MURRAY BOOKCHIN, RIP: The left-anarchist writer Murray Bookchin, inventor of "libertarian municipalism" and "social ecology," has died of heart failure at age 85. For the most part, I wasn't a fan of his work, but he had his moments. I'm fond of his 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist!, distributed at SDS's final convention, whose cover took that familiar row of faces from so many Stalinoid tomes -- Marx, Engels, Lenin -- and added Bugs Bunny at the end. "Once again the dead are walking in our midst," Bookchin wrote, "ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century. So the revolution of our own day can do nothing better than parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1918-1920, with its 'class line,' its Bolshevik Party, its 'proletarian dictatorship,' its puritanical morality, and even its slogan, 'soviet power.'"
His subsequent sniping at the Sandinistas, Bernie Sanders, and various Malthusians was also enjoyable, and he did some interesting historical work on insurrectionary movements. For a while his social vision was broad enough to include market libertarians: He spoke at a Libertarian Party convention and contributed to a newsletter edited by Karl Hess. In 1976 he told a Libertarian activist that "If I were a voting man, I'd vote for MacBride" -- LP nominee Roger MacBride, that is -- and when Jeff Riggenbach interviewed him for Reason in 1979, he said this:
People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights -- this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise...I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.
Later, Bookchin would speak of free-marketeers less favorably.
Bookchin sometimes seemed like a funhouse-mirror version of the libertarian luminary Murray Rothbard. A quick rundown:
BOOKCHIN: Was named Murray.
ROTHBARD: Was named Murray.
BOOKCHIN: Enlivened the fractious 1969 convention of Students for a Democratic Society with an anarchist essay titled "Listen, Marxist!"
ROTHBARD: Enlivened the fractious 1969 convention of Young Americans for Freedom with an anarchist essay titled "Listen, YAF!"
BOOKCHIN: Late in life, turned his fire on the bohemian fringes of his movement, who he denounced as "lifestyle anarchists."
ROTHBARD: Late in life, turned his fire on the bohemian fringes of his movement, who he denounced as "luftmenschen."
BOOKCHIN: Pined for a more authentically proletarian "Left That Was."
ROTHBARD: Pined for a more authentically bourgeois "Old Right."
Needless to say, they despised each other. Indeed, Rothbard reportedly kicked Bookchin out of his living room at some point in the '60s, for reasons that seem to have been lost in the shifting sands of time. I suppose if there's anything worse than being annoyed by a leftist ideologue, it's being annoyed by a leftist ideologue who could be your twin.
That is true only if "all polls" does not include SurveyUSA, which currently has Kinky running second. (Granted, the margin of error is big enough to push him back down to fourth.) At any rate, Frost argues that Friedman's support boils down to a batch of Austin liberals and a contingent of "rural voters who are down on everyone currently in government." In other words, the candidate has reassembled the grand coalition of urban ironists and back-country militiamen who made the '90s so interesting. That's reason enough for me to back the man -- though as it happens, I have three other reasons as well:
1. I support any offbeat celebrity running on a third-party ticket, regardless of platform.
2. Friedman once rhymed "Baruch atah Adonai" with "What the hell you doin' back there, boy?" That's worth at least five votes right there.
3. My brother once bought me Kinky's book Blast from the Past and stood in line so the author could sign it for me. He wrote:
Dear Jesse-- Any brother of Andrew is a brother of mine!
I never finished the book -- I prefer Friedman's songs to his novels -- but that's the funniest inscription I've ever seen.
Frost may well be right about Brother Kinky's chances, but he's wrong to attribute reporters' fascination with Friedman to a habit of treating Texas like "some erratic third-world nation." They just like to write about an entertaining guy who keeps spouting funny one-liners; if John Waters was running for governor of Maryland, they wouldn't treat the Free State any differently. Either way, Frost's defense of Texas' honor isn't doing his state any favors:
The remarkable thing about the national media's blind spot about Texas politics is that so many nationally prominent politicians have come from Texas during the last 50 years. During that time, three U.S. presidents have been Texans: Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush; two U.S. vice presidents have been Texans: Johnson and Bush Sr.; Texans have served as speaker of the U.S. House: Sam Rayburn and Jim Wright; three Texans have served as majority leader of U.S. House: Wright, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay; one Texan has served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee: Bob Strauss.
Many nationally prominent television journalists have also come from Texas: CBS's Walter Cronkite (University of Texas), Dan Rather (Houston) and Bob Schieffer (Ft. Worth); ABC's Sam Donaldson (El Paso) and PBS's Jim Lehrer (San Antonio and Dallas).
LBJ? Tom DeLay? Are you trying to make your state look bad? I'd take Kinky Friedman over all those schmoes put together. He's an heir to the other great Lone Star political tradition: the one that elected Pappy O'Daniel.
Finally, I'm not sure what to make of this passage:
Kinky is exactly the kind of candidate for whom my 26-year-old daughter--who is single [and] socially liberal and has read all his books--would vote. There is only one problem. She lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and is not registered to vote in Texas. There are a lot of out-of-staters who would vote for Kinky if they only could.
Oh, I understand the point that Frost is making. I just don't know why he threw in the bit about his daughter being single. You think you're reading a political column, and suddenly you're in the middle of a personals ad. SWF. Liberal. Kinky Friedman fan. No smokers. She's only 26, Dad. You don't need to rush things.
Wisconsin was relatively tolerant of third parties in those days: The left-wing Progressive Party elected several state officials in the '30s and '40s, including a governor and a senator, before the party folded itself into the GOP in 1946. (The Republicans were more ideologically diverse back then.) Thanks mainly to a large local contingent of German leftists, Milwaukee had been a Socialist stronghold since the early decades of the century. The party's first mayor, Emil Seidel, served from 1910 to 1912; the second, Daniel Webster Hoan, held the title from 1916 to 1940. He was knocked out of office by Zeidler's brother Carl, who was not a Socialist, and whose chief claim to fame was to have the pulp writer Robert Bloch running his campaign. Bloch's friend Harold Gauer recalls: "most of the active Socialists were old parties with white underwear showing over the tops of their high-button shoes, with chewed cigars sticking out of their choppers, who had no idea of how to appeal to young people -- who didn't know how to stop printing doctrinaire tracts and do something innovative. And when guys like myself and Bob Bloch, who depicted the city hall as a 'House of Mystery' and a lot of other whoopee stuff, came along, they ran into something that could only happen once in a lifetime, and they were lost."
Milwaukee's "sewer socialism" was never particularly radical. Indeed, in the first quarter of the century, Milwaukee Leader editor Victor Berger was the head of the party's right wing. Obviously, "right wing" is a relative term when you're discussing the Socialist Party; I'm following the spectrum laid out by James Weinstein in The Decline of Socialism in America, which stretched from Berger's reformists on the right to the IWW's revolutionary syndicalists on the far left.
Berger was also a virulent racist. According to Weinstein, he
proclaimed that only by keeping the United States a "white man's" country could socialism be victorious, and at one point went so far as to appeal for the defense of white womanhood against the invasion of "yellow men." Early in the debate Berger warned that the United States was already beset with one race problem and that if something were not done, "this country is absolutely sure to become a black-and-yellow country within five generations."
That may be part of the historical background to one of the more surprising coalitions of 1924, described in Kenneth Jackson's The Ku Klux Klan in the City:
The political situation in Milwaukee led to a curious alliance between the Socialist party and the Klan. Through the common bond of anti-Catholicism, the two groups supported John Kleist for the state supreme court as both a Socialist and a Klansman. The Klan had more Socialists on its rolls, Kleist told party leaders, than they did.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the Milwaukee politics of that era to say how much that reflected bigotry among the Socialists, and how much it reflected "progressive" ideals within the Klan.
Unlike Berger, Zeidler was, to his credit, a vocal supporter of equal rights for blacks. Indeed, his politics were largely indistinguishable from those of the left wing of the Democratic Party; the sewer socialists built a lot of public housing and other municipal projects, but they never made a move towards, say, workers' control of the means of production. Their most welcome legacy was to make Milwaukee a place where politicians can be a bit more maverick than is the norm on the national stage. Even after it went back to electing Democrats, the city had room for pols like John Norquist, mayor from 1988 to 2003, a "fiscally conservative socialist" who quoted Jane Jacobs, supported school choice, spoke at the Cato Institute, and crusaded against freeways and modern architecture. He was eventually felled by a sex scandal, proving that even a Milwaukee mayor can behave like a conventional politician.
JOHNNY LIVES: Johnny Cash's posthumous Personal File has been in stores for a couple months now, and American V: A Hundred Highways comes out July 4 (and is currently streaming for free over at MySpace). The latter was completed after Cash's death, and it's an open question how much of it is Cash's vision and how much is producer Rick Rubin's; I wouldn't be surprised if a few years hence they put out American V Naked, with all the Rubinean adornments excised.
If they do, I'll probably buy that one too. I'm a fan.
And as a fan -- worse yet, a fan with a blog -- it's my duty to nitpick the comments of other fans. So here's David Cantwell, writing in the July-August No Depression:
American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around continued the variety [of American Recordings and Unchained], albeit with increasingly formulaic results, while reinforcing the singular focus upon the gothic Cash with Trent Reznor's "Hurt" (IV) and Will Oldham's "I See A Darkness" (III). There were innumerable comparisons of Cash to gangsta rappers, and somewhere along the way, Murder became inaccurately elevated onto equal footing with Love and God in the cataloguing of the Cash sensibility.
I once wrote an article that compared Cash to gangsta rappers myself, though I'm pretty sure I did it before he reinvented himself for the alternative audience. (I was quoting "Cocaine Blues," and making a point about the folly of confusing a singer with the characters he plays in his songs.) I agree with Cantwell about the way Cash is mistaken in some quarters for a musical Grim Reaper, but I have to stand up for Solitary Man, one of the best albums in his catalog. It may have established the recent trend of Cash Albums About Death, but because it got there first it was anything but formulaic. It's essentially a concept album about the singer's impending exit from the world, and its tone is established on the cover: The musician stands alone in a hallway, eyes cast downwards, waiting.
The first track on the CD is a cover of Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down." When Petty sang "You can stand me up at the gates of Hell/But I won't back down," it was a metaphor, but when Cash sings it you get the impression he might mean it literally. The whole disc continues in that vein, and there isn't a single misstep along the way. The Man Comes Around, by contrast, feels like a series of outtakes from the album that preceded it; some of it's great, but some should have stayed in the vaults. (A Sting cover? Good Lord, why?) IV got a lot more attention than III, thanks to Cash's powerful cover of "Hurt" (and Mark Romanek's powerful video for the song), but it was the earlier album that deserved the acclaim. IV was formulaic. III wasn't.
And V? Terrific stuff. The high point is the old gospel song "God's Gonna Cut You Down," a.k.a. "Run On for a Long Time." At least three stars have recorded this one in recent years, and if Cash's performance isn't quite as good as the version the Blind Boys of Alabama did a few albums back, it still kicks Moby's ass.
