Friday, March 1, 2019

Off the Books: The Outsourcing of American Foreign Policy, Part I -- A Roll of the Dice

This piece was originally posted at kotorimagazine.com on 1/31/08


The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America brings the numbing artificiality of America ’s internal foreign policy dialogue home in stark detail. Outside of the rarefied left-alternative press there has been little national reckoning or pause for reflection on the root causes of 9/11. The instant, overwhelming response was to man the barricades; those who have fallen out of lockstep to honestly assess the wreckage have been systematically marginalized.

Stepping into this narrative vacuum is Peter Dale Scott, a poet, emeritus professor at Berkeley, and long-time writer-researcher of the hidden histories of major events in modern America . As he has done in previous books about the JFK assassination and U.S. intelligence alliances with drug-dealing military surrogates, in The Road to 9/11 Scott has developed a detailed narrative of what he calls "deep politics," the machinations of the men behind the curtain, powerful players unelected and answerable to no one who have exhibited breathtaking recklessness with other peoples’ lives, many of them on repeated occasions. Scott touches on several shameful – and largely secret - episodes in U.S. foreign policy, including CIA-supported coups that resulted in bloody dictatorships in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, the Congo, and Greece, but being a book about how we got from there to the terrifying precipice of here, the central story is the straight line from the covert Cold War deals with the devil in the 50s, 60s and 70s through to our present predicament in the Middle East.

The primary thread picks up in the early seventies. In the space of a few years, President Richard Nixon, in league with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, fruitlessly extended the Vietnam War with an air assault on Southeast Asia that killed 1-2 million civilians and supported Pakistan as its military butchered a similar number of Bangladeshis in 1970 and 1971. In 1973, Nixon-Kissinger helped engineer the assassination of Salvador Allende, Chile ’s popularly-elected socialist leader, and replaced him with a US-corporate-friendly dictator. But when Nixon went off-script with peaceful overtures to Communist Russia and China , in what are now generally considered shrewd counterintuitive moves, American hawks had conniption fits.

Nixon resigned in 1974 following Watergate, but Kissinger stayed on as President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor until November 2 of 1975, the day of the Halloween Massacre. A palace coup for a small, unified group of right-wing ideologues, the Halloween Massacre promoted Dick Cheney to Chief of Staff, made Donald Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense, elevated George Bush Sr. to director of the CIA, and dropped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller from the ’76 presidential ticket in favor of the more hawkish Bob Dole. Once in place, Bush Sr. authorized Team B. A forerunner to Vice President Cheney’s Office of Special Plans (created to trump up intelligence on Iraq's WMDs), Team B was created to exaggerate the national security threat posed by the Russians as a way of justifying massive, sustained defense budgets. Assisting Bush Sr. on Team B was future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

Working in concert with Team B was the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a forerunner to the neocon-spawned Project for a New American Century. Created in 1976 with a grant from David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, the CPD also overhyped the Russian threat, in hopes of maintaining fat government-military contracts for the companies connected to its various members (according to The Road to 9/11, "‘the 141 founding directors of CPD were linked to 110 major corporations"). Packard was particularly concerned with a possible resumption of the SALT II peace talks, which would have reduced anti-ballistic missile stocks in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., because Hewlett-Packard produced the computer systems for the missiles. The SALT II talks had been sabotaged by a leak from Richard Perle (who would later be a major cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq ) to reporter Robert Novak (who would out Valerie Plame as a spy thirty years later).

Despite CPD and Team B attempts to scare the public, Democrat Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election with the intent of lowering defense spending, helped along by the misadventure in Vietnam and the very public hearings of Democratic senator Frank Church in 1975, which had held up many of the CIA’s despicable acts abroad (and the FBI’s civil liberties abuses at home) to public exposure. Carter staffed much of his foreign policy team with moderates and doves, but his appointment of Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor would prove fatal. A zealous anti-communist, Brzezinski convinced Carter, against his instincts, to keep over-feeding the military industrial monster and to support Afghan rebels six months before the Russians invaded Afghanistan . Later on, Brzezinski worked behind the scenes to kill Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's negotiations with the Russians about withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Carter showed his lack of nerve again in November of 1979 when he let the Shah of Iran (a U.S.-installed dictator who had replaced a democratically-elected leader in 1953) come to America for medical treatment. According to The Road to 9/11, Carter thought this was a bad idea but went along with it at the behest of his corporate benefactor David Rockefeller, whose Chase Bank had major contracts with Iran . Within a week students stormed the U.S. embassy in Iran and seized 52 hostages. Again swayed by Rockefeller, Carter froze Iranian assets, which spared Chase an interest payment soon due to the Iranian government and made negotiations with the hostage-takers that much more challenging.

Adding a further degree of difficulty to the hostage negotiations were the shenanigans (known as “the October Surprise”) of William Casey, a member of Team B and campaign manager for Jimmy Carter’s opponent in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan. Continuing a GOP tradition (allies of Republican candidate Richard Nixon had helped undermine peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968 to deny Nixon’s opponent a boost in the days leading up to an extremely close election), Casey is alleged to have met with Iranian representatives and convinced them to hold on to the hostages until after the 1980 election, in exchange for weaponry. Assisting Casey were Richard Perle, Laurence Silberman (who later led an official whitewashing of George W. Bush’s false WMD claims in the run-up to the Iraq invasion), and Michael Ledeen, who is now one of the most vocal advocates of a U.S. assault on Iran. Investigative journalist Robert Parry, cited in The Road to 9/11, later discovered that a Houston lawyer with ties to Vice Presidential candidate George Bush Sr. deposited three million dollars into the account of Jamshid Hashemi, a Carter peace talks representative, that fall.

In the elections that soon followed, the hostage crisis and a steep economic downturn sunk Jimmy Carter, and Idaho Senator Frank Church lost his senate seat of 25 years when he was heavily targeted by vested interests from out of state. As if by magic the hostages were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. A year-and-a half later, on July 18, 1981, a cargo plane with weapons from Israel (the U.S. intermediary) to Iran crashed on the border between Russia and Turkey; Scott suggests that illicit arms deals with Iran may have continued all the way through the beginning of the Reagan Administration until 1986, a departure from the conventional media line that the Iran-Contra affair (exposed in 1986) was a one-time trade of arms for hostages. A congressional investigation of the October Surprise was unable to turn up William Casey’s passport from 1980 or his personal calendar covering 7/24/80-12/18/80.
---

A central focus of The Road to 9/11 is the rarely discussed evolution of the secret Continuity of Government (COG) plans of successive presidential administrations. Though Ronald Reagan had coasted into office on a rhetorical wave of anti-government vitriol, his administration quickly replaced big government with steroidal government that hatched a series of plans that gave the executive branch of the federal government vast new powers in time of ill-defined national disasters. To forge the administration’s COG plans as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Reagan picked his long-time ally Louis Giuffrida, who in 1970 - when Reagan was governor of California – had written up a paper advocating relocation camps for ‘at least 21 million negroes’ in case of a national uprising by black militants.

Giuffrida’s 1982 COG plan involved the “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, [and] martial law” in case of a declared national disaster. This order was further developed by future Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North into Rex 84, which included surveillance of dissenters and detention camps for illegal aliens. Rex 84 was so radical that Reagan’s conservative Attorney General William French Smith wrote a letter to North’s superior Robert McFarlane saying that the plan “[exceeded] its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness.”

While the Reagan Administration granted itself extra-constitutional power at home, it greatly increased America ’s covert actions abroad, as could be expected of an administration staffed with 33 members of the unilateralist Committee for the Present Danger (there had been none in the Carter Administration). Helming these secretive operations was William Casey, who became Reagan’s CIA director. Chief among Casey’s goals was increasing United States aid to the Islamic forces battling the Russians in Afghanistan . Aid to Pakistan (halted by president Carter after Pakistan’s former prime minister had been hung following a kangaroo court proceeding) was reinstated, and Pakistan’s efforts to develop nukes were ignored, as Pakistan offered up human and tactical support for the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan.

Back home, Ronald Reagan initiated a highly-publicized War on Drugs (centered on mandatory minimum sentencing) that would decimate young minority male populations, while across the world in Afghanistan, our allies used drug money as one of their central sources of funding. From the time the Mujahaddin mounted their challenge to the Russians, Afghanistan ’s heroin market exploded, making Afghanistan the biggest heroin supplier in the world. Drug money (much of which was laundered through the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International) helped raise large amounts of money under the public radar. The U.S. even worked with one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a known drug dealer who had been introduced to the CIA by Pakistan ’s secret service, the ISI. When Edmund Mc Williams from the U.S. State Department sent a 28-paragraph cable raising a red flag about CIA dealings with Hekmatyar, he was relieved of his post. In time, Hekmatyar received hundreds of millions of dollars in support from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to fight the Russians (Hekmatyar would go on to be designated a ‘global terrorist’ by the U.S. State Department in 2003.)

Hekmatyar was only one of a long list of jihadis who were allied with the U.S. In the Reagan Administration’s drive to rid Afghanistan of the Russians, and the covert campaign during George Bush Sr’s administration following to continue to push the Russians further north, the CIA allied itself with a who’s who list of anti-American extremists, including non-Afghans like Ali Mohamed (who led the plotters who bombed the U.S. embassy in Kenya in 1998 and trained two of the plotters of the first WTC bombings), Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the main planner of the first World Trade Center bombing), Wadih el-Hage and Clement Rodney Hampton El (both indicted for involvement in Osama bin Laden plots), Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (Osama bin Laden’s mentor), and many members of what would become Al Qaeda.
---

After reading The Road to 9/11, I was fortunate enough to interview the author. Part I of the interview appears below (Part II, covering 1993-present, will be posted in the near future.)

Get Underground: The Road to 9/11’s narrative begins with Richard Nixon’s presidency. Obviously despite the fact that Nixon had dragged the Vietnam war out, which probably was another one or two million dead, supported Pakistan when they slaughtered a million Bengalis, and orchestrated the bloody coup of Salvadore Allende in Chile, yet, according to your book, there were elements in the American right wing foreign policy establishment that considered Nixon and Kissinger’s relations with China and the Soviet Union to be traitorous. You suggest that the Watergate break-in may even have been a setup from the right. How could a president with so much blood on his hands be considered soft on Communism?

Peter Dale Scott: Well the big issue in America in the 1970s was with the winding down of the Vietnam War, what would happen to the Cold War? And the Soviet Union and China both played behind-the-scenes roles in helping America to extricate itself [from Vietnam], so I think it’s to the credit of Nixon and Kissinger that they took this opportunity to move towards a scaling down – not an end to the Cold War, but a scaling down -- of the Cold War and limited co-existence. You know I remember very vividly going to Washington in the summer of 1972 and seeing the Soviet hammer & sickle hanging outside of the White House because [Russian leader Leonid] Brezhnev was a guest of Nixon in Washington. You’re not old enough to realize how unthinkable this would’ve been in the 1950s, when we had generals who really wanted to have a first strike and drop the bomb on the Soviet Union...it was a matter of great tension. What was at stake really was the future role of the military in American society, because if you were going to scale down the Cold War, maybe you were going to scale down the military. That’s what Carter was actually proposing. This was I think the most important debate in the 1970s.

Nixon had conspiratorial enemies on the right, people that genuinely believed that he was a traitor. This included people inside the political establishment and particularly inside the CIA. There was a whole faction that believed that Kissinger was a spy. It sounds so nutty now, but everybody was kind of nuts in the ‘70s. The left was consumed with paranoia that Nixon was going to suspend the 1976 election and it would be the end of democracy. The mood in the country was full of paranoia. And let’s not forget that we had massive rioting in the cities and that meant that we had massive governmental counter-terrorist plotting, including putting informants and provocateurs into the anti-war movement.

G.U.: You write about Cheney and Rumsfeld and the Halloween Massacre in November ’75, which basically made Bush Sr. head of the CIA, Cheney was Chief of Staff, Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, and then Kissinger –

P.D.S.: Nelson Rockefeller was moved out of –

G.U.: Taken off the [1976 Republican presidential] ticket.

P.D.S.: Yes. And Kissinger ceased to be the National Security Adviser, that’s also important.

G.U.: That’s right, he was downgraded. And then, not long after the Massacre, Bush Sr. formed Team B, and the Committee on the Present Danger was revived.

P.D.S.: There were three Committees on the Present Danger, one in the ‘50s, one in the ‘70s, one in the ‘90s, all playing on the same tradition with a bit of overlap of personnel, but they were different committees and had different purposes. The one in the ‘50s was backing up government policy, the one in the ‘70s was from outside government trying to change government policy to get a bigger defense budget.

G.U.: Is it fair to consider the Halloween Massacre the start of Neoconservatism, if one were to plot it out?

P.D.S.: I certainly would link the Halloween Massacre to Neoconservatism. In fact, the word Neocon goes back to that era, to the Democratic liberals who switched over to being Republicans because they felt more secure getting the kind of defense budget they wanted from the Republicans. The Democrats at that time had moved into quite an anti-military stance because of Vietnam and that’s when the Neocons deserted. A lot of them because of their allegiance to Israel , but not all of them. And this was a huge issue by 1975, you know, the Vietnam War is over, is the defense budget going to go down, or is it going to go up? And the Committee on the Present Danger, they revived an old name to push for it going up, and the idea of Team B, to change the estimate of the Soviet threat and make it look worse, had started already [during the reign of Bush Sr’s predecessor, CIA director William Colby] and Colby refused – everyone knew who these people in Team B were, what they would say. They were all hawks. And Colby refused to have anything to do with them, and one of the consequences of the Halloween Massacre was that Colby was fired. That was just as important as Bush Sr. being hired [to head the CIA and create Team B.] I can’t prove it, but I think that Team B was on the mind of Cheney and Rumsfeld when they made those changes.

G.U.: Apparently the scare tactics of Team B and the Committee on Present Danger were successful because Jimmy Carter started with the idea that he was going to lower defense spending - and of course [Carter’s hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski played into that - but Carter completely changed his course and increased defense spending..

P.D.S.: If I could just comment on that…Brzezinski’s role was that we now had conflicting estimates [of the Russian threat to U.S. national security], and Brzezinski, looking like a moderate, appointed a committee to reconcile Team B with traditional estimates. But that, inevitably led to a radical increase in the estimate of the Soviet threat. Carter I think never really had control of his administration, and the thesis of my book is that, you know, Carter was the candidate of the Trilateral Commission, and Brzezinski had been the executive director of the Commission, and the grandfather and patron had been David Rockefeller.

But domestically, the big impact of the Trilateral Commission was to get Carter elected President and therefore Brzezinski the National Security Adviser, and what Brzezinski wanted was more important in the Carter administration than what Carter had campaigned on even though he was sincere in wanting to lower the budget. And that’s why I spend so much time on the issue of the Shah coming to America , because Carter genuinely didn’t want to do it, and Brzezinski was actively plotting to make it happen. And it did happen, and of course it destroyed Carter, and the Democrats didn’t get back into the White House until Clinton .

G.U.: You don’t think the embassy would’ve been seized if Carter hadn’t let the Shah into the U.S. ?

P.D.S.: You can never be sure about counter-history. But there was the – you still had a relatively pro-American government in Iran . The Revolutionary Guard was not the government; the Revolutionary Guard seized power and in effect hung the Iranian government. And then it’s quite a complicated story, but, and this again is another act of Brzezinski’s, that Brzezinski brought in [Samuel] Huntington to create FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and FEMA had a procedure whereby Chase Manhattan Bank’s seizure of all Iranian deposits was given to bankers to adjudicate. So here was a most important element of Carter’s foreign policy in the Middle East [left in the hands of] bankers who had their own agenda which was, in effect, to save Chase Manhattan from catastrophic losses.

G.U.: Because they had an interest payment coming up.

P.D.S.: Right.

G.U.: You say in The Road to 9/11 that “although one should not force the analogy between Carter’s fate and that of the Shah’s, there is this point of comparison: both men lost their power not by defying the Rockefeller team but capitulating to it.”

P.D.S.: Yes. Brzezinski was urging a more militant repression of the opposition than the Shah was inclined to support. After all, the Shah knew a little bit more about Iran than Brzezinski did. In some ways his regime was always brutal, the [CIA-tutored] Savak, the intelligence agency tortured – any torture we’re doing today is pale compared to what Savak was doing in the 60s and 70s - but the Shah’s style was to try and go with the flow and here it was Brzezinski – not just Brzezinski, but the hawks in Washington - insisting on a more militant line that helped precipitate the final crisis.

G.U.: According to your book, in 1980 Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey cut a deal in Paris with the Iranians to hold the hostages [until after the upcoming presidential election] in order to undercut Jimmy Carter’s re-election efforts. Of course the hostages were released when Reagan was inaugurated, and on July 18th 1981 an Argentinean plane with weapons en route from [ America ’s intermediary] Israel to Iran crashed on the border between Russia and Turkey . Continuing on, a later House of Representatives query into the deal showed that an FBI raid of Casey’s home conveniently failed to turn up Casey’s passport for 1980, his personal calendar for the period July 24th through December 18th of 1980 and a file labeled “hostages.”

P.D.S.: Right. Let’s not call that a raid, because if my memory’s right he [Casey] was dead by now, and this was when the House was investigating the whole question of the October Surprise and had there been a deal. And so Congress, I don’t know if they subpoenaed the documents or requested the documents, I think that the FBI was getting the documents in connection with the federal investigation. There was no question of having to raid, because Casey was dead.

G.U.: Right. Okay. And maybe this is an obvious question, but with all of the evidence that exists that this took place, it’s still dismissed by the media or ignored as kind of a wild conspiracy theory. Do you think this is just too big of a lie for them to go near?

P.D.S.: Right. I think that ever since the Kennedy assassination there has been a level of deep politics in America which – just, even such a relatively simple matter as whether the Contras were dealing in drugs. The real question there wasn’t so much the Contras (as they were very small potatoes) but the people who were supplying the aid, the arms, and the infrastructure to the Contras. And this definitely involved drug dealers. And there is no question about it. But it cannot be admitted.

The mainstream media are so committed to a view of how things work that is excluding so much. You know. The Kennedy assassination was done by a lone nut. Nobody believes it. Johnson didn’t believe it. Nixon didn’t believe it. We still play by those rules in the media and that’s one reason why the Internet has been so successful on the blogger level, because it is filling a need which the mainstream media are not and, so, from one point of view it really is a threat to the status quo to have people spinning conspiracy theories. Because even if 90% of them are garbage – and certainly a very high percentage of them are – enough of the real truth about how this country is working can be found only in the realm that is assigned to conspiracy theorists. And that of course is the big common denominator between JFK and 9-11. 9-11 was an unsolved conspiracy and has become one of the major forces for change in the American political system.

G.U.: You talk a lot about Continuity of Government, particularly in the gubernatorial and presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan.

P.D.S.: One [Continuity of Government plan] was a national plan; one was a state of California plan where Reagan at the time was governor. To deal with the massive rioting going on in the cities there was a – this was the real source of paranoia in high places – Reagan appointed Louis Giuffrida, who was thinking of massive detention of blacks. And when Reagan became president he brought Giuffrida around with him to be the head of FEMA, so now all this planning was going on in an era where we were separated by more than a decade from the riots but the planning was now going on on a federal level. Oliver North was principally involved in it. Vice President of George H.W. Bush was overseeing North. And then there was this secret committee planning for Continuity of Government. Congress didn’t know about this even though, I mean, it was very serious business – they were planning for, you know, suspending the Constitution.

Originally a totally legitimate kind of contingency planning, [meant for] a nuclear disaster – in its origin this goes back to the 1950s when people really seriously worried about a nuclear attack; it wasn’t just a fantasy. But in the 1980s they changed the notion of what the planning was for and one of Reagan’s acts was to pass an executive order that it would be for any kind of emergency, not just nuclear. And the proof of that COG was actually brought in – to a limited extent – we don’t know how limited of an extent – on September 11th. So it now was no longer just nuclear, it was emergency planning. FEMA was the basis on it. And the head of FEMA [Louis Giuffrida] was a man who had been talking seriously about massive detentions of people. And a good deal of what we’ve had since 9/11 is actually fulfilling these ideas that were sort of way out in right-field, crazy ideas, from Louis Giuffrida.

G.U.: So, despite the fact that Reagan ran on the virtues of limited government he greatly expanded executive power…

P.D.S: I’m not sure that Reagan’s the Chief Agent here. Reagan did have certain things he wanted very much to do but I think he himself did have a fairly limited agenda. I think [William] Casey got himself to be head of CIA [after having served as Reagan’s campaign manager in the 1980 election]. He wanted to be Secretary of State – but he probably was able to do more damage as head of the CIA. And he also got into the Cabinet. He was a very powerful person who did things on his own that even the CIA didn’t know about and in some cases even the CIA operations officers were opposed to…Casey went ahead and did them with enormous consequences and the key example that I point to is giving American support and assistance to the foreign legion in Afghanistan which in 1988 renamed itself Al Qaeda.

G.U.: You talk at length about how the United States recruited the nastiest elements they could find to fight the Russians in Afghanistan , including of course Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

P.D.S.: Okay, bin Laden wasn’t – didn’t look so nasty in the 1980s. The one who looked nasty in the 1980s was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was overtly anti-American at that time. There was a genuine Afghan indigenous resistance, and the tragedy is, we didn’t give most of the aid to those people, because their brand if Islam was quite different from the [radical] Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia or the Islam of the Madrasahs in Pakistan . It was more Sufi…when the Wahhabis come in, they kick over the gravestones of the Muslims and say “You’re not supposed to have gravestones…” We imposed a Muslim reaction on Afghanistan that’s not indigenous to that country.

And the one person of all those leaders I would say was hateful was Hekmatyar. Because he was very ruthless, he didn’t have much of a popular base, he was popular with Pakistan , and he used the arms he got to fight other jihadi militants instead of fighting the Soviets. [then-Prime Minister of Pakistan ] Benazir Bhutto said to George H. W. Bush in 1990, “You’re creating a Frankenstein.” People could see what was happening but because of this whole thing about secret power, the experts who could see were excluded from the decisions made by Casey and his successors. It went on after Casey.

G.U.: And what year was the Al Kifah refugee center in Brooklyn opened up?

P.D.S.: There are different versions of when it was created. But I quote from the charter which I think says it was created in 1988, the year that the Soviets said (at the beginning of the year) that they were going to get out…and then by March of 1989 they’re out, and now in July of 1989 the FBI is photographing Ali Mohamed, training people in terrorism. It wasn’t to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan . I’m in correspondence with someone who’s pretty convinced they were training for Bosnia . And I myself talk about Rodney Hampton Ell, who was connected with one of the trainees and given a list by what was purported to be an American major in the Army, or the Marines, a list of people to recruit for Bosnia . This again goes into the area of deep history, because it’s not in the mainstream account of what we did in Bosnia .

G.U.: You mention that visas were extended, whether CIA or FBI who did it, to many people who were on terrorist watch lists, you mention –

P.D.S.: Ali Mohamed himself.

G.U.: Ali Mohamed, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, Sheik Rahman

P.D.S.: The Blind Sheikh [Rahman] is, you know, let’s not underestimate how important he was in the global Islamist movement. I mean, they were very aware of him in Peshawar and Afghanistan . And America must have known what they were doing when they admitted him to go to the [Al Kifah] mosque. There doesn’t seem to have been any particular fuss when the imam of the mosque was murdered, and the Sheik’s people took over. There was an obvious cover-up and protection of Ali Mohamed when this racist Meih Kahane was murdered. And they had the goods on three – actually photographed the three murderers together in terrorist training. And went out and said, “We can’t link [Ali Mohamed ally El Sayyid] Nosair” – they got Nosair by accident – “We can’t link him to anybody.” Of course they could link him to people. They weren’t going to reveal their connection to Ali Mohamed so they end up saying that Nosair was a lone, deranged gunman. Which was playing an old record, you know - that’s what they said about Oswald in 1964.

G.U.: So you had a long list of people who were involved in Al Qaeda plots who went through Al Kifah at some point: Sheikh Rahman, Wadi el-Hage, and Clement Rodney Hampton-Ell, Ali Mohamed…

P.D.S.: An important one I maybe didn’t mention was Al Zawahiri, who’s the number 2 in Al Qaeda, and perhaps the real leader, and certainly the real intellectual, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the intellectual overseer of the plot. Al Zawahiri, who sold the plot to bin Laden, came to this country at least twice, when he was on that list, to raise funds. Because ironically, one of the few countries where Al-Qaeda could recruit easily, and raise funds easily, was America , because in most of the countries where the Al-Qaeda people came from, the governments were very frightened of them.

Background: "Yes, But-"

2007-2008 was a heady time for liberals. 

Bush was still president, appointing reactionary judges, embarrassing us daily in the eyes of the world, and passively working his way toward one final, colossal fuck-up by ignoring warning signs in the overheated housing market, but Democrats had regained control of Congress in the 2006 midterms and looked like a better-than-even bet to win the White House.

Better yet, Democrats had not one, not two, but three dynamic candidates:  frontrunner Hillary Clinton and challengers John Edwards and Barack Obama.

At getunderground.com, we did profiles of all three. Our main editor, Mindy Nettifee, chose Barack Obama. Fellow features editor Aldra Robinson, a Southerner with populist inclinations, profiled her candidate of choice, John Edwards. Since no one else at the site was interested, I wrote a piece about Hillary Clinton.

At the time the feature was posted, Hillary appeared almost unbeatable. She was way out front in the polls, had racked up by far the most endorsements, and had a big war chest. There was enthusiasm behind Obama, but he had only been on the national stage three years at that point and many (including me) wondered if he had the guts and stamina to beat the Clinton machine, let alone the GOP. His smashing success in both regards was a political feat that still amazes me to this day.  

Yes, But-

Originally posted at getunderground.com on 9/30/2007. Click here for background information.


You know you’re in trouble when the first words in your argument are yes, but.  Last Labor Day after a long day of flights and layovers and connections and delays I arrived late one evening at a barbecue and after a few minutes to meet and greet and drop my bags found myself standing around a fire with a tasty cup of Octoberfest talking about the 2008 presidential election with two friends.  As soon as Hillary’s name came up they both started with a look and pose that indicated deep, almost unsettling dissatisfaction. 

I wasn’t excited about Hillary, but I was surprised to see such a reaction from two people who had voted for John Kerry, so I began with what I assumed was an obvious point:  yes, but at least she’d be better than any of the Republicans

…both said that they would vote for John McCain over Hillary.  I mentioned a litany of issues on which McCain is well to the right of Hillary, and most sensible people, but they wouldn’t budge.  Other than vague and easily dismantled assertions about Hillary’s “Big Government” healthcare plan and a suspicion that she might take their guns away, they had nothing of real weight, but the conclusion was firm:  Hillary was a non-starter and the Democrats may as well throw in the towel if they go with Hillary.

Hatred of George W. Bush is often portrayed by mainstream and right-wing pundits as a nervous condition, a neuroses, despite the overwhelming stench of illegitimacy and the staggering amount of suffering he has unleashed, for decades to come if not longer, which make his vast personal inadequacies seem quaint by comparison.  

Yet in my experience, most water cooler Hillary-haters, those who don’t understandably resent Hillary for her stances on the Iraq War, need or seek little hard evidence to make their case.  They don’t trust her and never will.  After all, she went on TV in a Jackie Kennedy pink suit and defended her husband’s lying about a blowjob.  And she’s cold.  And she said “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.  But what I decided to do was pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life,” a slight to breeders everywhere.  And she’s the reason we didn’t get universal healthcare, right?    

Even as independent voters increasingly support Democrats on the issues, Hillary consistently polls very poorly among men, 34% for and 47% against in a recent New York Times poll.  40% of men in the same poll said they definitely would not vote for her.

Many people find Hillary inauthentic.  The ambition, seen as “drive” when the media refers to media-savvy apemen like Rudy Giulani, or as some of the greatest entertainment on the planet when oozed out in buckets by Bill Clinton, equals calculating, which then becomes scheming when stirred with misinformation, lack of information, or damning information.     
Playing on this theme some months back was a viral spoof of an Apple commercial from 1984 in which a big screen Hillary spoonfeeds poll-tested lines to a throng of drones who are then liberated by a sledgehammer thrown by an Olympian blonde woman.  The ad ends with an Apple insignia in the shape of an "O" for Barack Obama, who represents something fresh, new, unbound to the corporate clowns at the Democratic Leadership Council, ready to change the political landscape.  The implication is that Hillary simply doesn’t have "it," that hard work and high qualifications aren’t enough.  She’s often stiff and serious before the klieg lights; as Ronald Brownstein of the L.A. Times put it, Hillary “excels more at the prose [governing] than the poetry [campaigning] of politics.”

Authenticity would seem a funny criterion in a profession owned by world-class used car salesmen.  The one relatively sincere president we had (Jimmy Carter) was run out on a rail in favor of Ronald Reagan, whose lies and misstatements fill volumes and whose administration included 138 officials who stepped down under a cloud.  If you’re going to be a phony, you have to hide the hand that holds the strings. 

The recent “pick Hillary’s theme song” contest on YouTube showed the puppeteer in all its naked vainglory.  Under the circumstances, it would have made sense to pick quality nominees, even something safe and stale if familiar from classic FM, to ensure that she wouldn’t be stuck with a dud, but somehow "You and I" by Celine Dion (of Titanic theme song fame) won out.  Worse than the song itself, or the fact that it was previously used in an advertisement for Air Canada, is that the contest (complete with a YouTube victor announcement spoofing the final episode of The Sopranos) was very likely an attempt to appeal to young voters, to appear hip with an updated (as of 2004) Alanis Morrissette wannabe.  Hillary is saddled with an albatross which is one of the most soulless theme songs in presidential campaign history, a reminder of the Clintons’ habit of calculating everything down to the smallest detail. A leap of faith is made that most voters won’t question their sincerity, or the abundance of grease easing the transom of their machine. 

To anyone who has been awake these past seven years, these discussions of public personas and communication styles will sound eerily similar to the banal media narratives in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  On cue, the Democratic candidate’s friends will tell stories of how warm and kind and funny Hillary is behind closed doors…

…And yet, despite a "personality gap," Hillary maintains a 20-point lead over her nearest competitor, Barack Obama, a lead which actually grew after the recent Democratic debates.  With the amount of money she’s raising, the length of time she’s held her lead, and her fine-tuned campaign machine, people are beginning to wonder if Hillary’s nomination is inevitable.
---

As usual in America’s a.d.d.-numbed media culture, the most important questions are rarely asked.  Not that a country led by someone as uniquely incurious, ignorant, incompetent, inarticulate, and inadequate as George W. Bush can pretend to be a meritocracy, but in the hope that we will put this sad chapter behind us, and stop being the laughingstock of the civilized world, an adult discussion of the most powerful position in the world should include comparisons of experience among the candidates. 

Many on the left would sooner get a colonoscopy with a rusty fish hook than vote for Hillary, due to her support for the invasion of Iraq, and her unwillingness to admit that she was wrong.  She has also pandered to mainstream idiocy with tacks to the right on flag burning and video games, and the union-buster connections of her top adviser and the long list of CEOs supporting her signal that she won’t be willing to challenge big business.

At the same time, Hillary’s proactive, progressive engagement with public life goes back a long way, to the heady days of 1969, when she wrote her senior thesis on radical activist Saul Alinsky and was the first student to deliver the commencement address at Wellesley.  In 1971, she clerked at the law firm of Bob Treuhaft, a leftist firm that defended the Black Panthers.  In 1974 Hillary was a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund and was on the impeachment staff in the last glorious months of Richard Nixon’s downfall.  She followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas and married him in 1975.  From 1978 to 1992 (with a two-year interruption after Clinton lost his first battle for re-election), Hillary served 12 years as Bill’s gubernatorial first lady, adviser, and educational reformer which she complemented with a seat on the board of the Children’s Defense Council.  

Most people don’t remember it now, but when the Clintons came to Washington in 1993 they had an ambitious progressive agenda, much of which they made law.  In short order, they pissed off the anti-abortion right, the military establishment, gun owners, college loan lenders, union-busters, ranchers who have long gotten fat on the public dime, the wealthiest 1.4% (who had their taxes raised), tobacco company execs who were forced to take a very public grilling before Congress, and many of the other mutant forces who have poisoned American life for so long.   

When Bill Clinton first proposed his healthcare reform measure, in September of 1993, 23 Republican senators publicly supported universal healthcare, but as it became clear to the GOP that any bill would help Clinton and the Democrats consolidate their power even further,  Republicans launched a disinformation campaign whose false tenets still echo today in the mainstream media chamber.  Hillary pegged the situation exactly in early 1995, after a right-wing surge at the ballot box in 1994 put Republicans in control of Congress:  "In fact, many of the problems will only continue to get worse.  The problems that middle-class Americans care the most about – like what doctor they can see – will likely become appreciably worse, because many will be forced into managed care over which they have no say.  Employers will make those decisions.  They will pay more for fewer benefits.  How deeply this sinks in and how much it motivates political action, I don’t know.”

As in Arkansas, when Bill Clinton lost his first re-election contest for pushing the envelope a little too much, the Clintons were humbled by their inability to fundamentally alter the system, so they took to political crossdressing.  Bill Clinton played the Republicans like a fiddle in budget battles but sold his soul on Welfare "reform," Communications "reform" (that opened the gates for Clear Channel to increase its stranglehold on content and good taste), and many other GOP initiatives, as a way of fishing for corporate dollars and selling himself as a safe, centrist "New Democrat."  Bill Clinton’s crass and destructive moves to the right opened the way for Ralph Nader in 2000 and cemented a permanent mistrust of both of the Clintons among many on the left.

---

No matter what you or I or anyone else thinks about Hillary’s true motives, if she becomes the Democratic candidate, we better hope to hell that she wins.  One of the major problems of the two-for-one view of the Clintons as joined at the hip is that it’s a one-size-fits-all model for a dynamic entity.  Hillary is not Bill.  She was not the peacemaker in an alcoholic’s family who just wants everyone to get along.  She lacks Bill’s puppy-dog like desire to bring "everybody" (even disgraceful right-wing Republicans with nothing but ill will) together to cut a deal, any deal.  We can’t look into their hearts, but we know Hillary has often if not always or necessarily usually taken more left-leaning positions.  And were she to win, she’d have a Democratic Congress, so she wouldn’t have to face the prospect of vetoing a lot of insidious bills and being portrayed as "obstructionist."

Hillary would pick circuit and appellate judges who decide 90% of the cases that come to court, and Supreme Court justices, which is no small thing when the most liberal justice, John Paul Stevens, is hanging on for his (and the nation’s) life hoping for a Democratic president.  In the latest Supreme Court term, there were nineteen 5-4 rulings, of which an unlucky thirteen went to Antonin Scalia and the hard-right Republican majority.  If Stevens retires under a Republican president, Roe v. Wade is dead, as is a long list of other progressive causes, including but not limited to environmental, labor and consumer protections, civil rights and civil liberties, separation of church and state, regulation of campaign financing, and laws governing open government.

For years, Republicans have done everything they could to make national discussions about false notions of "character," rather than about how well-served the public is by politician A’s decision or politician B’s.  This distorted discourse has been the go-to ever since the Red Scare of the '50s, and has taken central form in chickenhawk attacks on Democrats, even decorated veterans like George McGovern and John Kerry, as weak on national defense.

Support for the Iraq invasion among John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary was a gutless assumption that talking sensibly – as opposed to talking tough – on Iraq, a year after 9/11, would be a loser among voters.  The gap between Kerry’s early support of the war and the criticisms he made down the stretch in the 2004 presidential election opened him up to charges of flip-flopping that stuck, and Hillary, especially vulnerable as a woman for being accused of not having the good ol’ boy American desire to kick some third world country’s ass every so many years, is willing to risk loss of support on the left to not be portrayed as just another weak-kneed Democrat.  A lack of public regret on Iraq is frustrating, but it maintains the feeling among voters that Hillary is strong and unwavering.  In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll of Democrats, Hillary was rated as a “strong” leader by more people than John Edwards and Barack Obama combined. 

Politics ain’t patty-cake.  Those who say that sending Hillary up against the right-wing campaign wrecking machine is like sending a woman into a lion’s den in a porkchop suit forget that the Clintons can play this game.  In 1991, it was broadly assumed that George Bush Sr. would win a second term easily, but Bill Clinton’s operation, with its rapid response to all attacks, firm counterattacks, and simple and steadfast message ("It's the economy, stupid"), toppled the formidable GOP presidential machine.

The things that drive any right-thinking liberal nuts about the Clintons (the schizophrenic ideological turns, the connections to wealthy and sometimes sleazy people, the slick, mechanized operations) are also unfortunately virtual prerequisites to the most powerful position in the world.  John Edwards is making wonderful populist sounds, and has high likability numbers, and Obama is a truly gifted speaker with pitch-perfect themes and the most potential to really change the tone in and from D.C., but both or babes on the political battlefield next to the Clinton, who have sustained fifteen years of hellfire and damnation from the twin-headed Republican media monster of financial parasites and pseudo-religious primitives.   

Hillary would have the weight of history at her back, and an ability to erode double standards.  As Laura Liswood (of the White House Project) told the Nation:   [Hillary would] “change the whole memory scan of young people, in terms of…what leaders look like.”  Perhaps Hillary could even get the corporate media to stop regularly using words like “calculating,” “ambitious,” and “opportunistic” to describe a female politician following in the unremarked steps of every male presidential nominee ever.     

If you think Hillary is bad news, just look at the alternatives to her right.  There’s John McCain, famous for showing the soundness of the surge by wearing a flak jacket for the cameras in Baghdad while accompanied by 100 fully-armed U.S. marines and 5 Apache helicopters.  From Mormon country, there’s Mitt Romney, whose ideology has gotten a more thorough workover than Jenna Jamison’s danger zone.  Or Rudy Giuliani, whose active fascistic genes combine Cheney’s cleverness with a physical energy that won’t quit.   

Those on the left who claim to vote their heart, and not their head, invoke a false dichotomy, as the argument that presidential elections are of negligible real importance in peoples’ lives belongs on the ash heaps of the dead and decomposed bodies in Iraq, finely ground and blown to dust.  No matter who the Republican nominee is, we will undoubtedly be left with two significantly different decision trees, in which one is far better for humanity despite what we know will be excessive gravitation in both models toward concentrated economic interests that leave democracy straining at the bits.                    

Background: "Without a Net: Henry Miller in His Own Words"

Without a Net: Henry Miller in His Own Words

Originally published at getunderground.com on 7/2/07



“There was something heroic about it and he could have driven us stark mad, Ravel, if he had wanted to. But that’s not Ravel. Suddenly it all died down. It was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he had on a cutaway suit. He arrested himself. A great mistake, in my opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT. Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest before going to bed.”

-Henry Miller




Norman Mailer called Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer “One of the ten or twenty great novels of our [20th] century.” George Orwell hailed Cancer as “a remarkable book” with “a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are unapproached in any at all recent novel.” Novelist Lawrence Durrell said “For me Tropic of Cancer stands beside Moby Dick…American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done.” Ben Ray Redman spoke for many an excited reader when he wrote that Miller was “one of the most remarkable, most truly original authors of this or any age.” Also to pile on the plaudits at one time or another were powerhouse writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and John Dos Passos.

And yet, today, Miller’s raucous autobiographical novels receive scant attention in America's literary media organs. Essays on Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac and other long-deceased 20th century American novelists continue to circulate through the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New Republic, but Henry Miller is conspicuously absent.

Have the mannerly beasts of convention that Miller gleefully used for buckshot banished him forever, or will there be revivals, a reward for keeping it real? Would he turn in his grave at this very discussion?

---

Henry Miller was born in Manhattan to German immigrants in 1891 and shortly thereafter moved to Brooklyn . Of this time and place, Miller wrote in Black Spring, “Where others remember of their youth a beautiful garden, a fond mother, a sojourn at the seashore, I remember, with a vividness as if it were etched in acid, the grim soot-covered walls and chimneys of the tin factory opposite us and the bright, circular pieces of tin that were strewn in the street.”

Early on it was apparent that Miller was gifted, and endlessly curious, but he was not much interested in formal education or a career track, though he had a vague idea that he wanted to be a writer. In 1909 he left City College of New York in his first semester and proceeded to drift until 1917, when he married Beatrice Wickens. In 1919, Miller’s daughter Barbara was born, and in 1920, to support his family, he became an employment manager for Western Union .

Miller’s experience at Western Union (fictively referred to as ‘the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company’) forms the backbone of Tropic of Capricorn, which was published abroad in 1939. Stripping the gloss off the U.S. economic ‘miracle' of the Roaring Twenties, Miller described the grim corporate practice of employee recycling that continues to this day:

What was needed was a mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things were temporarily out of order. And things being temporarily out of order brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism…sometimes strikes and lockouts. Whereupon, according to this logic, you took a big broom and you swept the stable clean, or you took clubs and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the illusion that things were fundamentally wrong. It was good now and then to talk of God, or to have a little community sing – maybe even a bonus was justifiable now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad for words. But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep mopping up the trenches.

The time at Western Union soured Miller on the work world, and America itself, specifically the American notion that human progress was inextricably bound to a culture of industry:

I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy.

---

In 1924, Miller divorced his first wife and married June Mansfield, a dancer with bohemian leanings who was to become his central muse for many years after. June was also a hustler, capable of scrounging up money with the wiles of her enimagnetic personality. Not long after they tied the knot she convinced Miller to leave his job and devote himself to writing.

For the next several years, Miller lived on a shoe-string budget subsidized by June, worked occasional odd jobs, and wrote and submitted for little money and zero acclaim. One editor was kind enough to tell the aspiring author, “It is quite obvious that writing is not your forte.”

All along he had ridden the tide, let the course of events be determined from without, but now Miller found a focus:

I want to go contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a superinfantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an adult and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my daily bread. I have adapted myself to a world that was never mine. I want to break through this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of an unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into shadows.

Miller's wish came true when he moved to Paris in 1930 (June stayed behind in New York ). Being alone and in a foreign environment in the early years of the Great Depression was fraught with homelessness, loneliness, and hunger, but the fresh wash of new people, places and experiences put Miller in a creative fervor that birthed his opus, Tropic of Cancer (released in September, 1934).

From the opening pages of Cancer, the reader is confronted with a bold first-person voice with little concern for literary niceties:

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris . I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…


Where many novelists have been known to sit at their desk and pull material from the safe haven between their ears, Miller believed in the value of direct experience and spun his narratives the way he lived them, bouncing around aimlessly from one incident to the next, overarching themes be damned, with deft splotches of local color:

Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough…Dashing here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then, sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an erection looking at the dumb statues. Or wandering along the Seine at night, wandering and wandering, and going mad with the beauty of it…the trees leaning to, the broken images in the water, the rush of the current under the bloody lights of the bridges, the women sleeping in doorways, sleeping in newspapers, sleeping in the rain; everywhere the musty porches of the cathedrals and beggars and lice and old hags full of St. Vitus’ dance; pushcarts stacked up like wine barrels in the side streets, the smell of berries in the market place and the old church surrounded with vegetables and blue arc lights, the gutters slippery with garbage and women in satin pumps staggering through the filth and vermin at the end of an all-night souse.

Other than a brief stint as a proofreader, and some time teaching English, Miller had little employment from the time he arrived in Paris . On the fringes but ever-adaptive, he created a new, loose network of friends by idling around cafes and deploying his listening skills and gift of gab. Among his new friends was Anais Nin, a writer of erotica who became one of Miller’s lovers and a sometime benefactor. Nin was just one of many helping hands; to remove the need to punch a clock for sustenance, Miller parlayed his affability into a rotating schedule of meal invitations which broadened his group of associates and provided a well of stories and personalities to channel into his writing.

Miller’s wife June visited Paris , but, sadly, went back to New York :

The last glimpse I had of her was in the window waving goodbye to me…Mona at the window waving good-bye. White heavy face, hair streaming wild. And now it is a heavy bedroom, breathing regularly through the gills, sap still oozing from between her legs, a warm feline odor and her hair in my mouth. My eyes are closed. We breathe warmly into each other’s mouth. Close together, America three thousand miles away. I never want to see it again. To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth - I count that something of a miracle. Nothing can happen now till morning…

In the winter of 1934, Miller divorced June, not least because he had no desire to return to the United States . He rejected America ’s economic regimen, the tacky consumer culture that drove it, and the toll it had taken on spirituality, creativity and human interplay. The soul-sucking eventuated by industrialization had robbed man of his true nature:

All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and Mexico . The same story everywhere. If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward! Time presses. The embryo is pushing through the neck of the womb, and there’s not even a gob of spit to ease the passage.

Miller rejected automatonism and reveled in the senses and the sensual, filling his pages with a ripe smorgasbord of tastes, smells, sights and sounds, including liberal use of naughty words and graphic sex scenes that snuffed the guilt out of sin. Tropic of Cancer – and future Miller releases – were banned in the United States, but the response in France (where the book was published) and among many readers of note generated enough sales to keep a roof over Miller’s head and helped fuel the enthusiasm that produced his next two novels, Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn.

It’s doubtful Miller would have minded following the tide in Paris for some time longer, but World War II intervened. Miller came back to New York for a time, eventually to settle in Big Sur, California, where he got back to the land, married, fathered two more children, got divorced and re-married, hosted writers, artists and sundry admirers, and continued to write.

In 1958, the prestigious American Institute of Arts and Letters made Miller a member due to a “boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature…unequalled in the prose literature of our time.” Ironically, his major works were still banned in America at the time, but a quantum leap in free expression was right around the corner. In 1961, at the age of 70, Miller received his biggest paycheck ever when Grove Press handed over a $50,000 advance for three novels with every intent of banking on Miller's underexposed ouvre. Three years later, in September of 1964, Tropic of Cancer finally beat the censors in the Grove Press, Inc., v. Gerstein U.S. Supreme Court ruling, thirty years after Cancer’s initial release in France .

Miller spent his remaining years in Pacific Palisades, California, where he continued to read and write, paint and show his watercolors, ride his bike, and entertain guests until the ripe age of 88.

---

What about posterity? Will Henry Miller last?

Though he joked of writing for posterity, and graciously kept nearly everything he ever produced for future scholars, biographies and articles about Henry Miller have been rare. His red-blooded, pre-p.c. sensibility hasn’t endeared him to many feminists and elements of the academic left, and he’s too frequently pigeonholed as a writer of dirty books, a la Charles Bukowski, because detractors seek a neat categorical slot in which to stuff his work. Even Miller’s library in Big Sur refuses to look back. The library's website pointedly says: “It is not a Library where you can borrow books, it is not a memorial with dusty relics, it is not a fully stocked bookstore, it is not a trinket store where you’ll find a large selection of glossy photographs of the coast, t-shirts, mugs and baseball caps. It is not Henry Miller’s old home (that was four miles down the road on Partington Ridge), it is not originally built to be a public place.”

Miller's ego may have been bruised by a modern day lack of recognition, but he probably wouldn’t have lost a lot of sleep over it, for art, like life, was about the moment. Behind the scathing rants was a childlike joy at drinking, eating, talking, laughing, and screwing, especially, and a belief in the transformative power of art, and above all, the performance:

I remember an anonymous performer on the Keith Circuit who was probably the craziest man in America , and perhaps he got fifty dollars a week for it. Three times a day, every day in the week, he came out and held the audience spellbound. He didn’t have an act – he just improvised. He never repeated his jokes or his stunts. He gave of himself prodigally, and I don’t think he was a hop fiend either. He was one of those guys who are born in the corn crakes and the energy and the joy in him was so fierce that nothing could contain it. He could play any instrument and dance and step and he could invent a story on the spot and string it out till the bell rang…it was a show that contained more therapy than the whole arsenal of modern science. They ought to have paid a man like this the wages the President of the United States receives. They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole Supreme Court and set up a man like this as ruler. This man could cure any disease on the calendar. He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it for nothing, if you asked him to. This is the type of man who empties insane asylums. He doesn’t propose a cure – he makes everybody crazy.

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Background: "Waiting for the Sun"

Waiting for the Sun

This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 6/1/2007


... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him…We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.

- Willa Cather





We bound off the evening ferry onto land toward Market Street as fast as our legs will carry us with rush hour rhyme and reason. Across the Embarcadero, over the red brick road to the first major downtown intersection. People zip around in all directions like smashing atoms, and in the middle of it all a middle-aged homeless man with a stubbled grimace stands by the curb wiping his ass with one of those dinky little white napkins they stash in the old school silver dispensers at the diner, right in front of the swank Hyatt Regency and the cable car turnaround which shoots bubbly tourists up California Street just like you’ve seen on those pristine sunny blue sky day frozen moment postcards. Nobody seems to notice, except two cable car operators who stand and laugh as the next ride loads up.

I walk a block to the Embarcadero Center , a downtown mall and insanely expensive commercial real estate, and wait for a bus due west, toward the Pacific Ocean. About twenty yuppie worker bees from the financial services sector are randomly strewn inside and around the bus shelter. No one talks or laughs or reacts; all eyes are glued to the turn ahead.

The clumped network of wires above that guide the electric system shake a little when the bus arrives. A few people herd like cattle at the door, but most are tired and civilized enough to fall in line. As I board I hold up my bus pass. The driver stares through me and the formality and on to the next rider. A sign in the front of the bus reads:

INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION

It’s the first stop on the route, so we all have a choice of seats. I sit near the back, next to a window, and listen to the low steady hum of the electric bus as it pokes along.

Within a few downtown stops we are jammed tight, the aisles full of feet, hands taloned to the overhead bar. Here and there someone reads but most just stare into their laps, the space in front of them, or off into the distance. There’s not a lot to see outside: tall buildings, chainstores and the slate gray sky. Denying golden silence is the sound of heavy metal pounding through someone’s headphones.

Sitting next to me is a tall man in his early thirties that I’ve seen around town several times throughout the years, but can’t recall where. Through the ride he bounces a knee up and down, shifts in his seat, and puts his head in his hands, his anxiety exacerbated by the snail’s pace at which overloaded clean energy can move.

When we come to his stop he escapes out the back door and is replaced by a middle-aged man in a suit. My new companion carries himself with a certain slow exactitude, sitting down carefully so as not to bump me, then reaching into a black sidebag from which he removes a book I recently read, All the King’s Men. I have an urge to ask him what he thinks about the book, but I drop it when he pulls an IPOD out and inserts the headphones into his ear holes. I wonder how the hell he can concentrate on long-form prose when listening to music – or is the IPOD just a way of cordoning off humanity?

The bus comes to a stop and those exiting thread their way through to the back exit while new passengers file in through the front.

Suddenly a pungent odor drifts through the crowded space. I wonder where it comes from. The man next to me turns the pages of his novel, oblivious.

A few moments later there is a muttering that seems addressed to no one in particular. I search for the voice and find the source of the funk a few seats ahead - a homeless man in his fifties whose face is red-tanned, cracked, and bloated. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, a worn black leather coat and a baseball cap, his eyes open halfway in a woozy drunk fashion as he cradles a fifth of Jim Beam like a baby in coarse, leathery hands. The seats on either side of him are open.

“Turn the heater up,” he yells to the driver.

Many of the other riders stare at him out of curiosity, the pornography of raw poverty, then look away when he turns toward them, lest they be lured into listening. To fill the space, he converses with himself, then hums, then laughs:

“Ah, that cracks me up,” he says, and slaps his palm to his head, as if why didn’t I think of that before.

At the next stop a college-aged girl with a natural look – long straight brown hair, no makeup, jeans, jeanjacket – gets on. She winds through to the back of the bus, sees there are no other seats, and sits down next to the homeless man.

“I used to have a girlfriend,” he says. “She was pretty like you.”

The girl looks over and mouths thank you. She is a little nervous, if nice, probably new to these parts. He feels it and continues to talk to her; she fights the urge to look away.

Just as everything is settling in, the poles that connect to the wires above that power the bus come undone. The driver stops the vehicle, lurches out of his seat, and walks behind the bus to re-attach the poles as we sit in the dead air of a collective gasp. One minute goes by, two minutes, five, and the driver’s still out there, but no dice. Finally he comes back into the bus and tells us we have to get off.

The electric poles are tucked and tied down when we pour out on to Van Ness Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. I look up Van Ness a few blocks and see a southbound bus coming. It’s going away from the ocean, but by now I’m ready to slip back into my pod.

---

The driver of the 49 Van Ness-Mission could care less when I flash my pass; fifteen people just piled in through the middle and back doors without paying and he just closes the front door and hauls ass in his long gas-powered accordion bus, like he just wants to be done with it all.

I see an aisle seat toward the back of the bus. The Hispanic man in the window seat next to me slides a leg that straddles the dividing line back into his square.

Dead center in the middle of the bus is a big metal wheel that spins one way, then the other, as the accordion that connects front and back crunches up while the bus whips around corners like a snake with no nerve endings at the back, then expands back to its full length on the straightaways. The seats in the wheel are empty; no one wants to face one another.

As we come to a stop at the turn onto Mission Street , a homeless woman in a wheelchair with rotted teeth and stringy strung out long hair panhandles window-to-window at a divider. The bus turns right and the buildings become gray and brown brick, like in a black and white movie.

With no human voices to fill the air, public service announcements drone on over the intercom:

“Eating, drinking and smoking are prohibited on all transit vehicles.”

At the next stop, as the bus is about to take off, a large man with grocery bags in each hand flounders up with a look of desperation; no one wants to have to stand at a bus stop for ten or fifteen or who knows how many minutes. This time the driver waits and re-opens the door. When the bus starts up again the intercom reminds us:

“Please hold on,”

then, a moment later,

“Remember on a crowded bus, always protect purses and wallets.”

High up and off to the side is a St. Pauli Girl billboard that features a snow white buxom Minnesotan of the kind rarely seen in these parts, which reminds me that I’m one of the only Caucasians on the bus, which makes me again wonder how much social progress emerging polyglot demographics will bring (or will majorities of people of color follow whitey's lead and become more selfish and short-sighted once they get a bigger piece of the pie?).

I come out of my head into the floor of the bus, strewn with newspapers, trash, candy wrappers, a red plastic grocery bag, blue powder from a capsized capsule and squiggly spraypainted signatures, when I hear someone say “Spare a quarter?”

Ten feet forward a gaunt and frazzled addict with jeans hanging down past his ass crack bounces from person to person with his pitch. The riders shake their heads; they so just want to be home. The man looks up at me as the bus stops and The Voice comes on:

“Please exit through the rear doors.”

Empty-handed he turns around and bolts out the back door as a young woman gets on with her kids and finds two spots in the front of the bus. The bigger of the two sits next to her, the smaller sits in her lap while she holds a plastic shopping bag with one hand. The kids must have read the script: the younger is quiet and subdued, while the older turns around with his knees on the seat and looks out the window with mute enthusiasm. Once every one is on, the driver puts his foot to the floor.

Minutes later I step down and through the rear door onto a corner with a subway station where people are very friendly. First up is a bible-wielding Spanish-speaking preacher (with a bible-wielding double stepping in stride, translating in English to the best of his ability), then a Socialist Worker pusher, and an elderly Hispanic woman standing back from the subway entrance cooing a soft sell: “Ro-ses, flo-res?”

As I walk along I look at the cracks in the sidewalk old and gray as the day and the few faces that come past me, long and self-contained. A little ways down the block I encounter one of my next door neighbors, who continues to talk into his phone as we brush elbows.

Just before going home, I stop at the corner store for evening provisions. The man behind the counter gives me a nod of familiarity when I enter. We’ve known each other for five years - a decent amount of time by San Francisco standards - and grown increasingly familiar since we discovered we had a shared need to gripe about the dumb and dangerous piece of work that occupies the Oval Office.

I set a bottled water on the counter as we talk about our summer weather (gray, windy, mild) and wonder aloud when the sun will come out again, until another customer steps up and foreshortens our discussion. As I head for the door, the store owner says goodbye, but does not address me formally; he does not know my name.

Background: "The Honest Republican?"

The Honest Republican?

This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 4/15/07



He stands with his waders submerged in mud above the article title “Prisoner of Conscience,” clad in beat up old blue jeans, a blue denim shirt under a green hunting vest, a black baseball cap on his head. To his left is a fishing pole, perched on a rock pointing away; at his feet his loyal springer spaniel looks with master directly into the camera. He is everyman. He is Republican Senator John McCain, a.k.a. Straight Talkin’ McCain, and he is running for president.

In the opening paragraphs of “Prisoner” the writer says of his subject: “In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human.” The burning question of the 10,000-word love letter in February’s Vanity Fair is: does John McCain possess the guile necessary to be a successful candidate? And would McCain even want the presidency if he has to sell his soul to get it?

Throughout his 24 years in Congress, McCain has gained a reputation for speaking his mind, consequences be damned, often in opposition to the Republican Party line of the moment. McCain has bucked the GOP – sometimes loudly – on gun show loopholes, lobbying reform, HMO reform, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, climate change, gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, seeking compensation from tobacco companies and upholding the filibuster. In a party long run with and on authoritarian discipline, this is a novelty that the press can’t get enough of.

In his 2000 presidential run, McCain rambled around the early primary states aboard a bus famously dubbed the Straight Talk Express for his direct attacks on the ideological orthodoxies of both major parties and the extraordinary level of access given to the media, a way for McCain’s cash-strapped campaign to get free and favorable press coverage.

McCain giddily attacked the Republican establishment candidate George W. Bush from the rhetorical center and clobbered Bush in the vital early primary state of New Hampshire by almost twenty points, only to get buried in South Carolina by an evangelical militia backed by a shitstorm of slanderous attack ads. Along with the above-ground assault were whisper campaigns claiming that McCain was a nutcase due to his five years in captivity as a POW in Vietnam, that his wife was a drug addict (she had had an addiction to pills following surgery), and that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains have an adopted Bangladeshi daughter.)

Bush’s victory in South Carolina was the beginning of the end for McCain, who marched on to Pat Robertson’s home town and denounced Bush as “a Pat Robertson Republican” and Robertson and Bush supporter Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”

While McCain lost the primary, he piqued interest among a substantial block of independent voters thereafter known as “McCainiacs.” More importantly, McCain won the media, whom he later referred to as “my base,” which was not much of a stretch. Opposite Al Gore’s funereal seminars and George W. Bush’s scripted platitudes, McCain’s shake and bake liveliness and equal opportunity willingness to upend both major party platforms cemented a reputation for integrity that has become conventional wisdom in the national political dialogue. Our lazy media corps love labels that save them from doing their homework (i.e. the tedious and unsexy task of sifting through voting records to see what candidate X is really about), and the labels attached to McCain are uniformly flattering: “maverick”, “insurgent”, “rebel”, or “icon.” The press’s favorite adjective for McCain is “defiant.” McCain’s autobiographies play on this handy image with titles such as Character is Destiny, Worth the Fighting For and Why Courage Matters.

From early 2001, McCain became the media’s go-to guy in the Senate, as he was quick with a quotable quote and often likely to mix it up with someone, thereby creating an artificial controversy guaranteed to rattle around the hollow media chamber for a day or two until the next flavor-of-the day came along. Still smarting from Team Bush’s manhandling in the presidential race, McCain leveled populist attacks on Bush’s tax cuts (“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us”), 40% of which went to millionaires, and in July 2001, a McCain aide talked to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle about the possibility of McCain leaving the Republican Party and caucusing with the Democrats. The assumed benefits would’ve been the committee chairmanship of his choice, a louder megaphone through which to project his voice, and revenge on Bush. Then came 9-11.

When it comes to picking presidents, many Americans favor instinct to empiricism, reducing presidential elections to popularity contests. Despite the dire and dramatic events of the past few years, 55% of respondents in a March AP poll of American voters valued subjective personality traits such as honesty and integrity more than objective observations on policy positions and credentials.

The most obvious shortcoming of this mode of assessment is that politicians are professional chameleons: they thrive and survive by adapting to shifts in public opinion, while concealing that they are doing so. Judging a politician by their honesty is like tipping a hooker on the sound of her sweet nothings. Moreover, when most Americans rely on corporate network news, content-starved newspapers with bite-size AP dispatches, and cable programs that revolve around horse race stories and Kabuki quibbles, public perception of who’s telling the truth will often be out of line with factual reality, sometimes wildly.

Playing on this, George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, like many Republican campaigns before it, ran on a ‘character-first’ platform. Messy details about the far-reaching results of Bush’s decisions were discarded in favor of a contrived dialectic positing Bush’s stubborn resolve against John Kerry’s alleged weakness of will. Bush, who had pulled strings to get into the National Guard and then ditched his commitment, was strong, firm, and constant as the tides, while Kerry, who had volunteered for service in Vietnam and gone on to win three Purple Hearts, one Bronze Star and one Silver Star, was weak and indecisive. The subtext was that a president should be respected and rewarded for certitude, no matter how terrible his or her judgment.

Though Karl Rove & Associates had put a serious hurting on John McCain in 2000, McCain was only too happy to bolster this charade with the knowledge that loyalty to the king would go a long way toward giving him first dibs on the fundraisers and campaign staff from Bush’s well-oiled machine in 2008, while helping to repair McCain’s image among rabid right-wing Republican primary voters.

In a tv spot, McCain said that Bush, the same president who had: 1) stepped into office on the backs of minorities his brother had purposely disenfranchised in Florida; 2) done as little as possible to stop 9/11; then 3) relentlessly manipulated the fear spawned by 9/11 to start a disastrous invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in order to 4) seize Iraq’s oil and commandeer the framing discussions of close 2002 senate races while 5) accusing opponents of being unpatriotic, had “led with great moral clarity and firm resolve.”

At the GOP convention in New York City, held unusually late to milk the third anniversary of 9/11 to maximum advantage, McCain added that Bush “has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time…He has not wavered. He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield. And neither will we.” Lest anyone question his newfound genuflection before President Bush, in September of ’06 McCain told attendees at a dinner hosted by The American Spectator that “Campaigning with George W. Bush was one of the proudest moments of my life.”

In late September of 2005, as the city of New Orleans lay in wake following Hurricane Katrina, John McCain held a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee in which he hit his desk as he doled out heavy-handed cross-examination to the central witness: “You were told more than five months ago to come up with a tougher proposal. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it…Don’t you understand that this is an issue of transcendent importance that you should have acted on months ago.”

The source of McCain’s outrage and indignation? The most corrupt administration since Richard Nixon? An invasion of choice that had started a civil war in Iraq? The most extreme income inequality since the Great Depression? 45,000,000 Americans with no health insurance? The skyrocketing costs of a college education?

Nope. Steroids in sports.

Along with the show trial hearings, McCain (who likes to refer to himself as a “limited government conservative”) proposed urgent federal legislation to regulate drug tests in sports, only to let the (non) issue go a couple months later when Major League Baseball made token concessions.

Earlier in the same year, as bloodshed and chaos grew in Iraq, the Republican Party showed its respect for the sanctity of human life by trying to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen years following cardiac arrest. McCain backed Republicans’ attempt to force Schiavo’s husband to keep his wife on life support, quality of life and multiple court decisions be damned. When the public saw through the publicity stunt, the GOP brought their ace in in a pinch to do damage control. Of the breathtakingly crass sketch, McCain told ABC with grandfatherly earnestness: “I think that the motivation of my colleagues is that we want to give this young woman’s family a chance to care for her as long as she lives.”

Both incidents demonstrated the decoy tactics the Republican Party has used for decades, from McCarthyism forward, to distract the American public from more important matters, including in this day and age the fact that most of us are working longer hours for less pay and shrinking benefits while the rich gorge on ever bigger portions of America’s economic pie. McCain’s response to our fraying social contract has been to oppose unions that would reverse these trends at every step, to back Bush’s plan to privatize (i.e. draw and quarter) Social Security, which would do little to solve America’s retirement problems (it could potentially make them worse), and to support brutal cuts to the tiny portion of Congress’ budget that goes to discretionary spending programs such as Headstart, school lunches, childcare subsidies, infant nutrition programs for the economically disadvantaged and other programs that actually help people. Healthcare? McCain doesn’t talk about it. An urban agenda? McCain doesn’t have one.

While expecting sacrifice from the poor, McCain has recently reversed his opposition to Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In November of 2005 he told Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal: “I just thought [Bush’s tax cut] was too tilted to the wealthy, and I still do…We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me.” Yet in recent months, McCain has gotten over petty concerns about bloated budget deficits and basic economic fairness and now supports making these huge windfalls to investors, inheritors of wealth, and other beneficiaries of America’s 21st century brand of predatory capitalism permanent, just as he seeks deep pockets for the most expensive fundraising season in world history.

McCain followed his Shakespearean performances in 2005 with more partisan water-carrying in 2006, when he made 346 campaign appearances for Republican candidates, endorsing many who were to the right of Genghis Khan, and with the 2008 presidential campaign already well underway, McCain’s carefully crafted image of independence proves increasingly farcical as he panders time and again to the hard right, though sometimes quietly.

At the end of February, on the same night he announced his candidacy on Letterman (generating the autopilot McCain-as-maverick headline “In Newly Unusual Way, McCain Says He’ll Run”), McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate to skip the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly meeting of conservative activists. McCain’s spokesman cited a scheduling conflict, but it later came out that McCain’s people had tried to set up a media-free private reception for attendees, a way of appeasing the right without doing so publicly.

CPAC rejected the offer, but as McCain’s spokesman pointed out, his candidate’s 20-year voting record should be more than enough to bring right-wing Republicans into lockstep with McCain’s bid. For while McCain gets major mileage out of his handful of differences with the GOP (on issues on which Republicans are out of step with public opinion), he votes with his party more than 90% of the time. A study of McCain’s votes in 2005 by professor Keith Poole found McCain to be the 4th most conservative senator in Congress, while voteview.com ranked him as the second most conservative senator for the whole 109th.

McCain has buttressed this distinction with craven 180 degree turns to the right. Though McCain had said in 2004 that a GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” he did television ads in favor of a measure that banned gay marriage at the state level in 2006. Though McCain said in 1999 that he supported Roe v. Wade (“…I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations”), he now says flatly that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Jerry Falwell, once labeled an “agent of intolerance,” now gets on famously with Mr. McCain, who gave the commencement speech at Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University in May of 2006. Falwell returned the favor by inviting McCain to the Religious Broadcaster’s Convention (held in 2007) and offering up Brett O’Donnell, Liberty University’s debate coach, for McCain’s communications team.

As he’s crisscrossed the country on the weathered Straight Talk Express Bus, McCain has traveled back in time to a land of back alley abortions and legal machine guns, where public funds go to the teaching of intelligent design and abstinence education, big powerful weapons blow missiles out of the sky, and Cuba policy is stuck like groundhog’s day in 1961.

Against this backdrop, John McCain recently made a trip to Miami to speak before a group of right-wing Cubans, including veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the speech, McCain decried the rise of ‘socialism’ in South America, or more accurately, the election of leftists supportive of the redistribution of economic spoils to long-exploited indigenous people and opposed to US-imposed free trade agreements. A surprisingly blunt AP dispatch mentioned that McCain “said all the right things about Cuba for [the] audience,” including stating his opposition to ending the embargo until Cuba has free elections and basic human rights, and releases all political prisoners. McCain’s stance on behalf of freedom would be believable and maybe even noble if only he could reserve the same degree of indignation for vastly more oppressive U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but of course their expatriates don’t control 25 electoral votes.

As the 2008 campaign heats up at this sad, early date, the question is not whether McCain can find within himself the guile to compete, but just how low he is willing to go. Down the campaign stretch in 2006, Democrat Harold Ford of Tennessee led his opponent Bob Corker in most polls, giving Ford the potential to become the first African-American to win a Senate seat in the Deep South since Reconstruction. As ever, when backed against the wall, the GOP aimed low with character assassination and innuendo, with an ad in which people “off the street” make crass statements (ex: “terrorists need their privacy”) in defense of views falsely attributed to Ford. The implication of the ad was that the safe-as-milk Ford, one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress, was out of touch with mainstream values.

Playing to the most deep-seated, residual white Southern racism, the ad was roundly condemned, by John McCain among others. Terry Nelson (known for his connections to disgraced former GOP operator Tom Delay), who birthed the ad for the Republican National Committee, was fired by Wal-Mart, for whom he worked as a consultant. But the ad worked – Corker went ahead in the race and never looked back – and Nelson got a promotion not a month later when McCain hired him as his campaign manager. (Joining Nelson will be the ad firm of Stevens Reed Curcio & Pothold, who produced the notorious Swift Boat ads from the 2004 campaign, which McCain said at the time were “dishonest and dishonorable.”)

The one issue that has most contributed to McCain’s image as a man of unshakable principle is campaign finance reform. Todd Purdum’s sycophantic “Prisoner of Conscience” channels this conventional wisdom with the blithe assertion that McCain “has always loathed the cozy and corrupt culture of Washington D.C.” Though McCain has been in front on many of the baby steps to clean up Congress, in the eighties he was involved in the Keating 5 scandal, in which he engaged in a quid pro quo with a crooked S & L chairman whose failing S & L cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and McCain wasn’t above using his recent Commerce Committee chairmanship to steer favors for contributors. Purdum gets away with this distortion because DC’s pay-to-play culture is off limits to mainstream political discussion.

Much more in line with the mainstream media’s antiseptic national narrative is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill which banned soft money in federal elections. McCain deserves some credit for being one of the only people in his party to support the measure, but the truth is that McCain-Feingold is a toothless ‘reform’ measure of the kind loved in D.C. – a great way for politicians to prance before the cameras and claim to be concerned about an issue that is rotting our republic while actually doing very little. If McCain-Feingold really had bite, George W. Bush, second to none in trading dirty deeds for dirty money, never would have signed it.

In the past, McCain could be counted on to cry from the rooftops about campaign finance (ex: “The voices of average Americans have been drowned out by the deafening racket of campaign cash”), but now that he’s focused on becoming president, he’s singing a different tune, one much more harmonious with his current motives. In 2006 McCain supported a measure to make 527 donations illegal, but upon receiving flack from conservative grass-roots groups, he backed off, and in fact has taken a good deal of money from 527 leaders and organizers, according to a recent Washington Post article by investigative reporter John Solomon. The same article pointed out in detail that the long-time crusader has received money from lobbyists – a source of many of his rhetorical fusillades in the past – and a good number of Bush’s biggest fundraisers, including those who McCain criticized in the past for their lack of ethics and pollution of the political system.

The Post article that showed the gap between the mythological Citizen McCain and the shifty candidate McCain was one of the biggest signs that the media’s refusal to question the eternally earnest senator’s sincerity may be at an end. On signs of a breakup, McCain responded ferociously, calling Solomon’s truth serum the “worst hit job that has ever been done in my entire political career,” while failing to cite any factual inaccuracies.

McCain’s twenty fundraisers in March, and the 20 he is doing in April fail to make him any more of a money-grubber than the other candidates, but they do signify that he ought to lose the soapbox that has so long been a part of his act, and give us some real straight talk. We don’t need heroes. We just need someone that can clean up the mess.