Deep Clean

I tracked down one of my favorite articles on Los Angeles: "Deep Clean" by Edward Zuckerman. I'm not sure why this essay, which appeared in the May 1993 issue of Harper's Magazine, isn't widely anthologized.

Zuckerman, a New York writer transplanted to Los Angeles, contrasts his new home's penchant for producing entertainment schlock with the fastidious professionalism of the city's top car detailers. The juxtapositions are comical. One paragraph describes a new film about a dog in a witness-protection program. The next one shows the detailer rubbing three layers of wax from the Brazilian carnauba palm into the body paint of a car. To do so, he employs a soft fabric used in sanitary napkins, since diaper cloth is too harsh. Then back to a vapid story meeting, and so on.

It's a nice piece of work, but it also captures an important truth about the American combination of high technology and low culture.

Lowell Bergman and Ramparts

I talked to Lowell Bergman about Ramparts this week. He told me some great stories about the magazine and its staff, but he also made some important points about media technology and finance in the 1960s and 1970s.

The conversation sent me back to my favorite scene from The Insider, where Lowell is played by Al Pacino. Check this out if you haven't seen it lately--classic Pacino.

I just realized that The Insider's focus on a whistleblower links it to another Pacino movie, Serpico. That was one of my favorites as a kid in the 1970s. Pacino's beard in that film deserves a lifetime achievement award.

Bo and Steve--Patrons of the Arts

I've been poring over issues of Ramparts at my leisure this week, courtesy of former managing editor Bo Burlingham. When I interviewed him in Oakland a while back, he said he had some back issues he could lend me. As it turned out, his collection kicked in just when Steve Keating's petered out. (Steve, the son of founding publisher Ed Keating, offered a box of early issues when I visited with him last year.) So I now have a nice run of the issues, separated into annual piles, spread out in my office. This is a huge boon for my project and will save me many trips to the Cal library.

Speaking of Steve, I met him through an interesting coincidence. He attended a book event in Palo Alto with PoliPointPress author Norman Solomon. When he introduced himself, Norman directed him to me. Lucky! This week, Steve passed along an even more unlikely serendipity. He was installing cabinets in an Atherton home and happened to mention that his father published a magazine. When his clients asked which one, he told them about Ramparts. It turns out they knew a little bit about it, since his client's father was former editor (now conservative polemicist) David Horowitz.

David Weir

I had a long and illuminating conversation with David Weir today. His name has come up several times during my Ramparts research, but I didn't realize until today how much I could learn from him. I won't rehearse the details here, but the sheer number of overlaps (Rolling Stone, Center for Investigative Reporting, Mother Jones, etc.) could fill a lot of space.

Here's a link to his blog for the curious among you.

Scheer on the Defense Hawks

Earlier this summer, I hung out a bit with Robert Scheer and his wife, Narda Zacchino. We talked about Ramparts, mostly, and had a few dinners, including a tasty one at Chez Panisse. (As it turns out, Alice Waters worked on his remarkable 1966 run for Congress.) That same week, I attended two talks about his new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

Before I say anything about the book itself, let's consider Scheer's decision to focus on this topic. I don't hear many other people calling attention to the military budget right now. For this year alone, that's $506.9 billion, plus the two "supplementary" appropriations for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those came to $197 billion. So we're looking at $700 billion plus for 2008. That's a lot of hot dogs, people. In fact, it's most of our discretionary hot dogs. For every ten dollars the federal government spends on non-mandatory items, six go to the military.

The result? We spend as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. But when Congress proposed a $7 billion expansion for children's health insurance, President Bush vetoed it, saying it was too expensive. (He wanted a $1 billion expansion of the program.)

One could make a lot of partisan hay out of this issue. Mean old President Bush! Why does he hate the babies? That may be as close as we'll get to a critical debate about our national priorities. But as Scheer points out in the book, the runaway military budget is a bipartisan creature. Even Bush's staunchest critics (e.g., Barbara Boxer) fight to retain programs for stuff nobody needs--in Boxer's case, cargo planes produced in Long Beach. The "defense" budget has been disconnected from any rational discussion of our actual defense needs. Now it's almost exclusively about bringing home the bacon.

Well, you say, don't we want a strong defense? It's dangerous out there! Yeah, I want a strong defense, especially one that has something to do with actual and potential threats. But I also want roads, schools, hospitals, and all the other stuff we've been trained not to expect anymore because, like health insurance for poor kids, it's too expensive.

This little home truth doesn't really count as news anymore, but Scheer makes a strong case that it's disfiguring our national politics anyway. "War doesn't pay," he concludes, "nor does imperial ambition." He dedicates the book to two great Americans--Dwight Eisenhower and George McGovern--who shared that view.

Having just returned from Washington DC, I wonder why this view doesn't cut more ice there. Is it because its causes are so blindingly obvious and seemingly irresistible? If so, does it help to be a little farther away from it, a little less inured to business as usual in DC?

With this book, one could argue, Scheer is reprising a role he played during the Vietnam era, when he challenged the lies and nonsense that led us into that regrettable conflict. His reporting helped propel the success of Ramparts, but many experienced people could have told that story.

This summer, I asked Warren Hinckle why he thought Ramparts was so successful. "Probably because the other places were so shitty," he replied. As I watch the presidential campaign coverage this season, with its breathless discussion of lapel pins and fist bumps, I think of Hinckle--and Scheer.

The Fake Angeleno

Just arrived in Los Angeles? Check out The Fake Angeleno. (I've also added the link to your starboard.) TFA is documenting the situation on the ground in Lo-Cal. As for the fake part: well, sometimes you have to solve the problem of artifice with more artifice.

Gonzo Redux

Turns out Gonzo was playing in San Rafael, so my daughters and I watched it last night. It's the best film I've seen, feature or doc, on Hunter Thompson.

Two scenes gave me chills. One showed the Chicago police flaying demonstrators at the Democratic convention in 1968 to Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." According to Thompson's wife, Chicago was one of two experiences that caused him to weep in her presence.

Another moving scene shows an aged George McGovern, a Thompson favorite, lashing out against old men in air-conditioned offices in DC planning the next war. Doesn't sound like Spielberg stuff, I realize, but it got to me. As you might imagine, there are a few laughs, too. Many cluster around Thompson's run for sheriff in Aspen.

Although Thompson was from Kentucky and spent most of his adult life in Colorado, the film identifies San Francisco in the 1960s as his true place and time.

Check it out, I say.

Obscene in the Extreme

I just finished reading Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman. It's about the furor that followed the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.

Rick focuses on the way that dust-up played out in Kern County, where the board of supervisors considered the merits of banning the book. Along the way, he weaves in the stories of major players in California agribusiness, labor, media, and government. That cast includes Carey McWilliams, whom Rick treats perceptively and at some length. But Rick is also very attuned to the stories of particular Kern County residents and families touched by the controversy. Highly recommended.

I have lots more to say, including many adjectives, but I'm leaving it here for now just in case some shrewd editor asks me to review the book. (By the way, check The Nation, July 14, p. 39, for the latest news in this department.)

Obscene in the Extreme isn't out yet--I threw around my ever increasing weight to get an advance copy--but I noticed that the publisher, PublicAffairs, used the jacket as the basis for its Fall catalog cover. That's a good sign, don't you think? We're hoping Rick will talk about the book this fall in Berkeley. More on that soon.

Jules Tygiel

I just learned about the death of Jules Tygiel, the San Francisco State historian.

I interviewed Jules about Carey McWilliams, whose work he taught and understood very well. I also had the good fortune to meet him at a series of SF State lectures devoted to California politics. Jules's work, which focuses on California and baseball, is first-rate.

Here's an article from the Los Angeles Times on him and his work. Jules was only 59.

Gonzo

I haven't seen Gonzo, the Hunter Thompson doc from Alex Gibney, but here's A.O. Scott's review in the International Herald Tribune.

Very happy to see mention of Carey McWilliams, of course, who first suggested that Thompson write about the Hell's Angels. That was a game changer, as Thompson always acknowledged. Throughout his career, he consistently admired and respected only one editor--Carey McWilliams. This according to Douglas Brinkley in Proud Highways, Thompson's edited letters.

And let's not forget the Ramparts connection. Thompson was living on Parnassus Street in San Francisco during the magazine's heyday. After Peter Collier reviewed Hell's Angels, he brought Thompson by the office at 301 Broadway for lunch with Warren Hinckle. Let's just say that the result wasn't healthy for Hinckle's pet monkey, Henry Luce.

Later Thompson hung with the Ramparts cohort at the Democratic convention in Chicago. He also borrowed the magazine's wall poster idea for later use in Aspen. And he eventually wrote the first generally recognized piece of Gonzo journalism, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," for Hinckle's subsequent magazine, Scanlan's Monthly.

The photograph above is one of my favorites. I wanted to use it in American Prophet, but I couldn't track down a quality image or the rights holder.