khrushchev, but the Crusaders of this New Order are too aggressively dumb to comprehend that the Beast of War takes on a life of its own, shrugs off all control, and the only power that remains in their hands—if they’re lucky— is the choice of striking or not striking the match in the room full of gasoline.

I feel like a fool, regurgitating the cliches of my youth, to actually ask if rock’n’roll is going to be part of the problem or part of the solution, but much more is at stake here than me appearing foolish, or risking any cultivated cynicism. One of the few perks of not dying before you grow old is that you don’t have to fear being mocked as a fool. I no longer give a damn. I know the music I love is at its very pinnacle when it’s played with a no-prisoners passion, and bellows the battle cry of freedom directly into the mouth of Hell. That is a law immutable.

So c’mon, everybody. You’ve taken the drugs, and you’ve taken the cures, you’ve fucked and forgotten the names of the lovers, and you’ve all made far too much money. Like it or not, the time to hesitate is once more through. There’s even a rumor that Bush is back on the bottle. Gotta save the bloody world again.

Rocks Backpages, April 2003

LUNATICS WITH NOTHING TO LOSE

The Director of the Agency faces the Committee

Gentlemen, we have a problem

That we can no longer ignore

We have attempted to

Psycho civilize the lower bell curve

Of the indigenous population

But we have to face the unfortunate side effect

That even with the introduction of Mortal Kombat

And fifth generation anti-depressants

Plus the chemical additives in the water supply

And the TV subliminals

Instead of a docile subspecies

We seem to have created a line

Of lunatics with nothing to lose

The Director of the Agency paces the marble floor

Of the conference room of the committee

I cannot emphasize the point too strongly

We have done everything within

Our capability to reduce the attention span

I have often suspected that the real motivation of those who seek power is a fear of how the world is full of other people, a fear so chronically intense that they come to believe a sense of safety is only possible if they control absolutely everything absolutely.

And induce greed as the sole motivating factor

To create hostile divisions

Of race, gender, belief, and preference

To burn out empathy, and desensitize them

To the concept of mortality

Hopelessly confuse violence and sexuality

And negatively sanction wilful individuality

By the use of quasi-legal narcotics

And the threat of a lethal and lingering retro-virus

According to our projections

We should have reached the point

Where they would allow themselves

To be driven like sheep

Yet our studies reveal increasing numbers

Of what can only be classified

As lunatics with nothing to lose

The Director of the Agency regards the committee

Over the cold frames of his designer glasses

The blame for this aberration

Can be apportioned later

Our most pressing need now

Is to order an increased presence

Of control forces in the major centers of population

Prior to the transition

To a more restrictive and prejudicial

Structure of government

The camps must be activated

And the Nightwatch put on full alert

The time for Malathion—gentlemen—is past

The helicopters must commence to do their worst

I am aware this involves design jumping

And forward shifting the timetable of our masters

But, for our own protection

We can only treat this deviation

With absolute seriousness

For if we don’t, make no mistake

We ourselves could become victims

We ourselves could be

Dragged out—gentlemen—and hung by our feet

From municipal street illumination units

By mobs of lunatics with nothing left to lose

Not previously published

WHISKEY DRUNK IDIOTS

I’ve always had the uneasy feeling that, when it came to the unthinkable, ultimate showdown, nuclear powers might just behave as badly as drunks in a bar carrying guns. When one whiskey-drunk idiot pulls his gun and starts shooting, the others just can’t stop themselves doing the same. Okay so Kennedy and Khrushchev skated by in the Cuban Missile crisis, but that was just two of them. These days, the barroom is a lot more crowded.

A fragment

A moment comes in most people’s childhood—we hope in infancy—when they wise-up to the fact that their parents are not all powerful, all seeing superbeings, and are, in fact, decidedly fallible. For some reason, all too many of us never experience the similar revelation that many of our leaders are pretty bloody stupid.

ETHICS OF BARBARISM

In the year 2001, instead of following the monolith to Jupiter, America detached from reality and attempted to take the rest of the world with it. Those of us who remained awake stared in disbelief at how the new century was shaping up. Except “up” didn’t have much to do with it.

THE END OF 2002 AND THE COMMENCEMENT OF 2003 have hardly been kind to the rock’n’roll generation. John Entwistle provided the first shock. At the start of the Who’s 2002 tour, the band’s seemingly indestructible bass player, who once rejoiced in the nickname “the Ox,” did up a line of coke in his Las Vegas hotel room and dropped dead. Then, at Christmas, Joe Strummer of the Clash not only keeled over from a fatal heart attack, but was forced to endure the postmortem mortification of having an uninvited Courtney Love make a total spectacle of herself before his family and friends. A matter of days after Strummer’s demise, a second bombshell came from the Who. Guitarist and composer Pete Townshend’s name and credit card number surfaced in the dragnet of the FBI’s Operation Avalanche child pornography sting. Pete claimed that he was only doing research for a book, but the incident created strange resonations for all of us who ever owned a copy of Tommy or Who’s Next.

The news that Phil Spector had been arrested for murder was received with far less humor, and set those of us who could still remember to wondering how the mastermind behind ’He’s A Rebel,’ ’River Deep Mountain High’ and ’He Hit Me (And It felt Like A Kiss)’ came to gun down poor Lana Clarkson, who’s main claim to prior fame was the lead in the movie Barbarian Princess. He shot me and it felt like a kiss? What the hell had the man behind the Wall of Sound been into in his suburban Castle Dracula in Alhambra, California, with its Transylva-nian turrets and high, maximum-security walls, that had led him allegedly to firing the fatal shot? Markie Ramone attempted to explain on CNN how Phillip had indeed once pulled a piece on the Ramones, but that had only been drunken R&R fun. Back in the late sixties, just a few months before the Stones played Altamont Speedway, Spector had been one of the celebrities on the Manson Family’s supposed hit list. Now he was on the other end of a homicide investigation.

In just a couple of weeks, we saw press photos and TV newscasts of two major rock icons looking old and pathetic in the back of police cars. These visions were more than enough to spawn a feeling that a form of madness was loose, or to trigger a bout of where-did-we-all-go-wrong introspection, and bring on those nagging doubts that maybe the so-called conservatives were right, and all the blows that had been struck in our youth for supposed liberation had been empty or in vain.

Fortunately we only have to look hard to the right, to the other side of the ideological fence, to where our Republican contemporaries are now running the country, for confirmation that the outbreaks of craziness, incarceration, and death among my rock’n’roll peers are nowhere close, either in incidence or intensity, to the epidemic of post-yuppie psychosis that rages in the corridors of state, where the maintenance of power would appear to be harnessed to a snarling coalition of TV-fascist totalitarians, short attention-span pragmatists, and fraudulent corporate bagmen. Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and his attendant demons-from-the-id still have the same homicidal intent and expensive haircuts, but are now cloaked in a superior middle-aged certainty, and, in private, a smug and smiling amorality. I recognize them from way back. They are the same college boys who kept Ayn Rand and Machiavelli on the coffee table, but probably never read either, quoted Sun Tzu without understanding a word, and dismissed Henry Kissinger as a closet liberal.

Then they graduated to invade Wall Street like Armani Huns in the roaring eighties, when greed, for want of a better word, was good. They drank Chablis and single malt, snorted coke, but passed on the introspection of marijuana, or the cosmic self-criticism of acid, and, as I suspected at the time, would resort to date rape with little provocation. Twenty years on, they are cleaner, more sober and even meaner. Greed is no longer merely good, it has become imperial. To them, all things appear possible, whether you’re pissing away fortunes in Washington or at AOL Time Warner, when confronted with a population they see as terminally dumbed down to mindless preoccupation with American Idol, and the denouement of Joe Millionaire, when not lurching to victim mass hysteria in the face of a first real taste of domestic terrorism, or maudlin mourning the symbolic loss of a crashed spaceship.

In an editorial that circulated by email at the end of January, the venerable Kurt Vonnegut shared a similar view of the current power structure, but, as a breed, they seemed to take him more by surprise. “Our country might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka ’Christians,’ and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club, and kiss my ass!”

Anyone who, in addition to the invention of Ice-nine, has the World War II Dresden firestorm on his resume, and survived the most devastating air raid in human history prior to Hiroshima, while simultaneously a prisoner of the Nazis, must be taken a little bit seriously. John le Carre, the master of the espionage novel is also hard to dismiss as a bleeding heart liberal, but, writing in the London Times, his thoughts are almost identical to Vonnegut’s. “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded.”

That Kurt Vonnegut, and John le Carre should pause from whatever they do all day to warn of what’s being put over on us in the name of Homeland Security and Traditional Values can only be encouraging. Since September 2001, over on our left side of the barbed wire, we have been afraid of debate. Apologetic Susan Sarandon voices of reason have been raised only to be screamed down by Ann Coulter, and the other shrieking harpies of the right, who howl “treason” when what they really mean is “loyal opposition,” and would convene a lynch mob if one expressed what’s truly in one’s heart—that the only traditional values the Bush junta embrace are those of a gang of drunken Chetniks on a looting rampage. One only has to watch Crossfire, to see that even the value of debate itself has become highly questionable. The ground shifts and the arguments do indeed have the irrational mutability of madness or a nervous breakdown.

All eyes are on the polls and the approval points, and any story will do in a pinch. As the defence budget continues to rise from its already staggering $364.6 billion, the Religious Right might well promote the assault on Baghdad as a biblical Fall of Babylon, and the Crusade of Millennium, but then, far from putting any distance between themselves and their 700 Club allies, the True Believers of Gekko will just wink and smile, and happily invoke God as they move in like Tony Soprano, making sure that their transcendently rapacious military industrial skim is being skimmed to the max. The real difference is that Tony, with his distorted mob morality of obedience and omerta, will admit, if only to his psychiatrist, “I’m a fat crook from New Jersey.” The Bush gang consistently cloak themselves, shameless and uncaring, in a nebulously belligerent, red, white, and blue. It is on this lack of caring or shame that Vonnegut primarily focuses in his editorial. “They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! And what syndrome better (than psychopathic personalities) describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?”

An understandable core of feeling could be present among those of us out in left-field that maybe we ourselves might be partially to blame for allowing these psychopaths anywhere near the reins of government. Our generation has had its rock’n’roll president, who, in hindsight, presided over a period of comparative peace and prosperity only to have it all brought to naught in the obliging but too-talkative mouth of Monica Lewinski, and Bill’s opening for the Stones at a benefit in LA. The guilt that we may have blown our chance, so to speak, might be one of the reasons, that, while we have finally started to protest Bush’s War, we are still not prepared to think the unthinkable; the unspeakable fear that, having fixed the last election, the implacable triumvirate of Cheney, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld might be fully capable of cancelling the next one. If GWB’s handlers seriously thought their dyslexic boy was in danger of losing the next election, maybe, in pure panic and dread, to First Lady Clinton, how long would they hesitate before whipping up a state of emergency in which the constitution itself was suspended? It’s only the classic course of dictatorship, and habeas corpus is selectively suspended already under the terms of the Patriot Act.

I have never before written a piece in which I have actually quoted Julius Caesar, but I am as worried as Vonnegut and le Carre, and Caesar’s comments are too apt to go un-mentioned, so treat this as something of a first in a new magazine. Julius Caesar was, after all, the noblest Roman of them all who brought about that crucial and perhaps fatal change from the rule of the Senate to the rule of the Emperor—before a conspiracy of Senators stabbed him to death in a last ditch attempt to preserve pre-Christian democracy. “Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

Metro, 2003

CONSERVATIVE DREAMIN’

I’VE BEEN ENTERTAINING THE IDEA THAT I’M DEALING with an Elmer Gantry, a cynical and successful media opportunist making her way through the book and TV circus, and doing very well by going to extremes. But, at one point, she becomes very animated, as if she really believes she is the victim, threatened by a ruthless liberal elite.

“My enemies are accusing me of saying dissent is treason,” she bristles. “Of course I’m not saying that, but in point of fact, you know, there were massive antiwar protests, across the country. The only dissent that anyone is trying to squelch here is my dissent from the proposition that liberals love their country. You can’t say that. How dare you? Everyone is trying to intimidate me, and they’ve used the myth of McCarthyism, McCarthyism! McCa-rthyism . . . to prevent anyone from asking this question. Do liberals love their country? That’s off-limits. That’s the one thing you can’t ask.

In 2001, a PhD called Kelly Bulkeley conducted a study on the dream lives of opposing political groups and found that Republicans reported three times as many nightmares as Democrats. “The dreams of the people on the political right reveal them to be insecure, anxious, conflict-ridden, and emotionally repressed. When they are not terrified of imaginary threats they cling to the comforts of the status quo. They seek a kind of power through their political views that they lack within their deeper selves.” Two years later, I interviewed Ann Coulter the strident ultra-right pundit who I believe I once called a “shrieking harpy.” In the middle of a confrontational but totally civilized conversation, and quite without warning, she confirmed the Bulkeley research when she melted into a near-fugue claiming she was the victim.

“I’m the one people are trying to silence,” she goes on. “Not the antiwar protesters. People burning the American flag, denouncing our war aims. Flying to Baghdad. They’re invited on Fox News, even they see O’Reilly, Hannity, and they’re all saying, you have a First Amendment right to dissent. Well, so does David Duke. We don’t slap him on the back. I want to start arguing about this again. They need a little tough love right now. I’m the one people are trying to silence, not antiwar protesters. It’s a taboo to question them. They’re like children who need discipline. So, I’m applying the tough love.”

I can only blink through a silence of my own. Ann Coulter is white, wealthy, and successful. She has her health, and she dines with people who at least advise those who rule the world. She has personally assisted in an attempt to bring down a president. If any woman is part of the elite, she is. And yet, when the hyperbole approaches outburst, I am almost convinced she truly thinks she’s victimized.

And she has come to this victim conclusion while George W. Bush, to whom she demonstrates unwavering loyalty and who she places beyond criticism, has been riding high. As the guerrilla war drags on in Iraq, the deficits become unmanageable, and Bush may face being forced to ignominiously pull out or hand over control to the U.N., I don’t like to speculate how Coulter and her kind will react. Fear tends to beget hate, and, at least for the moment, she has enough media access to communicate this hate to a public that is pretty damned confused already.

For conservatives, these have been the good times. If we traitors have our way, it will all be downhill from here, and I’ll guarantee that the likes of Ann Coulter will descend with neither grace nor equanimity.

A segment from LA CityBeat, September 2003

THE BLACK ARTS OF ELECTION

THE PHONE RINGS IN LOWER MIDDLE-CLASS WEST VIRGINIA during a commercial break in prime time TV. “You may be concerned to know that, if elected president, John Kerry will ban the Holy Bible in America.” Welcome to the spook show. The political process enters a realm in which rational thought is overtaken by impressions, and subconscious suggestion has its way with fear and cultural superstition. John Kerry orders a Philly cheese steak with Swiss, no onions, and his manhood is impugned. Real men go for Cheez Whiz and onions. It’s a small thing, but part of a larger on-going operation that has including Carl Cameron’s fabricated Fox News story about Kerry’s “French manicure” after the first TV debate. Every effort has been made to brand Kerry the Vietnam vet as somehow effeminate, and play to a deep and ugly homophobia.

We’ll never know if the phone banks motivating the Bible Belt with biblical crank yanking were authorized by Karl Rove’s central command in the Bush campaign, or just local improvisation doing what was known back in Nixon’s Watergate heyday as “rat-fucking.” The Cheez Whiz story, and other attempts to feminize the challenger, could only have emanated from Rove’s office, because the president himself confirmed his potency in a good-old-boy, Philly vernacular soundbite. Bush takes his cheese steaks “Whiz and with.”

Down the years, while staring at the History Channel, I have idly, but quite fruitlessly, wondered what went on in the mind of (say) Adolf Hitler, or Mao Zedong, or Margaret Thatcher—or Gandhi and FDR, for that matter. How many nightmares did they have? These inner processes are, of course, totally unknowable and probably wholly alien. We can only judge our leaders by their actions. It can only be a game of proof and puddings. Here in the democracies we are wise to note the lengths to which our elected leaders will go to subvert the democratic process.

These are the stories that feed directly into the left’s anxiety-attack vision of Karl Rove as the near-invincible Prince of GOP Darkness, directing the apocalypse from atop his Dark Tower, like Sauron the Manipulator. The strategic mastermind behind the battle to reelect George W. Bush is credited with a control so complete that even language is bent to his will, as dictated to a wormtongued news media. Karl Rove, at twenty-one, dropped out of college and into politics, and became an early protege of convicted Watergate player Don Segretti—the man who invented the term “rat fucking” in the first place. Rove has been linked to The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, attacks on John McCain’s mental health, and back in the Texas day, the whispering that Democratic Governor Ann Richards was a lesbian. Rove remains, for many, a prime suspect in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, and even Republicans tend to reinforce his image as Bush’s Dark Lord. “He dominates a campaign,” fellow Republican strategist David Weeks told the Washington Post. “Nothing ever happens that he’s not aware of.”

“The Republicans have the best propaganda out there since Lenin, and they just make stuff up and they keep repeating it, and hope people are going to believe it.” —Howard Dean to Associated Press, September 11, 2004

Of course, manipulation of the dark side is nothing new in US politics. Lyndon Johnson’s campaigning is the stuff of Texas legend. In 1948, Johnson ran for the Senate against fellow Democrat Coke Stevenson, and the story goes that Johnson told an aide, “Go out there and tell ’em Coke was caught having sex with a farm animal.”

The aide seemingly protested. “But you know that’s not true!”

“Of course it’s not true!” snapped LBJ. “That’s not the point. Tell it anyway, and make him deny it.”

The tale may be one of little more than the shit-kicking nastiness of old style stump-ranting, but Johnson also approved the famous 1964 TV commercial in which the little girl picked flowers while the spectre of nuclear annihilation loomed. The impression was clear although not literally stated. GOP candidate Barry Goldwater, a hardliner of the Old Right, was too crazy to be in charge of the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. Goldwater lost to Johnson, and politics reached a new benchmark in its relationship with television. The seeds were sown for one of Karl Rove’s prime directives. “Remember that emotion is a window into the soul.” Where previous political advertising had simply sold the candidate, it now moved to the Madison Avenue state of the art, cultural connection or emotional response made the pitch. Politics was another product in the marketplace like breakfast cereal, automobiles, beer, and steak knives, and, after the technique had worked so well for Johnson, there could be no turning back. Political campaigns even had the advantage of the First Amendment. Commercial claims for their “product” were not subject to FCC truth-in-advertising regulations.

“You may recall the 2000 election brouhaha when an attack ad by the Republicans flashed the word RAT over the visage of Al Gore. It was so fast you had to slow the tape to see it, rousing accusations of subliminal advertising by Democrats (Bush was unfazed, saying his campaign was not using ’subliminable’ advertising.)”—Keith Olbermann, MSNBC

Richard Nixon, running for four more years in the chaos of the Vietnam War, looked to black-bag operations and the intelligence community. Wire tap, burglary, forgery, character assassination, and even IRS audit were tricks of CREEP’s electoral trade, but would eventually be Nixon’s downfall, if only by the intervention of karma and the Washington Post. The overt racism of the 1988 Bush-Quayle, “Willie Horton” commercial played to straight racism. Ronald Reagan used his Hollywood skills to sell platitudes. Bill Clinton campaigned on MTV and aspired to a rock star charisma, but was tarnished by a rock star attitude to casual blow-jobs. All helped design the landscape of the modern election. No campaign strategist would ever openly admit having studied the real dark side of the political force, but a nodding acquaintance with classic George Orwell, Joseph Goebbels, or Stalin is evident in the brute psychology that is being applied to what can only be defined as the lizard brain of the electorate.

The lizard brain is what takes over when the rest of the mind is inundated, tired or distracted. It senses threat on sub-verbal levels and becomes poised for fight and flight.

As James Moore, the coauthor of the book and current TV documentary Bush’s Brain puts it, “Rove knows that we are all too busy worrying about our jobs and retirement and health care or paying for our children’s college education that we don’t have time to pay attention to the details of issues. Few of us read the 3,000 word stories in the newspaper. We read the headlines. We watch the news with the sound turned down. We’re too busy.” Over the years, we have taught our upper brains to tune out much of the electronic babble—especially TV commer-cials—and too many of our opinions are formed by the sub-verbal, half-seen impressions that are replayed day after day, and repeated ad nauseam. In California we have had it comparatively easy, but, in Ohio, between March and late September 14, 273 political ads were aired on Toledo’s four leading TV stations. How anyone in a swing state can still form a coherent opinion under such a weight of bombardment has to be open to question.

“War plays to some fundamental urges. Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a mythic reality in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn’t our ally is our enemy. This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power.”—“War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” from an essay on the psychology of war by Chris Hedges, veteran war correspondent.

In a nation at war, all deals are off, and the potential for emotional manipulation goes into overdrive. John Kerry reports for duty at the Democratic National Convention, and rocker John Fogerty plays his Credence classic ’Fortunate Son’ on the Vote For Change Concert Tour sending resonances through everyone old enough to remember. The Sinclair Broadcast Group follows up on the Swiftboat assault on Kerry’s service record, ordering its stations to preempt regular programming to air the documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, that chronicles Kerry’s 1971 testimony before Congress and links him to a freshly re-demonized Jane Fonda. In the gray areas of implication and illusion, the 2004 presidential race has been fighting two wars at the same time. One in the bloody present and another in Vietnam, thirty-five years ago. And yet it is not a Vietnam War I recognize. Even movie-memories of Apocalypse Now and Platoon are erased, along with the recanting of Robert McNamara, as talking haircuts on my TV characterize the debacle as an heroic stand against the Red Menace, and not a disastrous intervention into a distant and misunderstood civil war.

Bush stayed home, but Kerry, who volunteered for combat, is labeled a traitor. The LBJ strategy of “let him deny it” has advanced to Orwellian “doublethink”—the totalitarian art by which two seemingly contradictory statements could support a conclusion, if only by shameless repetition. In recent weeks, George Bush has taken a shine to the phrase “he can run but he can’t hide,” and repeats it with relish. At first, it referred to Osama bin Laden, but when Osama became an un-apprehended embarrassment, it was applied to terrorists in general. Then, during Debate III, John Kerry was suddenly the fugitive. “He can run but he can’t hide” became the favorite sound bite, and the carefully vetted crowds at the Bush rallies went wild. The thread defies all rationality, but, in the TV-zombie flicker, it subconsciously links John Kerry to bin Laden.

“The truth is useless. You have to understand this right now. You can’t deposit the truth in a bank. You can’t buy groceries with the truth. You can’t pay rent with the truth. The truth is a useless commodity that will hang around your neck like an albatross”—Jeb Bush quoted on Buzzflash.com

Part of an LA CityBeat story, 2004

HELL MOVED CLOSER, AND EVERYTHING TURNED UGLY

THE BUSH MACHINE STANDS IN MENACING RESERVE like the fiscal equivalent of an SS Panzer division, with the capacity, I understand, to spend a million bucks a day on the SOB’s reelection all the way clear to November. Shee-it, I know with that kind of money, I could probably fix anything. I even wonder about today’s rumor that the real reason Dick Cheney is running all over the planet trying to convince the world that he has no plans to conquer it is only to thwart a palace coupe, that in which Bush would dump Cheney in favor of Rudy Giuliani as VP. It could so easily have been concocted in some evil White House sub-basement, and tossed like a bone of false hope to the opposition. Kinda like the python giving the mouse a fleeting but erroneous idea that it might not be swallowed and digested after all.

One of my problems, of course, is that Democrat primaries always take me back to 1968, when the Dems milled about like chickens in the rain, as cities burned and the SE Asia war raged, and Hubert Humphrey presented himself as the natural successor to LBJ, while all the time the dark prospect of Richard Nixon bore down on us. But, wondrous day, a white knight in the shining form of Bobby Kennedy suddenly made it seem as though democracy might actually work one more time. Then finally the shock, horror and a scream of “No! Not again!” as, in the moment of winning California, he was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel by yet another implausible lone gunman (with a cleanup by the LAPD and a young-but-rising Daryl Gates) and the sun went out, Hell moved closer, and everything turned ugly.

Fragment from Doc40, 2004

Or looking for the same thing from a different angle and with a more emotional attitude . . .

MEDIA CAN WORK FOR ANYONE

IT IS THE SYSTEM THAT FORGES A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN otherwise unrelated individuals. Media, however, are subject to a great amount of spatial distortion. Take the example of the Vietcong who is shot in the head regularly by a South Vietnamese colonel in TV documentary shows. He is a TV personality, an international symbol, millions of individuals are intimately familiar with the instant of his death. They know nothing else about him, no other information, no background. His death has been translated into a cipher. His death and Jayne Mansfield’s tits both provide raw material for whoever creates for media.

The property of media to freeze the individual in an instant situation and then to relay this situation repeatedly is what modern propaganda is about. The essential situation may be fact. The inference placed on the situation by juxtaposition is quite possibly spurious. Example: John is black. John is a rapist. Blacks are rapists.

The artist is subject to this freezing situation every time he commits himself to creation. Every action is only the one between the action before and the action after. Transferring it to media is apt to give a single action overemphasis.

Make way for the essential paradox.

For the first time in human history the nature of social organization has been questioned in its very essence rather than in its structure. This is revolution in terms of basic principles rather than methods.

This is total revolution.

Man, as a work unit, has always been viewed as the principal factor in the production of his own needs. Thus all previous social change has been concerned with the distribution of material possessions (either equitable or otherwise).

Up the workers!

It is a technical fact that man need no longer be concerned to such an extent (that is, to the extent of eight hours a day plus) with the production of his own life support.

Back in 1972, when no one in my neck of the ideological woods would so much as consider moderation, I had my first book published. Watch Out Kids gave me a chance to offer a summation of all the thoughts and ideas that I’d be generating and developing with my work at IT and being on the road with the Deviants. Even after a decidedly intense exposure to the realities of the world and the way it worked, some of that naivete still remained. If only we could explain it with sufficient clarity, the squares would see the error of their ways. We could quite believe that those in power would propagate poison simply because it fitted their unimaginable agendas.

The robots are coming—make way for the robots. The only barrier to the elimination of the essentially degrading toil that for the last Christ-knows-how-many centuries has been the necessity for the majority of the human race to survive, is one of a purely social nature. The current rulers of twentieth century civilization seem incapable of working out the methods for the basic social reconstruction that is necessary for a leisure orientated civilization.

It’s about time we had a new civilization. The human race is technically capable of supporting itself at a high standard of living. The major cause of famine is organized human greed. I often feel that in a historical context we are witnessing the decay of a great civilization. We are in the position of Rome in 400 AD. It could be that us hippies are the barbarians within the gates. This would indicate that it is down to us to acquire as much information as we can to equip ourselves to survive the coming dark ages with some degree of culture and comfort. The lemmings have a great and groovy method of population control. The trouble is that it’s a bit hard on the individual lemming.

Later for jumping in the sea.

Leary points out that the rulers of this planet have a basic working principle that ecstasy is dangerous. The principle manifests itself in censorship, drug laws, sexual repression.

Why??

Our current rulers have an overriding prejudice against the needs of the individual taking any kind of precedence over the needs of the mass.

But why??

The mass—society, the state, the people—does not fundamentally exist. These words are collectively nouns which save time when dealing with a large number of individuals. Obviously individuals of the same species have, to a great extent, common or similar needs. Thus these needs can be catered for at a mass level. This is the function of civilization. What this current civilization has become criminally blind to is the fact that each and every individual has unique needs and desires that are entirely his own. These needs cannot be catered for at a mass level, they can only be worked out in terms of the individual himself.

We are all perverts—we are all afraid.

Our rulers and their attendant bureaucratic machine find these unique individual needs a time wasting and inconvenient factor in their manipulation of the mass. They, by the very nature of their trip, cannot conceive that these individual needs have to be considered. They find, moreover, that a population that is maintained at a high level of frustration is easily manipulated. Thus the idea behind the current government of humanity is to eradicate any original or unusual desires in individuals by labeling the individualist abnormal and causing him to suffer social or legal victimization. In addition to this, the attempt to repress common needs for sensual or spiritual release by denying the means of release and offering either titillation or a planned substitute. These methods create a malleable population.

He who don’t get laid is a sucker for patriotism: proverb.

Our leaders have one flaw in their characters. Although their system of repression works extremely well, they seem prone to personal greed and dishonesty to themselves whereby if they can detect a short term material gain in a situation which is potentially dangerous to their system, they will allow the situation to continue or even develop.

There is always someone who will sell guns to the Indians.

The system, it cannot even be tied down to individuals, that rules our planet is corrupting and polluting the land, sea and air. Animal life is being destroyed. Humanity is being misused and distorted until it is almost impossible for it to live with anything but a pretence of dignity. In the West a generation is being turned into criminals, in Asia, Africa, and South America the same generation is having its land, its home, its standard of living, in some cases its very life, destroyed by the global chess game that is an apparently essential part of the system.

For the most part, those of us who are aware of this situation can only make a feeble attempt to bring down the system. We can only use what media are available to give vent to our impotent anger. The juxtaposition of our efforts in media are nonetheless still controlled by the ruling system, and by its control of that positioning it is more than able to contain our efforts.

In every medium, from machine guns to color TV, the system out-numbers and outmaneuvers us. Art has become a luxury, and the attainment of any degree of perfection in my craft as an artist is blocked by constant impotent fury at the system. The New York Times will inform us about pop music, books will rest on a lot of hip coffee tables, and the system will continue. We will all compromise in order to survive and the system will still continue.

The feeling of community that was about to emerge three years ago has scattered and split. If that singleness of purpose can be recaptured and developed it might enable us to survive and hold tiny pieces of territory in which we could live according to our own ideals, and by living in this way we may remind the population that an alternative to the system actually exists.

They will try to crush any part of the alternative society that they cannot buy.

Frank Zappa got written up in the Sunday Times while John Sinclair rotted in jail—last Tuesday they showed us Attica prison victims’ blood on TV—the Sunday supplements carry Lenin’s biography but no contraceptive adver-tising—you get your picture in the paper but don’t have enough money to buy a copy—last summer the musical Hair was a focal point for hippie beggars. Media can work for anyone but they mainly work for the system.

Watch Out Kids, 1972

WE THE PEOPLE

IT WAS THE END OF DONAHUE. IT HAD BEEN ONE OF those discreetly prurient, sexual confessionals that are such a tidy combination of Phil’s Catholic upbringing, liberal sensibility, and watch on the ratings. The subject had been the menage-a-trois and, from the stage, the audience, and over the phone lines, all manner of individuals had recounted every imaginable variation on the romantic triplex—imaginable, that is, within the parameters set by Standards and Practices for afternoon viewing. The usual audience members stood up and said their predictable pieces into the proffered radio mike. The fundamentalist wanted to know where God stood in all this, and the concerned conservative demanded to know how they could raise their children in such an awful situation. All this was fairly routine. There’s a Donahue show of this sort at least once a week. The only untoward moment came just before the closing credits. Phil looked into the camera with professional impishness and grinned, “You’d be surprised who’s in the audience,” intimating that, included in their number, were people with even stranger stories than they had heard already. The audience reacted as though they’d been goosed. They looked around. The creatures were in among them but they had no way of telling who was who. Were they dangerous, were they diseased? I have seen the deviants and they are us.

A decade and a half later, the refusal to see error of any kind was so shamelessly manifest that we knew the fix was in and the manipulation—like a dayglo, MTV version of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth— was big-time, and could only grow. And, maybe as a byproduct, reality TV was being spawned.

It was around that point that it occurred to me how these shows, Donahue, Oprah, Geraldo, not to mention the ravening and soon to be syndicated Morton Downey Jr., could, taken as a whole, be giving us a very strange image of ourselves. These mutated talk-shows, along with, I guess, The People’s Court, are the only TV shows that present us, the general public, in any context other than hysterically striving to win the Buick Regal; or as bemused bystanders at the scene of a news story. (“He was such a nice guy, I can’t believe that he shot twenty-nine people, right here in the Fatburger.”)

On Donahue, Oprah, Geraldo, and Mort, the general public—or at least a selected slice of the general public— is the motivating force of the show. This could be interpreted as an act of TV populism and, indeed, these shows are frequently sold to us as exactly that. The unfortunate part is that these shows, dependent on their need to titillate, present a section of the population that is, for one reason or another, flying in the face of the norm. They come to the screen only passing as plain folks. They may look like the Joneses but, very quickly, they reveal their fixations, their abnormalities, and their dirty little secrets. The cumulative effect of all this is to subliminally convince the protracted viewer that everyone out there is a little weird. An image starts to grow of the suburban avenue on which, behind closed doors, every third house is a bed of exotica. You can check them off. This one’s the home of the chan-neler, next door are the S&M swingers, and down the street there’s the Satanists’ split level. (Perhaps it’s no accident that Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey almost offer stranger-than-fiction reinforcement to the hothouse plot-lines of the soaps that they follow in the time schedule.) Far from populist, on close examination, this all starts to reveal a potential for mutual distrust that is little short of frightening. Are neighbors and coworkers really what they seem, or will they turn up on Oprah next Tuesday advocating man/sheep love?

Village Voice, June 1988

A GENTLEMAN RADICAL

FOR A LONG TIME I HAD A PHOTO CLIPPED FROM A MAGAZINE pinned to a bulletin board. It was probably taken somewhere around 1960. Three men smiled for the camera. On the left was Tennessee Williams, on the right Gore Vidal, and in the center John Kennedy. At the time, Kennedy was either running for president or had just been elected. The grouping said much about twentieth century iconography. All three came from the World War II generation, the one now rapidly passing. Lately these parents and grandparents—the ones whose lives were disrupted by old-style dictatorship—have been celebrated and idealized, but, having been raised by that generation, my memories of it are not as fond. I recall small-minded conformists who became bent out of shape by everything from Little Richard to the length of my hair.

We tend to depend on the media for our vision of the world. What other choice do we really have? We can’t go to the war zone and see for ourselves, and, beyond that, all is merely rumor, propaganda, or hearsay. For an intelligent, measured, and also extremely witty analysis of how power is wielded in this world, I can recommend nothing better than an afternoon spent in the company of Gore Vidal.

The men in the old photograph were, however, something else again, definitely deserving of idealization, and all products of what Gore Vidal—the lone survivor of the three—called a golden age. “1945 through 1950 was the only time we have not been at war in my lifetime. Five years. That’s all we had. In ’50, we got the Korean War. After that, nothing but war. Between ’45 and ’50, we were ahead in music with the whole world. We were ahead in poetry. We were ahead in the ballet, something we’ve never been noted for before; ahead in the theatre, with Tennessee and Arthur Miller. There was, in five years, this great burst of culture, because we had been repressed—first by the Depression for some twenty years, and then by World War II.”

Of the trio in the picture—and this is not in any way to denigrate him—Vidal is hardest to define. Kennedy was the consummate politician and, later, the assassinated boy king. Williams is counted among the great playwrights of the English language. But what exactly is Gore Vidal? Excellent company, perhaps, but something of a cultural Jack-of-all-trades. Now approaching his eighty-first birthday, he has spent a long and infinitely productive life shuttling among a variety of roles. He has written twenty-five novels under his own name, five more under pseudonyms, plus a collection of short stories. He has had seven plays produced, crafted movie and television scripts—including having a subversive hand in the screenplay of Ben-Hur— and his essays, articles, monographs, memoirs, and other works of nonfiction and political commentary are too numerous to count. He has acted on the stage and in a number of movies, including Bob Roberts, Gattaca, With Honors, and Fellini’s Roma, and he appeared in the film version of Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, in addition to adapting it for the screen.

Vidal was also an early TV personality, quick to recognize the power of television as a tool of self-promotion, and he became a regular on the early talk-show circuit, trading quips with the likes of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Dick Cavett. His love affair with the small screen extended as far as What’s My Line, Laugh-In, and Playboy After Dark, and, even today, he continues to bring his august presence to Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily Show with John Stewart. He has even sat still for Sacha Baron Cohen’s wigger-moron shtick on Da Ali G Show.

Gore Vidal’s heavyweight exposure to the mass TV audience came in 1968, when he and right-wing pundit William F. Buckley Jr. were hired by ABC News to provide point-counterpoint political commentary on the Republican and Democratic national conventions in that troubled year. As the Chicago police gassed and clubbed war protesters on the streets, Buckley and Vidal came close to blows in the studio, with Vidal calling Buckley a “crypto Nazi” and Buckley responding by calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to “sock him in the goddamn face.” In a subsequent essay, published in Esquire in August 1969, Buckley attacked Vidal as an “apologist for homosexuality” and trashed Vidal’s novel Myra Breckenridge as “pornography.” A month later, Vidal countered with an essay of his own, in which he denounced Buckley as “anti-black,” “anti-Semitic,” and a “warmonger.” A lawsuit ensued, which would be settled to neither’s satisfaction, and then, amazingly, the whole matter resurfaced just three years ago, in 2003, when Esquire published its Big Book of Great Writing that included Vidal’s original essay. Buckley launched another libel suit, which the magazine settled for a total of $65,000.

This furor and TV feud at the violent end of the 1960s set Gore Vidal on the path to what he has become today— the gay, patrician, highly erudite preserver of all that is worthwhile in traditional American dissent. Although he would probably dislike the characterization, Gore Vidal is an American institution whose voice is still crucial in these grim and oppressive times.

My own first brush with Vidal came during my early teens. A sleazy store at the bad end of my English hometown specialized in books and magazines remaindered in bulk from the USA, and, if you looked hard enough among the pulp fiction, the go-go girlie mags, and the Archie comics, you might come up with a Beat Generation gem, like a Digit paperback of Burroughs’ Junkie, or an Olympia Press edition of De Sade’s Justine. I discovered Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar racked with a mess of print-porn paperbacks with titles like Party Girl, Pagan Urge, and Caged Lust. I had no idea, as I walked away from the store with a Black Hawk comic, Famous Monsters of Filmland, a copy of Swank, and The City and the Pillar in a plain brown bag, that this was a notorious gay novel. Indeed, I had no real idea there were such things as notorious gay novels—and no clue that the book’s publication had cause such fury in American literary circles that the New York Times refused to review Vidal’s next five novels. The book, however, did much to offset the institutionalized homophobia that was standard issue to the British schoolboy of the time. I also found myself totally convinced by what seemed to be Vi-dal’s underlying theme—that one should not dwell upon the past, because the future was what counted.

From then on I consumed Vidal wherever I found him, from the inevitable Myra Breckenridge and the allegorical Two Sisters, through the heavyweight historical novels like Burr and Lincoln, to the satirical science fiction of Duluth, and, of course, the constant and invaluable political commentary. No part of this, though, has prepared me for the eventuality that I would find myself, in the summer heat of 2006, driving up to his house in the hills—his permanent home since he gave up his cliffside villa in Ravello, Italy— and ringing the doorbell of the Hollywood faux-Spanish house that might have been that of a well-heeled client in a Raymond Chandler novel. The English schoolboy is completing one unexpected circle.

This afternoon meeting with Gore Vidal is on the second or third day after the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. The news has just broken that the US government is expecting its citizens to pay for their evacuation from Lebanon, and Vidal, despite seeming tired and frail, and also walking with difficulty—“I have a titanium hip”—is furious. He makes no attempt to contain his towering contempt for George W. Bush, his principles, and his henchmen.

“We need a real American president, not this bad joke,” Vidal says. “I think he did himself in with the 25,000 Americans trying to get out of Lebanon. The Norwegians got their people out. The Swedes got their people. The French got them out. Everybody, every other nationality is out, with less logistical problems than ours, and it’s Kat-rina number two. Not only does he pay no attention to anything; he doesn’t give a damn. It is clear to me by his activities, first in the Katrina affair, and now in his total indifference to 25,000 Americans marooned in Lebanon, he does not like the American people—he really dislikes them. You can just see him when he gets out there. He is so uncomfortable. He will not go to a funeral of any of the soldiers that he’s sent off to be killed. He has no response other than loathing. They’re in his way. Things he wants to do, he can’t do. Like cut brush, or whatever it is he does in that little place of his.”

Regrettably, current events and anger at Bush overshadow our entire encounter. In theory, sitting with Gore Vidal should offer the possibility of a hundred stories and anecdotes of the famous and notorious with whom he’s rubbed shoulders, but to depart from the crisis of world politics is wholly impossible. That’s the way of things in this wretched summer.

“Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war, because, to be at war, Congress has to vote for it,” he fumes. “He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It’s like having a war on dandruff—it’s endless and pointless.”

Vidal pulls no punches. “We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarized. Everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of government are in the hands of this junta. Plus we have a media more vicious, stupid, and corrupt than at any previous time.” He lapses into a parody of Bush’s phony Texas drawl: “I’m a wartime president, wartime president, wartime president. Why doesn’t somebody say, ’There is no war’?”

But, in fact, someone has just said there is no war—no less than Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s own attorney general. While the media were focused on the explosions in Haifa and Beirut, Gonzales faced the Senate Judiciary Committee over the legality of the National Security Agency wiretaps, and, under pressure from California Senator Dianne Feinstein, haltingly admitted that the country was not, in legal terms, at war. Most of the world had not been watching, but Vidal had missed nothing.

“There’s no war. Gonzales—who proved to be even dumber than one suspected—said that to Feinstein . . . did you see that? It was on C-SPAN,” he says. “Gonzales was before the Judiciary Committee, and she said something about FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], that court which Bush refuses to use to get permission for warrants on everybody, and Gonzales really—usually he’s very good at being slithery—put his foot right in his mouth when he said, ’Well, of course, that was designed for wartime, and this is not wartime.’ No, there is no war. There are no wartime powers. Bush pretends that he has certain inherent powers as Commander in Chief which allow him to do anything he wants to do . . . torture, wiretap, imprison without trial.”

Vidal becomes passionately emphatic. “There are no inherent powers. There are enumerated powers in the Constitution, and each one is written out very clearly. A child of five could explain to Bush about his enumerated powers. But I don’t think they can find a child of five who wants to expose himself to the tedium of explaining the Constitution to the president.”

The degree to which Vidal detests Bush might seem obsessive in someone less sophisticated, but he uses the weapons of wit, charm, and intelligence to remain and sound entirely rational. A part of his contempt may also be rooted in his own experience. He fought in a war, freezing in the Aleutians during World War II, and he has lost someone close to him in war. The dedication in The City and the Pillar is to “J.T.”—Vidal has revealed that these are the initials of Jimmie Trimble, his lover at St. Albans prep school, who had died in the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. In his memoir Palimpsest, Vidal wrote of Trimble’s death: “Forever after, I was to be the surviving half of what had once been a whole.” He knows the truth about war, and has no tolerance for those who don’t, yet are prepared use it as a tool of power.

“[Bush and his cronies] are all sissies. Remember that,” he says. “These are people who’ve never been in an army. The men behind the war in Iraq are cowards who did not fight in Vietnam. They’ve run away like the president, who I refer to as the Yellow Rose of Texas. They’re weak little people with an agenda—which is: ’We’ve gotta show our muscle around the world. Running out of oil? We’ll take it. Show how tough we are. We’re macho.’ And we’re also dumbo, and that is the problem.”

The rarest pleasure of talking to Gore Vidal is to witness his acute sense of history. While most historians slice the past into bite-sized decades or easy political eras—the Clinton period, the Reagan era, the Nixon years—he sees the past as a continuous process that leads inexorably to the present, and on to the future. It is no surprise to him that American service people should be killing and dying for Big Oil in Iraq. It’s merely one more inevitable incident in the long thread of US corporate imperialism.

“We behaved badly always—Central America in particular, but Latin America too,” he says. “We’d taken them for granted. United Fruit was ripping them off, paying no tax, and they couldn’t run their governments because Chase Manhattan was collecting all the money to service old debts. The great Smedley Butler, Commanding General of the Marine Corps in the early twentieth century, he always said, ’I was an enforcer. As head of the Marines, I was an enforcer for Chase Manhattan. I was an enforcer for Standard Oil.’ He said, Al Capone had only five city districts in Chicago; I had five continents.’”

Vidal fluidly cites historical examples—from the Founding Fathers to the Civil War to the New Deal and FDR (a man he seems to simultaneously revere and dislike)—as they relate to the modern world. When I ruminate that Bush—or, more likely, Rumsfeld—might actually use a nuclear weapon just to prove that he could, Vidal has the historic reference at his fingertips. “Harry Truman did. Truman received a unanimous ’no’ from all the commanding officers of World War II—from Eisenhower in Europe to Nimitz in the Pacific. Every one of them, including the mad Curtis Le May, said, ’Don’t do it. Japan is already asking for a peace treaty. They surrender.’ But Truman wanted to scare Stalin, so he dropped not one but two bombs. And really let the world in for hell. And we’re objecting to Iran getting a little nuclear bomb? It would be nice if they didn’t have it, yes. It would be nice if we didn’t have it, too.”

He makes it clear that his innate respect for history has been the driving force behind some of his best known fiction. “In fact, it is to correct bad history that I have spent thirty years writing Burr and Lincoln, 1876, and all those books. You can be more truthful in fiction. Professional historians, by and large, have their prejudices, which condition everything they write because they must always be looking for tenure. Once they have tenure, they must maintain it. They must not rock the boat. They must not take political stands. That’s why we have no intellectual class.”

The common mistake is to assume that Gore Vidal is a true-blue Democrat. But, at best, his affiliations with the party are by default. He has run twice for office on a Democratic ticket. The first time was in 1960, when he ran for a congressional seat in upstate New York. The second was when he entered California’s 1982 Democratic primary for the Senate, and finished second in a field of nine, polling a half-million votes but losing to former California Governor Jerry Brown. When I ask him why he never attempted such a thing again, Vidal wryly shakes his head. “The moment of truth for me came from Alan Cranston—quite a good senator. And he said, ’You realize what you’re doing if you get elected? Let me tell you. If you get elected for a first term—six years—every week you have to raise $10,000 if you want to run again.’ That’s six years, every week—fifty-two weeks a year, six times fifty-two—you do the math. And this was in 1982. Ten thousand dollars a week for six years. I said, ’How do you get time to do anything?’ Cranston replied, ’Oh, you don’t. You call people for money.’ This didn’t sound healthy to me, so I never even thought about it again.”

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two right wings, Republican and Democrat,” he says. “Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently—and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists got out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

Vidal sees Bush and his neocons only being halted in their tracks when the nation runs out of money. “We’ll just default,” he says. “There’s really no way out. I think the financial collapse—which seems to me to be on its way— will at least stop the wars. We cannot go into the military adventures. Cost too much. We haven’t got the men to fight the wars. Don’t think we’ll find them. I don’t think we can hire that many Albanians, you know, to pretend they’re American soldiers, but it will get to something like that.”

As I review all that’s been said, and all that I’ve read, I start to believe that maybe the only word to define Vidal is radical. With his charm, his elegance, his wit, and his art collection, he hardly conforms to the popular image of the radical. He’s no wild-haired Abbie Hoffman or rumpled and academic Howard Zinn. Gore Vidal is something currently unique, a gentleman radical. As someone in Vidal’s entry on Wikipedia puts it, he “is a radical reformer” with “a disdain for privilege and power” who wants to return to the “pure republicanism of early America”—a secular, egalitarian democracy with an elegant and comprehensively crafted Constitution, and leaders honestly elected by, for, and of the people. He is a radical striving for the revolutionary concept of a civilized America, and who, incidentally, once wrote “in a civilized society, law should not function at all in the area of sex, except to protect people from being interfered with against their will.” And also once remarked in an online interview, “As you may by now suspect, I don’t think we [the US] are civilized.”

Vidal’s new book, Point to Point Navigation, will be published in November. It is, essentially, a companion volume to his Palimpsest. When I carelessly refer to Navigation as an autobiography, Vidal sternly corrects me: “A memoir.”

Gore Vidal is always precise. And—goddamn it—do we have serious need of his precision in this slovenly era of trash and duplicity.

LA CityBeat, August 2006

POWER AS ILLUSION

THE STORY MAY BE APOCRYPHAL, SINCE MOST HARD EVIDENCE was subsequently destroyed, but, if there’s any truth in it all, the tale speaks volumes about the nature of large scale surveillance within a police state, and mass manipulation by the fear that one is being constantly watched by those in authority. During the violent chaos of 1989 that surrounded the fall of Communism in Romania, and culminated in the executions of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, a large crowd occupied the Communist Central Committee building in Bucharest. While the majority of the mob seized Ceausescu’s writings, official portraits, and either burned them or hurled then out of windows, one group broke into an office supposedly used by the Securitate to tap private phones in the city.

And duplicity in government is most often used to instill either fear or blind ignorance, and to disguise what those in power are really up to. And what they are all too often up to is interfering in the private business of their own citizens.

The Securitate were one of the most feared secret police organizations of the Cold War era, considered quite as brutally efficient as the Soviet KGB, or the East German Stasi, and yet an engineer who supposedly looked over the equipment before it was ripped out and smashed, estimated that Securitate operators were unable to tap any more than two dozen phones at one time. For decades, all Romanians—or at least all Romanians who could afford phones—had assumed that, at any time, their lines would be tapped and acted accordingly. As it turned out, it was paranoia rather than realty that struck fear into the population and kept them on the Ceausescu straight and narrow.

POWER AS TECHNOLOGY

MENWITH HILL IS THE ECHELON NERVE CENTER where, as members of the public chat on the phone, surf the Internet, or engage in routine online transactions, they unknowingly leave behind trails of personal details that are automatically captured and retained in computer logs. Intelligence analysts at each of the respective “listening stations” keep separate keyword lists to help them analyze conversations or documents flagged by the system, which are then forwarded to the intelligence agency that requested the intercept. The interception and interpretation of signals by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration intrudes into all forms of communication including broadband Internet access and Voice Over IP. Although the number of intercepts currently being made by Echelon is highly classified, some idea can be gleaned from the fact that as early as 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War, the system was intercepting two million messages per hour, of which all but around 13,000 were discarded before being refined down to the 2,000 that satisfied forwarding of investigative criteria. These were whittled down further to a mere twenty messages that were read and examined by analysts. Fifteen years ago, Menwith Hill station was intercepting seventeen-and-a-half billion messages a year, and thus any projection today that takes into account the massive growth of all types of communication through the 1990s and up to today, makes the data flow through Menwith Hill close to unimaginable.

The astronomical volume of intercepts does, though, lay to rest any idea that shadowy NSA operatives are actually listening to the world’s telephone calls and reading every piece of email. What Echelon primarily deals with is flow patterns and clusters of chatter. Pattern recognition software might, for instance, detect an unusual high volume of calls between (say) Cairo and Frankfurt, Germany, which might be flagged for further investigation, and sorted according to selected criteria in a radiation-hardened underground facility called Steeplebush 11. Word or phrase recognition software (the Echelon dictionary) would then come into play to decide if samples need actually be replayed in realtime by human operatives. This is not to say that specific individuals are not subject to Echelon scrutiny.

POWER, A HISTORY LESSON

IN REALITY THE CREATION OF SYSTEMS WHEREBY CITIZENS were manipulated by those in power to spy and report on other citizens is as old as civilization itself. While the masses were illiterate and no methods of mass communications existed, this internecine surveillance was largely limited to those with power in the society—the aristocracy, the educated elite, plus, of course, their slaves, servants, and concubines, because only they had the ability to threaten the status quo. In Imperial Rome or feudal Japan, the mob might need to be placated with bread and circuses, or crushed by military force, but they hardly need to be constantly watched. This state of affairs really only began to change when societies became more mobile, and the first printing presses facilitated the rapid spread of ideas.

As with so much of our history, this change really began with the Crusades, and took hold during the Renaissance and the Reformation. The clash of cultures in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Christianity first squared off against Islam, put a huge menu of new and radical ideas into motion. Europe was opened up to new directions in mathematics, astronomy, dress, architecture and cuisine. Even religion was openly questioned, and the inevitable schism between Catholics and Protestants would ultimately result in open warfare, as whole cities were put to the fire and their populations slaughtered in the name of the true faith. The famous order “Neca eos omnes. Deus suos ag-noset”—that became loosely translated as “kill them all and let God sort it out”—was issued by Amalric Arnaud, the Abbot of Citeaux to Simon de Monfort while purging the town of Beziers in Southern France of heretics at the behest of Pope Innocent III. After some 20,000 townsfolk had been either burned or clubbed to death in order to eradicate an estimated 200 heretics, the Papacy was finally forced to recognize that there had to be a more subtle way of enforcing religious conformity. Out of this recognition was born what became known as the Inquisition, and in the religious sector, spies and informers found themselves working in a growth industry, the main product of which was mass fear. The Catholic Inquisition and its Protestant equivalents basically invented the concept of what, hundreds of years later, George Orwell would call “thought crime.”

Three excerpts from the book Who’s Watching You?, 2007

WHO’S WATCHING WHAT YOU’RE WATCHING?

PORNOGRAPHY HAS BEEN ATTACKED BY EVERYONE FROM feminists to fundamentalists to Al Qaeda, accused of debasing the moral standards of the culture, and giving free reign to man’s most base and animal instincts. When the computer and the Internet came into the picture, the accusations grew in both number and volume. Far from being relieved that pornography was now being consumed behind closed doors in online transactions that involved no one except the vendor and subscriber, the furor only increased. With porn now online, the dubious old time sleaze-flick movie theaters, and hole-in-the-corner adult bookstores became out-of-date anachronisms, but that still didn’t satisfy the moralists, evangelists, and decency crusaders.

Mass surveillance is usually assumed to be the work of government or law enforcement acting on the government’s behalf. Unfortunately it has started to emerge over the last decade that private enterprise has also moved in on the act. Some measure of the extent of commercial spying was revealed—somewhat surprisingly—by the porn industry.

A whole new wave of complaints was levelled at the adult online industry, some true, some possible, and some implausible nonsense. Unwanted and unexpected porn spam was being randomly sent to kids and little old ladies. Porn websites were committing all manner of credit card irregularities, and planting spyware, adware, and Trojan horse viruses in our PCs. Teenagers were being deliberately targeted so, by the time they were adults, they would be helpless smut addicts. About the only accusation not levelled against porn was that it was anything but either a solitary vice, or the mutual recreation of consenting couples. In theory, porn should be a private matter, but in a world where anything and everything we do on our computers can be logged and stored on some massive database, against which we have absolutely no recourse, privacy has become history. As we open the lid of the laptop, an inanimate presence watches and records.

And, for once, this ceaseless surveillance is neither the work of law enforcement nor some extra-legal government agency, but a vast and immensely profitable segment of the private sector, dealing in what has become politely known as data brokerage, but is really nothing more than cash-driven spying. Pop paranoia has always focused on the Federal Government as the keeper of unwarranted records on citizens who have committed no actual crimes. The FBI, the CIA, and, more recently, the NSA, have always been feared for their potential for becoming an “American Gestapo,” turning the nation from a democracy to a totalitarian “Big Brother” state. Here in the twenty-first century, corporate entities—but motivated by income rather than power—are quietly fulfilling some of our most basic societal fears, and run virtually unregulated.

The largest and most perfect example of a data mining operation is the company known as ChoicePoint. Based in Georgia, ChoicePoint buys information from anyone willing to supply it, and then resells to anyone willing to pay. Its clients include insurance companies, government agencies, corporate marketing departments, advertising agencies, and even private investigators. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that ChoicePoint provides personal information to thirty-five or more government agencies, and also has several multimillion dollar contracts to sell personal data to law enforcement groups.

In the last ten years, since 1997, ChoicePoint has steadily accumulated a huge share of commercial data brokerage by acquiring thirty-eight other businesses, and is now one of the biggest players in the game. These acquisitions include major data retention organizations such as Pinkertons Inc., National Data Retrieval Inc., CITI Network, Bode Technology, Accident Report Services and many more, and their takeover has given ChoicePoint a combined database so comprehensive and detailed that it may outstrip any information system amassed by a national government.

ChoicePoint and operations like it also conduct their business with the same obsessive secrecy as any part of the Federal intelligence community, but a small tip of this large and sinister iceberg was revealed early this year when AOL, the nation’s largest Internet service provider, and a division of Time Warner, admitted they had given away private search engine data on some 658,000 “anonymised” users. Privacy defenders became apoplectic. One news report ran “AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, simple analysis can easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to.” As anyone who maintains so much as a blog tracker is well aware, search engine requests can be self-revealing in the extreme, ranging from “Mexico City UFO sightings” to “teen girls in handcuffs.”

The AOL revelations were rendered even more shocking, coming as they did on top of a less widely publicized admission by ChoicePoint that, in February 2005, the company had “accidentally” sold personal information on at least 145,000 Americans to a criminal ring engaged in identity theft. This was a little too much for even the shadow world of data brokers, and ChoicePoint was forced to issue a statement defending its business practices.

Unfortunately the company’s press release proved to be a classic example of twenty-first century corporate doublespeak. ChoicePoint “reserved the right to sell sensitive information to support consumer-driven transactions where the data is needed to complete or maintain relationships . . . to provide authentication or fraud prevention tools to large, accredited corporate customers where consumers have existing relationships . . . and to assist Federal, state and local government and criminal justice agencies in their important missions” But what exactly were “consumer-driven transactions” and when is data “needed to complete or maintain relationships”? Even “relationships” were not defined. To many reporters, the wording sounded close to the euphemisms of old school Cold War intelligence jargon in which “plausible deniabili-ty” and “extreme prejudice” were used as substitutes for the plain English of words like “deception” and “assassination.”

When a business can issue statements that baffle the media, the general public has little chance of understanding what’s being done to them. The great misconception is that computer surveillance is conducted in real time, or at least any action is studied and analyzed shortly after it’s made. This is far from being the case. A consumer who logs on to the “wrong” porn site is not going to suddenly find an FBI morality squad at his door. Most of data stored on private individuals is never seen by a human being until requested by a customer, usually when one applies for a loan, opens a bank account, becomes involved in divorce proceedings, or some other lawsuit, or runs for public office. Only then does it become revealed (for instance) that a pillar of the community has a private taste for downloading girl-on-girl lesbo porn.

Reality, however, does not stop ChoicePoint from using fear in its advertising, and—as happens so frequently— citing child protection to defend their actions. The company claims, for instance, that it protects against predatory paedophiles, and that many missing children have been found through its database. But at a hearing before the California Senate Banking Committee, in March 2005, ChoicePoint was asked for the numbers of these lost children it had rescued, but no answer was forthcoming.

Worse still, it would appear that much of the data obtained by data mining is also far from accurate. According to a report by the watchdog group World Privacy Forum, ChoicePoint’s reports have a “high error rate.” In WPF’s sample, ninety percent of the reports contained errors, many serious and others plain ridiculous, including one individual being assigned the wrong sex. Behind the high-minded smokescreen, ChoicePoint, LexisNexis, Acxiom, and those like them, gather all the information they can on all of us, good, bad, or ugly. They have little interest in its accuracy and sell it to anyone who will pay the price, like a cash-driven secret police force, currently unchecked by regulation or legislation.

Sadly computer surveillance doesn’t end with huge, all devouring, corporations. To find true “Big Brother,” realtime spying, one need look no further than the home and the workplace. Surveillance at work has become close to a way of life, with more and more employers checking that their workers are not sending private emails, instant messaging friends, downloading streaming hentai, or playing online blackjack on company time. Low cost monitoring technology and a recklessly amoral business climate encourages firms to watchdog their workers in the name of supposed “efficiency.” Unfortunately, according to a Privacy Foundation study, the simplest way for an employer to watch the hired help is to watch all of them. Monitoring just those employees who exhibit suspicious behavior is expensive, so most employers opt for the cruder but more cost effective “continuous, systematic surveillance,” and everyone receives the Big Brother treatment.

Computer-monitoring programs with impressive names like Shadow, SpyAgent, Web Sleuth, and Silent Watch—that vary in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars—form the base of an emerging multi-million dollar, “employee Internet management” industry. For two grand, the Spector company offers their 360 model that “records websites visited, emails sent and received, chats and instant messages, keystrokes typed, files transferred, documents printed and applications run. In addition, through a first of its kind surveillance-like camera recording tool, Spec-tor 360 shows you in exact visual detail what an employee does every step of the way.”

For the real police state in miniature, though, the home is the place, especially homes that have succumbed to the pitches for the domestic versions of Spector or Web Sleuth. Yet again children are the core of the sales pitch. What are little Johnny and Jane doing all alone in their rooms with their laptops and webcams? Are they being victimized by sexual predators, or planning to blow up their high school in some goth/guerrilla chat room? The first line of defense offered is the keylogger, simple software and a plug-in that monitors each keystroke made on a computer’s keyboard. All typed text, URLs or commands are recorded, keystroke-by-keystroke, and saved in the logger’s miniature hard drive. At some later time, the keylogger can be removed, and the parent can access every action that has been performed on the computer.

Or, at least, that’s the theory, but when the New York Times reports teen and even preteen boys organizing their own webcam peepshow porn sites, and being paid via gift vouchers for Amazon.com, and other online shopping malls, one can only wonder just how much of a clue many Internet-age parents really have about what their children are up to.

The hugely popular MySpace has recently come under intense media scrutiny as a kind of cyber jungle, rife with sexual predators and unregulated weirdness. A website calling itself wiredsafety.com is replete with horror stories of the insidious spread of MySpace.

“Mom accidentally came upon her eighteen-year-old son’s MySpace page. His ’Friends’ section had girls pictures everywhere. They were provocative pictures, with provocative write-ups. Mom later found out that her son had introduced MySpace to his eleven-year-old sister. She had her own page and own friends. Although her page appeared hugely innocent in comparison to his, she would get daily messages that discussed penis sizes, breast augmentation, etc.”

What we are really seeing is, of course, adults interfacing with children and teenagers online and being shocked at the degree of their kids’ sophistication. Much sentimental rhetoric is spouted—usually by individuals and groups who want to ban, censor, or control something—about the innocence of children, but little is said about appalling and apathetic naivete of parents. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, MySpace describes itself as “a social networking website, offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos.” What we’re not told is that MySpace is causing more problems than just the unwelcome parental revelations. MySpace leaks data like a rusty bucket. Its web pages, containing multiple profiles, pictures and other intimate details, that can be effortlessly lifted for anything from nuisance pranks to identity theft. Employers have been using MySpace as a free background check, and young college graduates ruefully complain that they have been turned down for jobs because they had unthinkingly posted accounts of keg-parties, and sexual conquests. (Gee, we never thought anyone in the real world would actually see that stuff.)

The psychology of the way both adults and children feel the need to gather in online cyber communities to bare their souls (and also their bodies and innermost secrets) on sites like MySpace and Facebook is well beyond the scope of this story, but it has a spawned a growth industry in specific monitoring software. Families can happily spy on each other and create their very own Big Brother environment. Parents load software to spy on the kids, while the kids install counter programs. Electronic suspicion rules, and, of course, the same software is also being put to use by suspicious spouses and jealous lovers to spy on supposedly cheating husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, establishing a generally unhealthy atmosphere of unwarranted cyber snooping and domestic paranoia, and, in some anecdotal cases, nothing short of domestic violence, misery, and divorce.

So can anything be done to curb an area of computer technology that makes the online porn business resemble a paragon of virtue? The answer is, regretfully, not much. A new regime in Washington after 2008 might do something to strengthen and enforce existing privacy laws, and even institute new ones, but there is so much money in snooping, spying, and data mining, that it will be hard. Also, legislation is wholly incapable of keeping up with technology. As always, I pin my hopes on human ingenuity and deviousness. We will learn to outfox the snoops and data pirates. They can ferret out what they think is essential while we cunningly figure ways to effectively conceal what we don’t want them to know.

AVN Online, 2007

THE BEST POLICE FORCE THAT MONEY CAN BUY

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I’M CLOSE TO BURNED out on the antics of the Los Angeles Police Department. As atrocities go, the mini-riot after the UCLA basketball team won the NCAA tournament a few weeks ago amounted to very little in the grand scheme of things. Nothing more, in fact, than just another dreary indication that the LAPD is apparently incapable of learning from its mistakes or in any way connecting with the fact that, although its members may be the principal guardians of law and order, they do not actually own the streets, and that we, as citizens, might have a few residual rights to go about our lawful business, or even our lawful fun, without being at risk from indiscriminate beatings or random arrest.

OK, so the kids in Westwood became a tad rowdy. Perhaps some store owners feared for their window glass, and a KIIS-FM van certainly did get trashed. On the other hand, similar scenes occur in most cities around the globe following a major victory by a local sports team. The police in Munich, Osaka, or Sydney don’t immediately blitz the neighborhood with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a Kevlarclad riot squad. Even in Britain, where violent soccer hooliganism has been a clear and present problem since the late sixties, the police manage to handle victory celebrations with a great deal more tact and diplomacy.

The human macro-system on this planet may be controlled by multinational corporations, national governments, and the military industrial complexes and intelligence communities who dance attendance on them, but down on the more mundane ground, on the streets where most of us live, it’s the cops who wield the power—in some cities the power of life and death. (And if you don’t believe that, explain the syndrome of “suicide by police officer.”)

As every Beatles fan knows, the city of Liverpool is anything but a sleepy backwater. Unemployment and public drunkenness are high, and the Liverpool constabulary extends no kid-glove treatment to any potential breakdown in public order. Liverpool does, however, have one of the greatest soccer teams in the world, and its coppers are highly experienced in sport-related crowd control. One has only to watch the TV news coverage when the Liverpool team brings home the Football Association Cup to realize that the key to the successful management of such a hard-drinking, spontaneous street event is that the police are seen to be participants in the celebration. Individual officers pose for photographs, smiling and allowing themselves to be hugged and kissed by intoxicated female fans. The message is clear: The Liverpool cop is also a citizen and is as proud as the next guy that his team is number one.

Beneath the public relations exercise, a watchful presence is maintained. Pairs of mounted officers play a major role, using their better visibility and the psychological effect of their horses to spot knots of potential troublemakers and cut them off from the crowd, quite literally like cowboys cutting steers from the herd. At no time do they resort to the kind of paramilitary, street-clearing skirmish line employed by the LAPD in Westwood.

Over the last few years, we have watched Los Angeles’ finest violently brutalize striking janitors in Century City, fire tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd at last year’s downtown Cinco de Mayo celebrations, and then repeat the performance when the Mexican soccer team won its playoff in the 1994 World Cup. It’s almost impossible to drive around the city for any length of time without seeing LAPD or sheriff’s deputies holding our fellow citizens— usually male minority youths—spread-eagled against a wall or sitting humiliated in the gutter while the officers search their cars and persons for drugs, weapons, or whatever contraband might be the subject of current hysteria.

Over and above the smaller incidents is the Rodney King debacle, which started as a small group of officers indulging in some sadly familiar Nazi-boy fun, and ended with more than sixty people dead, a half-billion bucks in property damage, and a collective trauma from which the city has yet to fully recover.

The sum total of all this is that the citizenry of Los Angeles probably has the worst us-and-them perception of its police department of any city I’ve ever known. For many years, law enforcement theorists have identified this kind of “army of occupation syndrome” as one of the major ills that can infect a big-city police force. After the riots, when Daryl Gates was handed his hat and the suggestion that he retrain as a talk-show host, and Willie Williams was brought in from Philadelphia, a lot of lip service was paid to the concept of community policing. On the ground, however, little appears to have changed. In my community, the sheriffs continue to roust and harass the drag queens and rent boys on Santa Monica Boulevard, and, when the weather gets warmer, the helicopters will again clatter over Plummer Park in the dead of night, irritating the sleeping homeless, and interrupting my late-night TV viewing, making me feel as if I’m in Saigon waiting for a mission.

The unfortunate perception that Los Angeles police officers are a bunch of spit-shined, robotic town bullies— or, as my girlfriend’s lawyer put it, with deadpan cynicism, “the best police force that money can buy”—can only counteract the basic maintenance of Los Angeles as a workable and inhabitable environment. Certainly the great majority of us seem to be willing to believe the worst. We are ready to buy Johnnie Cochran’s conspiracy theories or that, at the O.J. Simpson celebrity crime-scene-of-the-decade, vital evidence was handled with all the finesse of Larry, Moe, and Curly. It becomes extremely easy to give credence to urban legends like the deputy sheriff who shot the blind wino’s dog when it growled at him, or to accept the current media speculation that Chief Williams, far from being the brave new broom, is nothing more than a fat freeloader.

The bottom line is that a police force has to get down with the population it claims to protect and serve. It cannot function efficiently when a majority of its rank and file live in far-flung suburbs and look at the inner city with distance and contempt. The status quo has, so far, given us law enforcement that proved ineffectual during the riots, is tainted in the O.J. case, and appears to be viewed by a large section of the populace on a spectrum that starts at fear and ends at loathing. God save us from the kind of chaotic hell that might break out should anyone blow up our Federal Building.

LA Reader, April 1995

PILLAR OF FIRE

The most recent Los Angeles riot, that broke out in the spring of 1992, after the Rodney King incident and the acquittal of the cops involved, was one of those extreme occurrences that bring out both the superlative and the very worst in people—proving, if nothing else, that Hobbes made his Leviathan just too simplistic. The cool detachment of the poet also came into play. Obsessively watching the local TV news to see which way the mob was headed and what neighborhood would burn next, I noticed how nighttime lens-distortion by the cameras on the TV news choppers gave each burning building a vertical halo reaching for the sky. It had a terrible beauty and became the motif for this song.

Shake’s gotta case of Colt 45 an’ I got an AK47
Shake’s gotta VCR to go an’ I got an AK47
Bud’s gotta brand new pair of Reeboks
An’ I got an AK47
Bud’s gotta pipe an’ Shake’s gotta lighter
An’ I got an AK47

The warning’s plain for all to see

The writing crowds the wall

Now greed has spawned disaster

And pride precedes the fall

The rapid fire of destiny

Takes history by the hour

Now you and I have chained ourselves

To the pillar of fire

The deputy’s got a shotgun

The Marines got CS gas

The cops have got a swagger

Says you can kiss my ass

Politician now ain’t nothing

But another word for liar

The only truth is in the light

Of the pillar of fire

Rising from the jewelfield

Rising from the plain

Rising from the liquormart

Rising from the pain

Rising from consuming rage

Rising from the mire

Rising from Los Angeles

An awesome pillar of fire

The Huxtables can’t save us

Willy Horton takes the point

St. Theresa of the Roses

Works a topless joint

Can’t trust no ballgame hero

Until he’s on the barricade

And Eddie Murphy’s having lunch

With Himmler in the shade

And high above the carnage

Cold eyes lack all desire

While you and I in fascination

Approach the pillar of fire

Shake’s gotta case of Colt 45 an’ I got an AK47

Shake’s gotta VCR to go an’ I got an AK47

Bud’s gotta brand new pair of Reeboks

An’ I got an AK47

Bud’s gotta pipe an’ Shake’s gotta lighter

An’ I got an AK47

Written in 1992 in wake of the riots.
Recorded by Wayne Kramer in 1995.

666

THE BLONDE HAD AN UNCANNY ABILITY TO REMAIN ALMOST totally motionless. She was already on stage, naked but for a purple drape, as the audience/congregation took their seats for the Fortieth Anniversary High Mass of the Church of Satan. She held a Vargas-style calendar pose, stretched out on her right side, head tilted, partially supporting herself on her arm, one leg extended, the other bent under her. She could almost have been a mannequin, except, now and again, the pendant pentacle that hung between her breasts flashed slightly in the stage lights. In a perfect world she would have been a comely devotee, immobilized in an occult trance, but the truth was more prosaic. She was a model, Leola Jossi, hired for the gig, and just extremely good at what she did. Which was to keep very, very still for approximately ninety minutes, and function as human scenery for the Satanic ceremony.

In addition to Leola Jossi, the Church of Satan had also engaged a quartet of armed security guards, and the invitation-only arrivals were frisked for concealed weapons before being admitted. Were these rent-a-cops merely to heighten the drama? Maybe, but in a world where a pro-life, pro-gay Episcopalian Priest—a friend of a friend— has received so many death threats he wears a Kevlar vest under his surplice, who knows what homicidal zealots might do if they knew that Lucifer was being invoked in the heart of the city?

Not all power stems from simple politics or direct reaction to oppressive authority. There are many who believe that power both extends to and emanates from the occult and the paranormal. Scientology has a huge influence on Hollywood. The Bush family males are all members of Skull & Bones, and then there are the rumors of secret rooms in Dick Cheney’s bunker equipped for strange and arcane rites. On June 6, 2006, I attended a black mass in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The invitations stipulated dress was formal, and pre-ceremony cocktails were served in the theater’s foyer where muted conversation melded with discreet piped-in bebop. It could have been a high-end art opening except for all the pentagram pendants round the necks of the well dressed crowd. (I was also wearing a pentagram, except it was under my shirt on a leather thong, along with an Elvis talisman, a voodoo heart, and the key to the Tardis, but those were just my usual protective totems.) The only Satanic pop-culture reference I could apply to this select and affluent gathering were the uptown friends of Minnie and Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby, but even that was something of a stretch and, anyway, where was Rosemary?

After the audience was seated, I could see nothing except the dimly lit figure of Leola Jossi, but with the darkness came a half-second frisson. I didn’t really expect a daemonic emanation, or that I’d fall victim to a conjured succubus, but this was my first Satanic mass, and a boy can hope. Anticipation was heightened by the music of Lust-mord, an electronic fusion resembling an early and particularly depressed Pink Floyd, and a humpbacked whale familiar with Bach fugues. Finally the church hierarchy, filed in from the rear of the theater. The hoods of their robes hid their faces and they carried candles, but a lifetime of watching Hammer horror diminished the drama. I had seen it all before, and with Christopher Lee in the starring role.

The audience was initially instructed by Magistra Peggy Nadramia on how to respond at various points in the service, and her warm-up—like telling the goys at the Seder what was expected of them—put us somewhat at ease. She even threw in a gratuitous Pee-wee Herman reference that evoked the only laugh of the evening. The mass was divided into three thematic parts—Compassion, Lust, and Destruction—and at the end of each, three supplicants were led to the stage to make their requests of Satan. A Hugh Grant-looking young Englishman wanted to be “the Casanova of my neighborhood,” a corporate wannabe craved a highly paid job, a nervous young woman desired nothing more than to be happy. A guy who looked like an East European car dealer wanted major hurt put on some people who had fucked him in a deal. The only altruistic request was an inarticulate plea for the environment. Cynicism set in. The High Mass was turning depressingly middle-class, a self-realization seminar with occult trappings. I figured that approaching a Mafia Don on the day of his daughter’s wedding might yield more practical results.

The only truly human moment came when a woman, clearly suffering an emotional crisis, prayed for her husband to love her. I later saw her being helped to her car in tears. Did she gain any comfort from the Satanic mass? Maybe as much as from a therapist or a more conventional encounter group. She had come and she had asked for help, and sometimes that’s really all solace requires. But solace and theater are not the same thing.

Gongs were struck, a bell rung to the four points of the compass, a sword flourished—although more a long dagger than Excalibur—but the performance was oddly static. Where was the soul energy of the Reverend Ike, or the Bible pounding stagecraft of Jimmy Swaggart? I’ve seen Episcopalians with more juice. But my primary problem is with the text. The High Mass is based on the rituals created by Anton LaVey who founded the Church of Satan in a flurry of notoriety in the mid 1960s. It’s little more than inverted Catholic litany, with a pinch of H.P. Lovecraft, a recipe for pretentious and ponderous poetry.

The 1960s also saw the rabbinical Zen grandeur of Allan Ginsberg, and Jim Morrison, as the Dionysian delinquent, calling down concho belt chaos and mojo disorder with his Celebration of the Lizard, and this quasi-ecclesiastic melange is minor league in comparison. LaVey was making his occult bones at the same time as Bob Dylan was completing Blonde On Blonde, Lenny Bruce was being hounded to death by the defenders of decency, the Warlocks had changed their name to the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were on the bus, and Owsley Stanley III was making the best acid on the planet. Anton Szandor LaVey and his Church of Satan—at its zenith—attracted celebrities like Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr., while an ex-con called Charlie Manson cast covetous glances at LaVey’s operation, and a hippie chick called Susan Atkins—later a knife-wielding Man-son slaymate—posed nude at a LaVey ceremony. LaVey was part of this cultural explosion. The only real twenty-first century energy was finally generated at the end of the Destruction phase, conducted by Magister Rex Diabolos, who actually has horns permanently implanted in his forehead. On his command, the audience/congregation rose to its feet, right arms extended, fingers in horned salute.

“Hail Satan!”

“Hail Satan!”

I have some very serious reservations about straight arm salutes, especially en masse. Last time I found myself hemmed in by a pack of hail/heils I had foolishly infiltrated a neo-Nazi punk gig (Skrewdriver, if I recall) and barely escaped with life and limb. I’m not, in any way, equating the Church of Satan with Nazism old or new, but this mass gesture—the salute and the call and response— generates a weird energy that just plain makes me nervous. While the believers lined up to collect some kind if souvenir tokens, I headed for the bar.

The choice of various Satans is a wide one. In the biblical chronology, he’s right there in Genesis, the serpent of Eden tempting Eve into a fig-leaf bikini, but also endowing humanity with self-awareness, not unlike Prometheus who, after bringing the gift of fire, suffered horribly at the hands of the gods. From then on, the Evil One has so many personae it’s hard to keep up. Is he the horned demon of medieval folklore? The Beast of Revelations, or Lucifer Son of Morning, the fallen favorite from Milton’s Paradise Lost? Or is he the diabolic maestro who, in the nineteenth century, made Niccolo Paganini the greatest violinist of all time in return for his immortal soul, and, 100 years later, the devil who met Robert Johnson at the crossroads, or scared the shit out of Jerry Lee Lewis when drunk out of his mind in Sun studios? Is he the motivating force behind Norwegian death metal, a bad-rap, third century rewriting of Mithras, or the gleefully urbane Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate? Could he even be the secret consigliore of Dick Cheney?

And why celebrate 6/6/06? This Number of the Beast from Revelations is the product of one of the most savagely pernicious books of the Bible, an insanely vicious piece of ancient science fiction, written by the half-starved and possibly hallucinating John of Patmos, exiled in a Roman Gulag, and maybe eating the fungus on the wall of his cave. It is obsessed with mass destruction, retribution, sex, and death, and although it is currently the paranoia-inducing favorite of Rapture believers, and evangelists like Pat Robertson who also like to play Armageddon politics, it was not always so. In the fourth century, bishops led by St. John Chrysostom wanted Revelations excluded from the New Testament because of its potential for abuse. No less than Martin Luther loathed Revelations, considered it “neither apostolic nor prophetic.” Don’t Satanists, by accepting the 666 mystique, also put themselves in an unbreakable symbiosis with Christianity?

Christians—especially fundamentalists—will tell you Lucifer is all of the above. Satan employs every seductive form to ensnare his victims, and this multitude of manifestations proves the fiendishness of his infernal plan. But Christians must come under suspicion of extreme bias— or worse—where Lucifer is concerned. For centuries, the devil has been the convenient excuse to brutally torture and horribly execute hundreds of thousands of inconvenient midwives, wisewomen, freethinkers, and rebels against theocratic orthodoxy? And these witch-hunts are far from being confined to history. The Reagan era saw the “Satanic Panic,” during which born-again Christians scoured heavy metal albums for secret messages, and claimed (eagerly abetted by media shills like Geraldo Rivera) to have uncovered repressed memories that indicated a Satanic underground honeycombed the entire US, and thousands of unfortunate victims, many young children, were being slaughtered in Satanic rituals.

Estimates of the Satanic bodycount ran as high as 60,000 dead, until an FBI spokesman pointed out this was close to triple the national homicide rate, and the Bureau had yet to find a single plausible body. These claims may be laughable, but the moral panic that surrounded incidents like the 1983 McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, when children were manipulated supposedly to recall underground tunnels and Satanic private jets, or the West Memphis Three who, in 1993, were convicted of murder after prosecutors used Pink Floyd lyrics and Stephen King novels as evidence of Satanic conspiracy. As recently as 2004, Scott Peterson attempted but failed to convince a jury that Satanists were the “real killers” of his pregnant wife Laci. Satan also figured in the trench-coat folklore of the genuinely dangerous. Richard Ramirez, Charlie Manson, Klebold and Harris, these are poster boys for the counterculture’s nihilist trailer park. The disturbed and inadequate, the self-serving energy leeches, the teenage cat mutilators, can use the same symbols and language as an excuse to indulge their deep seated viciousness. “Hail Satan” can cover a multitude of sins.

A section from LA CityBeat,June 2006

THE PEREZ GIRL

Henry Kissinger, when asked how he always had good-looking women on his arm at public events, replied in that trademark accent that “power was the ultimate aphrodisiac.” In this short excerpt from a novel that I never finished, the character is the leader of the secret police in a fictional country in Central America who is planning a coup that will make him its dictatorial head of state.

ESTERO GLANCED BACK THROUGH THE DOORWAY BEHIND him at the young girl who now lay curled among the disarray of black silk sheets in one half of the huge king-size bed. She was the personal, private side of his sense of well being and accomplishment. The girl’s name was Isabella Perez, and she was the supposedly chaste and protected daughter of one of his staunchest and most conservative backers. At some point, Perez, the father, if he didn’t know already, would probably hear some whisper of Estero’s liaison with his daughter, but he would never have the courage to either confront Estero, or withdraw his political support. Such was the freedom that came with power based largely on fear. It was possible to take a man’s most prized possession and that man would be too afraid to even react. In many respects, the Perez girl was a symbol of the city, the country, of all that was about to come to him, and, for that reason alone, Estero had taken a silent delight in way that she had given herself to him with such adoration and blind faith. He had also noted that, judging from her behavior, deep in the black bed, she was hardly as chaste as her father apparently believed, and her family’s moral protection must have been greatly less than absolute. The eager and accomplished upward thrusts of her pelvis and the convulsive gripping of her vaginal muscles told of an experience and enthusiasm hugely at odds with the supposed convent innocence of such a daughter of a so-called “good family.”

She had cried out in pain just once during their love-making. He had hurt her a little, quite deliberately, just enough to demonstrate that what they were doing was also about power, the power that he controlled and that she received as she lay spread beneath him, shuddering, abandoned and helpless. He knew it was his power that she’d craved, and that power was the reason that she had been so instantly willing to come with him to wherever he might decide to take her. If she’d wanted tenderness, if she’d desired affection, she would never have been drawn to a man like him. Her lust had been for his power, pure and simple. She wanted him to move her in the same way that he had moved the mindlessness of the mob.

From an unpublished novel

HOW VICKI MORGAN ALMOST BROUGHT DOWN RONALD REAGAN BUT WAS MURDERED INSTEAD

WHILE CIA DIRECTOR CASEY MIXED IT UP WITH TERRORISTS, and Oliver North went about his illegal international intrigues in the White House basement, a 1983 sex scandal cast yet another shadow of doubt on the Reagan-era. Model and party girl, Vicki Morgan had been the longtime mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, the founder of the Diner’s Club and heir to the Bloomingdale’s department store fortune. Bloomingdale was also a close friend of Ronald Reagan, an unofficial advisor, a member of his personal “kitchen cabinet,” and an appointee to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. On July 7, 1983, Morgan was found beaten to death in her Hollywood apartment. Her roommate, Marvin Pancost, immediately confessed to the slaying. Initially, it seemed to be nothing more than another sordidly pointless Hollywood murder out on the fringes of showbusiness, but then some bizarre rumors began to circulate.

Political power and sex scandal will go hand in hand as long as politicians sell a spurious moral rectitude to the electorate. Bill Clinton all but fell when the simple liaison with Monica Lewinski was revealed, but if Vicki Morgan’s alleged bondage parties had become public it could have decimated American conservatism.

A year earlier, when Bloomingdale had been hospitalized for throat cancer, his wife Betsy had attempted to end his relationship with Morgan by cutting off the money Bloomingdale had been paying her. Vicki immediately retaliated by threatening to go public with the story of her relationship with Bloomingdale. Apparently it had been more than just a one-on-one romance. Vicki had acted as hostess at regular S&M, whip and bondage parties thrown by Bloomingdale for prominent figures in the Reagan administration, and she had videotapes to prove it. She went to the William Morris Agency with a tell-all book proposal, but this project was supposedly derailed by powerful Hollywood figures looking to protect Reagan’s interests. Vicki then threatened to go directly to the media, but died before she could make a public statement. Five days after the murder, attorney Robert Steinberg claimed that he had the Bloomingdale orgy tapes, but was unable to produce them when ordered by a court. They had been mysteriously stolen from his briefcase.

Marvin Pancost was convicted of the murder on the strength of his confession and that should have been the end of the Vicki Morgan story, except that weird tidbits of information continued to surface. Pancost turned out to have a history of confessing to crimes that he never committed, all the way back to when he tried to take the blame for the Manson Family, Tate/LaBianca murders. The LAPD investigation of the Morgan murder was revealed to be a badly botched job. The crime scene had not been sealed for twenty-four hours, and was a gem of police negligence. These items were more than enough to start the conspiracy mill grinding and fingers were again pointed at the CIA. The most popular interpretation was that someone in the Reagan camp had used Bloomingdale’s intelligence connections to enlist Agency help to silence Morgan, before copies of the sex party tapes could find their way to tabloid TV and maybe bring down the supposedly ultra-moral Republican presidency.

From the book The CIA Files, 1999

COME WITH ME TO THE CASBAH

THE FOLLOWING SMALL WONDER CAME IN TODAY (AS A forwarded email) from Henry Cabot Beck. Spam that serves as the come-on, the hook for what has become known as the Nigerian Scam can often be highly implausible, but this illiterate wonder was a gem of the genre.

DEAR Citibank Members,

This E-mail was sent by the Citibank server to veerify your E MAIL addres. You musst clmoetpe this prsecos by clicking on the link below and enttering in the smal winddow your CITI-bank ATM Card number and Pin that you use in the local ATM Machine.This is done—for-your pcertotion G because some of our members no logner have accses to their email adrssedes and we must verify it.

Aside from qualifying as the most inept webscam of all time—or at least to date—this loony clip also started me thinking. I’m well aware that my imagination tends towards over-cook a lot of the time, but that’s how I earn a living (distant laughter), and also how I keep myself sane (more distant laughter), but it serves as yet another reinforcement of my fantasy picture of the Internet. Al Gore dubbed it the Information Super Highway, conjuring, for me at least some rolling, big-deal perspective that had elements of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Roads Must Roll, the world of the clone-makers in Star Wars: Episode II, the Venusian city of Mekonta, and Osaka International Airport, all clean and chrome, plexiglass, and air-stream tubular, with order and efficiency, a precision of integrated and organized traffic. And maybe that’s why Old Al found himself incapable of defeating chump-chimp George W. because at least Bush, probably courtesy of Dick Cheney, and with rich-boy contempt, could see a little, if iniquitous, vision of the true unkempt nature of reality.

For me, the Internet has always seemed far more like a Middle Eastern bazaar, a souk or casbah, part futurist, part medieval, a space-floating Interzone, unplanned, asymmetrical and labyrinthine, although easily negotiable by those who know, with narrow accessways between gim-crack structures, whose flaws are hidden by hypnoswirls of niteglo color, and all the whores, hustlers, cutpurses, dead-rabbits, footpads, swackdogs and gutter jumpers at which an adventurer could ever hope to shake his swordstick.

The sense of isolation and powerlessness is the raw clay out of which despots mold societies. It may seem as though they have it all their way, but when that helpless feeling comes upon you remember once again the words of the Mahatma. Gandhi was always positive. “There have always been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall.” Governments become bloated and sluggish and if the people stay on their toes and are not paralyzed by intimidation, they can often take control of an innovation before the rulers have even figured out what it is.

Quack croakers with dirty instruments want to enlarge your penis, brothel-shills do it with domestic beasts, and that’s only the promise of better things inside, swarthy bunco artists whisper of fortunes in Nigeria, and politicians with corrosive blood want your money even more than they want your vote. Sexualized cartoon hentai-children retail their tears in darker alleyways, dancing in come-to-me display for dangerously scarred and mind-numbed teenage gunpersons on R&R from the carnage of their Xboxes, while dealers in long coats of a million pockets whisper transactionally of every dubious pill known to man and crustacean, to calm your mind, roll up your eyes, or keep you fucking to Sunday. Pop-ups like dirty gray beggars need beating, while mules look for their forty acres, and the gambling games tell you there’s ninety minutes in every hour and 100 seconds in a minute and the odds are in your favor. And you should believe that when pigs eat your brother.

And in the middle of it all, there’s Doc 40’s Own Cozy, Leather-Jacket Gin-Joint, Twenty-four Hour Global House Party, and Medicine Show, offering sharp conversation, bad ideas, honest politics, cheap stimulation, dirty concepts, and links to revolution, right out on the stairs. The girls are smart, the women wicked, the men at least reasonable, poets cut up, the aliens behave themselves, the cats help themselves, the fire escapes work, and there’s never a cop around even if you need one. And that, my friends, is why I attempt to keep it all going. Even if it is only a bunch of freaks on a stream of electrons. Come on back now, y’hear.

Doc40, 2004

THE ALL-SEEING EYE

WHEN THE EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN BECAME inevitable, I wondered how soon a video clip of the hanging would appear on YouTube. I was essentially joking, but, as reality played out, DVDs of the hanging were on sale on sidewalks of Sadr City within forty-eight hours of Saddam’s death, and the Western cable news channels were showing every part of the now famous “unauthorized” camera-phone footage, except for the sprung trap and former Iraqi dictator’s actual drop into the abyss. Plainly the CNN rule on prurient death was the same as for prurient sex—cut before the consummation. Far more important, however, was that a very crucial line had been crossed in news management in a world where truth is often an inconvenience and must be spun, sanitized, and as predi-gested as baby food before being served to the public.

Had the camera-phone never recorded the noose (another traditional use for hemp, by the way) being placed around Saddam’s neck, the assumption would have been— first as news, then as history—that the execution was conducted with, at the very least, the death row decorum of The Green Mile or Dead Man Walking, with dress uniforms, a blindfold, a pre-set script, practiced choreography, and maybe a final cigarette. Only those involved would have known that it was, in fact, a homicidal cluster fuck with masked thugs screaming abuse, and only Saddam himself maintaining any vestige of dignity. Propaganda was betrayed by the ubiquitous and miniaturized recording device, something that will happen with increasing regularity from here on out, and may actually constitute a major and far-reaching revolution in what we know and when we know it, that radicalizes every level of communication, all the way from news to art.

The stream of electrons can seemingly take us anywhere—whether we want to go there or not.

(The purpose of this piece is not to discuss the death penalty, but—since it can’t be ignored in the process—I feel obligated to make clear I am totally opposed to its use under any circumstances. It fails as a deterrent, it is administered with haphazard inequality, and, as judicial revenge, has no place in a civilized society, since it lowers the culture to the moral level of the criminal. If, however, we collectively insist on putting criminals to death, I do feel that sentences should be carried out live on television, so at least we all see what is being done in our name. And by the same token, anyone who enjoys a good steak should maybe visit a slaughterhouse.)

The camera in the hands of the amateur civilian—as opposed to the sanctioned media—can be a powerful, and even dangerous tool, and a potential challenge to the status quo. In 1963, when John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Abraham Zapruder was the lone cameraman. While others filmed earlier moments in the motorcade, Zapruder alone, with his 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic, recorded the fatal headshot that cast so much doubt on the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Oswald acted alone. Collusion between Life magazine and the federal government kept the film totally under wraps for a full six years, and then prevented it from being aired on national TV until as late 1975, a dozen years after the assassination.

In 1991, twenty-eight years after the JFK killing, the VHS camcorder had become so common that, when George Holliday saw a crew of LAPD officers abusing a motorist named Rodney King in the Lake View Terrace area, he was able to make a permanent record of the crime. At the subsequent first trial of the officers involved, defense lawyers were able to persuade a Simi Valley jury to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes, and in so doing, sparked some of the worst rioting in this city’s history.

If these incidents teach us anything, it has to be that those in authority view the motion picture or video camera in the hands of the public with suspicion and discomfort. From a Rolling Stones concert to a National Guard patrol in Baghdad, a camera phone can record and disseminate the event, and there’s damned little that anyone can do about it. The Rolling Stones don’t like it and the Pentagon likes it even less. Both organizations know they’re losing control of the shape and flow of their own imagery, and, in a world where data is a cash commodity and perception is paramount, this is cause for serious concern. Mick Jagger is unable to collect royalties while the Pentagon loses it’s capacity for propaganda spin.

Not that authority doesn’t have cameras of its own. Anyone who has run a red light at Hollywood and La Brea, and then received a ticket in the mail along with an incriminating picture, is well aware that some electronic DMV version of Big Brother is watching and recording our traffic transgressions, and, as Winona Ryder learned to her cost and humiliation, most major stores and retail malls employ extensive surveillance systems. Maybe from a supposedly ingrained sense of privacy, the US has been relatively slow to move into the Big Brother business. The British currently lead the field with between two and three million cameras watching its citizens, and anyone going about their business in central London will be under virtually non-stop scrutiny by either private security or law enforcement. There’s little consolation in our lagging, however. What happens in London today will be happening in Hollywood or Culver City tomorrow.

In all of this, the twenty-first century may well be showing us the shape of things to come. On one hand we have a booming industry in systemized surveillance, while, on the other, citizens brandishing camera phones potentially turn Big Brother on his head, making all things visible, and empowering average citizens to become news reporters, paparazzi, visual artists, or pornographers. The clips created by camera phones and similar technology is not even subject to the editing and censorship process of mainstream media. Back in the early 1990s, George Hol-liday’s potentially explosive cassette of the Rodney King beating required a local TV channel, and ultimately a national network, to air the damning visual evidence. Today any video clip can be easily uploaded to YouTube, or a similar Wiki-style online site with only the most minimal censorship.

The cry is, of course, that this overabundance of random electronic recording is the death of individual privacy. This might indeed be true, except many of our concepts of privacy are largely illusions of fond hindsight. From Richard Nixon, to Joe McCarthy, to Cotton Mather, America has never shown too much respect for a citizen’s privacy, and, in the small town so beloved by US folklore, everyone took—and still takes—a vicious interest in their neighbors’ business. The trade-off for having cameras constantly pointed at us may well be a multilevel cultural revolution. The digital distortion of cell phone visuals and security cameras have already become part of the filmmaker’s palette, and we can only guess at the post-punk, body modification subculture’s ultimate response. Neo-pagans and techno-primitives could easily advance from piercings and tattoos to the cyberpunk predictions of implanted processors, body-wired hard drives, miniature video cameras, infrared vision, and a new breed of electronic street-art outlaw—truly masked and anonymous—thwarting the watchers by walking around in a haze of their own electronic distortion.

We all know the Chinese curse of living in interesting times. We can only wonder if an interesting future is equally ill-omened.

LA CityBeat,January 2007

ELECTRIC BAKUNIN

THE NEW ELECTRIC ANARCHY? ONE PERSON’S VIRUS IS another’s empowerment. From Nero to Nixon, despots have feared the mob—could the videophone, YouTube, Blackberry Internet et al be the New Mob they must rightly fear? The voting machines may be fixed, but every politician will be open to scrutiny and ridicule twenty-four/seven. Perhaps ol’ Mikhail Bakunin, the great anarcho-syndicalist, was just a century-and-a-half in front of himself when, in 1866, he called for “the absolute rejection of every authority which sacrifices freedom for the convenience of the state.”

Doc40, 2007

Maybe all we need is the ability to walk blindly into the unknown and make use of anything we find there.

HUMANITY V TECHNOLOGY
(WE MAY HAVE ALREADY SURRENDERED)

“Nothing can change the shape of things to come”

—Max Frost

“Belief can be manipulated, only knowledge is dangerous”

—Bene Geserit maxim

“It can only be attributable to human error.”

—HAL 9000

ON THE EVE OF WATERLOO, WELLINGTON CAUTIONED his officers about “running around like wet hens.” A cool simile, and still apt, after 190 years, when applied to our media, as we enter this brave new 2006. Tech is in such uproar that few can factor it into their thinking. 2005 saw unprecedented, multi-leveled upheavals in mass communications. At one end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles Times dropped in circulation, downsized its editorial staff, and gave up its online edition to free access/no subscription. At a far extreme, highly illegal, if enterprisingly twisted young boys sold webcam voyeur sex, quite without any recourse to adults except as customers and Internet providers. Change shakes windows and rattles doors. Something is happening here that is probably exponential, but does any one have clue as to what it is?

The majority of the power structures currently running this world have roots that stretch all the way back to the nineteenth century. Both Marxism and capitalism were products of Victorian smokestack industry, and early indications are that neither is making an exactly smooth transition to the high-speed, headlong, and unstoppable progress of twenty-first century techno-development. Newspapers flounder while what might have once been their readership reduces their attention span to the 140 characters of Twitter. The global economy teeters on the brink of the unthinkable as market traders treat money as an abstraction. And who the hell really knows what’s happening in China?

If current floundering augurs anything, the answer is “the hell we do.” While Netflix eats the video store, Hollywood thrashes like a dying ape, creating movies that look like video games, and wondering why the XBox generation fails to show at theaters. In a world that dreams of liquid crystal home cinemas with cheap Chinese hardware, and where game CGI is better than the last Charlize Theron movie, movie houses full of popcorn reek and babies on cell phones lose their appeal. Print and The Electron go head to head with the end maybe sooner than many expected. Daily newspapers show battle fatigue, and make undignified advances on the youth market, trying to prove they’re not twentieth century relics. But everybody knows that The Electron will win, if only because The Electron says it will.

The Electron’s Labyrinth, however, is not without conspiracy and conflict. Cable television/Internet providers slither fat in local monopoly, but phone companies are straining at the government leash to deliver programming to subscribers. Fundamentalists—via the FCC—have been led to believe they have oversight of everything, and now complicate every regulatory move with absurd stipulations of morality, and make the chances for even marginally intelligent solutions close to hopeless. The New American Century is hardly a golden age of clarity and vision. Communications are a massive sector of global Roll-erball capitalism, and operate with the same tooth’n’claw audacity that allows a Bechtel monopoly to sell the Bolivians’ their own rainwater by order of the World Bank.

A president of the United States, who is leery of science, uncomfortable around smart people, and distrusts the Internet, still dominates a congress so shamelessly corrupt it gives new meaning to Bob Dylan’s old maxim “everything is legal as long as you don’t get caught.” And they all do business with the equally corrupt Comrades of Beijing, who believe they can control cyberspace, but are threatened by sex blogger Mu Zimei, and hackers like the Hongkong Blondes, and a Second Cultural Revolution might actually succeed, unless Google gets bigger and smarter, in which case we may well he headed to either Utopia or the Matrix. Or both.

In a recent letter, Felix Dennis, self-made print-billionaire, and publisher of Maxim expressed the belief that print, in many of its most familiar forms, will become obsolete in the foreseeable future, but that nothing radical would happen “in the next couple of years.” He saw sufficient cushion for industries to adapt. The proprietors of daily and weekly newspapers might disagree, having, of late, sustained more bites to their flesh than a drunken teen in a shark movie. The single chomp of Craigslist may have hit vital organs, as a nation that once paid newspapers for its want ads—jobs, apartments, buy/sell, hookers, and personals—now increasingly logs on to Craigslist for free.

The Craigslist empire grew out of software designed by Craig Newmark in San Francisco that could automatically add email postings to an expanding website. Launched in 1995, with a mission to “restore the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, noncommercial environment,” the system can now boast three billion page views per month in multiple cities. Classified advertising might seem minor to the outsider, but, within the newspaper industry, this loss of traditional hard-cash represents a body blow from which recovery may not be easy.

Newspapers, however, aren’t the only area of print where previously undisputed turf is being conceded. The days of the reference book may already be numbered. Instead of reaching for Leonard Maltins Movie Guide to check the dates, spellings, and casts of films, I now fast-click to the Internet Movie Database. It’s a no brainer. The Electron wins because the electron offers speed. For more general information I have Wikipedia, “the Free Encyclopedia” on a hot button, and it’s faster and more complete than any printed desk encyclopedia. Doubts may have been voiced as to how an encyclopedia can be accurate when it is created and updated for and by the people, but constant use tends to confirm Wikipedia’s exactitude, and the entry on me (which makes me profoundly happy) is accurate, if short, and written with enough mild cynicism to keep me in my place.

The times that Wikipedia has been used for mischief— most famously the guerrilla rewrite of the entry for Donald Rumsfeld that bathroom-walled the Sec of Def as a child molester—were used as evidence that Wikipedia was just another treasonous liberal conspiracy. The problem, in reality, however, was trolls, the bottom feeding posters-of-mindless-messages who roam the entire net, defacing anything they can reach, like inner city taggers without the flair or color. Trolls were, in part, responsible for the collapse of Michael Kinsley’s “Wikitorial” experiment at the Los Angeles Times, they brought down the message boards on Howard Stern.com with their dumb-bastard overload, and currently keep webmasters and checkers at IMDb, Wikipedia and Craigslist on their toes. But trolls are one of the prices we pay for Internet freedom, and are generally viewed as infinitely preferable to any FCC-style oversight, if that was even possible.

With Wikipedia and Craigslist, so-called liberal web conspiracies have created functional resources, and without charging the consumer or hustling advertising. Donations need only cover tech and management. Nerds work on their obsessions, and don’t require a salary. A post-capitalist business model? Hasn’t Star Trek already been there? (Don’t laugh yet.) Richard Mason says it all on Cal Tech’s Robotics website. “Characters often describe the Federation as if it were a perfect socialist (or at any rate, post-capitalist) society, where there is no money and nobody wants for material things.” In one TV episode, Captain Picard elaborated on a microwave oven-looking device into which you simply entered the code, and anything— a perfect martini or a perfect rose—materialized out of stray atoms. After such an invention, Picard indicated, money became pointless.

If not pointless, money certainly poses a problem on the contemporary Internet. Irrespective of content, some sites make truckloads of cash and others make none. The grim truth is that folks don’t like to pay for anything online except porn, gambling, or shopping. All else—especially news items—is like paying for the peanuts in a bar. William Gibson’s fictional cyberpunk imaginings may have been slightly off target, but a vision of endless cyberspace, populated by a million lightpoints of capricious blogs, and the slightly denser glow of more centralized information at the Huffington Post, Drudge, and Wonkette, still indicates that, if the mainstream media sail in like big-buck battle-stars, they’ll have problems with their navigation. The Internet has proved so skilled at circumventing attempts at control, it may actually be where freedom truly rings. On the other hand, many on the political right see this free choice as the tool of Satan, and, in this, they have some strange allies in modern late-model Chinese communists.

Beijing’s new-look totalitarianism was recently rocked by a sex-blogger called Mu Zimei. Mu Zimei was originally Li Li who wrote a Sex Tips For Girls column for the Chinese fashion mag City Pictorial. Mu Zimei was the name Li Li used when, last spring, she started up a far more explicit blog of her hot-sheet adventures among China’s rich and famous on the nation’s top Internet site, Sina.com, and attracted ten million daily visitors to her tales of blowjobs and threesomes. While the government made no comment, Sina recognized a good thing and ran even more of Mu/Li Li. Official displeasure was finally expressed in oblique Chinese fashion, via an editorial on November 16, 2005, in the state-run Beijing Evening News that warned “the blind pursuit after this kind of phenomenon will mislead people into thinking that the authorities are turning a blind eye.”

In her blog, Mu Zimei defended her right to sleep with whomever she fancied and to write about it. “I think my private life is very interesting. If a man does this it’s no big deal. But as a woman doing so, I draw lots of criticism.” Sina.com backed off, down-played its Mu promotion, but allowed her blog to continue. Not good enough apparently, because the government then moved to ban a print anthology of her work, despite a massive advance sale, and Sina was ordered into a period of old-fashioned Maoist self-criticism. To defuse more escalation, Mu voluntarily shut down her website, but she also told the foreign press that she had “other offers and hoped to continue writing, assuming the government did not ban her writing altogether.”

For the moment, Mu Zimei lays low, but a market force has been revealed. China has sixty-eight million “netizens” on the Internet, with an annual growth rate approaching thirty percent, and they want what Mu offers. Dissident hackers with names like The Cult of the Dead Cow and The Hong Kong Blondes have meanwhile been infiltrating Chinese police and security networks just to prove they can. Link them with Mu—or the next rebel blogslut to challenge the status quo—and the creation of the unstoppable may be in motion. Unless, of course, Google decides to take a side in some virtual-future Tiananmen Square.

Folks who once loved Google are growing nervous. The revelation that the huge and near-indispensable search engine had rewritten some of its programs to accommodate political censorship by the Chinese government didn’t sit well. Others simply saw its infinite capacity to store data as approaching the metaphysical. Already it’s loading entire libraries into its vast new book-search, customizing our web ads, and Google Earth will take you to a simulated spy satellite picture of your very own building if directed. (Although not on my four-year-old laptop.) Google must already know more about any one of us than the FBI, and will ultimately know absolutely everything, which, to a few, will make it God. Even those who worry can’t hide their respect. While debating the theoretical dangers of a challenge to Microsoft by a Google operating system, Thomas Y. Lee, professor of operations and information management at Wharton College is openly admiring. “Google has hired really, really smart people. When you put that many smart people in one place, neat things happen.”

And one of the potentially neat things may well be this heavily rumored Google Operating System, duking it out with Microsoft for the favor of PC manufacturers. Balaji Padmanabhan, another Wharton professor, sees a Google system as part of “a move toward PCs that don’t have a lot of software installed on them, where most applications can run off a network.” How a systems war would impact the consumer remains to be seen, but, since the Google OS would have the user more plugged into Google than ever he or she was to Microsoft, concern is kindled that we may be putting too many of our most basic eggs in the Google basket. And the comfort and freedom of any Google basket is also questioned after Google’s response to reports that—after acquiring an interest in Baidu.com, a Chinese search engine—they had intentionally excluded headlines of government-banned Chinese web sites from Google News. Their statement turned out to be a gem of corporate-global doublespeak. “Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible, as their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking for information.”

A good experience, however, is often in the perception of the beholder. One person’s heaven is another’s purgatory. In the cyberspace vision, Google begins to look strangely maternal. A vast and synergetic mother system extends umbilicals of fun and data to the entire planetary population, feeding our human curiosity and need to delve—but maybe leading us in predetermined directions we know nothing about. The very name of this wholly faceless but intimate entity is babytalk. The word Google is comforting but meaningless, and, almost without knowing it, we are already modifying our behavior. Our love of stuff diminishes. Once we had CDs in jewel cases, and rolled joints on album sleeves. Now the music we own is an abstraction, a title on an iPod. The stuff we do acquire is frequently more electronic hardware to expand the modification of our minds. I’ve even observed—although the research is highly unscientific—that online readers are uncomfortable with long essays, and initially scan webtext with an am-I-interested speed-read. TV has already raised two generations with attention span disorders, so are we natural-born lazy slobs or merely adapting? Google knows more than we ever will, world without end, and may simply be preparing us for the day when it’s smarter than we are. And—dare it be said—self aware? But that, of course, would be science fiction. Or the futurist predictions of Ray Kurzweil of the Singularity, coming in thirty years, when we humans will meld with our computers.

But you’re okay. You’re still reading a newspaper. Like, ink on paper, right?

Or are you?

LA CityBeat, 2006