BOTTOM LINE: THE TRUE COSTS OF EXTREME CAPITALISM

Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of that remarkable moment when this country began to turn its back on values that had sustained it throughout its first two centuries - values that included balancing power and wealth with concern for, cooperation with, and compassion towards others in the community we called America. In their place came a psychotic faith in the ubiquitous virtue of the market, a faith almost creationist in its absence of objective foundation, intellectually barren when not actually dishonest, and as monomaniacal as the creed of the religious fundamentalist. Every other aspect of existence - religion, family, morality, creativity, politics, community, tradition, ethnicity - was declared merely a byproduct of the marketplace.

True, America had always been a highly commercial culture. And it had gone through periods - such as that of the 19th robber barons or the 1920s - when its better nature was submerged or perverted by a corrupt culture of greed, but in these prior instances it had been generally clear who the true beneficiaries were and there had been little effort, even by these lucky few, to pretend, for example, that the luck of the Goulds, Carnegies or Rockefellers were but a tax cut away from the rest the country.

With Reagan, however, that all changed. For the first time in our history, the self-serving delusions of the privileged few became the standard for the whole nation, propagated in politics, on campuses and in the media. Even liberals would begin to adopt the language of extreme capitalism. Few asked for the evidence to support its thesis or examine critically its deceptive logic.

To give some sense of the cultural eruption that had occurred, consider some remarks from the 1960s. The first were delivered in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson:

"The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

"It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

"But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

That same year, Ronald Reagan had this to say: "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." And two years later: "Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."

Reagan was still just a brash voice for the wealthy, the greedy, and the lucky, a Bill O'Reilly with charm. But by the time he ran for president, the crudity and the covert cruelty had been transformed into a faith, a philosophy, and a political platform, in part due to a small group of rightwing economists and other academics, but mostly thanks to the new prime minister of England, Margaret Thatcher. As Newt Gingrich noted, "Margaret Thatcher was the forerunner who made Reagan possible. The 1979 campaign was the direct model from which we took much of the 1980 Republican campaign."

Time Magazine would later exude, "By the mid-1980s, privatization was a new term in world government, and by the end of the decade more than 50 countries, on almost every continent, had set in motion privatization programs, floating loss-making public companies on the stock markets and in most cases transforming them into successful private-enterprise firms. Even left-oriented countries, which scorned the notion of privatization, began to reduce their public sector on the sly. Governments sent administrative and legal teams to Britain to study how it was done."

To be sure, Reagan and Thatcher can not be blamed for everything that followed. For example, both Clinton and Blair were more effective in destroying their own party's traditions of social democracy than Reagan had been. As Gingrich remarked, "in a lot of ways Tony Blair is Margaret Thatcher's adopted son." Still it was Thatcher and Reagan that got things rolling. Every president and prime minister, regardless of party, who followed took their country further to the right

What Reagan was up to was easily apparent to the modestly observant. In 1985 Haynes Johnson noted in the Washington Post:

"His appeal has been to private instead of public interests, the self instead of selfless interests. Absent is any call for public service, for common effort, for shared sacrifice, for actions that extend beyond the gratification of the individual, for a wise perspective on the experience of the past and a clear definition of the unmet challenges of the future. The result of this sort of thinking leads to greater celebration of selfishness. It means a greater green light for a new wave of greed so evident in these mid-1980's."

That same year, I wrote:

"I'm worried. I don't think even the president's critics are taking the Reagan phenomenon seriously enough. This is not just another bad president we're facing, but an administration that is attempting a massive revolution in economics, social and moral values, foreign policy, class and racial relationships, and civil liberties. . .

"We laugh at its error, hyper-simplicity and naiveté, but as Goebbels pointed out in 1926: 'There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.'

"I do not propose that Reagan and his aides are fascists, but I do suggest that they could well - because of their ignorance, selfishness and egotism - be leading us into a proto-fascist period in which America would accept accelerated depreciation of its democratic values based on the faulty premises so effectively sold by the Reagan crowd.

"Stand back a minute and look around you. We face a massive deficit and what does our president want to do to correct it? Increase still further military spending even at the cost of destroying programs that have been an integral part of American life for decades. Forget about the issue of priorities and think what this says about who holds power in this country. When people starve to feed the military machine, democracy is in deep trouble. In truth, the Reagan administration is an attempt to turn the military-industrial combination from a complex to a full autocracy.

"Part of the problem stems from the cultural background of the Reagan elite; they are used to being bosses, they now have the key to executive washroom of the world, America, and damned if anyone else is going to get in. This executive suite mentality helps perhaps to explain why the Reagan people are so abysmal at the ordinary politics of compromise and negotiation. They're best at telling people what to do, only now instead of it being a branch manager it's a senator, an interest group or another once sovereign nation. Listen to them talking about why they won't help this or that segment of the population; their rhetoric is that of a CEO announcing the closing of a plant to improve the profitability of the company. . .

"We must cast this struggle in its true nature: the protection of traditionally honored American values, rights and goals against the would-be usurpation of a small, wealthy, power-hungry elite that is increasingly turning this into a government for the few and against the people. The Reagan administration's big lies must be called what they are. The hypocrisy and the Orwellian perversion of language must be hit at every turn. Americans must be reminded that after the blacks suffer, the poor suffer, the farmers suffer, they are next. They must learn that the smile on the face of their president is that of the Cheshire cat. And that they are being politically robbed of their heritage, their rights and their money.

This was the real Reagan, one that barely surfaced in his lifetime and had largely disappeared by the time of his absurd death fest, in no small part thanks to a media that quickly adopted the icon's language, clichés and premises. Reagan transformed American politics into show business and the media was glad to join the cast. The fatuous banalities passing for sound philosophy or ex cathedra statements pretending to be arguments passed deep into the mind of America. Reagan had taught us that truth and reality were no longer important.

One indicator of the power of this lesson came in a 1996 Nexis search of news media by Norm Solomon. He found that:

- "Free enterprise" had been used in 3,489 stories, "free market" in 9,345, and "property rights" in 6,802.

- "Labor rights," however, showed up in only 440 stories; "economic justice" in 592; and "economic democracy" in only 38.

- "Welfare reform" was mentioned in 22,013 stories but "corporate welfare" in only 2,351 and "corporate welfare reform" only 17 times.

Reagan was still calling the shots nearly a decade after leaving office.

O

So where has all this left us? To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off than you were 25 years ago?

The media doesn't even ask this question, but if it did here are just a few of things it would discover, much of it easily retrievable from its own clip files:

- "The traditional pension, an employee benefit that was widely available until the early 1980's has been vanishing from the American workplace ever since. More than two-thirds of older households - those headed by people 47 to 64 - had someone earning a pension in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did" - New York Times

- In the 1980s about two-thirds of corporations included health care benefits with their pensions. Today only about a third do.

- In April 2004, the nation's trade gap hit a record $48 billion, precisely the sort of thing extreme capitalism, free trade, and globalization was supposed to prevent.

- The top one percent's share of household wealth had dropped from 1929 to 1981 from 44% to 27%. By 1998 it was back up to 39%.

- "The Congressional Budget Office says the income gap in the United States is now the widest in 75 years. While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent" - CBS

- "[Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University] found that the average net worth of an older household grew 44 percent, adjusted for inflation, from 1983 to 2001, to $673,000. But much of that growth was in the accounts of the richest households, which pushed the averages up. When Mr. Wolff looked at the net worth of the median older household - the one at the midpoint of the economic ladder, a better indicator of what is typical - the picture changed. That figure declined by 2.2 percent, or $4,000, during the period, to $199,900.
For a generation to emerge from two bullish decades with less wealth than its parents had 'is remarkable,' Mr. Wolff said. Based on economic growth and market returns over those 18 years, he said, their wealth "should be up around 30 or 40 percent." - New York Times

- Meanwhile, for households of all ages, between 1983 and 1998 the average household net worth of the poorest 40% in the U.S. declined 76%.

- "The biggest indicator of a healthy society - average life expectancy - dropped. People in the U.S. now don't live even as long as people in Costa Rica. Meanwhile the U.S. infant mortality rate has risen, so much so Cuba has a better success rate of bringing healthy children into the world." - CBS

- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. By 2002, six corporations did.

- Between 1981 and 1997, children 3-12 spent 25% less time playing, an hour less a week eating meals, one-half hour less a week sitting and talking with someone at home.

- The number of Americans without health insurance climbed 33 percent during the 1990's, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real dollars than in 1984.

- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 2000 there were two million. In 1980, 8% of the prisoners were there for drug offenses; by 1998, 28% were.

- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a recent male high school graduate declined 28% between 1973 and 1997.

- Wages for the bottom 10% of all wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999

- Median student-loan debt, 1977: $2,000. 1997: $15,000

- Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1980: 42 to 1. Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1998: 419 to 1. Annual pay of a factory worker if it had kept pace with executive salaries: $110,000

- In 1977, the disclosed wealth of the top ten senators was $133 million. In 2001 it was $1.83 billion.

- In 1982, U.S. foreign debt was less than 5% of GDP; by 2002 it was almost 25%

- Between 1973 and 2001, the incomes of the poorest 20% went up 14%, that of the 20% in the middle went up 19%, but the richest 5% went up 87%.

- The real value of the minimum wage peaked in 1969 at over $7 an hour. Its real value is now at $5 an hour.

- Eighty-six percent of stock market gains between 1989 and 1997 flowed to the top ten percent of households while 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one percent.

- In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.

- Two-thirds of American households headed by a person between the ages of 47 and 64 in 1998 had the same pension wealth or less in real dollars than they did in 1983. Almost 20% of all near-retiree households could expect to retire in poverty.

- 1973 to 1995 was the only time in American history that real earnings declined.

- By the turn of the century poor black families were working 190 hours more a year - and poor white families 22 hours more -- than in 1979 for roughly the same pay.

- The two richest men in America -- Bill Gates and Warren Buffet -- own more assets than the bottom 45% of the country.

o

Economic deterioration is not the only damage done by a quarter century of extreme capitalism. Money, after all, is just another form of power, the type you can carry around in your pocket. Once you accept the idea that power in one form is its own justification, there is nothing to stop the principle from extending to every aspect of life. The elements of extreme capitalism - including winner take all, damn the damage, zero tolerance for those who can't make you richer, contempt for activities without monetary profit, disrespect for the less fortunate - spread like a virus to our communities, our schools, our police departments, and our foreign policy.

Here is only a partial list of the other pain that resulted:

- Anti-trust laws, once considered the great mediator of commercial excess, have been steadily eroded.

- Organized labor has become a mere shadow of its former self; the rights of workers are damaged in ways that would have caused national turmoil had they been attempted when America was still a social democracy.

- Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. per capita spending on schools increased 32%. The per capita spending on prisons grew 189%

- California built 21 prisons between 1980 and 1998; it built just one college.

- From the inauguration of a full-scale war on drugs in 1985 to 1998, the number of deaths per 100,000 for drug-induced causes almost doubled. In other words, having a drug war proved twice as deadly as not having one.

- Employers have become notoriously less loyal to their workers forcing an increasing number to become economic nomads. This not only creates burdens for the individual but disrupts the stability of communities.

- Despite the endless talk of free markets, those doing the talking have jammed Washington with thousands of additional lobbyists whose job it is to make damn sure that such free markets don't exist.

- As media has become increasingly monopolized, the cultural choices of Americans have become more limited as have the possibilities for artists who might supply those choices. It is not an accident that America has produced so little significant art, music, or theater since 1980; extreme capitalism has no interest in it.

- There has been a massive shift towards the language of capitalism in all aspects of our conversation and speech, making our words more clichéd, less meaningful, less enjoyable, and less human. To an extraordinary degree we now speak to each as salesmen rather than as fellow citizens. This makes for a pretty seedy culture, full of insincerity and deceit while short on cooperation, individual creativity and shared goals.

- The age of Social Security coverage is rising as the public is being taught not to expect that either Social Security or Medicare will continue to serve as they do at present.

- There has been a dramatic increase in homelessness.

- Efforts to control individual rebellions against the banal and life-draining culture of extreme capitalism have produced increasingly authoritarian, militaristic and punitive tactics such as the war on drugs, zero tolerance, and the conversion of public schools into quasi-detention centers. We drug our students for daring to be restless, the very students who, in another time, would have become the creators, the thinkers and the wise that a society so badly needs.

- Advertising has invaded every aspect of our life making existence increasingly one long commercial.

- Our environment has steadily and dangerously deteriorated, but extreme capitalism has taught us not to care and so we approach crises like an oil shortage critically unprepared.

- Medicine has been converted from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.

- The number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity or any other rational factor. The number of lawyers have grown with it; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. It now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.

- Our public school system has steadily declined, all the more so as corporate and bureaucratic principles are laid on top of on the very non-corporate business of teaching.

- We increasingly use corporatized prisons without adequate public supervision and prison slave labor to serve corporate interests.

- Our voting turnout has declined.

- Corruption, both corporate and political, has increased to the point that it is no longer deviation but an assumed part of our culture. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

- Employing the techniques and goals of corporate monopolization to our foreign policy we have become more hated and fearful than at any time in our history. We have reacted with a spiral of panicked and brutal responses that have simply made things we worse.

- We have lost interest in our Constitution and democratic ideals and have made our government serve first and mainly the interests of our largest corporations. There is a technical name for this: it is called corporatism or fascism.

None of this has made us happier, wealthier, healthier, safer or better custodians of this land to pass on our children. We lack glory, gladness, grace and decency, having traded them in for tricks, treachery and greed.

This is the bottom line of extreme capitalism. but placated by Prozac, persuaded by prevarication and pacified by prohibition, we ignore our drift towards the mean and the brutish and continue to accept the lie that we are the better for it.

HOW MUCH DO WE LEARN FROM EVIL?

The 60th anniversary observance of Auschwitz brings back a question that periodically lurks in the corner: how much do we really learn from evil?

It is widely assumed in this country that humanity is significantly improved by such things as Holocaust studies, international war crimes, and showing teens scary films about driving. There is, however, far more faith than evidence about all this.

This is not to say that such matters should not be an part of the human curriculum, only that in American culture they are approached with a zeal that borders on moral pornography and, in the process, overwhelms the far more important matter of learning and practicing alternatives to that which we are meant to avoid. It is almost as though we were constantly being given directions by naming all the streets we shouldn't use without ever being told the ones we should.

I learned about Auschwitz in 1956, on the eleventh anniversary of its liberation. It was at the tail end of Soc Sci 2, taught by intense, red-headed liberal Samuel Beer, who covered six revolutions -- including the French, industrial and Nazi -- with enthusiasm for real people and events. Each revolution required a two thousand word paper. The climax of the course led us from Nietzsche to Hitler to an evening of Nazi propaganda films and footage of concentration camps liberated just a decade earlier. The concentration camps were gruesome, but the movies the Nazis had made to celebrate themselves were in some ways even more horrific, depicting as they did millions of Germans voluntarily surrendering their souls as millions of others were involuntarily losing their lives. In one of the films, the frame was almost entirely filled with an overhead shot of Nazi soldiers. One thin corridor cut through the dark mass and down it walked three tiny figures -- Adolph Hitler and two aides.

What we saw had been placed in history's context; we had been taught not just brutal endings but far more instructive beginnings, and we got to see not just evil's horror but its accompanying banality.

What I didn't realize, however, was that college students all over America weren't learning the same thing and that when they did, it would have acquired a name, and a politics, and a semiotics, and it would have become multiple worlds inhabited by victims, philosophers, journalists, politicians, leaches, symbol snatchers, propagandists, self-servers and deniers. And that people like Sharon and Bush would do new evil in the name of exorcising the old. I had learned about the Holocaust before it became whatever anyone wanted it to be.

By the time I graduated, I had read William Shirer's new book, The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, and found myself absorbed not so much in what the Nazis had become but how they had begun - how normal, how ordinary so much of it had been, with that frighteningly familiar mix of opportunism, lust, incompetence, and failure of courage at a time when something still could be done. If they had let me build the Holocaust museum that would have been its prime exhibit: not what had happened, but how.

Years later I read Martin Mayer's book, They Thought They Were Free, based on interviews with ordinary Nazis before and after the war. In it, this Chicago Jewish reporter summed up:

"Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany. . . It was what most Germans wanted -- or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it. I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusions. I felt -- and feel -- that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I."

Here is the part of the Holocaust that is most frequently denied. Not that millions were slaughtered but that those who did the deed might under certain conditions be either you or I. And we would do it, as Adolph Eichmann had suggested, simply by finding the right words for it, what he called 'office talk.'

It is this unrecognized, undiscussed denial, especially at moments of solemn observance, that most frightens me. And our recovery does not lie in still more talk, ceremonies, and professions of horror. It lies instead in the study, honor, and practice of the good and the decent.
If you watch good people closely, their good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not have to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just the everyday unconscious behavior of those graced with honor: the banality of decency.

We need perhaps a museum of the good, curricula in decency studies, and practice in their skills and rhythms. We need peace experts instead of military experts talking about Iraq on Fox TV. We need mediators instead of just lawyers on Court TV. We need movies, and heroes, and moving stories that win Academy Awards and models for our children that lead them to the contentment of cooperation and fairness rather than to brutal examples drawn from the play-by-play of violence and wrong that appears with every other click of the zapper.

Even our memories and mourning of the wrong can be directed toward the better. Do we only regret or do we reconstitute ourselves and our community, creating a soul and a place where we don't even have to imagine something like that happening again? Too often, confronted with past great horror, we not only mourn the victims, we join them in unconscious capitulation to the presumed inevitability of the evil.

The frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Al Graib and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocaust's lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it.

Idler

Idler

From "Multitudes: An Unauthorized Memoir"

by Sam Smith

 

Copyright 1998 Sam Smith

Shortly before I left the Coast Guard in the early 1960s, the cutter Spar's crewmembers were presented the Defense Service ribbon in delayed recognition of the fact that at some point whatever had been going on in Vietnam had turned into a war. We were now officially -- although the actual phrase had yet to be born -- Vietnam era veterans.

Besides, I had spent three and a half years thinking about what I wanted to do with the  rest of my life. As I did, the excitement of my broadcasting work wore off; it now seemed a life full of the shallow and cynical. In its place, as first sporadically and eventually compulsively, came visions of Sid Yudain publishing Roll Call and Ronnie Dugger putting out the Texas Observer, and of me sitting like them in some office doing what they were doing, only my way instead of theirs. It was odd to be in uniform on the bridge of a United States naval vessel thinking of such matters but I realized the ease with which I had adapted to the Coast Guard reflected as much as anything skills I had learned during the discipline of my childhood. They had little to do with what was in my heart. What I could do, even well, and what I wanted to do, even poorly, were far apart. Like Thoreau I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet stool.

Once unleashed, ideas for a publication poured into every vacant recess of my brain. Together they began to create the notion of an elegant, funny, literary yet journalistically hard-hitting monthly. Its saints would range from Samuel Johnson and Mark Twain to the guys I would later come to think of as The Initials: A.J. Liebling, E. B. White and H.L.Mencken. From Dr. Johnson, I even stole a name: The Idler.

I put together The Idler like I was assembling a hunting shack. My friend Dick Sullivan had just purchased the Warren Printing Company in the next town over from Bristol. Figuring that I would do much better getting my printing done in a small New England town than in DC, I contracted for the presses. I wrote friends to ask them to subscribe and to contribute; more than a few would, although John Neary, already at Life, reminded me that it was Dr. Johnson who had said that only a blockhead wrote for other than money. I asked Hugh Haynie, cartoonist for the Louisville Courier Journal, to let me use his cartoons and I sought out the columns of Charlie McDowell of the Richmond Times-Gazette.

Hugh was not only a cartoonist but a fellow Coast Guard hooligan with whom I had successfully conspired to defraud the government of a number of flights to Louisville in order to design a boating safety manual based on his drawings. In fact, my time there was largely spent enjoying the gestalt of a town which centered, without distraction, upon enjoyment. One Saturday we did wander down to the paper and Hugh drew a few sketches, but we quickly tired of the effort and went home to prepare for that evening's party. Standing in the lobby, the elevator door opened and a young black man bounced out, bragging loudly, and causing all eyes to turn his way. It's that new fighter, Hugh explained, a guy by the name of Cassius Clay.

McDowell I had not met, but I thought I knew him, which was easily the case for anyone who had read more than a handful of his columns. These columns had been required reading for those of us at Officer Candidate School who retained a thirst for words written by someone other than the US Government. We somehow found time to grab a Richmond Times-Dispatch from the paper box and read Charlie's column between breakfast and having to fall into formation again.

Haynie and McDowell readily agreed to my request. John Perts, the caricaturist for Roll Call, was a bit more cautious. A conservative Virginian, he sought to find out more about my politics before committing his drawings to my care. I wrote him in March 1964:

Among those who responded to news of my impending return to DC was my friend Larry's mother and my ex-landlady, Olive Smith. Mrs. Smith offered me the whole first floor of 125 5th Street NE for $110 a month.. I now not only had a place to stay but an exceedingly inexpensive office.

The initial reaction was favorable. Ron Linton, clerk of the powerful Senate Public Works Committee, called to find out who the hell was putting out such a magazine and invited me to lunch to find out more. We became lifelong friends. It was not long before articles and short items from The Idler began appearing elsewhere, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Reader's Digest to the members' bulletin of Washington's Cosmos Club.

The monthly also included whimsical and humorous pieces including those of McDowell, a wry column by an old leftist named Sam Darcey, and a character named Uncle Abner who reported regularly from Saltlickham and answered letters from imaginary readers. Perhaps the most unusual contributor was Madeleine Dion of Federalsburg, Md. Mrs. Dion was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1890 and had resided in various places around Europe, including a stay in Vienna from 1908 to 1913.

When I tumbled upon her, she was living in greatly reduced conditions with a collection of cats (including her favorite, Oliver Wendell Holmes) and writing a column for the local paper under the name of Lorelei. Her style was so mercurial, prejudiced and unpredictable that I suggested that she write me regularly and let me excerpt the letters at will.

I thought that leavening the portentous with such pieces might remind the reader of something that I had learned from my time in rural Maine and from writers like E.B. White: that the great is only the aggregate of the small and that the detailed is often a far better window onto truth than the most elegant abstractions. Lorelei, I thought might help keep my readers, and me, in our place.

Not everyone, however, enjoyed The Idler. Rollin, my Coast Guard journalist's mate from St. Louis -- now on his way to becoming a fundamentalist minister -- wrote me a three page single-spaced letter in September 1964:

Dear Sam,

Thank you for the first copy of Idler and the subscription. Needless to say, your entire publication is contrary to my very existence, but that only signifies we live in America. You are very intelligent and witty. I am sure you have put on paper your philosophy for our troubled nation that you are sure is our panacea. But please remember even Voltaire, Napoleon, Caesar, Hitler, Tojo, Lincoln, Kennedy, and the odds-makers at Las Vegas have been mistaken; some incredibly so.

I initially saw myself more as an unconventional member of the establishment rather than its opponent. Early on, I tried to explain to readers who I suspected were considerably more traditional than myself some of the remarkable changes that were occurring in America and how they might best adapt to them. If anything, my view of American radicalism was that of a sympathetic, albeit sometimes patronizing, observer. Among other things, The Idler in its three short years of existence, tracked my sometimes awkward, equivocating, and even pompous pilgrimage away from what I had been taught and still in many ways believed I was. In June 1965, for example, I wrote:

There is a new radical spirit. It has drawn much of its strength from the civil rights movement, but it goes far beyond that. challenging not just America's racial attitudes but some of her most cherished and smug assumptions. …  It protests the whole humdrum, humbug world of white urban American sophistication with its self-serving definition of success, its indifference towards the socially and economically disenfranchised of the country, its phony values and its 8 oz. drip-dry culture.  It is as purposeful as a March on Montgomery and as pointless as an obscene sign on the University of California campus.

It may provide some perspective to quote a small item that appeared in a box in an issue:

We sent a classified ad up to the Saturday Review not so long ago and got back a reply which said, in part, "After careful consideration, our Acceptability Board came to the conclusion that it would prefer not to run your ad."  We had hoped that the Saturday Review would be able to find a little space for us amongst their other ads concerning Sell's Famous Liver Pate, WBAI-FM, exotic tropical fruit, work for an ex-convict, sex education records, and a private party wishing to buy Horatio Alger books. So we called them up to find out what was wrong.  Nothing wrong with the ad, the lady told us. "The board just decided your magazine was a little too liberal."

 

o

There was a story that wound its way across the pages of The Idler. It was first expressed in a moving fashion in letters written from Mississippi in the summer of 1964 by my college roommate, ex-wrestler and ex-paratrooper Gren Whitman. From Biloxi on August 8 he wrote:

Fear cannot be described, only felt. I have been frightened many times In my life in varying degrees, in varying circumstances. And courage is not the absence of fear. Fear is the essence of courage. What are your emotions now, driving with us along a lonely highway in rural Mississippi, in an integrated car? It you are frightened, you are with friends, and you are sane. If you are not afraid, you know nothing about Mississippi. You have never heard of the Free-dom Rides and how they ended in Jack-son. You have never heard of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, and countless oth-ers. You have not heard of Neshoba County. You have never talked with a Mississippi Negro or a civil rights veteran.

And if your fear has overcome your convictions, you have no business with us. Go home.

Our three colored companions are profoundly aware that two whites are in the car with them and what this will mean if we are stopped for any reason. The two of us, likewise, know that though we are white, we become as black as tar once we are known to be CR types.

In January, I got a chance to help plant the seed. The notorious DC Transit wanted to raise its fares and the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized to stop it. They urged citizens with cars to drive bus passengers during a one-day boycott.

I joined the volunteers. On the morning of January 24, 1966, 1 hauled myself out of bed, swallowed a cup of coffee, warmed up my '54 Chrysler, and made my way to Sixth and H Streets Northeast, one of the assembly points for volunteer jitneys. A boycott organizer filled my car with three high school girls and a middle- aged and rather fat woman.

A bus drove by and it was empty. If both the fat lady and her husband worked, the five cent fare increase DC Transit was seeking would cost them two week's worth of groceries over the course of a year.

At the delicatessen at Twenty-fourth and Benning, one of the assembly points, a young black who worked with SNCC greeted me: "Been waiting all morning for a car to work from here; said they were going to have one, but they didn't send it. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Thanks."

"I'm tired, man. Been up all night down at the office. We got some threats. One bunch said they were going to bomb us, but they didn't."

We got into my car and continued east on Benning. Lots of empty buses.

"We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it. I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the way I feel about it." I agreed. "You ever worked with SNCC before?" "Nope," I said.

'Well, I'11 tell you man, you hear a lot of things. But they're a good group. They stick together. You know, like if you get in trouble, you know they're going to be in there with you. If you get threatened they'll have people around you all the time. They stick together. That's good, man."

People stuck together that Monday, I carried seventy-one people, only five of them white. SNCC estimated that DC Transit lost 130,000 to 150,000 fares during the boycott. Two days later, the transit commission, in a unanimous but only temporary decision, denied DC Transit the fare hike. The commission's executive director dryly told reporters that the boycott played no part in the decision. He was probably right. The commission worried about such things as cash dividends, investor's equity, rate of return, depreciated value, and company base. The boycotters worried about a nickel more a ride. And in the end, the commission was to approve the fare hike and then more; a few years later the fare was up to forty cents.

But the boycott was important, anyway. Never had so many Washingtonians done anything so irregular and contrary to official wishes. The assumption that DC residents would passively accept the injustices of their city was shattered. SNCC and the Free DC Movement had laid the groundwork for future action.

After the bus boycott, I wrote a letter to its leader congratulating him and offering to help in the future. Not long after the leader, Marion S. Barry, and his colleague, L. D. Pratt, were sitting in my living room talking about how I could help in SNCC's public relations. I readily agreed; for the first time in my life I had joined a movement.

Three years earlier Barry had quit his $5,500 a-year post teaching chemistry at Knoxville College in Tennessee and joined the SNCC. He soon showed up in Washington to head the local office. Barry early formed an improbable and ultimately nearly explosive partnership with an erstwhile farm implements manufacturer, salesman, self-styled nutrition expert, and economic theoretician named L. D. Pratt. Barry was lean, black, soft-spoken, self-contained, and given to wearing a straw plantation style hat; Pratt was husky, white, excitable, demonstrative, and covered his baldness with a felt fedora that made him appear a character out of a one-column cut in a forties edition of Time magazine.

Barry and Pratt both worked themselves to the marrow and it was during those months that Barry first gained a long-lingering reputation for always being late for appointments, news conferences, and actions. "I work on CPT-- colored people's time," explained Barry. Part of my job was to stand on the street-corner and convince the press that Marion really would show up if they just waited a bit longer. The reporters would bitch, but since Barry was shaking up the city, they mostly waited anyhow.

Barry's subsequent moves in his drive for passage of right-to-vote legislation in Congress included an effort to get businessmen in downtown stores and along H Street (a black shopping area second only to downtown in commercial importance) to support the movement by displaying its sticker in their windows. Hundreds of orange and black stickers with the slogan "Free DC" below a shattered chain went up in store windows; but the threat of a business boycott led other merchants to cry blackmail, and some of the more traditional civil rights and home rule leaders began to back away from Barry's tough tactics.

In the coming months, Barry and his organization would disrupt the calm of the city with increasing frequency. A number of Free DC supporters were arrested at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. By the following fall, Barry would have been arrested three times, for failing to "move on," for disorderly conduct, and for holding a Free DC block party without official sanction.

Marion was leading a movement, but it had some of the intensity, closeness and spirit of a rebellion. Barry enlisted into the cause anyone he could find. You would be talking on the phone and a special operator would break in with an "emergency call" and it would be Barry or Pratt or someone else with the latest crisis or plan. There were black cops who had been spiritually seconded to the movement and ministers who served as a link between the radical Barry and the more moderate civil rights movement and friendly reporters who still believed there was an objective difference between justice and injustice,. And through it all was movement, excitement and hope, not even dampened by the thirtieth chorus of "We Shall Overcome" sung in a church hall while waiting for Marion finally to show up.

While the 20-something Barry was an anathema to the white business leaders and considered a rogue by the local civil rights establishment, as early as 1966 a poll found him ranked fifth by black residents as the person who had done the most for blacks in DC.

o

In 1965, the US Civil Rights Commission announced that it would hold hearings in Mississippi -- at a time when the governor of the state had warned of "civil war" if the federal government dare send registrars in to put blacks on the voting rolls. I covered the hearings and the result was a whole issue that summarized one of the grimmest and least known stories of failed democracy:

Henry Rayburn, a 63-year-old farmer from near Charleston, was approached by a man with a club when going to vote. Rayburn says the man told him "he would kill me if I tried to vote."

The Commission wanted to know if the police had been notified of the threat. No, Rayburn replied, because "the law coincides with what the other side does insofar as Negroes are involved."

Another man named John Brewer went to sign up. He and his friends were met by a crowd of whites:

One of them said, "You niggers get away from the courthouse. You don't have no business here,"

For the next three weeks trucks with gun racks on the back repeatedly drove up and circled Brewer's house. He finally registered on the fourth try.

Brewer is a World War 11 veteran. He told the Commission, "The only time I felt like a man was when I was in the Army, After I got out it seemed my freedom run out."

And he added, "I want to vote because there are some things I want to get straight."

o

A few years later, I found no shortage of stories or causes. In November 1965, I broke with my political heritage and called for "neo-populism" in a piece titled Where are the Gutbucket Liberals?  A couple of months late I went further, attacking the chief icon of liberalism. Hubert Humphrey. But few things startled my friends and readers more then an article in February 1967 issued called Keep the Seat, Baby, defending Adam Clayton Powell's right to remain in Congress. The article produced a phone call from Powell's top aide, Chuck Stone, beginning a friendship that in itself justified the article. Stone arranged with me to meet with Powell. I walked in about 10 am one morning. His suite had the longest office bar I had ever seen. Powell opened the cabinet doors to display a generous selection of liquors. "This, Sam," the Reverend Powell said, "is what comes of serving the lord."

Meanwhile at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Lyndon Johnson, who was helping to create the Great Society with no little help from Powell, was serving the Lord in his own bizarre way. Stories abound -- from Johnson holding high level conferences while seated on a toilet to an alleged Oval Office tete-a-tete with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton during which Johnson leaned over to Burton, put his hand on his knee and said, "I figure that between the three of us we've fucked just about everybody."

o

When people would write about Marion Barry years later, they wouldn't mention the good part because they had never seen it. All they saw was the cynical, corroded shell of a man they hadn't known and thought it had been that way all along. Like an old car rusting in a pasture.

As Barry moved into politics, first on the school board, then the city council, then the mayor's office I had moved my support and enthusiasm with him, and without apologies. Once in the top job, however, his weaknesses quickly lost their constraints and whatever greatness Marion might have possessed started to disintegrate.

I had been close to Marion, but there came a time when I remembered Jack Burden, the journalist turned henchman to Willie Stark in "All the King's Men" and I told myself I didn't want to end up like him. And so I let increasing distance grow between us until finally there was nothing except the passing reference to times of which I suspect both of us were prouder.

Later I would sometimes tweak him when we met.

"What's happenin', Sam?"

"Not much, Marion. Just staying home with the wife and kids. How about you?"

One February of an election year, he told me at a party, "We've got to have lunch, Sam." I replied, "Marion, we don't have to have lunch until at least July."

Yet there was a portion of the bond that remained unbroken. I would sometimes describe Barry as a drunk uncle you both liked and hated. He introduced me once as "one of the first white people who'd have anything to do with me" and to his new third wife he said, "Sam and I go back a long time. Over the years he's become more radical and I've become more conservative."

When Barry ran for reelection the last time, I took the position that I was all in favor of redemption; I just didn't see why you had to do it in the mayor's office. With a straight face, I suggested as an alternative that he follow the example of an Irish bishop whose long-ago love affair had just been exposed. The bishop had gone to Guatemala to care for the Indians in the mountains. The thought completely broke up the show's host.

During the campaign I appeared on a TV show with Barry. In a more serious manner, I pointed out to him that he had never apologized to the people of the city for the pain he had caused them. He went into his redemption speech and ended by saying that he hoped some day "Sam would consider me redeemed, too."

That was the end of the show, and we walked out together and sat down in the lounge next to the studio. "Marion," I said, "I wasn't talking about your redemption. There are a lot of people in this town who were embarrassed and hurt by what you did and I don't see any sign that you even recognize it." Barry still didn't seem to understand what I was talking about and so I said, "Look, isn't it one of the twelve steps that you're meant to make amends to those you have harmed along the way?"

For a moment, he connected: "You mean I should tell them that I'm sorry.?"

"It might help."

Barry nodded and excused himself, but he hadn't really heard. As I looked into his well-trained eyes I realized I had sought something beyond his vision. For him there were no others.

o

And yet I still think of the good years. The years in which Barry was one of a handful of people who made self-determination for DC possible, the years in which he was the voice of progress and sanity on the school board and city council. I think of a man who was willing to risk his life for the freedom of others, who was willing to go to jail on the chance it would help others gain a measure of liberty. And like Jack Burden writing of Willie Stark, "I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."