Hitchens's Review of Outlaw Journalist

I just read Christopher Hitchens's review of Outlaw Journalist in the Sunday Times today. I like the way he highlights Hunter Thompson's San Francisco heyday. Most of HST's best work was rooted in the Bay Area, though he's usually associated with the fortified compound in Colorado.

The first Bay Area benchmark was the Hell's Angels piece, commissioned by Carey McWilliams for The Nation when HST was living in the Haight. (Kudos to Hitch for mentioning McWilliams; I just noticed that Jonathan Yardley's review in the Washington Post skipped that critical connection.) Then there was the Kentucky Derby piece for Warren Hinckle's Scanlan's Monthly, also mentioned in this review. And of course Rolling Stone, which published his most famous work, was a San Francisco magazine with close connections to Ramparts. Those three magazines (Ramparts, Scanlan's, and Rolling Stone) produced some impressive fireworks in those years.

Fanatical readers of this blog already know that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner worked for Ramparts' spinoff newspaper, that HST wrote for Scanlan's after editor Warren Hinckle left Ramparts, and that HST was a big Ramparts fan and appeared on the masthead for a while. But did you know that one of the first Americans Christopher Hitchens met upon his arrival in the USA was Carey McWilliams? And that Hitchens wrote for Ramparts under the name Matthew Blaire?

I learned that by visiting with Hitchens in Marin last year, and you can read all about that (and everything else) in my forthcoming book on Ramparts. Soon, I hope.

Jann Wenner

I spoke with Jann Wenner about Ramparts magazine last week. Jann wrote for the spinoff newspaper, The Sunday Ramparts, before starting Rolling Stone with his mentor, Ralph Gleason, in 1967. Gleason was the Chronicle's jazz critic and a contributing editor at Ramparts before quitting in a fury. The problem was Warren Hinckle's depiction of San Francisco's hippies in the magazine's first major article on the subject.

In our conversation, I learned a lot more about the relationship between Ramparts and Rolling Stone, which Jann described as one of "overlapping trajectories." I already knew that Jann borrowed his design from Ramparts and pasted up the first issue of Rolling Stone (see photo) in a spare room at the magazine's office at 301 Broadway. But I also learned that he met his wife, Jane Schindelheim, at Ramparts. And that Bob Scheer tried to get him to fetch coffee. And lots of other stuff that will be in the book.

Richard Rodriquez

I met Richard Rodriguez Monday afternoon at a party for Kerry Tremain, who's stepping down as editor California magazine. Kerry has done a fantastic job there. Among his many accomplishments was recruiting writers like Richard Rodriguez.

We read Hunger of Memory in my California Culture class at San Francisco State, so meeting Richard was a special pleasure. That course is organized around utopian and dystopian images of California, so Richard emerges as a key skeptic (along with Joan Didion) of 1960s-style social optimism. In Hunger of Memory, that skepticism seems to be rooted in Richard's Catholicism. Although he doesn't say so, the political projects of the 1960s and 1970s come off as modern forms of the Pelagian heresy.

But skepticism is only part of Richard's project. Language is even more important. As a boy, his two languages apply to radically different worlds--the public (English) and private (Spanish). That split is at the center of the book.

Hunger of Memory is also very concerned with education. As Richard embraces his identity as a model student, he becomes separated from his family, or at least his parents. But then he also renounces an academic career and becomes a solitary writer. Each round of renunciation and alienation is another step on his writerly journey.

That journey leads him to oppose both bilingual education and affirmative action. But the grounds of his opposition are deeply personal--as we would expect from a writer, who must find his individuality and voice not through big, blunt, unchosen categories of identity (race, class, gender), but in his relationship to language.

Hunger of Memory isn't a treatise on public policy. To read it that way is to misunderstand its value. I think it belongs to another literary tradition that stretches back to Augustine's Confessions. You heard it here first.

During our brief chat, Richard brought up Carey McWilliams, more or less out of the blue. You can believe that I walked through that door.

The Living New Deal

I heard Gray Brechin speak last night in Berkeley about California's Living New Deal Project. He's attempting no less than a complete inventory (and photographic record) of FDR's public works projects in California.

What's really impressive about Gray's project, aside from his visually polished description of it, is the sheer weight of his examples. In fact, the government built a staggering number of California schools, hospitals, parks, museums, theaters, courthouses, post offices, golf courses, roads, bridges, culverts, etc. during the 1930s.

We use these facilities every day, whether or not we know their provenance. This fact, and their frequently stunning beauty, is the most effective reply to those who cast the government as an incompetent nuisance.

The event was hosted for the first time by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment--Clark Kerr's old outfit--and was very successful. Until last night, these talks happened at the Cal faculty club, which was cool in its own way, but the IRLE support is a very welcome development.

Review of Obscene in the Extreme

I just read Jonathan Yardley's Washington Post review of Rick Wartzman's Obscene in the Extreme. To each his own, of course, but I wondered about some of the major points.

Rick's book is about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and its reception, especially in Kern County, where there was a movement to ban it. Yardley notes that the novel deals with the Dust Bowl migration and hopes of starting fresh in California. Then he makes an extremely misleading claim. "The issues this [migration] raised have long since been resolved," Yardley maintains, "and many descendants of the Okies now live in comfort in a state whose economy is larger than those of all but a handful of the world's countries, but the book continues to move readers."

Long since resolved? Well, yes, many Dust Bowl families and their descendants ended up doing fine. But how about the people working those same jobs now? Is it possible that the novel still resonates not only because the book is easier to teach than more demanding novels, as Yardley supposes, but also because the underlying labor issues it documents persist in spades?

As Carey McWilliams observed at the time, the Joads' problems weren't exactly new. What distinguished them from what came before and after was the fact that the Joads were white, English-speaking citizens who could vote. In fact, California agribusiness continues to rely on a low-wage, disenfranchised, and easily exploited labor pool. And farm labor isn't the only forum for those issues, as T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain showed in 1995. (That novel owes something to Steinbeck as well as Voltaire.)

Yardley mentions McWilliams in passing but suggests that his appearance in the book, along with other "endless dollops of information," is a form of padding. I think that misunderstands Rick's goal. The book offers a snapshot of Kern County in 1939 and then places that snapshot in history. So I can't knock the book for mentioning McWilliams, the Wobblies, or other relevant players. I'm not sure I would have been interested in the snapshot if Rick hadn't added that historical context.

Yardley ends his review as follows: "A further difficulty is that Wartzman seems to have little if any literary judgment and fails to subject The Grapes of Wrath to careful scrutiny. No doubt it is an important novel, but whether it is a good one is another matter altogether, and this question Wartzman simply avoids."

I'm baffled by this. Again, it seems to misunderstand the book's goal, which isn't to critique the novel but to depict its reception in a particular time, place, and cultural context. Besides, we're not exactly short on critical readings of this or any other major American novel. The woods are full of them.

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.