Deep Throat
The revelation of former FBI second-in-command Mark Felt as the Watergate secret informer for Woodward and Bernstein has prompted ridiculous overreactions from both the left and the right.
On the left, for whom Richard Nixon was a demon, Felt has been lionized by some as a hero. Varying definitions of "hero" notwithstanding, it seems a stretch to characterize his actions as heroic. In the film “All the President’s Men,” where the suspense level is ginned up to make Woodstein’s exploits as positive and the situation as hyperominous as possible, Deep Throat is shown as primarily providing confirmation to Bob Woodward for information gathered elsewhere (not acting as a conduit for information so the reporters could act as "stenographers" as Pat Buchanan has stated).
By some on the right, Felt’s actions have been characterized as not merely less than heroic, but rising to the level of traitorous. This is more ridiculous than the canonization of Felt on the left.
Nixon was hated by the left because he was a strident anti-Communist at the beginning of his political career. They never forgave him for impeding their goal of establishing progressivism as the state religion of the United States. By the same token, Nixon continues to be almost blindly defended by the right because of his early anti-Communist actions, in spite of the fact that he governed more as a classic liberal than anything resembling a conservative.
Pat Buchanan continues to defend Nixon because of the personal kindnesses shown towards him, in spite of the policies that would gain Nixon disapproval from Buchanan were they to happen today. Much is made by those on the right that because Watergate in large part crippled Nixon’s ability to govern, this resulted in the failure of Vietnamization, and by extension caused the enslavement of the Vietnamese by the Communists and the deaths of millions in Cambodia by Pol Pot.
Conveniently forgotten is Nixon’s campaign in 1968 on the blatant lie that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam war. There was no secret plan. Nixon continued Lyndon Johnson’s plan of Vietnamization, stringing out the war and causing needless American deaths, presumably so he could have a “peace plan” agreed on at a convenient time before the 1972 Presidential elections. This is the kind of continued interventionism that would cause Buchanan to hammer Nixon today. The bombing that helped bring Hanoi to the negotiating table could have been done early in Nixon’s first term, but that wouldn’t have enabled him to play another “peace plan” card in the 1972 elections.
And in spite of Nixon’s anti-Communist stance in the 1950s, his and Kissinger’s policy of detente toward the Soviet Union helped to prolong the life of that totalitarian state, and enabled the continued enslavement of millions behind the Iron Curtain. Nixon’s recognition of the Communist government in China has resulted in the conditons that helped spur their economic growth over the past three decades, contributing to a United States trade imbalance and loss of manufacturing jobs, and giving cover to the economic supporters of China on the basis that the “conservative” Nixon opened the door.
Also part of the Nixon legacy are his economic policies. “We’re all Keynesians now” was his claim, and those policies helped cause the largest inflation in recent U.S. history and laid the groundwork for the energy shortages and horrible economy of the late 70s. The damage begun by Nixon wasn’t arrested until Reagan began to implement his version of supply-side economics in the early 80s.
Ben Stein defends Nixon as well, impugning Felt, and one of the pieces of his argument is that Felt, as partially Jewish, should not have turned on Nixon because he was a supporter of Israel. For those with dual allegiances, it seems that no amount of criminality is sufficient to trigger criticism or punishment if there is the chance that Israel will be negatively affected in some way, regardless of the damage to the United States.
I suspect that a lot of frustration on the part of some on the right who look back at Watergate now, results from the way Clinton was given much different treatment from the mainstream media. What they should be doing instead of trying to rehabilitate the crook Nixon, is to say: “Yes, Nixon was wrong and deserved to leave office. But so did Clinton, and here’s why.” By continuing to ignore or gloss over the crimes of Nixon and his teutonic merry men on the basis that it was no worse than his Oval Office predecessors (which in fact it was not), the criminality of Clinton and his cohorts is diminished as well.
No, Felt isn’t a hero. But he did the country a service by helping Woodward and Bernstein. And because he did so, and because they helped to bring down Nixon (regardless of their motives), the rise of Reaganism was hastened along with the policies and world situation that developed from that, and that is enough reason that Mark Felt (and the Washington Post reporters) should receive thanks.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Friday, June 03, 2005
From washingtonpost.com:
How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'
As a Friendship -- and the Watergate Story -- Developed, Source's Motives Remained a Mystery to Woodward
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 2, 2005
In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.
One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.
I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."
"Mark Felt," he said.
I began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the Navy and I was bringing documents from Adm. Moorer's office. Felt was in no hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.
This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree. After four years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year because of the Vietnam War.
During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.
When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining -- and this is the first time he mentioned it -- the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for a senator -- his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton, Ill., where I had been raised.
So we had two connections -- graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.
Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad."
Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter -- one of the most important in my life -- I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.
I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly, and his interest in me seemed somehow paternal. Still the most vivid impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner, in most ways a product of Hoover's FBI. I asked Felt for his phone number, and he gave me the direct line to his office.
I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House. But I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future, which now loomed more ominously as the date of my discharge from the Navy approached. At some point I called him, first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little desperate, and I'm sure I poured out my heart. I had applied to several law schools for that fall, but, at 27, I wondered if I could really stand spending three years in law school before starting real work.
Felt seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions. He said that after he had his law degree his first job had been with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment was to determine whether toilet paper with the brand name Red Cross was at an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. The FTC was a classic federal bureaucracy -- slow and leaden -- and he hated it. Within a year he had applied to the FBI and been accepted. Law school opened the most doors, he seemed to be saying, but don't get caught in your own equivalent of a toilet-paper investigation.
A TWO WEEK TRYOUT: Coming to The Post
In August 1970, I was formally discharged from the Navy. I had subscribed to The Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colorful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was much more than law school. Maybe reporting was something I could do.
During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to The Post asking for a job as a reporter. Somehow -- I don't remember exactly how -- Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero -- zero! -- experience. Why, he said, would The Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.
After two weeks, I had written perhaps a dozen stories or fragments of stories. None had been published or come close to being published. None had even been edited.
See, you don't know how to do this, Rosenfeld said, bringing my tryout to a merciful close. But I left the newsroom more enthralled than ever. Though I had failed the tryout -- it was a spectacular crash -- I realized I had found something that I loved. The sense of immediacy in the newspaper was overwhelming to me, and I took a job at the Montgomery Sentinel, where Rosenfeld said I could learn how to be a reporter. I told my father that law school was off and that I was taking a job, at about $115 a week, as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in Maryland.
"You're crazy," my father said, in one of the rare judgmental statements he had ever made to me.
I also called Mark Felt, who, in a gentler way, indicated that he, too, thought this was crazy. He said he thought newspapers were too shallow and too quick on the draw. Newspapers didn't do in-depth work and rarely got to the bottom of events.
Well, I said, I was elated. Maybe he could help me with stories.
He didn't answer, I recall.
During the year I spent on the Sentinel, I kept in touch with Felt through phone calls to his office and home. We were becoming friends of a sort. He was the mentor, keeping me from toilet-paper investigations, and I kept asking for advice. One weekend I drove out to his home in Virginia and met his wife, Audrey.
Somewhat to my astonishment, Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. He appreciated his orderliness and the way he ran the bureau with rigid procedures and an iron fist. Felt said he appreciated that Hoover arrived at the office at 6:30 each morning and everyone knew what was expected. The Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense, he said without being specific. I believe he called it "corrupt" and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.
In his own memoir, "The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside," which received almost no attention when it was published in 1979, five years after President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, Felt angrily called this a "White House-Justice Department cabal."
At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the vast pushing, shoving and outright acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover's FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970 a young White House aide named Tom Charles Huston had come up with a plan to authorize the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats," authorize illegal opening of mail, and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.
Huston warned in a top-secret memo that the plan was "clearly illegal." Nixon initially approved the plan anyway. Hoover strenuously objected, because eavesdropping, opening mail and breaking into homes and offices of domestic security threats were basically the FBI bailiwick and the bureau didn't want competition. Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.
Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control."
There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis. During this period, he had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angeles area, for example, or to open a file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society.
None of this surfaced directly in our discussions, but clearly he was a man under pressure, and the threat to the integrity and independence of the bureau was real and seemed uppermost in his mind.
On July 1, 1971 -- about a year before Hoover's death and the Watergate break-in -- Hoover promoted Felt to be the number three official in the FBI. Though Hoover's sidekick, Clyde Tolson, was technically the number two official, Tolson was also ill and did not come to work many days, meaning he had no operational control of the bureau. Thus, my friend became the day-to-day manager of all FBI matters as long as he kept Hoover and Tolson informed or sought Hoover's approval on policy matters.
EARLY TIPS: Agnew, and Then Wallace
In August, a year after my failed tryout, Rosenfeld decided to hire me. I started at The Post the next month.
Though I was busy in my new job, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but insisted that he, the FBI and the Justice Department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass onto others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or Justice Department. No one.
In the spring, he said in utter confidence that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had received a bribe of $2,500 in cash that Agnew had put in his desk drawer. I passed this on to Richard Cohen, the top Maryland reporter for The Post, not identifying the source at all. Cohen said, and later wrote in his book on the Agnew investigation, that he thought it was "preposterous." Another Post reporter and I spent a day chasing around Baltimore for the alleged person who supposedly knew about the bribe. We got nowhere. Two years later, the Agnew investigation revealed that the vice president had received such a bribe in his office.
About 9:45 a.m. on May 2, 1972, Felt was in his office at the FBI when an assistant director came to report that Hoover had died at his home. Felt was stunned. For practical purposes, he was next in line to take over the bureau.
Yet Felt was soon to be visited with immense disappointment. Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray III to be the acting director. Gray was a Nixon loyalist going back years. He had resigned from the Navy in 1960 to work for candidate Nixon during the presidential contest that Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy.
As best I could tell Felt was crushed, but he put on a good face. "Had I been wiser, I would have retired," Felt wrote.
On May 15, less than two weeks after Hoover's death, a lone gunman shot Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, then campaigning for president, at a Laurel shopping center. The wounds were serious, but Wallace survived.
Wallace had a strong following in the deep South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.
That evening, Nixon called Felt -- not Gray, who was out of town -- at home for an update. It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that Arthur H. Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured him after he shot Wallace.
"Well, it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told Felt.
Felt was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated and worried, attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every 30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation of Bremer.
In the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate to shoot. On May 18, I did a Page One article that said, among other things, "High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."
It was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone and without accomplices was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.
THE STORY BREAKS: Secrecy Is Paramount
A month later, on Saturday, June 17, the FBI night supervisor called Felt at home. Five men in business suits, pockets stuffed with $100 bills, and carrying eavesdropping and photographic equipment, had been arrested inside the Democrats' national headquarters at the Watergate office building about 2:30 a.m.
By 8:30 a.m. Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same time, The Post's city editor woke me at home and asked me to come in to cover an unusual burglary.
The first paragraph of the front-page story that ran the next day in The Post read: "Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here."
The next day, Carl Bernstein and I wrote our first article together, identifying one of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., as the salaried security coordinator for Nixon's reelection committee. On Monday, I went to work on E. Howard Hunt, whose telephone number had been found in the address books of two of the burglars with the small notations "W. House" and "W.H." by his name.
This was the moment when a source or friend in the investigative agencies of government is invaluable. I called Felt at the FBI, reaching him through his secretary. It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to "heat up" for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.
I was tentatively assigned to write the next day's Watergate bugging story, but I was not sure I had anything. Carl had the day off. I picked up the phone and dialed 456-1414 -- the White House -- and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer, but the operator helpfully said he might be in the office of Charles W. Colson, Nixon's special counsel. Colson's secretary said Hunt was not there this moment but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer. I called and reached Hunt and asked why his name was in the address book of two of the Watergate burglars.
"Good God!" Hunt shouted before slamming down the phone. I called the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett, who is now a Republican U.S. senator from Utah. "I guess it's no secret that Howard was with the CIA," Bennett said blandly.
It had been a secret to me, and a CIA spokesman confirmed that Hunt had been with the agency from 1949 to 1970. I called Felt again at the FBI. Colson, White House, CIA, I said. What did I have? Anyone could have someone's name in an address book. I wanted to be careful about guilt by association.
Felt sounded nervous. He said off the record -- meaning I could not use the information -- that Hunt was a prime suspect in the burglary at the Watergate for many reasons beyond the address books. So reporting the connections forcefully would not be unfair.
In July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who had copies of $89,000 in Mexican checks and a $25,000 check that had gone into the account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish that the $25,000 check had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice H. Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The Aug. 1 story on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.
I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home in Virginia and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla, perfectly kept, everything-in-its-place suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open.
I did not know then that in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during World War II, he had been assigned to work on the general desk of the Espionage Section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war he spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance.
So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face where no one could observe us.
I said anything would be fine with me.
We would need a preplanned notification system -- a change in the environment that no one else would notice or attach any meaning to. I didn't know what he was talking about.
If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at times, I explained.
We needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly. He never explained how he could do this.
Feeling under some pressure, I said that I had a red cloth flag, less than a foot square -- the kind used as warnings on long truck loads -- that a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on my apartment balcony.
Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony if I urgently needed a meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said sternly. The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night about 2 a.m. on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn.
Felt said I would have to follow strict countersurveillance techniques. How did I get out of my apartment?
I walked out, down the hall, and took the elevator.
Which takes you to the lobby? he asked.
Yes.
Did I have back stairs to my apartment house?
Yes.
Use them when you are heading for a meeting. Do they open into an alley?
Yes.
Take the alley. Don't use your own car. Take a taxi to several blocks from a hotel where there are cabs after midnight, get dropped off and then walk to get a second cab to Rosslyn. Don't get dropped off directly at the parking garage. Walk the last several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage. I'll understand if you don't show. All this was like a lecture. The key was taking the necessary time -- one to two hours to get there. Be patient, serene. Trust the prearrangements. There was no fallback meeting place or time. If we both didn't show, there would be no meeting.
Felt said that if he had something for me, he could get me a message. He quizzed me about my daily routine, what came to my apartment, the mailbox, etc. The Post was delivered outside my apartment door. I did have a subscription to the New York Times. A number of people in my apartment building near Dupont Circle got the Times. The copies were left in the lobby with the apartment number. Mine was No. 617, and it was written clearly on the outside of each paper in marker pen. Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times -- how, I never knew. Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 2 a.m., in the same Rosslyn parking garage.
The relationship was a compact of trust; nothing about it was to be discussed or shared with anyone, he said.
How he could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me. At the time, before the era of intensive security, the back of the building was not enclosed, so anyone could have driven in the back alley to observe my balcony. In addition, my balcony and the back of the apartment complex faced onto a courtyard or back area that was shared with a number of other apartment or office buildings in the area. My balcony could have been seen from dozens of apartments or offices, as best I can tell.
A number of embassies were located in the area. The Iraqi Embassy was down the street, and I thought it possible that the FBI had surveillance or listening posts nearby. Could Felt have had the counterintelligence agents regularly report on the status of my flag and flowerpot? That seems highly unlikely, if not impossible.
A KINSHIP: Felt Knew Reporters' Plight
In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him and being such a nag, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon's reelection committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on the doors of these people to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.
Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, had to rely on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my aggressiveness and pushy approach because he had been the same way himself when he was younger, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.
It was an unusual message, emphatically encouraging me to get in his face.
With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast-breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time to consider the motives of our sources. What was important was whether the information checked out and whether it was true. We were swimming, really living, in the fast-moving rapids. There was no time to ask why they were talking or whether they had an ax to grind.
I was thankful for any morsel or information, confirmation or assistance Felt gave me while Carl and I were attempting to understand the many-headed monster of Watergate. Because of his position virtually atop the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense, at times even staggering, authority. The weight, authenticity and his restraint were more important than his design, if he had one.
It was only later after Nixon resigned that I began to wonder why Felt had talked when doing so carried substantial risks for him and the FBI. Had he been exposed early on, Felt would have been no hero. Technically, it was illegal to talk about grand jury information or FBI files -- or it could have been made to look illegal.
Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons. The young eager-beaver patrol of White House underlings, best exemplified by John W. Dean III, was odious to him.
His reverence for Hoover and strict bureau procedure made Gray's appointment as director all the more shocking. Felt obviously concluded he was Hoover's logical successor.
And the former World War II spy hunter liked the game. I suspect in his mind I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him at all, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed.
In our book "All the President's Men," Carl and I described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimize his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded, "Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost."
Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: "I have to do this my way."
How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'
As a Friendship -- and the Watergate Story -- Developed, Source's Motives Remained a Mystery to Woodward
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 2, 2005
In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.
One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.
I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."
"Mark Felt," he said.
I began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the Navy and I was bringing documents from Adm. Moorer's office. Felt was in no hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.
This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree. After four years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year because of the Vietnam War.
During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.
When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining -- and this is the first time he mentioned it -- the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for a senator -- his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton, Ill., where I had been raised.
So we had two connections -- graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.
Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad."
Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter -- one of the most important in my life -- I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.
I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly, and his interest in me seemed somehow paternal. Still the most vivid impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner, in most ways a product of Hoover's FBI. I asked Felt for his phone number, and he gave me the direct line to his office.
I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House. But I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future, which now loomed more ominously as the date of my discharge from the Navy approached. At some point I called him, first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little desperate, and I'm sure I poured out my heart. I had applied to several law schools for that fall, but, at 27, I wondered if I could really stand spending three years in law school before starting real work.
Felt seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions. He said that after he had his law degree his first job had been with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment was to determine whether toilet paper with the brand name Red Cross was at an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. The FTC was a classic federal bureaucracy -- slow and leaden -- and he hated it. Within a year he had applied to the FBI and been accepted. Law school opened the most doors, he seemed to be saying, but don't get caught in your own equivalent of a toilet-paper investigation.
A TWO WEEK TRYOUT: Coming to The Post
In August 1970, I was formally discharged from the Navy. I had subscribed to The Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colorful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was much more than law school. Maybe reporting was something I could do.
During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to The Post asking for a job as a reporter. Somehow -- I don't remember exactly how -- Harry Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero -- zero! -- experience. Why, he said, would The Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.
After two weeks, I had written perhaps a dozen stories or fragments of stories. None had been published or come close to being published. None had even been edited.
See, you don't know how to do this, Rosenfeld said, bringing my tryout to a merciful close. But I left the newsroom more enthralled than ever. Though I had failed the tryout -- it was a spectacular crash -- I realized I had found something that I loved. The sense of immediacy in the newspaper was overwhelming to me, and I took a job at the Montgomery Sentinel, where Rosenfeld said I could learn how to be a reporter. I told my father that law school was off and that I was taking a job, at about $115 a week, as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in Maryland.
"You're crazy," my father said, in one of the rare judgmental statements he had ever made to me.
I also called Mark Felt, who, in a gentler way, indicated that he, too, thought this was crazy. He said he thought newspapers were too shallow and too quick on the draw. Newspapers didn't do in-depth work and rarely got to the bottom of events.
Well, I said, I was elated. Maybe he could help me with stories.
He didn't answer, I recall.
During the year I spent on the Sentinel, I kept in touch with Felt through phone calls to his office and home. We were becoming friends of a sort. He was the mentor, keeping me from toilet-paper investigations, and I kept asking for advice. One weekend I drove out to his home in Virginia and met his wife, Audrey.
Somewhat to my astonishment, Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. He appreciated his orderliness and the way he ran the bureau with rigid procedures and an iron fist. Felt said he appreciated that Hoover arrived at the office at 6:30 each morning and everyone knew what was expected. The Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense, he said without being specific. I believe he called it "corrupt" and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.
In his own memoir, "The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside," which received almost no attention when it was published in 1979, five years after President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, Felt angrily called this a "White House-Justice Department cabal."
At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the vast pushing, shoving and outright acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover's FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970 a young White House aide named Tom Charles Huston had come up with a plan to authorize the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats," authorize illegal opening of mail, and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.
Huston warned in a top-secret memo that the plan was "clearly illegal." Nixon initially approved the plan anyway. Hoover strenuously objected, because eavesdropping, opening mail and breaking into homes and offices of domestic security threats were basically the FBI bailiwick and the bureau didn't want competition. Four days later, Nixon rescinded the Huston plan.
Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control."
There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis. During this period, he had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angeles area, for example, or to open a file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society.
None of this surfaced directly in our discussions, but clearly he was a man under pressure, and the threat to the integrity and independence of the bureau was real and seemed uppermost in his mind.
On July 1, 1971 -- about a year before Hoover's death and the Watergate break-in -- Hoover promoted Felt to be the number three official in the FBI. Though Hoover's sidekick, Clyde Tolson, was technically the number two official, Tolson was also ill and did not come to work many days, meaning he had no operational control of the bureau. Thus, my friend became the day-to-day manager of all FBI matters as long as he kept Hoover and Tolson informed or sought Hoover's approval on policy matters.
EARLY TIPS: Agnew, and Then Wallace
In August, a year after my failed tryout, Rosenfeld decided to hire me. I started at The Post the next month.
Though I was busy in my new job, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but insisted that he, the FBI and the Justice Department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass onto others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or Justice Department. No one.
In the spring, he said in utter confidence that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had received a bribe of $2,500 in cash that Agnew had put in his desk drawer. I passed this on to Richard Cohen, the top Maryland reporter for The Post, not identifying the source at all. Cohen said, and later wrote in his book on the Agnew investigation, that he thought it was "preposterous." Another Post reporter and I spent a day chasing around Baltimore for the alleged person who supposedly knew about the bribe. We got nowhere. Two years later, the Agnew investigation revealed that the vice president had received such a bribe in his office.
About 9:45 a.m. on May 2, 1972, Felt was in his office at the FBI when an assistant director came to report that Hoover had died at his home. Felt was stunned. For practical purposes, he was next in line to take over the bureau.
Yet Felt was soon to be visited with immense disappointment. Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray III to be the acting director. Gray was a Nixon loyalist going back years. He had resigned from the Navy in 1960 to work for candidate Nixon during the presidential contest that Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy.
As best I could tell Felt was crushed, but he put on a good face. "Had I been wiser, I would have retired," Felt wrote.
On May 15, less than two weeks after Hoover's death, a lone gunman shot Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, then campaigning for president, at a Laurel shopping center. The wounds were serious, but Wallace survived.
Wallace had a strong following in the deep South, an increasing source of Nixon's support. Wallace's spoiler candidacy four years earlier in 1968 could have cost Nixon the election that year, and Nixon monitored Wallace's every move closely as the 1972 presidential contest continued.
That evening, Nixon called Felt -- not Gray, who was out of town -- at home for an update. It was the first time Felt had spoken directly with Nixon. Felt reported that Arthur H. Bremer, the would-be assassin, was in custody but in the hospital because he had been roughed up and given a few bruises by those who subdued and captured him after he shot Wallace.
"Well, it's too bad they didn't really rough up the son of a bitch!" Nixon told Felt.
Felt was offended that the president would make such a remark. Nixon was so agitated and worried, attaching such urgency to the shooting, that he said he wanted full updates every 30 minutes from Felt on any new information that was being discovered in the investigation of Bremer.
In the following days I called Felt several times and he very carefully gave me leads as we tried to find out more about Bremer. It turned out that he had stalked some of the other candidates, and I went to New York to pick up the trail. This led to several front-page stories about Bremer's travels, completing a portrait of a madman not singling out Wallace but rather looking for any presidential candidate to shoot. On May 18, I did a Page One article that said, among other things, "High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer."
It was rather brazen of me. Though I was technically protecting my source and talked to others besides Felt, I did not do a good job of concealing where the information was coming from. Felt chastised me mildly. But the story that Bremer acted alone and without accomplices was a story that both the White House and the FBI wanted out.
THE STORY BREAKS: Secrecy Is Paramount
A month later, on Saturday, June 17, the FBI night supervisor called Felt at home. Five men in business suits, pockets stuffed with $100 bills, and carrying eavesdropping and photographic equipment, had been arrested inside the Democrats' national headquarters at the Watergate office building about 2:30 a.m.
By 8:30 a.m. Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same time, The Post's city editor woke me at home and asked me to come in to cover an unusual burglary.
The first paragraph of the front-page story that ran the next day in The Post read: "Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here."
The next day, Carl Bernstein and I wrote our first article together, identifying one of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., as the salaried security coordinator for Nixon's reelection committee. On Monday, I went to work on E. Howard Hunt, whose telephone number had been found in the address books of two of the burglars with the small notations "W. House" and "W.H." by his name.
This was the moment when a source or friend in the investigative agencies of government is invaluable. I called Felt at the FBI, reaching him through his secretary. It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to "heat up" for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.
I was tentatively assigned to write the next day's Watergate bugging story, but I was not sure I had anything. Carl had the day off. I picked up the phone and dialed 456-1414 -- the White House -- and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer, but the operator helpfully said he might be in the office of Charles W. Colson, Nixon's special counsel. Colson's secretary said Hunt was not there this moment but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer. I called and reached Hunt and asked why his name was in the address book of two of the Watergate burglars.
"Good God!" Hunt shouted before slamming down the phone. I called the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett, who is now a Republican U.S. senator from Utah. "I guess it's no secret that Howard was with the CIA," Bennett said blandly.
It had been a secret to me, and a CIA spokesman confirmed that Hunt had been with the agency from 1949 to 1970. I called Felt again at the FBI. Colson, White House, CIA, I said. What did I have? Anyone could have someone's name in an address book. I wanted to be careful about guilt by association.
Felt sounded nervous. He said off the record -- meaning I could not use the information -- that Hunt was a prime suspect in the burglary at the Watergate for many reasons beyond the address books. So reporting the connections forcefully would not be unfair.
In July, Carl went to Miami, home of four of the burglars, on the money trail, and he ingeniously tracked down a local prosecutor and his chief investigator, who had copies of $89,000 in Mexican checks and a $25,000 check that had gone into the account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the burglars. We were able to establish that the $25,000 check had been campaign money that had been given to Maurice H. Stans, Nixon's chief fundraiser, on a Florida golf course. The Aug. 1 story on this was the first to tie Nixon campaign money directly to Watergate.
I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home in Virginia and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla, perfectly kept, everything-in-its-place suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open.
I did not know then that in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during World War II, he had been assigned to work on the general desk of the Espionage Section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war he spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance.
So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face where no one could observe us.
I said anything would be fine with me.
We would need a preplanned notification system -- a change in the environment that no one else would notice or attach any meaning to. I didn't know what he was talking about.
If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at times, I explained.
We needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly. He never explained how he could do this.
Feeling under some pressure, I said that I had a red cloth flag, less than a foot square -- the kind used as warnings on long truck loads -- that a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on my apartment balcony.
Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony if I urgently needed a meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said sternly. The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night about 2 a.m. on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn.
Felt said I would have to follow strict countersurveillance techniques. How did I get out of my apartment?
I walked out, down the hall, and took the elevator.
Which takes you to the lobby? he asked.
Yes.
Did I have back stairs to my apartment house?
Yes.
Use them when you are heading for a meeting. Do they open into an alley?
Yes.
Take the alley. Don't use your own car. Take a taxi to several blocks from a hotel where there are cabs after midnight, get dropped off and then walk to get a second cab to Rosslyn. Don't get dropped off directly at the parking garage. Walk the last several blocks. If you are being followed, don't go down to the garage. I'll understand if you don't show. All this was like a lecture. The key was taking the necessary time -- one to two hours to get there. Be patient, serene. Trust the prearrangements. There was no fallback meeting place or time. If we both didn't show, there would be no meeting.
Felt said that if he had something for me, he could get me a message. He quizzed me about my daily routine, what came to my apartment, the mailbox, etc. The Post was delivered outside my apartment door. I did have a subscription to the New York Times. A number of people in my apartment building near Dupont Circle got the Times. The copies were left in the lobby with the apartment number. Mine was No. 617, and it was written clearly on the outside of each paper in marker pen. Felt said if there was something important he could get to my New York Times -- how, I never knew. Page 20 would be circled, and the hands of a clock in the lower part of the page would be drawn to indicate the time of the meeting that night, probably 2 a.m., in the same Rosslyn parking garage.
The relationship was a compact of trust; nothing about it was to be discussed or shared with anyone, he said.
How he could have made a daily observation of my balcony is still a mystery to me. At the time, before the era of intensive security, the back of the building was not enclosed, so anyone could have driven in the back alley to observe my balcony. In addition, my balcony and the back of the apartment complex faced onto a courtyard or back area that was shared with a number of other apartment or office buildings in the area. My balcony could have been seen from dozens of apartments or offices, as best I can tell.
A number of embassies were located in the area. The Iraqi Embassy was down the street, and I thought it possible that the FBI had surveillance or listening posts nearby. Could Felt have had the counterintelligence agents regularly report on the status of my flag and flowerpot? That seems highly unlikely, if not impossible.
A KINSHIP: Felt Knew Reporters' Plight
In the course of this and other discussions, I was somewhat apologetic for plaguing him and being such a nag, but I explained that we had nowhere else to turn. Carl and I had obtained a list of everyone who worked for Nixon's reelection committee and were frequently going out into the night knocking on the doors of these people to try to interview them. I explained to Felt that we were getting lots of doors slammed in our faces. There also were lots of frightened looks. I was frustrated.
Felt said I should not worry about pushing him. He had done his time as a street agent, interviewing people. The FBI, like the press, had to rely on voluntary cooperation. Most people wanted to help the FBI, but the FBI knew about rejection. Felt perhaps tolerated my aggressiveness and pushy approach because he had been the same way himself when he was younger, once talking his way into an interview with Hoover and telling him of his ambition to become a special agent in charge of an FBI field office.
It was an unusual message, emphatically encouraging me to get in his face.
With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast-breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time to consider the motives of our sources. What was important was whether the information checked out and whether it was true. We were swimming, really living, in the fast-moving rapids. There was no time to ask why they were talking or whether they had an ax to grind.
I was thankful for any morsel or information, confirmation or assistance Felt gave me while Carl and I were attempting to understand the many-headed monster of Watergate. Because of his position virtually atop the chief investigative agency, his words and guidance had immense, at times even staggering, authority. The weight, authenticity and his restraint were more important than his design, if he had one.
It was only later after Nixon resigned that I began to wonder why Felt had talked when doing so carried substantial risks for him and the FBI. Had he been exposed early on, Felt would have been no hero. Technically, it was illegal to talk about grand jury information or FBI files -- or it could have been made to look illegal.
Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons. The young eager-beaver patrol of White House underlings, best exemplified by John W. Dean III, was odious to him.
His reverence for Hoover and strict bureau procedure made Gray's appointment as director all the more shocking. Felt obviously concluded he was Hoover's logical successor.
And the former World War II spy hunter liked the game. I suspect in his mind I was his agent. He beat it into my head: secrecy at all cost, no loose talk, no talk about him at all, no indication to anyone that such a secret source existed.
In our book "All the President's Men," Carl and I described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimize his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded, "Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost."
Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: "I have to do this my way."
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
From the blog Confederate Yankee:
Buried Alive By Illegals
Quite an accurate title, don't you think? Sadly, that title could describe dozens, if not hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands) of situations across American today.
"Buried alive by illegals" applies literally in this case, and figuratively when discussing the gutting of American hospitals of billions of dollars by illegals swarming across our poorly controlled borders in an unchecked invasion divisions strong. The threat to the healthcare of legal American working men and women and legal immigrants became so overwhelming that taxpayers like you and I are paying a one billion dollar bailout of local hospitals nationwide.
This is money taken away from our children; money that could have been used to vaccinate our rural and inner city poor against crippling, potentially fatal childhood diseases, money that could have helped our working and middle class parents find quality affordable childcare so that they can be sure that their kids are in a safe and supportive environment while the parents work hard to give them a better life.
Every illegal alien crossing the border to abuse our overburdened public assistance programs is stealing from out poor, our weak, our needy--and many illegals steal far more than social services.
Among the legions pouring over our poorly defended borders are all manner of criminals, from shoplifters and petty criminals to rapists, murderers, brutal narcotics organizations and human slave-traders.
American jails are overflowing with the flotsam and jetsam of other nations. Attacks on Border Patrol agents are increasing at a record pace, and public safety for increasingly in doubt along the border. The situation is so bad that the U.S. State Department has been forced to issue warnings because of heavily-armed narcotics traffickers running drugs across the border.
What's worse is that the internal policies within government agencies hamper the apprehension of illegals to such an extent that Border Patrol agents are rarely allowed to pursue and capture illegal aliens in almost any situation.
Government bureaucrats and lawyers are so worried about liability lawsuits that they open the borders not only to criminals flowing over the borders, but terrorists potentially armed with vanloads of just about anything.
Bioweapons like anthrax, chemical weapons like cyclosarin, radiological "dirty" bombs--all of these can easily be driven into the heart of San Diego or other American cities and detonated, because elements of the government from the Border Patrol, to the Department of Homeland Security, to the House of Representatives, to the Senate, to the White House, have all made a conscious decision not to pursue illegal aliens, not to pursue potential terrorists, not to pursue vehicles even when they set off radiation detectors.
Please tell me what your threshold in dollars and blood is, Uncle Sam.
How much money should we allow illegals to siphon away from our childcare and education system, Senator Clinton? How many hospitals must close under the weight of illegal's unpaid medical bills, Dr. Howard Dean? How many Criminals are you going to allow to waltz across our borders and either sell drugs or detonate in our schoolyards, Director Chertoff?
How many Americans need to be literally and figuratively need to be buried alive by illegals before you'll act, President Bush?
Buried Alive By Illegals
Quite an accurate title, don't you think? Sadly, that title could describe dozens, if not hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands) of situations across American today.
"Buried alive by illegals" applies literally in this case, and figuratively when discussing the gutting of American hospitals of billions of dollars by illegals swarming across our poorly controlled borders in an unchecked invasion divisions strong. The threat to the healthcare of legal American working men and women and legal immigrants became so overwhelming that taxpayers like you and I are paying a one billion dollar bailout of local hospitals nationwide.
This is money taken away from our children; money that could have been used to vaccinate our rural and inner city poor against crippling, potentially fatal childhood diseases, money that could have helped our working and middle class parents find quality affordable childcare so that they can be sure that their kids are in a safe and supportive environment while the parents work hard to give them a better life.
Every illegal alien crossing the border to abuse our overburdened public assistance programs is stealing from out poor, our weak, our needy--and many illegals steal far more than social services.
Among the legions pouring over our poorly defended borders are all manner of criminals, from shoplifters and petty criminals to rapists, murderers, brutal narcotics organizations and human slave-traders.
American jails are overflowing with the flotsam and jetsam of other nations. Attacks on Border Patrol agents are increasing at a record pace, and public safety for increasingly in doubt along the border. The situation is so bad that the U.S. State Department has been forced to issue warnings because of heavily-armed narcotics traffickers running drugs across the border.
What's worse is that the internal policies within government agencies hamper the apprehension of illegals to such an extent that Border Patrol agents are rarely allowed to pursue and capture illegal aliens in almost any situation.
“If anyone runs from us, we don’t chase them,” said one California-based border patrol agent who requested anonymity. “We could have information that there is a nuke in the back of a van but we don’t have authority to chase them,” the agent said. “We’ve had radiation pagers go off and we’re still not allowed [by our supervisors] to give chase,” he said. “They are scared to death something will go wrong and there will be a huge liability.”Shades of Norm Mineta.
Government bureaucrats and lawyers are so worried about liability lawsuits that they open the borders not only to criminals flowing over the borders, but terrorists potentially armed with vanloads of just about anything.
Bioweapons like anthrax, chemical weapons like cyclosarin, radiological "dirty" bombs--all of these can easily be driven into the heart of San Diego or other American cities and detonated, because elements of the government from the Border Patrol, to the Department of Homeland Security, to the House of Representatives, to the Senate, to the White House, have all made a conscious decision not to pursue illegal aliens, not to pursue potential terrorists, not to pursue vehicles even when they set off radiation detectors.
Please tell me what your threshold in dollars and blood is, Uncle Sam.
How much money should we allow illegals to siphon away from our childcare and education system, Senator Clinton? How many hospitals must close under the weight of illegal's unpaid medical bills, Dr. Howard Dean? How many Criminals are you going to allow to waltz across our borders and either sell drugs or detonate in our schoolyards, Director Chertoff?
How many Americans need to be literally and figuratively need to be buried alive by illegals before you'll act, President Bush?
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
From the blog Irish Eagle:
Bono on Bush
Long extract from Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas in this week's (London) Sunday Times. Probably nothing really new here, but Bono admits to liking President Bush and finding him funny.
I was in a photo with President Bush because he'd put $10 billion over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Development Bank.
I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so, too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered, "There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan."
I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humour. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the free world, and him waving back.
I say: "You're pretty popular here!"
He goes: "It wasn"t always so . . ." – Oh really? – "Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb."
Although offering anything other than sneers at President Bush will lose Bono a lot of street cred with the Hollywood/celebrity set, I think Bono's praise for Jesse Helms has to be far more surprising.
Jesse Helms did me and everyone working on the global Aids emergency a great favour when he came out in our support. It was a great irony for me to find myself feeling such affection for this old cold warrior.
He did an incredible thing: he publicly repented for the way he had thought about HIV/Aids. Politicians rarely do that. He really changed the way people on the right thought about this disease.
Bono also admits that the left is not necessarily more "his friend" than the right in his mission to try to help tackle Africa's economic and health problems.
I know, I know – Bono's an overbearing egomaniac, but so are many mega-rich rock and movie stars. I think he's at least genuinely concerned with the people of Africa and doing his best to try to come to some understanding of what will make the place better. And he's obviously got an open mind, which is more than can be said of most wealthy celebrities.
Bono on Bush
Long extract from Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas in this week's (London) Sunday Times. Probably nothing really new here, but Bono admits to liking President Bush and finding him funny.
I was in a photo with President Bush because he'd put $10 billion over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Development Bank.
I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so, too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered, "There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan."
I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humour. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the free world, and him waving back.
I say: "You're pretty popular here!"
He goes: "It wasn"t always so . . ." – Oh really? – "Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb."
Although offering anything other than sneers at President Bush will lose Bono a lot of street cred with the Hollywood/celebrity set, I think Bono's praise for Jesse Helms has to be far more surprising.
Jesse Helms did me and everyone working on the global Aids emergency a great favour when he came out in our support. It was a great irony for me to find myself feeling such affection for this old cold warrior.
He did an incredible thing: he publicly repented for the way he had thought about HIV/Aids. Politicians rarely do that. He really changed the way people on the right thought about this disease.
Bono also admits that the left is not necessarily more "his friend" than the right in his mission to try to help tackle Africa's economic and health problems.
I know, I know – Bono's an overbearing egomaniac, but so are many mega-rich rock and movie stars. I think he's at least genuinely concerned with the people of Africa and doing his best to try to come to some understanding of what will make the place better. And he's obviously got an open mind, which is more than can be said of most wealthy celebrities.
Monday, May 30, 2005
No Faith in This Force
By Orson Scott Card
Memo to would-be Jedis: in the new movie, the knights are elitist, dictatorial, and unconvinced that good is an absolute.
Star Wars fans are legendary for their loyalty. I saw plenty of that in the 9:45 p.m. showing of Revenge of the Sith on its opening day. They had waited in line to get tickets to the very first showing at midnight the night before, and then saw it twice more before the opening day was over.
Many had obviously memorized all the howlingly bad lines. They began laughing out loud just before the line was said, and applauded at the wretched “emotional” moments in the movie.
But then, walking out of the theater, they fiercely defended the movie against anyone who dared to speak against it. It might be badly written, but it’s their badly written movie.
Some fans are so loyal they have even adopted “Jedi” as their official religion on census reports and The Force as their equivalent of a “personal savior.”
In a way, this is kind of bittersweet. It shows that the universal hunger for meaning is still prevalent, even in our agnostic era, which is encouraging; but these true believers will eventually realize that the philosophy behind Star Wars is every bit as sophisticated as the science — in other words, mostly wrong and always silly.
It’s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it’s something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.
How Does the Force Stack Up As a Religion?
As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.
Good and evil are in a constant and nearly equipoised tug-of-war in the Star Wars series. But in the more recent movies, it seems that the goal of good people is not to wipe out evil, but rather for there to be a balance between the Light and Dark sides of the Force.
The new movie itself asserts a kind of equivalence. When the evil Palpatine says, “Good is a point of view--the Sith and the Jedi are almost the same,” we can dismiss this moral relativism as part of the deception of the dark side.
But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad!
I suspect that Lucas realized, after writing "Good is a point of view," that all his friends actually believed that. So he had to make it clear that moral relativism was the right way after all—so he had Obi-Wan say that absolutism was a Sith thing, even though in the actual story, the best of the Jedis show an unbending commitment to absolute Good.
It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.
The Jedi: A Ruling Elite
Revenge of the Sith gives us our first chance to see the Jedi council as anything more than an incredibly boring business conference that we were forced to attend between action scenes. Not as if the Jedi masters discussed ideas — it was still a business meeting, in which they told each other obvious things and then made decisions by a sort of instant consensus that is never achieved in the real world except in really scary dictatorships. Clearly they were modeled after an adolescent view of the Knights of the Round Table.
But they aren’t a political or military group, despite the talk of government, of war and peace. They are also monks of a martial order, who have trained each other and who live under a strict religious discipline.
The Jedi may claim to be in favor of democracy, but in fact they function as a ruling elite, making their decisions among themselves. They occasionally submit to the authority of the legislature, and they seem to respect the rule of law, though whose law it’s hard to say. By and large, however, they decide among themselves what they’re going to do and when it’s OK to break the law and defy the civilian authority.
They are, in fact, utterly anti-democratic, like a militia that owes nothing to civilian authority. Eventually there’s going to be a coup.
And even though they train like crazy to learn to master their power, none of their discussions as a council are devoted to considering what is right and wrong. They simply know the rules and, except for those being tempted by the Dark Side, they never question them.
They have way too much power.
There are other ways that the actual story subverts the official “religion” of the Force. Take the idea that you become a Jedi by training. Well, sure — but you are only chosen to train for the Jedity if you have some kind of inborn power.
You can dedicate your life to serving the Force if you want, but you can’t become a Jedi warrior-priest unless you were born with the power and anointed as some Jedi’s apprentice.
In other words, they may seem very inclusive—one Jedi from every species (except for humans, who are way overrepresented)—but in fact they’re a self-perpetuating aristocracy.
Who Are the Bad Guys?
So instead of looking at the storyline of Episode III as a conflict between good and evil, you could read it as a conflict between the entrenched aristocracy trying to preserve their monopoly on power, and an ambitious upstart, who is determined to break that monopoly and take control for himself. The only reason we don’t see it that way is because the other side is so much more evil. But the body count left behind by Jedi knights is — or should be — disturbing.
In other words, despite whatever political message Lucas might or might not have intended, the Jedi are the smug orthodoxy, always congratulating themselves on their rectitude. No wonder the whole senate seems thrilled when the new Emperor announces the fall of the Jedi. They don’t know yet how evil the Emperor will be, but they know they don’t mind having the meddlesome Jedi out of the way.
A Conservative Religion
The overt religion of Revenge of the Sith is a kind of democratic pantheism, but the real religion is for the privileged few, who get to decide what’s best for everybody else and then enforce their own rules, all in the name of “the Force.”
How did a nice Protestant boy like George Lucas come up with an official religion more rigidly hierarchical and doctrinally uniform than Catholicism?
It’s the religion of the people who are Chosen, and you aren’t ready to have a share of the power until we say you are. Quite the opposite of, say, the Quakers or even the Puritans, who eschewed permanent religious hierarchies.
Even the afterlife is reserved for the few, the proud, the Jedi. As we learned at the end of Return of the Jedi, even the most dark-side-serving of ex-Jedi mass murderers can, with a single “good” act like refusing to murder his own son (which even the most evil men generally avoid), earn the right to eternal life as the equal of true saints like Yoda and Obi-Wan.
But not one of the others who died in the war against the evil Sith emperor was similarly granted a life after death—or at least, if they were, they apparently weren’t allowed on camera at the end of Return of the Jedi. Maybe the non-Jedi had to stay in their own segregated section of rock-'n-roll heaven.
No! That’s not fair! The Jedi devote their whole life to the service of others!
But they’re not chosen on the basis of their virtue—for all we know, there are millions of people more virtuous and unselfish than they. And since they alone get to determine what “the good of others” actually consists of (though it does seem to include a lot of killing), how are the Jedi distinguishable from any number of other dictatorial groups that justify their actions by claiming that they do it all for the little guy?
So it might not be such a good thing if the Star Wars films become the first movies to lead to a real-world religion.
Of course, all this quibbling would be moot if, in fact, the Jedi religion actually worked—if people could tap into the Force and do the miracles that the Jedi routinely perform.
But it doesn’t work. No matter how intensely you believe, you can’t leap tall buildings with a single bound or drive a car with your eyes closed.
So if a religion is known to be fictional, trains its exclusive practitioners to be killing machines, and doesn’t actually work in the real world, why do people call themselves Jedi?
As a protest against religion in general?
As a yearning for power?
Or as a dream of a world in which virtue, however it’s defined, can actually do something tangible against the evil in the universe?
By Orson Scott Card
Memo to would-be Jedis: in the new movie, the knights are elitist, dictatorial, and unconvinced that good is an absolute.
Star Wars fans are legendary for their loyalty. I saw plenty of that in the 9:45 p.m. showing of Revenge of the Sith on its opening day. They had waited in line to get tickets to the very first showing at midnight the night before, and then saw it twice more before the opening day was over.
Many had obviously memorized all the howlingly bad lines. They began laughing out loud just before the line was said, and applauded at the wretched “emotional” moments in the movie.
But then, walking out of the theater, they fiercely defended the movie against anyone who dared to speak against it. It might be badly written, but it’s their badly written movie.
Some fans are so loyal they have even adopted “Jedi” as their official religion on census reports and The Force as their equivalent of a “personal savior.”
In a way, this is kind of bittersweet. It shows that the universal hunger for meaning is still prevalent, even in our agnostic era, which is encouraging; but these true believers will eventually realize that the philosophy behind Star Wars is every bit as sophisticated as the science — in other words, mostly wrong and always silly.
It’s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it’s something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.
How Does the Force Stack Up As a Religion?
As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.
Good and evil are in a constant and nearly equipoised tug-of-war in the Star Wars series. But in the more recent movies, it seems that the goal of good people is not to wipe out evil, but rather for there to be a balance between the Light and Dark sides of the Force.
The new movie itself asserts a kind of equivalence. When the evil Palpatine says, “Good is a point of view--the Sith and the Jedi are almost the same,” we can dismiss this moral relativism as part of the deception of the dark side.
But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad!
I suspect that Lucas realized, after writing "Good is a point of view," that all his friends actually believed that. So he had to make it clear that moral relativism was the right way after all—so he had Obi-Wan say that absolutism was a Sith thing, even though in the actual story, the best of the Jedis show an unbending commitment to absolute Good.
It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.
The Jedi: A Ruling Elite
Revenge of the Sith gives us our first chance to see the Jedi council as anything more than an incredibly boring business conference that we were forced to attend between action scenes. Not as if the Jedi masters discussed ideas — it was still a business meeting, in which they told each other obvious things and then made decisions by a sort of instant consensus that is never achieved in the real world except in really scary dictatorships. Clearly they were modeled after an adolescent view of the Knights of the Round Table.
But they aren’t a political or military group, despite the talk of government, of war and peace. They are also monks of a martial order, who have trained each other and who live under a strict religious discipline.
The Jedi may claim to be in favor of democracy, but in fact they function as a ruling elite, making their decisions among themselves. They occasionally submit to the authority of the legislature, and they seem to respect the rule of law, though whose law it’s hard to say. By and large, however, they decide among themselves what they’re going to do and when it’s OK to break the law and defy the civilian authority.
They are, in fact, utterly anti-democratic, like a militia that owes nothing to civilian authority. Eventually there’s going to be a coup.
And even though they train like crazy to learn to master their power, none of their discussions as a council are devoted to considering what is right and wrong. They simply know the rules and, except for those being tempted by the Dark Side, they never question them.
They have way too much power.
There are other ways that the actual story subverts the official “religion” of the Force. Take the idea that you become a Jedi by training. Well, sure — but you are only chosen to train for the Jedity if you have some kind of inborn power.
You can dedicate your life to serving the Force if you want, but you can’t become a Jedi warrior-priest unless you were born with the power and anointed as some Jedi’s apprentice.
In other words, they may seem very inclusive—one Jedi from every species (except for humans, who are way overrepresented)—but in fact they’re a self-perpetuating aristocracy.
Who Are the Bad Guys?
So instead of looking at the storyline of Episode III as a conflict between good and evil, you could read it as a conflict between the entrenched aristocracy trying to preserve their monopoly on power, and an ambitious upstart, who is determined to break that monopoly and take control for himself. The only reason we don’t see it that way is because the other side is so much more evil. But the body count left behind by Jedi knights is — or should be — disturbing.
In other words, despite whatever political message Lucas might or might not have intended, the Jedi are the smug orthodoxy, always congratulating themselves on their rectitude. No wonder the whole senate seems thrilled when the new Emperor announces the fall of the Jedi. They don’t know yet how evil the Emperor will be, but they know they don’t mind having the meddlesome Jedi out of the way.
A Conservative Religion
The overt religion of Revenge of the Sith is a kind of democratic pantheism, but the real religion is for the privileged few, who get to decide what’s best for everybody else and then enforce their own rules, all in the name of “the Force.”
How did a nice Protestant boy like George Lucas come up with an official religion more rigidly hierarchical and doctrinally uniform than Catholicism?
It’s the religion of the people who are Chosen, and you aren’t ready to have a share of the power until we say you are. Quite the opposite of, say, the Quakers or even the Puritans, who eschewed permanent religious hierarchies.
Even the afterlife is reserved for the few, the proud, the Jedi. As we learned at the end of Return of the Jedi, even the most dark-side-serving of ex-Jedi mass murderers can, with a single “good” act like refusing to murder his own son (which even the most evil men generally avoid), earn the right to eternal life as the equal of true saints like Yoda and Obi-Wan.
But not one of the others who died in the war against the evil Sith emperor was similarly granted a life after death—or at least, if they were, they apparently weren’t allowed on camera at the end of Return of the Jedi. Maybe the non-Jedi had to stay in their own segregated section of rock-'n-roll heaven.
No! That’s not fair! The Jedi devote their whole life to the service of others!
But they’re not chosen on the basis of their virtue—for all we know, there are millions of people more virtuous and unselfish than they. And since they alone get to determine what “the good of others” actually consists of (though it does seem to include a lot of killing), how are the Jedi distinguishable from any number of other dictatorial groups that justify their actions by claiming that they do it all for the little guy?
So it might not be such a good thing if the Star Wars films become the first movies to lead to a real-world religion.
Of course, all this quibbling would be moot if, in fact, the Jedi religion actually worked—if people could tap into the Force and do the miracles that the Jedi routinely perform.
But it doesn’t work. No matter how intensely you believe, you can’t leap tall buildings with a single bound or drive a car with your eyes closed.
So if a religion is known to be fictional, trains its exclusive practitioners to be killing machines, and doesn’t actually work in the real world, why do people call themselves Jedi?
As a protest against religion in general?
As a yearning for power?
Or as a dream of a world in which virtue, however it’s defined, can actually do something tangible against the evil in the universe?
Excellent U2 piece from last year, by Robert Hilburn.
The Songwriters - U2 - 'Where Craft Ends and Spirit Begins'
In a singular process of collaboration, U2 puts mood and emotion first. The words follow.
Los Angeles Times, August 08, 2004
Robert Hilburn
(New York) "It's one of the most banal couplets I've ever heard," Bono says sheepishly about the words he wrote for one of U2's best-known songs. " 'I want to run, I want to hide...' That's not very interesting, but you know what? People don't hear the couplets when we play the song.
"They hear something else in the music. They hear a band talking about a special place, a better place, and asking if the audience wants to go there with them."
Bono, who writes most of U2's lyrics, is keenly aware that the music's power often comes less from his pen than from the sweeping sonic foundation built by the band.
"Feelings are stronger than ideas or words in a song," he says, pacing the floor of his Central Park West apartment, offering a contrarian view of pop songwriting.
"You can have 1,000 ideas, but unless you capture an emotion, it's an essay. I'm always writing speeches or articles for causes I believe in. That's probably what I would have done if I wasn't in music, but that's not songwriting."
The comments are surprising from a man who devotes so much of his time to ideas -- from the spiritually tinged themes that underlie many U2 songs to his high-profile crusade to get wealthy nations to forgive Third World debt.
"Songwriting comes from a different place," he continues. "Music is the language of the spirit. I think ideas and words are our excuse as songwriters to allow our heart or our spirit to run free. That's when magic happens."
It happens so often for U2 that the group has come closer to matching the quality and mass appeal of the Beatles over the last 25 years than any other band.
This is pop music at its most ambitious -- personal and independent enough to satisfy discerning listeners, yet open and accessible enough to pack stadiums. Though the group has experimented with electronica and other contemporary sounds, the essence of U2 is classic rock 'n' roll.
You won't find lots of humor or party toss-offs in U2. The Irish quartet's flurry of Top 40 hits, including "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "One," mostly are soaring anthems built around the same message of brotherhood that characterized the Beatles' later years. Yet U2 arrives at songs in a much different way.
John Lennon or Paul McCartney usually came up with songs and then taught them to George Harrison and Ringo Starr. But U2 collaborates to a degree that is rare -- a process that depends on the singular chemistry of the four musicians.
Bono and guitarist the Edge bring ideas into the studio -- a title, the trace of a melody or a catchy riff -- then bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen join in the actual construction of the songs. The grueling give and take sometimes stretches for weeks as the musicians toss ideas back and forth, equal partners in the search for an emotion that seems fresh and deeply rooted.
When the marathon sessions are going well, Mullen says, the rehearsal studio feels like a playground. When they're going badly, it feels like a boxing ring.
"We're tough guys," Clayton says. "We know we'll get there eventually. A lot of it is perspiration. You just have to put in the hours and do your time." The Edge is fond of repeating the band's private joke that it's "songwriting by accident."
"It's more like Miles Davis than the Beatles in a way," Bono says as he keeps pacing the hardwood floor of the sun-filled living room, whose minimalist furnishings reflect little of the flash of the typical rock star lifestyle.
Only after the band finds that powerful emotion, be it blissful or melancholy, does he begin applying lyrics. Sometimes he'll draw phrases or lines from the notebook he carries with him, even when he's on holiday or meeting with world leaders such as President Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Occasionally, he'll work from a finished lyric he's brought into the studio.
Mostly, he tries to capture the spontaneous feeling the music inspires in him -- a creative strategy he learned listening to Lennon's first two solo albums, Plastic Ono Band and Imagine.
"He showed that the best way to unlock yourself as a writer was to simply tell the truth," Bono says, settling on the couch, while his wife, Ali, and 13-year-old daughter, Eve, have breakfast nearby. "When you've got a song to write or a blank page, just describe what is on your mind -- not what you'd like to be on your mind. If you feel you have nothing to say, your first line then is 'I have nothing to say.' "
A language all his own
Bono's improvisation in the studio often starts with him just muttering sounds that seem to fit the flow of the music being created -- "Bono-eze," his bandmates call it.
"When Bono starts going through his Bono-eze, it can change what we're playing and take the song in a different direction," Mullen says. "If he's doing something very intense, it might not even be what he's saying, but the way he's behaving, the way he's throwing the microphone around. The energy and intensity helps shape the song."
Gradually, Bono begins changing sounds into words and lines, trying to articulate the feelings the music stirs in him, instinctively drawing upon a storehouse of experiences and beliefs.
Though he didn't go past high school, he's an avid reader and loves spending evenings talking to everyone from poets to politicians. All of this feeds his writing, invariably giving U2's music a level of substance that is rare among bestselling pop acts.
In one of the band's earliest songs, "Rejoice," he outlined his personal goal, which reflects the group's strong Christian spirituality: "I can't change the world, but I can change the world in me."
Unlike many great songwriters, he doesn't spend much time editing his words. He even declares that "craft and taste can be the enemy of songwriting" because they encourage you to follow certain rules, rather than simply following your emotions -- not that he doesn't sometimes wish he had gone back over the lyrics.
Take "Where the Streets Have No Name," the 1987 vision of a world free of religious and racial divide.
The song, from the Grammy-winning The Joshua Tree album, is an adrenaline rush of guitar, bass and drums whose galloping rhythm and graceful images convey the sense of the open road and journey so well that it's no wonder a car manufacturer has offered millions to use it in a commercial.
It begins:
I want to run
I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls
That hold me inside
I want to reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
When a sheet of paper with the lyrics is handed to him, Bono smiles. He may dismiss that opening couplet, but he can't deny the power unleashed every time the band plays the song.
"We can be in the middle of the worst gig in our lives, but when we go into that song, everything changes," he says. "The audience is on its feet, singing along with every word. It's like God suddenly walks through the room. It's the point where craft ends and spirit begins. How else do you explain it?"
Moving with the music
When a band's body of work includes such elegant songs as "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "Running to Stand Still" and "With or Without You," you know Bono is drawing an awfully fine line when he says the songwriting craft isn't important.
Believe it, U2 employs plenty of craft. Their strength is that they don't rely on it. One reason veteran songwriters, including such great craftsmen as McCartney, sometimes get into trouble is that they start settling for craft. They'll put a song on an album just because it has a strong melody or a clever line.
U2 holds itself to stricter standards.
That was apparent as the band put final touches on the Pop album on a winter afternoon in 1996. With the deadline just a week away, everything was open to change.
That evening, Bono wanted to tinker with a few words in one song. Sitting in a chair in the control room in Dublin, where the band writes and records most of its songs, he sang the new line as an instrumental track played.
He looked around the room for a reaction. Clayton and Mullen both thought he needed to put more feeling in the vocal, so he tried it again. This time he delivered the lines with such passion that he stood up and moved with the music.
Given Bono's confidence on stage, it was revealing to see how vulnerable he was, waiting for his bandmates' verdict. A bit nervously, he suggested he might need to change a couple of more words. No, no, they said, the words and vocal were fine. He looked relieved.
In the months of making an album, the other musicians are frequently challenged the same way Bono was during that session. They thrive on their collective, organic way of building songs.
"At various times, we've tried to stick to conventional songwriting," says Mullen from Dublin. "But after a few months we see it's not working. We need to dismantle the ideas and start again."
Adds the Edge: "My worst nightmare is sounding 'professional.' I think we work best when we keep moving into the unknown."
Working by instinct
U2's unorthodox songwriting style was born out of necessity.
When the band members came together in high school, they weren't good enough at their instruments to play convincing versions of the hits of the day. To hide their inexperience, they came up with their own songs.
"From fairly early on, it became clear to us that we had no idea about songwriting technique," the Edge says. "Our way into songwriting was to dream it up. We'd try to imagine how others might do the song, the Clash or Lennon or the Jam. Instinct was everything for us, and it really still is."
Along with Bono's absorbing vocals, the Edge's guitar lines became the band's first distinctive feature.
"I like a nice ringing sound on guitar, and on most of my chords I find two strings and make them ring the same note, so it's almost like a 12-string sound," he said years ago. "So for E, I might play a B, E, E and B."
Because he didn't like the sound of the low strings on his Gibson Explorer guitar, Edge concentrated on the upper strings, giving the music engaging trebly overtones. It was the bright, clarion cry of his guitar that injected a rich, irresistible quality in "I Will Follow," the centerpiece of the group's debut album, 1980's Boy.
The lyrics of the song, with their "I was lost, but I am found" imagery, are commonplace on the printed page, but they soar in the energy and youthful optimism of the track.
The band members didn't even think of themselves as songwriters until the third album, 1983's War.
Before starting that project, Edge, the group's most accomplished musician, spent three weeks trying to put together some musical ideas so they wouldn't be starting strictly from scratch in the rehearsal hall. Two of the ideas led to "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day," songs that lifted the band to new creative heights.
"My job is to find an image that sort of evokes the music," Bono says, "and it was easy with 'New Year's Day.' The piano notes on the song were icy, and Adam's bass line told you it's outdoors, not indoors."
As he stood in the studio on the day in 1982 that U2 was finalizing "New Year's Day," Bono had a mental picture of Lech Walesa, the Polish Solidarity leader, standing in the snow on New Year's Day, leading a workers strike. It resonated with him.
The band members had gone through some problems, and they weren't sure they wanted to continue together. Their spiritual values seemed at odds with the rock lifestyle, but they finally realized they could use the music to share their beliefs. So it felt like the band too was beginning again.
Against a gentle musical backdrop, Bono pieced together a message about starting over and solidarity, a message of innocence and hope.
With "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the other key song on the War album, the idea for the song as well as the title and basic chords came from the Edge. The melody and a sort of militaristic, Clash-like frame were added in the studio.
"The idea was to contrast Bloody Sunday, where 13 peaceful Irish protesters were killed by British paratroopers, with an Easter Sunday," Bono says. "I had started to discover the principle of nonviolence at the time, and there's also a piece of that in there."
The song's opening lines:
I can't believe the news today
I can't close my eyes and make it go away
How long, how long must we sing this song?
By the time War was released, U2 was being widely hailed as the best young rock band in years. Yet their songwriting was still in question. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day" were good starts. But where was their "Let It Be"?
They found it the next year.
Blues and prayers
A salute to the nonviolence doctrine of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "Pride (In the Name of Love)" was the group's first Top 40 U.S. single. In it, the craft and spirit came together.
U2 was working by then with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who encouraged the band to adopt even grander, more atmospheric musical textures.
In "Pride," the music felt as majestic as cathedral bells as Bono sang these lines:
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride
The band's masterpiece -- and the first pure rock album to win a best album Grammy since the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- was just months away.
U2 had become fascinated with America on the tours that preceded The Joshua Tree album.
Where early musical influences included Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen and a lot of punk and post-punk outfits, from the Clash and Sex Pistols to Television and Patti Smith, the time in the U.S. led them to explore the rootsy blues and country sounds that had contributed so much to the birth of rock.
Bono read his way through tours, devouring the works of such American novelists, playwrights and poets as Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg, among hundreds. It all helped him become more intimate and immediate as a writer. And the Scriptures were, as they'd been from the beginning, a constant source of inspiration.
The fruits of the band's exploration came together in The Joshua Tree, whose "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" picked up a Grammy nomination for record of the year.
Like "Where the Streets Have No Name," "Looking For" was epic rock, built around Edge's exhilarating guitar and the march-like feel of Mullen's drumming and the seductive push of Clayton's bass notes. In movie terms, it was in every way a widescreen, Technicolor affair.
Bono's lyrics outlined the tale of search for satisfaction and salvation:
I have run I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
"I was always interested in the character of David in the Bible because he was such a screw-up. It's a great amusement to me that the people God chose to use in the Scriptures were all liars, cheaters, adulterers, murderers," Bono says. "I don't know which of the activities I was involved in at the time, but I certainly related to David," he adds with a laugh. "I was writing my psalm."
What intrigued him was what he felt was a link between the Psalms and the blues, which he had just discovered.
"In the Psalms, David questions God, 'Where are you when I need you?' Blues has this sort of honesty that gospel music doesn't have. Gospel music is the stuff of faith. It tells you about where you are going. The blues tells you where you are. God is much more interested in the blues because you get that honesty."
The album sold 20 million copies around the world.
Rather than repeat the anthem-ish nature of The Joshua Tree and 1988's Rattle and Hum, U2 went in the early '90s to Berlin, where they spent agonizing months updating their sound with darker, more electronic elements.
"We were really at a low ebb," the Edge recalls. "Everyone was in grumpy humor. People were harboring serious misgivings about what was going down, and the mood was getting more and more negative."
Yet the process yielded another landmark album, Achtung Baby, that signaled a new direction, one in which the lyrics and music took on edgier and less predictable dimensions.
Bono says he felt his vocabulary as a singer had been limited because only certain words and tones worked with his tenor vocals. But in Berlin, he learned he could expand his expressive range by lowering his voice through the use of such devices as distortion pedals.
"It gives you new language," he says, joking about how Tom Waits can go so many places in his songs with his growly voice. "The tone of your voice dictates the lyrics. Who'd know that?"
The album delivered a signature U2 song, the ballad "One," whose history dramatizes to him the gap between what's expressed in words and what is conveyed through the music. Though Bono thinks of it as a bitter statement, the music is so healing, audiences find it comforting.
"It amazes me when people tell me they played it at their wedding or for comfort at a funeral," Bono says. "I go to myself, 'Are you crazy? It's about breaking up.' "
While he sometimes wishes the band's songwriting process gave him more time to write the lyrics, he still thinks the system comes up with the best songs.
"When I look at our first 10 years, I just hear unfinished work, lyrics we never finished because we ran out of studio time," he says of his contributions. "I hear 'Bad,' and see what's not there. I just see a list of failures."
Still, he wouldn't change anything about the way U2 works. For all his personal frustrations and the band's uncertain moments, they all know they've found a way to connect with audiences.
Eno, one of pop's most sophisticated observers, is struck by the group's commitment to one another and the music.
"They really are a group, the only real group I've ever met," he once said. "They realize that intuitively, and there is a great loyalty, perhaps because they realize that none of them would have been a musician without the others...I can't imagine what kind of bands they would have ended up in."
The rule on rules
Bono and his family live most of the year in Dublin, but he enjoys the energy of New York.
Even though he's been visiting the city for two decades, he still takes delight in pointing out some of the landmarks as he sits in the passenger seat of a van headed to a meeting on easing world hunger. As the driver navigates through traffic, Bono shoves the new U2 album into the CD player and pounds his fist on the dashboard as the music blasts through the speakers. There's a driving, rock 'n' roll vitality to the music, which is due this fall; a freshness that you hardly expect from bands in their third decade.
But U2 has been able to remain both current and relevant. They get airplay on college and alt-rock radio stations and find their "Beautiful Day" at John Kerry campaign rallies.
As the vocal starts, he sings along. But it's so noisy in the car you can't really make out the words. Bono's expression, however, tells you he's very proud of this album. He suddenly stops singing and begins chuckling as he turns down the volume. "Did you hear that last verse?...You never write a verse like that. That was definitely improvised. But there are other lines in the song I wrote ahead of time."
When the songs are finished, Bono looks at the disc.
"Lou Reed is a friend and I once asked if he had advice for a young poet, and, in his usual cryptic way, he summed it up, 'Break rhyme occasionally.' "
Bono laughs as the van pulls to a stop.
"You know, songwriting really is a mysterious process...because we're asking people to expose themselves. It's like open heart surgery in some way. You're looking for real, raw emotions, and you don't find that by sticking to the rules."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five songs for the ages
While the epic nature of U2's musical landscape is what first catches the ear, it's also the compelling themes that make the songs stick with us.
1."Where the Streets Have No Name"/"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" 1987. It's a bit of a cheat to list two songs, but the tunes from The Joshua Tree have always seemed to be closely connected expressions of spiritual search.
2."One" 1991. Rock is often best when it is rowdy and irreverent, but the heart of U2's music is its gracefulness. Even in moments as melancholy as this, there is an overriding touch of eloquence. Key lines: "You ask me to enter/ But then you make me crawl/ And I can't be holding on/ To what you got/ When all you got is hurt."
3."Bad" 1984. Its themes may be dark, but U2 refuses to surrender to pessimism or despair. That's why this sober tale about heroin addiction also serves as a warm rallying cry.
4."Running to Stand Still" 1987. Not only do the words capture the way drugs can disorient people so that they feel they are running while remaining motionless, but the stark, funereal tone of the music is a perfect match.
5."Peace on Earth" 2000. This may be the darkest Christmas song ever written. After a terrorist bombing in Northern Ireland, Bono expressed the heartache and rage of a parent who can't be comforted by more promises of hope. "Sick of sorrow/ Sick of pain/ Sick of hearing again and again/ That there's going to be/ Peace on Earth."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five albums for the library
These albums, all released by Island, offer an absorbing chronicle of U2's artistry and growth.
1. Boy 1980. This album feels very much like the start of a journey, which it was for young men just out of their teens. The tunes capture marvelously the optimism and uncertainties one feels at that age. Highlight: "I Will Follow."
2. The Unforgettable Fire 1984. The War album in 1983 signaled the maturation of U2 as artists, but this CD was the real creative breakthrough. Highlight: "Bad."
3. The Joshua Tree 1987. The band's first masterpiece, a work of profound elegance and mystery and faith. Highlight: "Where the Streets Have No Name"/"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."
4. Rattle and Hum 1988. This will likely be a controversial choice because even some U2 fans thought the band's ego got in the way in this companion piece to the band's concert movie. But the mix of U2's imagination and the band's celebration of American roots music in this two-disc package is gloriously personal and daring. Highlight: "Love Rescue Me," which was co-written by Bob Dylan.
5. Achtung Baby 1991. The band changes gears in every way but one: The music still feels heartfelt and compelling, yet also more risk-taking and edgy. Highlight: "One."
© Los Angeles Times, 2004.
The Songwriters - U2 - 'Where Craft Ends and Spirit Begins'
In a singular process of collaboration, U2 puts mood and emotion first. The words follow.
Los Angeles Times, August 08, 2004
Robert Hilburn
(New York) "It's one of the most banal couplets I've ever heard," Bono says sheepishly about the words he wrote for one of U2's best-known songs. " 'I want to run, I want to hide...' That's not very interesting, but you know what? People don't hear the couplets when we play the song.
"They hear something else in the music. They hear a band talking about a special place, a better place, and asking if the audience wants to go there with them."
Bono, who writes most of U2's lyrics, is keenly aware that the music's power often comes less from his pen than from the sweeping sonic foundation built by the band.
"Feelings are stronger than ideas or words in a song," he says, pacing the floor of his Central Park West apartment, offering a contrarian view of pop songwriting.
"You can have 1,000 ideas, but unless you capture an emotion, it's an essay. I'm always writing speeches or articles for causes I believe in. That's probably what I would have done if I wasn't in music, but that's not songwriting."
The comments are surprising from a man who devotes so much of his time to ideas -- from the spiritually tinged themes that underlie many U2 songs to his high-profile crusade to get wealthy nations to forgive Third World debt.
"Songwriting comes from a different place," he continues. "Music is the language of the spirit. I think ideas and words are our excuse as songwriters to allow our heart or our spirit to run free. That's when magic happens."
It happens so often for U2 that the group has come closer to matching the quality and mass appeal of the Beatles over the last 25 years than any other band.
This is pop music at its most ambitious -- personal and independent enough to satisfy discerning listeners, yet open and accessible enough to pack stadiums. Though the group has experimented with electronica and other contemporary sounds, the essence of U2 is classic rock 'n' roll.
You won't find lots of humor or party toss-offs in U2. The Irish quartet's flurry of Top 40 hits, including "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "One," mostly are soaring anthems built around the same message of brotherhood that characterized the Beatles' later years. Yet U2 arrives at songs in a much different way.
John Lennon or Paul McCartney usually came up with songs and then taught them to George Harrison and Ringo Starr. But U2 collaborates to a degree that is rare -- a process that depends on the singular chemistry of the four musicians.
Bono and guitarist the Edge bring ideas into the studio -- a title, the trace of a melody or a catchy riff -- then bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen join in the actual construction of the songs. The grueling give and take sometimes stretches for weeks as the musicians toss ideas back and forth, equal partners in the search for an emotion that seems fresh and deeply rooted.
When the marathon sessions are going well, Mullen says, the rehearsal studio feels like a playground. When they're going badly, it feels like a boxing ring.
"We're tough guys," Clayton says. "We know we'll get there eventually. A lot of it is perspiration. You just have to put in the hours and do your time." The Edge is fond of repeating the band's private joke that it's "songwriting by accident."
"It's more like Miles Davis than the Beatles in a way," Bono says as he keeps pacing the hardwood floor of the sun-filled living room, whose minimalist furnishings reflect little of the flash of the typical rock star lifestyle.
Only after the band finds that powerful emotion, be it blissful or melancholy, does he begin applying lyrics. Sometimes he'll draw phrases or lines from the notebook he carries with him, even when he's on holiday or meeting with world leaders such as President Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Occasionally, he'll work from a finished lyric he's brought into the studio.
Mostly, he tries to capture the spontaneous feeling the music inspires in him -- a creative strategy he learned listening to Lennon's first two solo albums, Plastic Ono Band and Imagine.
"He showed that the best way to unlock yourself as a writer was to simply tell the truth," Bono says, settling on the couch, while his wife, Ali, and 13-year-old daughter, Eve, have breakfast nearby. "When you've got a song to write or a blank page, just describe what is on your mind -- not what you'd like to be on your mind. If you feel you have nothing to say, your first line then is 'I have nothing to say.' "
A language all his own
Bono's improvisation in the studio often starts with him just muttering sounds that seem to fit the flow of the music being created -- "Bono-eze," his bandmates call it.
"When Bono starts going through his Bono-eze, it can change what we're playing and take the song in a different direction," Mullen says. "If he's doing something very intense, it might not even be what he's saying, but the way he's behaving, the way he's throwing the microphone around. The energy and intensity helps shape the song."
Gradually, Bono begins changing sounds into words and lines, trying to articulate the feelings the music stirs in him, instinctively drawing upon a storehouse of experiences and beliefs.
Though he didn't go past high school, he's an avid reader and loves spending evenings talking to everyone from poets to politicians. All of this feeds his writing, invariably giving U2's music a level of substance that is rare among bestselling pop acts.
In one of the band's earliest songs, "Rejoice," he outlined his personal goal, which reflects the group's strong Christian spirituality: "I can't change the world, but I can change the world in me."
Unlike many great songwriters, he doesn't spend much time editing his words. He even declares that "craft and taste can be the enemy of songwriting" because they encourage you to follow certain rules, rather than simply following your emotions -- not that he doesn't sometimes wish he had gone back over the lyrics.
Take "Where the Streets Have No Name," the 1987 vision of a world free of religious and racial divide.
The song, from the Grammy-winning The Joshua Tree album, is an adrenaline rush of guitar, bass and drums whose galloping rhythm and graceful images convey the sense of the open road and journey so well that it's no wonder a car manufacturer has offered millions to use it in a commercial.
It begins:
I want to run
I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls
That hold me inside
I want to reach out
And touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
When a sheet of paper with the lyrics is handed to him, Bono smiles. He may dismiss that opening couplet, but he can't deny the power unleashed every time the band plays the song.
"We can be in the middle of the worst gig in our lives, but when we go into that song, everything changes," he says. "The audience is on its feet, singing along with every word. It's like God suddenly walks through the room. It's the point where craft ends and spirit begins. How else do you explain it?"
Moving with the music
When a band's body of work includes such elegant songs as "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "Running to Stand Still" and "With or Without You," you know Bono is drawing an awfully fine line when he says the songwriting craft isn't important.
Believe it, U2 employs plenty of craft. Their strength is that they don't rely on it. One reason veteran songwriters, including such great craftsmen as McCartney, sometimes get into trouble is that they start settling for craft. They'll put a song on an album just because it has a strong melody or a clever line.
U2 holds itself to stricter standards.
That was apparent as the band put final touches on the Pop album on a winter afternoon in 1996. With the deadline just a week away, everything was open to change.
That evening, Bono wanted to tinker with a few words in one song. Sitting in a chair in the control room in Dublin, where the band writes and records most of its songs, he sang the new line as an instrumental track played.
He looked around the room for a reaction. Clayton and Mullen both thought he needed to put more feeling in the vocal, so he tried it again. This time he delivered the lines with such passion that he stood up and moved with the music.
Given Bono's confidence on stage, it was revealing to see how vulnerable he was, waiting for his bandmates' verdict. A bit nervously, he suggested he might need to change a couple of more words. No, no, they said, the words and vocal were fine. He looked relieved.
In the months of making an album, the other musicians are frequently challenged the same way Bono was during that session. They thrive on their collective, organic way of building songs.
"At various times, we've tried to stick to conventional songwriting," says Mullen from Dublin. "But after a few months we see it's not working. We need to dismantle the ideas and start again."
Adds the Edge: "My worst nightmare is sounding 'professional.' I think we work best when we keep moving into the unknown."
Working by instinct
U2's unorthodox songwriting style was born out of necessity.
When the band members came together in high school, they weren't good enough at their instruments to play convincing versions of the hits of the day. To hide their inexperience, they came up with their own songs.
"From fairly early on, it became clear to us that we had no idea about songwriting technique," the Edge says. "Our way into songwriting was to dream it up. We'd try to imagine how others might do the song, the Clash or Lennon or the Jam. Instinct was everything for us, and it really still is."
Along with Bono's absorbing vocals, the Edge's guitar lines became the band's first distinctive feature.
"I like a nice ringing sound on guitar, and on most of my chords I find two strings and make them ring the same note, so it's almost like a 12-string sound," he said years ago. "So for E, I might play a B, E, E and B."
Because he didn't like the sound of the low strings on his Gibson Explorer guitar, Edge concentrated on the upper strings, giving the music engaging trebly overtones. It was the bright, clarion cry of his guitar that injected a rich, irresistible quality in "I Will Follow," the centerpiece of the group's debut album, 1980's Boy.
The lyrics of the song, with their "I was lost, but I am found" imagery, are commonplace on the printed page, but they soar in the energy and youthful optimism of the track.
The band members didn't even think of themselves as songwriters until the third album, 1983's War.
Before starting that project, Edge, the group's most accomplished musician, spent three weeks trying to put together some musical ideas so they wouldn't be starting strictly from scratch in the rehearsal hall. Two of the ideas led to "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day," songs that lifted the band to new creative heights.
"My job is to find an image that sort of evokes the music," Bono says, "and it was easy with 'New Year's Day.' The piano notes on the song were icy, and Adam's bass line told you it's outdoors, not indoors."
As he stood in the studio on the day in 1982 that U2 was finalizing "New Year's Day," Bono had a mental picture of Lech Walesa, the Polish Solidarity leader, standing in the snow on New Year's Day, leading a workers strike. It resonated with him.
The band members had gone through some problems, and they weren't sure they wanted to continue together. Their spiritual values seemed at odds with the rock lifestyle, but they finally realized they could use the music to share their beliefs. So it felt like the band too was beginning again.
Against a gentle musical backdrop, Bono pieced together a message about starting over and solidarity, a message of innocence and hope.
With "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the other key song on the War album, the idea for the song as well as the title and basic chords came from the Edge. The melody and a sort of militaristic, Clash-like frame were added in the studio.
"The idea was to contrast Bloody Sunday, where 13 peaceful Irish protesters were killed by British paratroopers, with an Easter Sunday," Bono says. "I had started to discover the principle of nonviolence at the time, and there's also a piece of that in there."
The song's opening lines:
I can't believe the news today
I can't close my eyes and make it go away
How long, how long must we sing this song?
By the time War was released, U2 was being widely hailed as the best young rock band in years. Yet their songwriting was still in question. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day" were good starts. But where was their "Let It Be"?
They found it the next year.
Blues and prayers
A salute to the nonviolence doctrine of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "Pride (In the Name of Love)" was the group's first Top 40 U.S. single. In it, the craft and spirit came together.
U2 was working by then with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who encouraged the band to adopt even grander, more atmospheric musical textures.
In "Pride," the music felt as majestic as cathedral bells as Bono sang these lines:
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride
The band's masterpiece -- and the first pure rock album to win a best album Grammy since the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- was just months away.
U2 had become fascinated with America on the tours that preceded The Joshua Tree album.
Where early musical influences included Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen and a lot of punk and post-punk outfits, from the Clash and Sex Pistols to Television and Patti Smith, the time in the U.S. led them to explore the rootsy blues and country sounds that had contributed so much to the birth of rock.
Bono read his way through tours, devouring the works of such American novelists, playwrights and poets as Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg, among hundreds. It all helped him become more intimate and immediate as a writer. And the Scriptures were, as they'd been from the beginning, a constant source of inspiration.
The fruits of the band's exploration came together in The Joshua Tree, whose "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" picked up a Grammy nomination for record of the year.
Like "Where the Streets Have No Name," "Looking For" was epic rock, built around Edge's exhilarating guitar and the march-like feel of Mullen's drumming and the seductive push of Clayton's bass notes. In movie terms, it was in every way a widescreen, Technicolor affair.
Bono's lyrics outlined the tale of search for satisfaction and salvation:
I have run I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.
"I was always interested in the character of David in the Bible because he was such a screw-up. It's a great amusement to me that the people God chose to use in the Scriptures were all liars, cheaters, adulterers, murderers," Bono says. "I don't know which of the activities I was involved in at the time, but I certainly related to David," he adds with a laugh. "I was writing my psalm."
What intrigued him was what he felt was a link between the Psalms and the blues, which he had just discovered.
"In the Psalms, David questions God, 'Where are you when I need you?' Blues has this sort of honesty that gospel music doesn't have. Gospel music is the stuff of faith. It tells you about where you are going. The blues tells you where you are. God is much more interested in the blues because you get that honesty."
The album sold 20 million copies around the world.
Rather than repeat the anthem-ish nature of The Joshua Tree and 1988's Rattle and Hum, U2 went in the early '90s to Berlin, where they spent agonizing months updating their sound with darker, more electronic elements.
"We were really at a low ebb," the Edge recalls. "Everyone was in grumpy humor. People were harboring serious misgivings about what was going down, and the mood was getting more and more negative."
Yet the process yielded another landmark album, Achtung Baby, that signaled a new direction, one in which the lyrics and music took on edgier and less predictable dimensions.
Bono says he felt his vocabulary as a singer had been limited because only certain words and tones worked with his tenor vocals. But in Berlin, he learned he could expand his expressive range by lowering his voice through the use of such devices as distortion pedals.
"It gives you new language," he says, joking about how Tom Waits can go so many places in his songs with his growly voice. "The tone of your voice dictates the lyrics. Who'd know that?"
The album delivered a signature U2 song, the ballad "One," whose history dramatizes to him the gap between what's expressed in words and what is conveyed through the music. Though Bono thinks of it as a bitter statement, the music is so healing, audiences find it comforting.
"It amazes me when people tell me they played it at their wedding or for comfort at a funeral," Bono says. "I go to myself, 'Are you crazy? It's about breaking up.' "
While he sometimes wishes the band's songwriting process gave him more time to write the lyrics, he still thinks the system comes up with the best songs.
"When I look at our first 10 years, I just hear unfinished work, lyrics we never finished because we ran out of studio time," he says of his contributions. "I hear 'Bad,' and see what's not there. I just see a list of failures."
Still, he wouldn't change anything about the way U2 works. For all his personal frustrations and the band's uncertain moments, they all know they've found a way to connect with audiences.
Eno, one of pop's most sophisticated observers, is struck by the group's commitment to one another and the music.
"They really are a group, the only real group I've ever met," he once said. "They realize that intuitively, and there is a great loyalty, perhaps because they realize that none of them would have been a musician without the others...I can't imagine what kind of bands they would have ended up in."
The rule on rules
Bono and his family live most of the year in Dublin, but he enjoys the energy of New York.
Even though he's been visiting the city for two decades, he still takes delight in pointing out some of the landmarks as he sits in the passenger seat of a van headed to a meeting on easing world hunger. As the driver navigates through traffic, Bono shoves the new U2 album into the CD player and pounds his fist on the dashboard as the music blasts through the speakers. There's a driving, rock 'n' roll vitality to the music, which is due this fall; a freshness that you hardly expect from bands in their third decade.
But U2 has been able to remain both current and relevant. They get airplay on college and alt-rock radio stations and find their "Beautiful Day" at John Kerry campaign rallies.
As the vocal starts, he sings along. But it's so noisy in the car you can't really make out the words. Bono's expression, however, tells you he's very proud of this album. He suddenly stops singing and begins chuckling as he turns down the volume. "Did you hear that last verse?...You never write a verse like that. That was definitely improvised. But there are other lines in the song I wrote ahead of time."
When the songs are finished, Bono looks at the disc.
"Lou Reed is a friend and I once asked if he had advice for a young poet, and, in his usual cryptic way, he summed it up, 'Break rhyme occasionally.' "
Bono laughs as the van pulls to a stop.
"You know, songwriting really is a mysterious process...because we're asking people to expose themselves. It's like open heart surgery in some way. You're looking for real, raw emotions, and you don't find that by sticking to the rules."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five songs for the ages
While the epic nature of U2's musical landscape is what first catches the ear, it's also the compelling themes that make the songs stick with us.
1."Where the Streets Have No Name"/"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" 1987. It's a bit of a cheat to list two songs, but the tunes from The Joshua Tree have always seemed to be closely connected expressions of spiritual search.
2."One" 1991. Rock is often best when it is rowdy and irreverent, but the heart of U2's music is its gracefulness. Even in moments as melancholy as this, there is an overriding touch of eloquence. Key lines: "You ask me to enter/ But then you make me crawl/ And I can't be holding on/ To what you got/ When all you got is hurt."
3."Bad" 1984. Its themes may be dark, but U2 refuses to surrender to pessimism or despair. That's why this sober tale about heroin addiction also serves as a warm rallying cry.
4."Running to Stand Still" 1987. Not only do the words capture the way drugs can disorient people so that they feel they are running while remaining motionless, but the stark, funereal tone of the music is a perfect match.
5."Peace on Earth" 2000. This may be the darkest Christmas song ever written. After a terrorist bombing in Northern Ireland, Bono expressed the heartache and rage of a parent who can't be comforted by more promises of hope. "Sick of sorrow/ Sick of pain/ Sick of hearing again and again/ That there's going to be/ Peace on Earth."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five albums for the library
These albums, all released by Island, offer an absorbing chronicle of U2's artistry and growth.
1. Boy 1980. This album feels very much like the start of a journey, which it was for young men just out of their teens. The tunes capture marvelously the optimism and uncertainties one feels at that age. Highlight: "I Will Follow."
2. The Unforgettable Fire 1984. The War album in 1983 signaled the maturation of U2 as artists, but this CD was the real creative breakthrough. Highlight: "Bad."
3. The Joshua Tree 1987. The band's first masterpiece, a work of profound elegance and mystery and faith. Highlight: "Where the Streets Have No Name"/"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."
4. Rattle and Hum 1988. This will likely be a controversial choice because even some U2 fans thought the band's ego got in the way in this companion piece to the band's concert movie. But the mix of U2's imagination and the band's celebration of American roots music in this two-disc package is gloriously personal and daring. Highlight: "Love Rescue Me," which was co-written by Bob Dylan.
5. Achtung Baby 1991. The band changes gears in every way but one: The music still feels heartfelt and compelling, yet also more risk-taking and edgy. Highlight: "One."
© Los Angeles Times, 2004.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Fundamentalists to the Right, Fundamentalists to the Left
What my hate mail tells me about Christian factions today.
By Frank Schaeffer
I abandoned Protestant Christian fundamentalism many years ago for Greek Orthodoxy. I converted because the Orthodox tradition embraces paradox and mystery. For someone raised in a strict Calvinist home, relief from absolutist certainty was most welcome.
But Christian fundamentalism has not abandoned me. It's come back to haunt me in both liberal and conservative forms. I find myself a minor lightning rod in the culture wars: apparently, I haven't chosen sides well enough.
You see, I write novels and nonfiction for a living. My novels describe a boy growing up in Switzerland as the son of American Calvinist missionaries. In these books, I take what I hope is an empathetically amusing insider's look at what it's like to grow up in a home run by zealots who make it their life's work to separate themselves from the World.
My most recent nonfiction work, "Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story About Love and The United States Marine Corps," I co-wrote with my son John. It's about the aftermath of his 1999 decision to join the U.S. Marine Corps.
So now I'm swimming in a vortex of indignant e-mail from members of both the "Christian right" and the "Christian left." Some Christian evangelical/fundamentalists who disliked my earlier novels find my latest one particularly offensive. They've written to me that they hate everything about it, starting with its "pornographic" cover (a bra and postcard of the Matterhorn are featured). In the book, the fourteen-year-old protagonist is torn between his volcanic burgeoning sexuality and a fundamentalist family so strict that he has never seen a movie, watched television, or danced (read an excerpt).
Apparently, some fundamentalists recognize themselves in the parents portrayed in the book and don't like looking in the mirror. They also don't like sex. The gist of their angry letters is: Take a number, God will kill you soon.
On the other side of the fence, my liberal readers assume I must be "some sort of right-wing war monger" because the book I wrote with my son expressed admiration for the Marine Corps. They accuse me of being the sort of imperialist who would stone Jesus to death if given the chance.
These two groups of Christians presumably don't like one another, but from where I'm sitting, they are more alike than different. To these members of the religious right and left, there seem to be only two choices: for or against their dogmas. And, like certain fundamentalist Muslims much in the news of late, they too seem to have no concept of the separation of art, culture, and religion. Dogmatic purity must be adhered to in all endeavors and the slightest deviation is a serious offense. Moreover, no one with a sense of humor about religion (let alone sex!) need apply.
I know something about fundamentalism. I'm the son of a fundamentalist evangelist. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a guru/prophet to his evangelical followers. Almost 20 years after his death, thousands of his books still sell each year. My father was very influential in the beginnings of the so-called Religious Right. Through his voluminous writings, he provided intellectual underpinnings for the views of tens of thousands of fundamentalists on such issues as a literal interpretation of scripture.
The Christian fundamentalists who stumble across my novels because of the family name detest them because they're about religious people and are set in Europe, where my parents had their mission. Some evangelical readers take them as biographies and are offended that the parents in the stories are portrayed warts and all, thus besmirching the memory of Francis Schaeffer. Other fundamentalists just don't like anything that pokes fun at the narrow legalistic Christianity in which they have invested themselves and with which they are inflicting their children.
Meanwhile, one liberal reader e-mailed me about my Marines book: "You seem not to understand the simple purpose and message that was Christ's life... I, for once, am gladdened that MY [Catholic] church has demonstrated the backbone to speak against this criminal invasion [of Iraq]... Yes, Jesus was/is a radical and you seem to be the kind of person in the crowd throwing stones at him for challenging the status quo." Never mind that my son and I wrote our decidedly personal, non-political account before the Iraq war was even on the horizon -- in fact, before 9-11.
And, in a letter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (April 17, 2003), another reader suggests that my problem is that not only that am I pro-Marines but that I'm white. "Schaeffer obviously suffers from guilt based on perceived privilege of class and race. (He is white, of course.) It is the use of young people like his son for imperialist projects in the invasion of Iraq that is the shame here, not a rejection of military service..." You get the idea.
Then a reader who liked the Marine book but hated my latest novel wrote: "WHY did you write these novels? Are you trying to insult the evangelicals? If so, you are succeeding... I admonish you, remove these books from the marketplace." Then this from a fan who used the fact that my son is currently deployed in the Middle East to amplify his critique: "In your 'Zermatt' you get cheap laughs at fundamentalists who actually believe in avoiding fornication even as your own 'heart,' your son, is in harm's way. Frank, God isn't mocked. A friend of mine just died of a massive stroke Friday night. Repent before it's too late. It isn't going to matter what Publisher's Weekly said about you back in 2003 when you stand before God's throne...."
So I'm caught in the shrinking space between two calcified political doctrines of the left and right. My correspondents seem so certain of everything -- especially that God is on their side.
I hope there is still room in our polarized country for Christians like me, who don't subscribe to any one-dogma-fits-all. It seems to me that life is too short, sweet, and mysterious for us to be able to exhaustively "explain" anything much, let alone explain everything with certainty.
For those of us who write, the choice these days seems to be between picking an ideological side (and learning to see things in black and white), or being wanderers unwelcome in either hostile camp. Come to think of it, that is not a bad place to be, at least for someone who believes in paradox and mystery.
Frank Schaeffer's new novel is 'Zermatt.' His most recent work of nonfiction, co-authored with his son, Corporal John Schaeffer, is 'Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story about Love And The United States Marine Corps.' For more information, visit www.frankschaeffer.com
What my hate mail tells me about Christian factions today.
By Frank Schaeffer
I abandoned Protestant Christian fundamentalism many years ago for Greek Orthodoxy. I converted because the Orthodox tradition embraces paradox and mystery. For someone raised in a strict Calvinist home, relief from absolutist certainty was most welcome.
But Christian fundamentalism has not abandoned me. It's come back to haunt me in both liberal and conservative forms. I find myself a minor lightning rod in the culture wars: apparently, I haven't chosen sides well enough.
You see, I write novels and nonfiction for a living. My novels describe a boy growing up in Switzerland as the son of American Calvinist missionaries. In these books, I take what I hope is an empathetically amusing insider's look at what it's like to grow up in a home run by zealots who make it their life's work to separate themselves from the World.
My most recent nonfiction work, "Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story About Love and The United States Marine Corps," I co-wrote with my son John. It's about the aftermath of his 1999 decision to join the U.S. Marine Corps.
So now I'm swimming in a vortex of indignant e-mail from members of both the "Christian right" and the "Christian left." Some Christian evangelical/fundamentalists who disliked my earlier novels find my latest one particularly offensive. They've written to me that they hate everything about it, starting with its "pornographic" cover (a bra and postcard of the Matterhorn are featured). In the book, the fourteen-year-old protagonist is torn between his volcanic burgeoning sexuality and a fundamentalist family so strict that he has never seen a movie, watched television, or danced (read an excerpt).
Apparently, some fundamentalists recognize themselves in the parents portrayed in the book and don't like looking in the mirror. They also don't like sex. The gist of their angry letters is: Take a number, God will kill you soon.
On the other side of the fence, my liberal readers assume I must be "some sort of right-wing war monger" because the book I wrote with my son expressed admiration for the Marine Corps. They accuse me of being the sort of imperialist who would stone Jesus to death if given the chance.
These two groups of Christians presumably don't like one another, but from where I'm sitting, they are more alike than different. To these members of the religious right and left, there seem to be only two choices: for or against their dogmas. And, like certain fundamentalist Muslims much in the news of late, they too seem to have no concept of the separation of art, culture, and religion. Dogmatic purity must be adhered to in all endeavors and the slightest deviation is a serious offense. Moreover, no one with a sense of humor about religion (let alone sex!) need apply.
I know something about fundamentalism. I'm the son of a fundamentalist evangelist. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a guru/prophet to his evangelical followers. Almost 20 years after his death, thousands of his books still sell each year. My father was very influential in the beginnings of the so-called Religious Right. Through his voluminous writings, he provided intellectual underpinnings for the views of tens of thousands of fundamentalists on such issues as a literal interpretation of scripture.
The Christian fundamentalists who stumble across my novels because of the family name detest them because they're about religious people and are set in Europe, where my parents had their mission. Some evangelical readers take them as biographies and are offended that the parents in the stories are portrayed warts and all, thus besmirching the memory of Francis Schaeffer. Other fundamentalists just don't like anything that pokes fun at the narrow legalistic Christianity in which they have invested themselves and with which they are inflicting their children.
Meanwhile, one liberal reader e-mailed me about my Marines book: "You seem not to understand the simple purpose and message that was Christ's life... I, for once, am gladdened that MY [Catholic] church has demonstrated the backbone to speak against this criminal invasion [of Iraq]... Yes, Jesus was/is a radical and you seem to be the kind of person in the crowd throwing stones at him for challenging the status quo." Never mind that my son and I wrote our decidedly personal, non-political account before the Iraq war was even on the horizon -- in fact, before 9-11.
And, in a letter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (April 17, 2003), another reader suggests that my problem is that not only that am I pro-Marines but that I'm white. "Schaeffer obviously suffers from guilt based on perceived privilege of class and race. (He is white, of course.) It is the use of young people like his son for imperialist projects in the invasion of Iraq that is the shame here, not a rejection of military service..." You get the idea.
Then a reader who liked the Marine book but hated my latest novel wrote: "WHY did you write these novels? Are you trying to insult the evangelicals? If so, you are succeeding... I admonish you, remove these books from the marketplace." Then this from a fan who used the fact that my son is currently deployed in the Middle East to amplify his critique: "In your 'Zermatt' you get cheap laughs at fundamentalists who actually believe in avoiding fornication even as your own 'heart,' your son, is in harm's way. Frank, God isn't mocked. A friend of mine just died of a massive stroke Friday night. Repent before it's too late. It isn't going to matter what Publisher's Weekly said about you back in 2003 when you stand before God's throne...."
So I'm caught in the shrinking space between two calcified political doctrines of the left and right. My correspondents seem so certain of everything -- especially that God is on their side.
I hope there is still room in our polarized country for Christians like me, who don't subscribe to any one-dogma-fits-all. It seems to me that life is too short, sweet, and mysterious for us to be able to exhaustively "explain" anything much, let alone explain everything with certainty.
For those of us who write, the choice these days seems to be between picking an ideological side (and learning to see things in black and white), or being wanderers unwelcome in either hostile camp. Come to think of it, that is not a bad place to be, at least for someone who believes in paradox and mystery.
Frank Schaeffer's new novel is 'Zermatt.' His most recent work of nonfiction, co-authored with his son, Corporal John Schaeffer, is 'Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story about Love And The United States Marine Corps.' For more information, visit www.frankschaeffer.com
Thursday, May 26, 2005
From Opinion Journal:
Heedful Hip Hop
Attacks on rap now come from within.
By Martha Bayles
Thursday, April 28, 2005
On April 9 a young black working mother came to midtown Manhattan to attend a public forum on hip-hop violence sponsored by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. The event was prompted by a shootout, one month earlier, between rival rap entourages outside Hot 97, one of New York's leading radio stations.
When the station's general manager, Barry Mayo, recited the cliché that parents should control what their children listen to and watch, the young woman rose to her feet: "I have a 12-year-old son, and I fear for him every day. I don't let him watch the videos, but I can't do it all by myself. I need help!"
Last spring another young woman, a student at Spelman College in Atlanta named Moya Bailey, was moved to protest by "Tip Drill," a video in which the male rapper Nelly takes to a new level the image of African-American women as "rump-shaking" meat available for cash by swiping a credit card between a dancer's thonged buttocks.
Violence and vulgarity are hardly unique to rap. The mainstream is full of gore and borderline porn. But these tendencies are undiluted in rap, which is why many young African-Americans and Latinos who grew up embracing hip hop as a grassroots, multimedia art form now deplore rap as a cynical "neominstrelsy" being mass-marketed not just nationally but globally.
This global twist is new. A decade ago, critics worried that "gangsta" rap was portraying African-Americans as drug dealers, killers, "bitches" and "ho's." Today the worry is international. Essence magazine recently launched an online debate about the image of black women in rap, and according to former editor Diane Weathers, that debate now includes Africans. "They are disgusted by what their African-American brothers and sisters are doing in entertainment," she says. "They wonder if we've lost our minds."
Significantly, these new protests come not as attacks from the outside but as self-examination from within. "Nobody is happy in hip hop anymore," comments Alison Duke, a Canadian filmmaker whose scathing documentary, "Booty Nation," was screened earlier this month at a conference at the Center for Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. "We've allowed the system of slavery to come back into our communities."
If things are that bad, then perhaps these insider critics should be seeking allies in the larger society. Millions of Americans are fed up with the calculated coarseness that now passes for "edginess" in the entertainment industry, and many (not all) might be willing to join forces with hip-hop fans. Such a broad-based, genuinely diverse movement might actually have an impact. But don't expect it anytime soon--there are three major obstacles in the way.
The first obstacle is the shameless manipulativeness of the rap industry. Present at the Sharpton event were several community activists, such as writer Kevin Powell and youth organizer Erica Ford, who implied strongly that the gunplay outside Hot 97 (in which no one was seriously hurt) was a publicity stunt designed to pump the "street cred" of two rappers, 50 Cent and the Game (both on Interscope Records).
If true, this is a damning accusation. But amazingly, none of the industry representatives on the panel bothered to deny it. Instead, two smooth black executives, Ron Gilliard of Interscope and Kelly G of BET, reassured the crowd that they were "here to listen." Then two "gangsta"-attired moguls, Dave Mays and Ray Benzino of Source magazine, picked a "beef" with E-Bro from Hot 97, thereby reducing the meeting to the verbal equivalent of a sidewalk shoot-out.
Watching this happen was like watching an SUV collide with a bicycle: The big machine (the rap industry) kept rolling, while the little one (the community) got crushed. The industry's primary audience is not black: Between 70% and 80% of all rap CDs are sold to whites. Yet because rap draws its talent and mystique from poor black communities, the executives present seemed to regard sessions like this as nothing more than the cost of doing business.
Mr. Sharpton is a latecomer to this protest, according to Davey D, an Oakland-based DJ and well-known hip-hop commentator. But Mr. Sharpton is welcome, Davey D adds, as long as he aims at the right target: "Instead of calling the radio station and complaining about the artist, we need to ask who's in charge? Who's provoking violence and letting DJs use the 'N' word?"
According to Davey D, some of the younger activists have been reaching out to potential allies in the media, education and social work. But here we encounter the second obstacle to a larger movement: Mr. Sharpton's in-your-face style of politics may attract attention, but it rarely attracts supporters beyond his own narrow following.
The third obstacle is academic feminism. At the University of Chicago conference, "Feminism and Hip Hop," the focus was on "crunk," the Atlanta-based style of rap that casts black men as pimps and black women as strippers and "ho's." Some speakers--notably Ms. Bailey from Spelman and Joan Morgan from Essence--used the language of morality when describing how crunk degrades women. But when the academic feminists weighed in, moral revulsion got bracketed as naive, and we groundlings were instructed to view "Tip Drill" as part of a "hegemonic intertextuality" in which "the structures of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and advanced consumer capitalism" are "embedded" or "inscribed" (I forget which).
This sort of thing may sustain graduate students through long Chicago winters, but it is not going to advance the anticrunk cause. For one thing, academic feminism rejects something most people hold dear, the traditional family. As one earnest graduate student put it, the late Tupac Shakur was a true artist because his lyrics "cut against the grain of the normative family," an institution she clearly regarded as the root of all patriarchal evil.
One is tempted to ask: Is this really an appropriate standard for judging any form of art? Like posters and cabaret, hip hop is an inherently populist and political art. But it is an art all the same, and it is striking that only one participant, Ms. Morgan of Essence, spoke about it in aesthetic terms.
At any rate, if rap is praised as an attack on the family, then feminist critics are not going to find many allies in either the white or the black mainstream. Yet interestingly, antifamily sentiment was not the dominant message of the conference. That message was articulated by Rachel Raimist, a Minnesota-based filmmaker, who said: "I've worked in the rap industry. I love hip hop. But when my seven-year-old daughter gets up and says, 'Shake it,' I realize something is wrong."
So perhaps there is some common ground here. No movement wants to get between the sheets with its political enemies. But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and unless these new critics of rap are willing to give some credence to the views of those who criticize it from the standpoint of public morality, neither side is likely to succeed.
Ms. Bayles is author of "Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music."
Heedful Hip Hop
Attacks on rap now come from within.
By Martha Bayles
Thursday, April 28, 2005
On April 9 a young black working mother came to midtown Manhattan to attend a public forum on hip-hop violence sponsored by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. The event was prompted by a shootout, one month earlier, between rival rap entourages outside Hot 97, one of New York's leading radio stations.
When the station's general manager, Barry Mayo, recited the cliché that parents should control what their children listen to and watch, the young woman rose to her feet: "I have a 12-year-old son, and I fear for him every day. I don't let him watch the videos, but I can't do it all by myself. I need help!"
Last spring another young woman, a student at Spelman College in Atlanta named Moya Bailey, was moved to protest by "Tip Drill," a video in which the male rapper Nelly takes to a new level the image of African-American women as "rump-shaking" meat available for cash by swiping a credit card between a dancer's thonged buttocks.
Violence and vulgarity are hardly unique to rap. The mainstream is full of gore and borderline porn. But these tendencies are undiluted in rap, which is why many young African-Americans and Latinos who grew up embracing hip hop as a grassroots, multimedia art form now deplore rap as a cynical "neominstrelsy" being mass-marketed not just nationally but globally.
This global twist is new. A decade ago, critics worried that "gangsta" rap was portraying African-Americans as drug dealers, killers, "bitches" and "ho's." Today the worry is international. Essence magazine recently launched an online debate about the image of black women in rap, and according to former editor Diane Weathers, that debate now includes Africans. "They are disgusted by what their African-American brothers and sisters are doing in entertainment," she says. "They wonder if we've lost our minds."
Significantly, these new protests come not as attacks from the outside but as self-examination from within. "Nobody is happy in hip hop anymore," comments Alison Duke, a Canadian filmmaker whose scathing documentary, "Booty Nation," was screened earlier this month at a conference at the Center for Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. "We've allowed the system of slavery to come back into our communities."
If things are that bad, then perhaps these insider critics should be seeking allies in the larger society. Millions of Americans are fed up with the calculated coarseness that now passes for "edginess" in the entertainment industry, and many (not all) might be willing to join forces with hip-hop fans. Such a broad-based, genuinely diverse movement might actually have an impact. But don't expect it anytime soon--there are three major obstacles in the way.
The first obstacle is the shameless manipulativeness of the rap industry. Present at the Sharpton event were several community activists, such as writer Kevin Powell and youth organizer Erica Ford, who implied strongly that the gunplay outside Hot 97 (in which no one was seriously hurt) was a publicity stunt designed to pump the "street cred" of two rappers, 50 Cent and the Game (both on Interscope Records).
If true, this is a damning accusation. But amazingly, none of the industry representatives on the panel bothered to deny it. Instead, two smooth black executives, Ron Gilliard of Interscope and Kelly G of BET, reassured the crowd that they were "here to listen." Then two "gangsta"-attired moguls, Dave Mays and Ray Benzino of Source magazine, picked a "beef" with E-Bro from Hot 97, thereby reducing the meeting to the verbal equivalent of a sidewalk shoot-out.
Watching this happen was like watching an SUV collide with a bicycle: The big machine (the rap industry) kept rolling, while the little one (the community) got crushed. The industry's primary audience is not black: Between 70% and 80% of all rap CDs are sold to whites. Yet because rap draws its talent and mystique from poor black communities, the executives present seemed to regard sessions like this as nothing more than the cost of doing business.
Mr. Sharpton is a latecomer to this protest, according to Davey D, an Oakland-based DJ and well-known hip-hop commentator. But Mr. Sharpton is welcome, Davey D adds, as long as he aims at the right target: "Instead of calling the radio station and complaining about the artist, we need to ask who's in charge? Who's provoking violence and letting DJs use the 'N' word?"
According to Davey D, some of the younger activists have been reaching out to potential allies in the media, education and social work. But here we encounter the second obstacle to a larger movement: Mr. Sharpton's in-your-face style of politics may attract attention, but it rarely attracts supporters beyond his own narrow following.
The third obstacle is academic feminism. At the University of Chicago conference, "Feminism and Hip Hop," the focus was on "crunk," the Atlanta-based style of rap that casts black men as pimps and black women as strippers and "ho's." Some speakers--notably Ms. Bailey from Spelman and Joan Morgan from Essence--used the language of morality when describing how crunk degrades women. But when the academic feminists weighed in, moral revulsion got bracketed as naive, and we groundlings were instructed to view "Tip Drill" as part of a "hegemonic intertextuality" in which "the structures of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and advanced consumer capitalism" are "embedded" or "inscribed" (I forget which).
This sort of thing may sustain graduate students through long Chicago winters, but it is not going to advance the anticrunk cause. For one thing, academic feminism rejects something most people hold dear, the traditional family. As one earnest graduate student put it, the late Tupac Shakur was a true artist because his lyrics "cut against the grain of the normative family," an institution she clearly regarded as the root of all patriarchal evil.
One is tempted to ask: Is this really an appropriate standard for judging any form of art? Like posters and cabaret, hip hop is an inherently populist and political art. But it is an art all the same, and it is striking that only one participant, Ms. Morgan of Essence, spoke about it in aesthetic terms.
At any rate, if rap is praised as an attack on the family, then feminist critics are not going to find many allies in either the white or the black mainstream. Yet interestingly, antifamily sentiment was not the dominant message of the conference. That message was articulated by Rachel Raimist, a Minnesota-based filmmaker, who said: "I've worked in the rap industry. I love hip hop. But when my seven-year-old daughter gets up and says, 'Shake it,' I realize something is wrong."
So perhaps there is some common ground here. No movement wants to get between the sheets with its political enemies. But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and unless these new critics of rap are willing to give some credence to the views of those who criticize it from the standpoint of public morality, neither side is likely to succeed.
Ms. Bayles is author of "Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music."
America's Recruiting Dilemma
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON -- Retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Krohn got himself in trouble with his superiors as a Pentagon civilian public affairs official during the first three and one-half years of the Bush administration by telling the truth. He is still at it in private life. He says not to blame the military recruiters for the current recruiting "scandal." Blame the war.
"Army recruiting is in a death spiral, through no fault of the Army," Krohn told me. Always defending uniformed personnel, he resents hard-pressed recruiters being attacked for offering unauthorized benefits to make quotas. In a recent e-mail sent to friends (mostly retired military), Krohn complained that the "Army is having to compensate for a problem of national scope."
The Army's dilemma is maintaining an all-volunteer service when volunteering means going in harm's way in Iraq. The dilemma extends to national policy. How can the United States maintain its global credibility against the Islamists, if military ranks cannot be filled by volunteers and there is no public will for a draft?
Krohn's e-mail describes the problem: "Consider the implications of being unable to find sufficient volunteers, as seen by our adversaries. Has the United States lost its will to survive? What's happened to the Great Satan when so few are willing to fight to defend the country? Surely bin Laden et al are making this argument, telling supporters victory is just around the corner if they are a bit more patient. And if they're successful, the energy sources in the Mideast may be within their grasp."
Krohn says this reality is accepted by recipients of his message. It also meets agreement from active duty officers I have contacted but who cannot speak publicly. They ponder how an all-volunteer force can be maintained when generals say there is no end in sight for U.S. troops facing an increasingly sophisticated insurgency.
Krohn's message goes on to say that "the recruiting problem is an unintended consequence of a prolonged war in Iraq, especially given the failure to find WMD [weapons of mass destruction]." He therefore calls for a "national consensus to address the root causes" of the recruiting problem -- that is, the war in Iraq.
But the focus at the Defense Department has been on the excesses of desperate recruiters, 37 of whom reflected their frustration in trying to meet quotas by going AWOL over the last two and one-half years. The official response was a 24-hour stand-down in recruiting to review proper procedures. It also has been proposed that enlistments, now usually three to four years with a minimum of 24 months, be cut to 15 months.
The recruiting guru Charles Moskos, professor emeritus at Northwestern University who once suggested an 18-month tour, now says shorter enlistment will not help. He proposes restoring the draft, but that is a political non-starter. Democratic Rep.
Charles Rangel, who as a drafted soldier won the Bronze Star in Korea, is one of the very few members of Congress who advocate the draft. He does not hide his motive: a president would be politically unable to take a conscript army into wars such as Iraq.
In contrast, Krohn is a lifelong Republican who actively supported George W. Bush's presidential candidacy in 2000. He specified in his e-mail that "I'm not now blaming" President Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the situation. "We have a problem that transcends politics," Krohn added.
The current Iraq war is America's first prolonged conflict fought entirely with volunteers. It is a more professional and in every way a better army than the conscript army of Korean War vintage in which I served, or the conscript army that fought in Vietnam for seven years. The problem was signaled when the 9/11 attack on America did not generate the enlistments expected. Three and one-half years later, willingness to face personal peril in Iraq has faded.
That means the problem goes beyond mechanics of recruiting and the details of volunteer service and is found in the war itself. Paraphrasing Rumsfelds' comment about going into battle with the Army we had, Charles Krohn said: "The war we have now is not the war we started off with. It's much more serious."
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON -- Retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Krohn got himself in trouble with his superiors as a Pentagon civilian public affairs official during the first three and one-half years of the Bush administration by telling the truth. He is still at it in private life. He says not to blame the military recruiters for the current recruiting "scandal." Blame the war.
"Army recruiting is in a death spiral, through no fault of the Army," Krohn told me. Always defending uniformed personnel, he resents hard-pressed recruiters being attacked for offering unauthorized benefits to make quotas. In a recent e-mail sent to friends (mostly retired military), Krohn complained that the "Army is having to compensate for a problem of national scope."
The Army's dilemma is maintaining an all-volunteer service when volunteering means going in harm's way in Iraq. The dilemma extends to national policy. How can the United States maintain its global credibility against the Islamists, if military ranks cannot be filled by volunteers and there is no public will for a draft?
Krohn's e-mail describes the problem: "Consider the implications of being unable to find sufficient volunteers, as seen by our adversaries. Has the United States lost its will to survive? What's happened to the Great Satan when so few are willing to fight to defend the country? Surely bin Laden et al are making this argument, telling supporters victory is just around the corner if they are a bit more patient. And if they're successful, the energy sources in the Mideast may be within their grasp."
Krohn says this reality is accepted by recipients of his message. It also meets agreement from active duty officers I have contacted but who cannot speak publicly. They ponder how an all-volunteer force can be maintained when generals say there is no end in sight for U.S. troops facing an increasingly sophisticated insurgency.
Krohn's message goes on to say that "the recruiting problem is an unintended consequence of a prolonged war in Iraq, especially given the failure to find WMD [weapons of mass destruction]." He therefore calls for a "national consensus to address the root causes" of the recruiting problem -- that is, the war in Iraq.
But the focus at the Defense Department has been on the excesses of desperate recruiters, 37 of whom reflected their frustration in trying to meet quotas by going AWOL over the last two and one-half years. The official response was a 24-hour stand-down in recruiting to review proper procedures. It also has been proposed that enlistments, now usually three to four years with a minimum of 24 months, be cut to 15 months.
The recruiting guru Charles Moskos, professor emeritus at Northwestern University who once suggested an 18-month tour, now says shorter enlistment will not help. He proposes restoring the draft, but that is a political non-starter. Democratic Rep.
Charles Rangel, who as a drafted soldier won the Bronze Star in Korea, is one of the very few members of Congress who advocate the draft. He does not hide his motive: a president would be politically unable to take a conscript army into wars such as Iraq.
In contrast, Krohn is a lifelong Republican who actively supported George W. Bush's presidential candidacy in 2000. He specified in his e-mail that "I'm not now blaming" President Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the situation. "We have a problem that transcends politics," Krohn added.
The current Iraq war is America's first prolonged conflict fought entirely with volunteers. It is a more professional and in every way a better army than the conscript army of Korean War vintage in which I served, or the conscript army that fought in Vietnam for seven years. The problem was signaled when the 9/11 attack on America did not generate the enlistments expected. Three and one-half years later, willingness to face personal peril in Iraq has faded.
That means the problem goes beyond mechanics of recruiting and the details of volunteer service and is found in the war itself. Paraphrasing Rumsfelds' comment about going into battle with the Army we had, Charles Krohn said: "The war we have now is not the war we started off with. It's much more serious."
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Joyce Meyer Ministries
The big squeeze
Saturday, May. 07 2005
THERE IS IN AMERICA a popular image of the good pastor as a person who seeks
reward in heaven rather than on Earth. The preacher preaches the Bible,
comforts the sick, cares for the poor and lives a comfortable but modest life while doing it.
This image may be unfair. Still, we don't quite know what to do with a preacher who thinks she deserves to live in extravagant wealth right here on Earth using money given to the ministry by its believers.
In Jefferson County, assessor Randy Holman thinks he knows what to do. He wantsto revoke the tax exemption for the 52-acre, $20 million headquarters ofJoyce Meyer Ministries. We're not sure the assessor is legally correct, but Ms. Meyer seems to be cruising close to the line separating a religious ministry from a for-profit operation.
Ms. Meyer, a televangelist and author, preaches a variation of the"prosperity gospel." Donate to God through her ministry, and God will reward you, she preaches. That reward may be spiritual, or it may come in the form of prosperity and wealth on Earth.
The Bible says, "Give and it shall be given unto you," she tells the thousands who gather at her revival-like "conferences" around the country. So she's not shy about asking for money. "Make your checks payable to Joyce Meyer Ministries/Life in the Word. And million is spelled M-I-L-L-I-O-N," she says with some levity.
Ms. Meyer says she's living proof of the payback phenomenon. Sexually abused as a child, she endured a failed marriage, then found a good husband and religious faith. She launched a powerful national ministry with legions of devoted followers and more than $90 million in annual revenue.
Her reward for that has been a mother lode of earthly wealth. As reported by
Carolyn Tuft of the Post-Dispatch on Sunday, Ms. Meyer and her family have received millions from the ministry in recent years.
For 2002 and 2003, the board approved $900,000 annual salaries for Ms. Meyer
and $450,000 for her husband as well as the use of a $2 million home where all the bills are paid by the ministry. The ministry also has paid $1.475 million for three houses for Ms. Meyer's children.
The ministry didn't volunteer those figures; they came from filings in the tax assessment case. But Ms. Meyer doesn't hide the fact that she does very well."I'm living now in my reward," she told an audience in 2003.
Although out of fashion these days, the idea that God enriches his servants on Earth is not new. It stretches back hundreds of years in Christianity. In some versions, great wealth is a sign of God's personal approval. Nor do we lack examples of clergy living in worldly splendor. The Roman Emperor Constantine let bishops keep a quarter of church revenue. Today's televangelizing millionaires follow in the worldly shoes of the palace-dwelling bishops of the Middle Ages.
In a nation that values freedom of religion, the state never should pass
judgment on Ms. Meyer's theology. Neither would this editorial page question a person's faith. But the state has to set criteria for tax exemptions. That's where Mr. Holman comes in.
State law says that a tax-exempt church property must be used "exclusively for religious worship, for schools and colleges or for purposes purely charitable and not held for private or corporate profit."
Besides the Meyer family's paychecks, Mr. Holman says it was the lavish
accouterments of the headquarters that convinced him that Ms. Meyer's ministry isn't purely charitable. Those included a $30,000 table, among other high-priced furniture, and several pieces of fine art, some of which are religious. To Mr. Holman's mind, Ms. Meyer's ministry is in business to make money.
Of course, such extravagance must be balanced by the good done by the ministry, and there obviously has been quite a bit. Thousands find inspiration in Ms. Meyer's life story and her down-home advice
about day-to-day living, keeping a family together and about the power of faith to redeem lives. That's why they donate and buy the books and tapes hawked endlessly at her conferences.
The Meyer family's own multimillion take is, after all, just a small percentage of the ministry's $90 million-plus revenue. Ministry spokesman Mark Sutherland says the ministry spends 20 percent on administration, with the rest going to good works. Those include support for 18 orphanages around the world, 3.5 million meals donated to the poor, 145 wells dug in poor nations and missions to AIDS hospitals and leper colonies.
It's tempting to ask why a ministry would spend $30,000 on a fancy table rather than digging a few more wells for poor Africans. But the legal balance may tip in favor of Ms. Meyer keeping her tax exemption.
In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus says, "It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God." Ms. Meyer would seem to believe she can make the squeeze. Those who feel that preachers shouldn't live like royalty always have the option of directing their donations elsewhere.
Joyce Meyer Ministries
The big squeeze
Saturday, May. 07 2005
THERE IS IN AMERICA a popular image of the good pastor as a person who seeks
reward in heaven rather than on Earth. The preacher preaches the Bible,
comforts the sick, cares for the poor and lives a comfortable but modest life while doing it.
This image may be unfair. Still, we don't quite know what to do with a preacher who thinks she deserves to live in extravagant wealth right here on Earth using money given to the ministry by its believers.
In Jefferson County, assessor Randy Holman thinks he knows what to do. He wantsto revoke the tax exemption for the 52-acre, $20 million headquarters ofJoyce Meyer Ministries. We're not sure the assessor is legally correct, but Ms. Meyer seems to be cruising close to the line separating a religious ministry from a for-profit operation.
Ms. Meyer, a televangelist and author, preaches a variation of the"prosperity gospel." Donate to God through her ministry, and God will reward you, she preaches. That reward may be spiritual, or it may come in the form of prosperity and wealth on Earth.
The Bible says, "Give and it shall be given unto you," she tells the thousands who gather at her revival-like "conferences" around the country. So she's not shy about asking for money. "Make your checks payable to Joyce Meyer Ministries/Life in the Word. And million is spelled M-I-L-L-I-O-N," she says with some levity.
Ms. Meyer says she's living proof of the payback phenomenon. Sexually abused as a child, she endured a failed marriage, then found a good husband and religious faith. She launched a powerful national ministry with legions of devoted followers and more than $90 million in annual revenue.
Her reward for that has been a mother lode of earthly wealth. As reported by
Carolyn Tuft of the Post-Dispatch on Sunday, Ms. Meyer and her family have received millions from the ministry in recent years.
For 2002 and 2003, the board approved $900,000 annual salaries for Ms. Meyer
and $450,000 for her husband as well as the use of a $2 million home where all the bills are paid by the ministry. The ministry also has paid $1.475 million for three houses for Ms. Meyer's children.
The ministry didn't volunteer those figures; they came from filings in the tax assessment case. But Ms. Meyer doesn't hide the fact that she does very well."I'm living now in my reward," she told an audience in 2003.
Although out of fashion these days, the idea that God enriches his servants on Earth is not new. It stretches back hundreds of years in Christianity. In some versions, great wealth is a sign of God's personal approval. Nor do we lack examples of clergy living in worldly splendor. The Roman Emperor Constantine let bishops keep a quarter of church revenue. Today's televangelizing millionaires follow in the worldly shoes of the palace-dwelling bishops of the Middle Ages.
In a nation that values freedom of religion, the state never should pass
judgment on Ms. Meyer's theology. Neither would this editorial page question a person's faith. But the state has to set criteria for tax exemptions. That's where Mr. Holman comes in.
State law says that a tax-exempt church property must be used "exclusively for religious worship, for schools and colleges or for purposes purely charitable and not held for private or corporate profit."
Besides the Meyer family's paychecks, Mr. Holman says it was the lavish
accouterments of the headquarters that convinced him that Ms. Meyer's ministry isn't purely charitable. Those included a $30,000 table, among other high-priced furniture, and several pieces of fine art, some of which are religious. To Mr. Holman's mind, Ms. Meyer's ministry is in business to make money.
Of course, such extravagance must be balanced by the good done by the ministry, and there obviously has been quite a bit. Thousands find inspiration in Ms. Meyer's life story and her down-home advice
about day-to-day living, keeping a family together and about the power of faith to redeem lives. That's why they donate and buy the books and tapes hawked endlessly at her conferences.
The Meyer family's own multimillion take is, after all, just a small percentage of the ministry's $90 million-plus revenue. Ministry spokesman Mark Sutherland says the ministry spends 20 percent on administration, with the rest going to good works. Those include support for 18 orphanages around the world, 3.5 million meals donated to the poor, 145 wells dug in poor nations and missions to AIDS hospitals and leper colonies.
It's tempting to ask why a ministry would spend $30,000 on a fancy table rather than digging a few more wells for poor Africans. But the legal balance may tip in favor of Ms. Meyer keeping her tax exemption.
In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus says, "It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God." Ms. Meyer would seem to believe she can make the squeeze. Those who feel that preachers shouldn't live like royalty always have the option of directing their donations elsewhere.
From The San Francisco Chronicle: Nice appreciation of a fine novel by the late Ross Thomas. I first bought the book in paperback at News and Novels at the old Kroger Shopping Center on West Market Street in Greensboro when Keith Ferrell was manager, back in the late 70s.
A wink and a grin at the spies among us
By David Kipen
Chinaman's Chance
By Ross Thomas
Introduction by William Heffernan
St. Martin's; 320 pages; $14.95
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a kind of code that crops up in the "about the author" copy of certain novelists, especially suspense novelists. One sees it on the jackets of Charles McCarry, whose fine books both old ("The Tears of Autumn") and new ("Old Boys") are finally getting a nice push from the Overlook Press these days. My old copy of "The Miernik Dossier" calls McCarry "a former newspaperman and speechwriter," but where exactly did he write all these speeches and newspaper articles? It doesn't say. It never does. Whenever they tell you somebody wrote a lot but don't tell you for whom, it's usually because they were really writing for us -- specifically, for the CIA.
Then there's Ross Thomas, whom an old edition of "Chinaman's Chance" fingered as "a reporter and an editor and public relations director for numerous publications, radio stations, national organizations, and political candidates in the United States, Europe, and Africa.'' E. Howard Hunt's jacket bio couldn't have put it any more delicately.
Unlike McCarry, Thomas didn't live to see the revival he's now enjoying. He died in 1995, and only now is St. Martin's Press mercifully rolling out much of his glorious backlist: "Ah, Treachery!" introduced by Joe Gores; "Briarpatch" introed by Lawrence Block; "Out on the Rim" with an essay by Donald E. Westlake; "Twilight at Mac's Place" fronted by T. Jefferson Parker; not to omit the enduringly perverse escapade titled, with a political incorrectness apparent even in 1978, "Chinaman's Chance."
For a Company man, Thomas always made excellent company. The puckishness of "Chinaman's Chance" starts with its title. Raised in a San Francisco orphanage, Artie Wu habitually leaves nothing whatever to chance. He trips over a dead pelican on a California beach in the first paragraph to set Thomas' intricate plot in motion, but even that stumble turns out to be anything but an accident.
Anybody who can trace the convolutions of Thomas' plot deserves a secret presidential commendation, but here's a stab at it: Artie's mishap leads him into the company of Randall Piers, an electronics billionaire whose nymphomaniacal actress wife used to sing in a folk trio with her sisters, one of whom is sending cryptic notes from undisclosed locations about the supposed murder-suicide of her congressman lover. Together with his witty, haunted partner, Quincy Durant, Artie has to sort out a couple of murders, clean up a dilapidated beach town modeled on Long Beach and all the while keep his signature thin oval cigars from going out. Oh, and did I mention a backstory featuring Castro and Jack Ruby?
After a while, all this byzantine playfulness starts to seem like something a former CIA agent ought to know a thing or two about: namely, a cover story. Possibly there's a real story underneath, some kernel of fact that Thomas has artfully obscured, but that seems too far-fetched. No, my guess is that all of "Chinaman's Chance" is simply a shaggy-dog pretext for Thomas to show off the one gift he had in greater abundance than any thriller writer who ever lived, and maybe any writer, period: a contagious air of utter bemusement, an unruffled intimation that nothing ever fits and all is folly.
How Thomas modulated his prose in such a way that a reader's smile becomes constant -- never cracking into a laugh, yet never quite evaporating, either -- is a greater mystery than any played out here by all his silk-cut arch-villains, slatternly femmes fatales and knavish thugs.
Check out this specimen of Thomas' prophetic cynicism, exhaling like marsh gas from another of his patented explanatory speeches: "[R]eal gambling will come to California, sooner probably than any of us think. The voters will decide that they'd rather have legalized gambling than confiscatory property taxes. It's wonderful, don't you think, how flexible one's lifelong convictions usually are?"
Bear in mind that the mercenary-turned-mafioso quoted is making his predictions as Proposition 13 was passing in 1978, probably before. And never mind that few real people, and even fewer mobsters, tend to throw around words like "confiscatory." Thomas isn't after realism -- more like a heightened sense of how the world would work if only criminals were as articulate, and antiheroes as brilliant, as we might want them.
Some readers may find all this a bit dated, however entertainingly it plays. One hungers to know what Thomas would be writing today, when cynicism seems at once more justified and more dangerous than it ever did. Thomas' books ultimately leave the reader with a sense of society as terminally corrupt, and all the funnier for it. One wouldn't want to live in any of them for very long.
But as a temporary posting, a furlough from geopolitical cares scarier than anything Thomas ever contrived, "Chinaman's Chance" is a perfectly rendered exercise in utter oblivion. This is the quintessential book to take to a deserted island, because fundamentally it is a deserted island -- a place apart, paced to its own rhythm, with little to think about but much to admire.
A wink and a grin at the spies among us
By David Kipen
Chinaman's Chance
By Ross Thomas
Introduction by William Heffernan
St. Martin's; 320 pages; $14.95
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a kind of code that crops up in the "about the author" copy of certain novelists, especially suspense novelists. One sees it on the jackets of Charles McCarry, whose fine books both old ("The Tears of Autumn") and new ("Old Boys") are finally getting a nice push from the Overlook Press these days. My old copy of "The Miernik Dossier" calls McCarry "a former newspaperman and speechwriter," but where exactly did he write all these speeches and newspaper articles? It doesn't say. It never does. Whenever they tell you somebody wrote a lot but don't tell you for whom, it's usually because they were really writing for us -- specifically, for the CIA.
Then there's Ross Thomas, whom an old edition of "Chinaman's Chance" fingered as "a reporter and an editor and public relations director for numerous publications, radio stations, national organizations, and political candidates in the United States, Europe, and Africa.'' E. Howard Hunt's jacket bio couldn't have put it any more delicately.
Unlike McCarry, Thomas didn't live to see the revival he's now enjoying. He died in 1995, and only now is St. Martin's Press mercifully rolling out much of his glorious backlist: "Ah, Treachery!" introduced by Joe Gores; "Briarpatch" introed by Lawrence Block; "Out on the Rim" with an essay by Donald E. Westlake; "Twilight at Mac's Place" fronted by T. Jefferson Parker; not to omit the enduringly perverse escapade titled, with a political incorrectness apparent even in 1978, "Chinaman's Chance."
For a Company man, Thomas always made excellent company. The puckishness of "Chinaman's Chance" starts with its title. Raised in a San Francisco orphanage, Artie Wu habitually leaves nothing whatever to chance. He trips over a dead pelican on a California beach in the first paragraph to set Thomas' intricate plot in motion, but even that stumble turns out to be anything but an accident.
Anybody who can trace the convolutions of Thomas' plot deserves a secret presidential commendation, but here's a stab at it: Artie's mishap leads him into the company of Randall Piers, an electronics billionaire whose nymphomaniacal actress wife used to sing in a folk trio with her sisters, one of whom is sending cryptic notes from undisclosed locations about the supposed murder-suicide of her congressman lover. Together with his witty, haunted partner, Quincy Durant, Artie has to sort out a couple of murders, clean up a dilapidated beach town modeled on Long Beach and all the while keep his signature thin oval cigars from going out. Oh, and did I mention a backstory featuring Castro and Jack Ruby?
After a while, all this byzantine playfulness starts to seem like something a former CIA agent ought to know a thing or two about: namely, a cover story. Possibly there's a real story underneath, some kernel of fact that Thomas has artfully obscured, but that seems too far-fetched. No, my guess is that all of "Chinaman's Chance" is simply a shaggy-dog pretext for Thomas to show off the one gift he had in greater abundance than any thriller writer who ever lived, and maybe any writer, period: a contagious air of utter bemusement, an unruffled intimation that nothing ever fits and all is folly.
How Thomas modulated his prose in such a way that a reader's smile becomes constant -- never cracking into a laugh, yet never quite evaporating, either -- is a greater mystery than any played out here by all his silk-cut arch-villains, slatternly femmes fatales and knavish thugs.
Check out this specimen of Thomas' prophetic cynicism, exhaling like marsh gas from another of his patented explanatory speeches: "[R]eal gambling will come to California, sooner probably than any of us think. The voters will decide that they'd rather have legalized gambling than confiscatory property taxes. It's wonderful, don't you think, how flexible one's lifelong convictions usually are?"
Bear in mind that the mercenary-turned-mafioso quoted is making his predictions as Proposition 13 was passing in 1978, probably before. And never mind that few real people, and even fewer mobsters, tend to throw around words like "confiscatory." Thomas isn't after realism -- more like a heightened sense of how the world would work if only criminals were as articulate, and antiheroes as brilliant, as we might want them.
Some readers may find all this a bit dated, however entertainingly it plays. One hungers to know what Thomas would be writing today, when cynicism seems at once more justified and more dangerous than it ever did. Thomas' books ultimately leave the reader with a sense of society as terminally corrupt, and all the funnier for it. One wouldn't want to live in any of them for very long.
But as a temporary posting, a furlough from geopolitical cares scarier than anything Thomas ever contrived, "Chinaman's Chance" is a perfectly rendered exercise in utter oblivion. This is the quintessential book to take to a deserted island, because fundamentally it is a deserted island -- a place apart, paced to its own rhythm, with little to think about but much to admire.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
