When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at '87, it gave its Best Picture award to The Last Emperor, an opulent but bland biography with a moderately Maoist message. You won't see that one here:
1. Full Metal Jacket Directed by Stanley Kubrick Written by Kubrick, Gustav Hasford, and Michael Herr, from a novel by Hasford
I was watching one of those Siskel and Ebert ripoffs -- I think it was the one with Michael Medved, but maybe it was the one with Rex Reed -- when they preceded their reviews of this terrific black comedy with the movie's funniest clip: the one where the sergeant brags that Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald learned to shoot in the Marines. I was still laughing uncontrollably as one of the hosts gazed gravely from the screen and announced that the scene had sent a chill down his spine. Not for the last time, I realized that many critics are full of shit.
2. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story Directed by Todd Haynes Written by Haynes and Cynthia Schneider
A 16mm biopic performed by Barbie dolls. A deeply disturbing movie, it ran into trouble with both Mattel and the Karen Carpenter estate -- and it's still under a legal cloud today. But it's not much trouble to find it online.
3. House of Games Directed by David Mamet Written by Mamet, from a story by Mamet and Jonathan Katz
Unlike many stories that rely on plot twists, this paranoid tale's sudden shifts are unpredictable without being unbelievable.
4. Hope and Glory Written and directed by John Boorman
From the screenplay: "he is astonished to see hundreds of children in a state of delirious celebration. Boys fling their caps in the air. They cheer. They whoop. They run amok. Behind them lie the smouldering ruins of the school."
5. Raising Arizona Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
I was watching one of those Siskel and Ebert ripoffs -- I think it was the one with Rex Reed, but maybe it was the one with Michael Medved -- when one of the hosts announced that he couldn't understand why this comedy about kidnapping had gotten such a positive reaction. After all, he explained, kidnapping is a felony. Not for the last time, I realized that many critics are full of shit.
6. Tin Men Written and directed by Barry Levinson
It's the best of Levinson's Baltimore movies, which is another way of saying it's the best Levinson movie, period. I'm a big fan of formstone, by the way. I don't understand why all those yuppies insist on peeling it off their houses.
7. RoboCop Directed by Paul Verhoeven Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner
A satire posing as an action movie. The fake ads alone earn it a place on this list.
8. Barfly Directed by Barbet Schroeder Written by Charles Bukowski
"Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don't wanna do. All the things that I don't wanna be. Places I don't wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned."
9. Withnail & I Written and directed by Bruce Robinson
If you want to impress the nerds, call it The Two Doctors.
10. Roxanne Directed by Fred Schipisi Written by Steve Martin, from a play by Edmond Rostand
"People ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."
I'm supposed to speak today on the question, "Does radio have to be lousy?" Before I can answer that question, though, I should probably address another one: "Is radio lousy to begin with?"
The answer to that is going to vary from person to person, since we all listen to the radio for different reasons and since we all like different sorts of programming. Furthermore, it's not enough to say that most radio is lousy, because the important point isn't whether we like everything that comes out over the dial. One consequence of great diversity is that whatever you like will probably seem to be drowning in a sea of trash. What's important is for the stuff you want to be out there and for you to know where and how to find it.
That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, yes, radio really is lousy—or at least a lot lousier than it could be and should be. I wrote a book about this, and the closest I've gotten so far to a negative review came from the conservative magazine Chronicles, which suggested that maybe there's more choices on the radio band than I was willing to admit. I quote:
"A survey of the average metropolitan area will yield broadcasts in Spanish, Korean, and Russian; sports talk shows; Gregorian chants; country and new country; classical music; National Public Radio; soft rock, hard rock, jazz, blues, oldies, classic rock, and Christian rock; fundamentalist preachers railing against all rock music as a tool of the devil; evangelical answer men telling listeners that they can't lose their salvation; Jewish geologists admonishing callers to sober up and take responsibility for their pitiful lives; call-in sex-advice shows; and outraged Republicans and libertarians whipping their listeners into a froth over Democrats, moral outrages, and Big Brother."
Now, that's an extraordinary list, in part because it describes an "average metropolitan area" that doesn't exist. Most cities do not have a Russian-language station or a program devoted to Gregorian chants, and in a lot of places you can't even get jazz or blues—or if you do, it's only for a few hours a week. There is a lot of variety out there: There's around 11,000 stations on the AM and FM dials, with dozens of formats for listeners to choose from; and even if there's no Russian station in your listening area, if you're in a big city there's a good chance that there'll be at least one station that offers non-English, non-Spanish programming. But you'd be shocked at how little variety there is within those stations. I went back to my old high school in North Carolina late last year, to help some students put a station on the air. We toured some of the local broadcasters, and the program director at one of them, an oldies station in Durham, was just beaming when he told us how big his music library was. Most places only have about 400 songs to pick from, he told us, but at this station, there were 1200 songs.
Later on, we dropped by the Duke college station, which is very good—a bunch of kids playing interesting and unusual music and doing a good job of it. I mentioned what the oldies guy had told us, and his jaw just dropped. That station—a tiny little place—had thousands of LPs and CDs crammed into it. The idea of limiting themselves to just 1200 songs was just completely foreign to them. But unfortunately, stations like that are fairly rare. For the most part, what we see out there is diversity without depth: an ether carved into a hundred niches, each of which is only an inch deep.
There's an even bigger problem with the claim that American radio listeners have enough diversity. It's true that in every American city there's a number of formats to choose from. But in every city, there's something else as well: a deafening silent sound of all the things that aren't being broadcast.
I'm going to give you samples of those things.
* * * * * * * * * *
play Wilmouth Houdini: "Uncle Jo' Gimme Mo'!"
We’ll start with something old. This was calypso in the days before Belafonte—the Arhoolie label, which put this out, collects all sorts of amazing folk music of the past and present, along with various ethnic flavors of pop. Most of it won't turn up on the radio.
play Bhundu Boys: "Ring of Fire"
African music. Anyone recognize this song? It's a cover of a Johnny Cash song—from Zimbabwe, where Dolly Parton and Don Williams are very popular. There’s very little African music on American radio, and what there is can't possibly reveal all the variety of music from that continent—a case in point.
play Marius Cultier: "Ouelele"
Where the Bhundu Boys were mixing Zimbabwean music with American country-western, this fellow from French Antilla was mixing the local sounds with American funk and jazz.
By the way, what I'm doing right now is itself something that's increasingly rare on the radio: I'm actually telling you what you're listening to.
play Orishas: "Represent"
Another combination. In this case, it's Cuban hip hop—or Cuban-American, anyway. I actually did hear this on the radio, in fact that's how I found out about the record, but it was a tiny college station in California—much as I love the Buena Vista Social Club CDs and what they've done for Cuban music, the way it's been presented, especially on public radio and public TV, has given the false impression that Cuban music (and traditional music in general) are frozen in time, and that they need to be quote-unquote "preserved." I'm all for preserving the music of past, but vibrant musical traditions evolve, and part of how they evolve is by getting influenced by the other music around them, even if the results don't fit into any obvious radio formats or marketing categories.
play Wally Brill: "A Loop in Time"
This is even more unusual. A DJ took took some ancient 78 rpm records of Jewish cantors, and remixed them. You might hear stuff like this in a progressive dance club, but it's pretty unlikely you'll hear it on the radio. The thinking is that people want to dance to electronic dance music, but not listen to it in the car or anything like that. Of course, there's people who've tried it: I know a fellow, Jerry Szoka, who combined the two, by setting up an unlicensed radio station in a gay dance club he owned and broadcasting the evening's entertainment to his listeners in Ohio—he had a fair number of listeners, but eventually the FCC shut him down. We'll talk more about cases like that later on.
play Jorge Ben: "Ponta de Lança Africano"
If you recognize this song, it's probably not because you heard it on the radio. It's because it was used in an Intel commercial. These days, the people who pick music for TV ads are actually more daring than the people who pick music for radio playlists.
In case you're curious, this is a Brazilian rock song. It came out in 1976, though most Americans didn't get a chance to hear it until David Byrne put it on a collection of Brazialian pop he pulled together in 1989.
play Muslimgauze: "Romania Abuse"
I want to jump back to electronic music for a second. At least the dance stuff gets played in clubs. Music like this, which isn't really very danceable, has a very devoted audience, believe it or not. It's really flourished online, but you're not likely to hear it on the radio. Some of you might think that's a good thing, and while I like this CD, I have to admit that the chief use I've put it to is to blast it when the neighbors are being too loud. But barring this stuff from the airwaves isn't very fair to the people who like it, and more importantly, to the people who might like it if they stumbled on it while scanning through the dial but aren't exactly about to go looking for it, since they don't know it exists.
play 3Tripper: "My Unfinished Novel"
This, by contrast, is really good pop, with clever lyrics by a local band from Hawaii that releases their own music. You can order it from MP3.com. Leave aside the fact that it's not likely to be a hit in general, and consider instead the fact that it's not likely to get much airplay in Hawaii itself. There are exceptions, but the days of the "regional" hit are mostly over, at least as far as radio is concerned, which is a real shame.
play Orson Welles: "Dracula"
Radio drama is pretty much dead as well. Some public radio stations will play old serials or plays like this one, which is also available online by the way, but you can count the number of stations regularly producing new radio dramas on one hand.
play Carl Stalling: "Porky in Wackyland"
I'm just tossing this one in—it's the score to a Porky Pig short called Porky in Wackyland, one of the best short films ever made. Everybody loves this music, but heaven knows you aren't likely to hear it on the radio. In general, film music is rarely heard outside its original context, though occasionally a noncommercial station will devote a program to it. This was composed by Carl Stalling, who's regarded in some circles as one of the most creative forces in twentieth-century music.
play Soggy Bottom Boys: "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow"
This time I'm cheating: You can hear this music on the radio. It's the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou. The amazing thing is, this sold millions of copies without any radio airplay, became the best-selling country music album in the United States, finally got some airplay on TV, and still it's considered daring to play it on commercial country radio. The market is finally responding to it, as you can tell from the success of quasi-bluegrass bands like Nickel Creek, but the fact that radio was so timid, even in the face of such a big hit, tells you a lot.
Don't let public radio get away with claiming that they're the home of bluegrass and old-timey music. WAMU in Washington used to have a bluegrass format, but now it’s all-news except on the weekend, even when that means playing the exaxt same programs you can hear on another public station across town at the same time. Given that, it's possible that on balance, public radio is playing less of this kind of music now than before.
play Merle Haggard: "Bareback"
Meanwhile, bluegrass and old-timey are hardly the only kinds of country music that have had a hard time getting on the air. There's a whole movement of so-called “alternative country” music, some of it ultra-traditional and some of it crossbred with punk rock. This is arguably the most interesting and exciting music coming out today, but it's almost entirely absent from the airwaves. What's worse, onetime commercial gods of country music, like Merle Haggard, have been crammed into this category, now that most commercial country stations either ignore them completely or play only a bare handful of well-remembered hits. Haggard put out this album, If I Could Only Fly, on a small independent punk rock label the year before last. It's the best work he's done in 20 years, but it didn't get much airplay, certainly not on mainstream country radio.
* * * * * * * * * *
There's two more things you usually can't find on the radio, and in some ways they're the most unfortunate gaps. One is a station that wouldn't simply play one of the styles of music I just played for you, but would mix and match all of them in the same show. This is called "freeform," and it used to be fairly common, but now is limited to a certain number of noncommercial stations and less than 10 commercial ones. There are a number of different definitions of freeform radio out there, but they all require the DJ to pick his own records, something that's incredibly rare these days.
The other thing you usually can't find on the radio is a place for you to do what I just did: to stand in front of a microphone and be a DJ. If you want to play CDs on the air, as opposed to through a couple of loudspeakers in a hotel, you'll find that it costs a lot of money to get the government's permission. A radio dial that isn't lousy wouldn't just give us more freedom to choose among different styles of programming. It would allow us the freedom to create programming of our own.
So what do we hear on the radio instead? On some stations, you're not just going to have trouble finding DJs who pick their own records. You're going to have trouble finding DJs at all. Some of you might have seen an article in The Wall Street Journal last month about the biggest commercial radio chain, a behemoth called Clear Channel, and its efforts to propogate a format called KISS-FM. Around the country, 47 different stations with different call letters are all calling themselves KISS-FM and offering pretty much the same programming (though with some variations). On these stations, prerecorded DJs add bits of local color without ever stepping into the town that hosts the station that's broadcasting them. Clear Channel, by the way, has been trying to establish a trademark on the phrase KISS-FM, which sometimes means threatening lawsuits against other stations that call themselves KISS — except for the station that has the actual call letters KISS-FM, which isn't owned by Clear Channel and follows a different format. You'd think that if there were a trademark to be claimed, that's the station that would hold it.
Now, some people would point to KISS-FM and say, "Obviously, listeners are satisfied with this kind of radio. The market has spoken." But the market hasn't spoken, and not every listener is satisfied. For more than a decade, according to the analysts at the industry publication Duncan's American Radio, the percentage of people who listen to the radio has gone steadily down, except for one brief uptick during the talk-radio boom of the early '90s. Meanwhile, radio broadcasting is encumbered with a ton of regulatory barriers which have prevented upstart stations from coming on the air and transmitting something new. Even direct-satellite radio, which promises to tremendously increase the number of listening choices we have, is limited. The National Association of Broadcasters fought hard to prevent it from going on the air at all, and for all the new channels that are now being unveiled for those willing to pay for them, the Federal Communications Commission, under industry pressure, only granted two companies the right to engage in satellite broadcasting.
At any rate, we could have a lot more variety even on the AM and FM bands, without paying for a special satellite receiver, if only the FCC would ease up on its entry barriers. There's a lot of talk about radio deregulation these days, and that can obscure a very important point: We do not have a free market in radio broadcasting. In a free market, you could go out this afternoon, buy some equipment, and start broadcasting whatever you want, and as long as you weren't seriously interfering with someone else's signal, no one would shut you down. The technical cost of starting a low-power FM station is within most Americans' reach: anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on how elaborate a station you want to put together. The legal cost is much higher. Your startup costs are going to be $100,000 at the very least. If you get a low-power FM license, it may be less, but as I'll explain later, most Americans are in no position to get a low-power FM license.
What sorts of stations are kept off the air by these entry barriers? Would they be interesting and lively, or would they just be more of the same? It's surprisingly easy to answer that question, because for the last decade or so, a lot of people who don't have $100,000 to spare have gone on the air anyway, without the Federal Communications Commission's permission.
Now, as you might expect, some of them did programming that was of no possible interest to anyone but themselves. Here's a sample:
[play excerpt from aircheck]
I actually listened to this entire tape once. I can't imagine that anyone else has, except maybe the guy who made it. Stations like that one tend to drift off the air long before the FCC notices them—in this case, the station shut down because some of its equipment broke. The really good unlicensed stations find a niche for themselves in their communities, and stay on the air until the government asks them to cut it out. Some of them keep broadcasting even then.
Consider Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois. This was started by a blind guy in a housing project, and originally, you couldn't hear it outside the boundaries of the John Hay Homes. Along with playing music and books on tape, Human Rights Radio covered local issues very intensely, especially police brutality. In January 1989, for example, after some Springfield cops beat up a boxing coach and his son, the fellow who started the station, M'banna Kantako, interviewed the victims in their hospital beds and then broadcast the tape.
Later that year, a domestic dispute turned into a hostage crisis and a hundred or so heavily armed cops showed up at the housing project. The standoff lasted for three days, and Kantako covered the whole thing live. It ended when someone started shooting, and three people from the projects were killed. Kantako investigated the standoff and the shootings, and concluded that by overreacting to the initial dispute, the police had paved the way for the deaths. He also probed the question of whether it was police bullets that had killed the three dead. Needless to say, no other local radio station, or any other media outlet, was giving these events this kind of attention.
In the early days, Kantako also trained kids from the John Hay Homes in the basics of radio production, though this project fell off when those same kids started getting harassed by teachers and the police. Eventually, the John Hay Homes were demolished, but the station is still on the air, covering issues of interest to the poor people of Springfield.
Another station: Excellent Radio, run by Charley Goodman in downtown Grover Beach, California. Only two weeks after its debut in 1995, a storm knocked down all the region’s radio towers except for Goodman’s. Charley monitored his scanner closely, passing storm news and emergency announcements along to his listeners. Not long after that, Goodman asked the city council if he could broadcast its meetings live to his listeners. After a few months, he got the go-ahead. The city attorney understood that the station had no license, but that, he felt, was a matter between it and the FCC. California’s open meetings act, on the other hand, guaranteed the station the right to cover the council.
The station's volunteers ranged from skate punks to retirees, from white hippies to Spanish-speaking cumbia DJs. There was an afternoon kids’ show called Treasure Ivan, hosted by the 1960s tunesmith Ivan Ulz, who'd written songs for the Byrds, the Four Freshmen, and several other pop groups. There was a swing show, a ska show, and a weekly helping of “pure pop for now people.” One pair of programmers started interviewing the stars of the World Wrestling Federation. And a retired teacher who'd become an environmental activist had a show called Pollutions—Solutions. Once more, the fact that the station was technically illegal didn't keep local officials from coming on her show—for members of the Planning Department, for example, to talk with their constituents about the contamination of the nearby dunes. Also, unlike Human Rights Radio, Excellent Radio maintained cordial relations with the police, who faxed it the same press releases they sent to all the other local media. The station even had a retired highway patrolman on its staff. He did a jazz show.
Some of you might remember an article Michael Lynch wrote for Reason a couple of years ago about pirate radio in Florida. (Pirate radio is another name for unlicensed radio. Some unlicensed broadcasters regard it as a term of abuse, but others have embraced it.) One of the stations Michael mentioned was Hot 97.7, based in Liberty City, better known as the Miami ghetto. This station was run by a fellow named Brindley Marshall, a.k.a. Bo the Lover. Bo used to be a gangster; back in 1984, he even managed to smuggle a gun into a courtroom. After five years in prison, though, he turned his life around, and became one of the most popular disc jockeys on the Miami club circuit. Hot 97.7 first went on the air in 1996, broadcasting from a warehouse called the Pure Funk Playhouse. At first it was a low-power station, but by the time the FCC shut it down, it was transmitting at 2,000 watts and covering all of Miami and then some.
Now, Liberty City is the poorest, most run-down part of Dade County. Jobs are scarce there, litter covers each corner, drug abuse is rampant, and crime is high. The Pure Funk Playhouse is only a few blocks from the dumpster where a little girl was killed in the crossfire between rival gangs. For a while, the local cops set up a camera in an abandoned bank across the street, to keep an eye on the young blacks who’d hang out in front of the Playhouse all day long. According to Bo the Lover, "They were sure we were fronting for something. They kept sending undercover cops over here, trying to buy crack." But the cops always came away empty-handed. Unlike some of Miami’s pirate stations, Hot 97.7 would never, say, broadcast where to score some coke or where someone had spotted some cops. They always told pushers to stay off their corner, and after that initial period of mistrust, the local police decided that the people in the warehouse weren’t just real DJs, but were real allies in the fight to keep kids away from drug abuse and gangs. Michael and I talked with the beat cop on Bo’s block, Sgt. Frank Dean, and he was full of praise for Bo. Naturally, he wouldn’t condone broadcasting without a license, but he actually had nothing but kind words for the station and its founder.
In a neighborhood where there just isn’t much to do, Hot 97.7 gave people a creative outlet. It also broadcast community announcements, and not just bland stuff like a local events calendar. Once, when a kid ran away from home, the police told his parents that they’d have to wait a day before they started searching. So Mom and Dad went to Bo’s radio station, the call went out over the air, and by the end of the day the runaway had been found. Bo's station also aired some talk shows. Kat, a teen mother turned community activist, hosted a weekly program called Underground Teen Talk, in which service providers and others took teenagers’ calls about pregnancy, HIV, and related issues.
But the most interesting thing about Hot 97.7 might be how popular it was. This wasn’t unusual for pirate stations in the Miami area, though it caught a lot of record companies by surprise. The companies kept wondering why some of their releases were selling well in Miami without getting any local airplay. Then they found out that a lot of stations were playing them—it’s just that those stations weren’t licensed. According to Vibe magazine, Big Pun’s album Capital Punishment topped Miami’s Soundscan charts weeks before any of the legal stations in town were playing it. After that, record companies routinely sent their new releases to the pirates.
Needless to say, Miami's licensed stations wanted the FCC to shut their unlicensed competition down. At the same time, though, some of them started copying their illicit competitors. So in 1996, when a Liberty City pirate called The Bomb started making waves, WEDR—that's a legal station—started a show called The Bomb and hired a former pirate DJ to host it. And in early 1998, when some fully licensed businessmen launched a Tampa station called WILD 98.7 FM, their disc jockeys claimed to be kids broadcasting illegally from a boat in Tampa Bay. Even after the hoax was exposed, some listeners still thought they were real pirates—just unaccountably lame ones.
So that's a small selection of the stations that have gone on the air without the FCC's permission. There's a lot of others, ranging from Panthers to Promise Keepers. There have been left-wing stations, right-wing stations, Hasidic stations, Haitian stations, high school stations, church stations, a station run by migrant farmworkers, a station based in a discount mart, a station based in a retirement home. There have been some really interesting programming experiments: I know of at least two stations, for example, which were basically programmed by their own listeners. The audience sends in music, newscasts, and promos via e-mail, as MP3 files. The station then broadcast them.
When you look at the tremendous variety that's been put on the air in defiance of the law, and then stop to ponder how much more there could be if you weren't weeding out the people who'd rather not break the law, you can't help think of contemporary radio as lousy. We could have all the variety of the Internet on our boomboxes, and we don't.
Speaking of the Internet: I'm not going to get into the field of Internet radio, which is obviously very diverse despite some new costs that have been heaped onto it by the intellectual-property lobby. One thing the Internet has proved, though, is that forms of music that allegedly aren't commercially viable can actually do quite well when they're allowed to find an audience. In 1999, when Arbitron released its first ratings for Web broadcasters, the two stations with the most listeners were a pair of FM outlets—that's licensed outlets, not pirates—with Internet simulcasts: KFAN in Fredericksburg, Texas, and KPIG in Watsonville, California. (We might be able to catch KFAN here in San Antonio—it's at 107.9 FM, if anyone wants to try.) Both of those stations broadcast a lot of alternative-country music mixed with rootsy rock and blues, and both of them have done very well in their local listening areas. But they haven't been imitated much in other markets, where the conventional wisdom is that listeners prefer the polished Nashville brand of country music. Obviously, there's an audience for this kind of stuff after all; and maybe, if the entry barriers to broadcasting weren't so steep, some more stations like these might emerge.
So why do we have all these entry barriers? One of the stated rationales—the main one—is that there simply isn't room for all these new stations. But the fact that so many unlicensed microbroadcasters managed to run stations without causing any serious interference should stand as a response to that argument. It's true that some microbroadcasters have run sloppy operations and stepped on other people's signals, just as some licensed broadcasters have done the same. But most don't.
When you actually talk to broadcasters, you find that the reasons for the entry barriers are a lot more cynical. A lot of them honestly believe that letting more stations on the air will result in a lot more signal interference. But mostly, they just don't want the competition. They're also sitting on some valuable licenses whose prices would sharply drop if more broadcasters were allowed on the air.
Also, some of them will say flat-out that you need to make sure broadcasters made a substantial investment in their stations, even if you need to gin up that investment artificially, because that way they won't waste their frequency on something frivolous. I've actually seen one activist trying to convince broadcasters that low-power FM won't be a threat because there will still be enough restrictions to keep the dabblers out. I'm going to quote him directly:
"How many of the 'nutcases' do you really think will be willing to spend a year trying to get a CP [construction permit], then spend ten grand or more (substantially more for a station with any sort of profit potential) to actually put the station on the air?"
And that's from a supporter of low-power broadcasting. So this is the mentality we're contending with.
OK. So how could we make room in the law for all these different sorts of radio stations? One step would be to allow broadcasters to transmit at lower levels of power. A new high-powered station set between another two high-powered stations might cause a lot of interference; a station with a weaker signal might not. The FCC used to issue so-called "Class D" licenses to schools and community groups to transmit at just 10 watts of power, until the public broadcasting establishment complained that all those little stations were sitting where they might put big NPR outlets instead, leading the government to stop issuing the licenses in 1978. More recently, Clinton's FCC Chairman William Kennard put forward a fairly conservative plan to license 100-watt noncommercial stations on the FM band. The FCC approved the plan, though it met some opposition from the Republicans on the commission. One of them, Michael Powell, is now the head of the FCC and is regarded as a booster for free markets; he often says that the FCC should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. But he dissented in part from the low-power FM plan, specifically citing the possibility that the new stations might erode the economic vitality of existing broadcasters. The other Republican commissioner at the time, Harold Furchgott-Roth, is regarded as a radical free-marketeer, but he voted completely against the plan. To be fair, he raised some significant issues, such as whether the new stations would face the same red-tape requirements endured by other broadcasters. But rather than propose answers to these questions, he used them as an excuse to oppose the plan altogether.
After the plan passed the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio started lobbying Congress to kill it, and a sizable number of Democrats, plus every Republican in the House except Ron Paul and Ed Royce, voted against low-power broadcasting. They didn't wipe out Kennard's plan altogether, but they did pile on yet more restrictions, to the point where there's no room, for example, for legal low-power broadcasting in any American cities. Some rural areas will still get new stations, and that's it.
Another step toward better radio would be to allow stations to broadcast closer together. To avoid interference, there must be buffers between broadcasters. That is why there are no stations at, say, 101.2 FM—the FCC won’t risk interfering with the outlets at 101.1 and 101.3. Similarly, and more importantly, if a station is transmitting at 101.3, you have to be a substantial physical distance away before you can be licensed to transmit at 101.1 or 101.5. No one disputes the need for such buffers. But the current rules are based on the technical standards of the 1950s. It’s now possible for far more stations to fit onto the spectrum without stomping on each other's signals.
The FCC is already pragmatic enough to allow stations some leeway in bargaining with each other to set the actual boundaries of their coverage areas. It should let them actually sell interference easements, allowing both established and new broadcasters to set up shop at a closer frequency if they pay for the privilege.
Then there's perhaps the most significant act of deregulation the government could do: It could open up new spectrum to broadcasting. Simply turning over unused UHF spectrum to FM radio would make room for hundreds more channels in every city. Beyond that, if the FCC would open even more of the ether to broadcasting, manufacturers could sell so-called downconverters: small devices that would attach to or sit near a radio and convert signals sent over other sections of the spectrum. This would work a lot like DirecTV, which allows a TV set built to receive UHF and VHF signals pick up broadcasts made in the SHF band. But if you want to bring down the price of the converter, you’ll need a highly integrated device without a high parts cost. And in order for companies to invest in developing such a machine, you’ll need a regulatory regime that will allow the product to be put to the use for which it was devised.
Meanwhile, we need a regulatory regime that will allow radio itself to be put, not just to the use for which it was devised, but to all the new, creative uses that broadcasters can conceive.
If we've got time for questions, I'll take some now.
Still, I ended up cutting some interesting stuff. I figure I might as well recycle some of it here, with the caveat that it's a few years out of date. And so, for your reading enjoyment: my account of the locally owned, self-managed stations of Bolivia's mining districts, plus some similar operations in El Salvador.
The first of the Bolivian outlets, La Voz del Minero, was apparently born shortly after the nationalist quasi-revolution of 1952, though some accounts claim it actually dates back to 1945. Back then, the story goes, a handful of miners with a homemade transmitter started broadcasting radical messages via loudspeakers to workers as they emerged from the mines. In this version of the tale, the station came to a violent end in the civil war of 1949, but was resurrected after the events of 1952. Whatever its origins, others soon joined La Voz on the air, transmitting an initially primitive mix of music and unionism. As the years passed, the programming grew more sophisticated, as news, poetry readings, radio drama, and local talk shows blossomed in the Bolivian ether.
By the mid-'70s, nearly every mining district in the country had its own station. Most were operated by unions, though two were municipal cooperatives. (This means the townspeople were all shareholders, and that the stations were formally independent of state control -- a useful technicality in times of hostile military governments.) Another station, Pio XII, is owned and run by the Catholic Church. Sympathetic to the miners, it is often classified with the community stations, though it really shouldn't be. Besides the fact that it's run by outsiders, its competition has led some miners' stations to professionalize, hiring outsiders as on-air personalities for as much as three times the miners' wages.
What was really interesting about the mining stations was their willingness to go underground during times of civil strife. "In 'normal' times of democracy," writes scholar Alan O'Connor, "the radios link the miners' union and its members, and the everyday culture of the miners and campesinos. In times of emergency, when the country and the workers face a military coup, the stations form a network of resistance against the approaching armed forces, broadcast decisions made at public and organizational meetings, and allow union leaders and members, women, and students to offer advice, encouragement, or criticism. Finally, in times of military control, when the stations are closed, they are a focus of underground organizing, and the people demand their return to the airwaves" ("Miners' Radio Stations in Bolivia: A Culture of Resistance," Journal of Communication 40:1). Some would keep broadcasting even then, and damn the laws. After one coup -- General García Meza's summer putsch of 1980, if anyone feels compelled to keep track -- the state threatened to jail even those who merely listened to the miners' broadcasts. Some stations kept transmitting nonetheless, pirates for a season.
In El Salvador, by contrast, some formerly clandestine stations turned into legal outlets. When that nation's long civil war ended, the peace accords of 1992 legalized the guerrillas' Radio Venceremos and Radio Farabundo Martí; the former triumphantly moved its transmitter from a covert mountain base to the roof of San Salvador's Metropolitan Cathedral.
At the same time, 11 community radio stations that had emerged in rural areas remained illegal, or at most semi-legal. They continued their broadcasts -- announcing community meetings, relaying emergency messages, reading the news, playing popular music -- despite the opposition of ARENA, the reigning right-wing party. Desperate for an excuse to close the stations, ARENA accused them of being fronts for the ex-guerrillas (who, you will recall, already had their own legal outlets).
The police shut down ten of the stations in 1995. (The eleventh successfully fended off the authorities, with over a thousand loyal listeners building stone barricades to keep the cops at bay.) In early 1996, the Supreme Court tentatively ruled that the stations should be allowed back on the air, but the political fight over their future did not abate. On July 25, 1997, the Salvadoran legislature passed Decree #56. In debate, the law was billed as a minor move to streamline the nation's broadcast regulations. Once it was passed, people started reading the fine print, and discovered that the government had essentially banned the community stations. Loud protests followed, and several politicians claimed not to have realized what they'd voted for.
In August, the president of the Legislative Assembly found a loophole: the deputies who had voted for the new measure had not affirmed their support in writing. So Decree #56 was "inapplicable," and when re-introduced it failed to pass.
Back and forth, back and forth. The stations were spared the axe, but still weren't properly legalized. And even as the legal battle continued, an extralegal war began, with vandals sabotaging the community outlets.
So in El Salvador, the actively revolutionary guerrilla stations were legalized, while the merely populist community stations continued to be harassed. Evidently, the Salvadoran state finds it easier to deal with fellow would-be rulers than with ordinary people who merely want to govern themselves.
SAM SMITH: THE THREE-DOT INTERVIEW: The first time I interviewed Progressive Review editor Sam Smith was in 1997. He was coming to Seattle to promote a book, and I had arranged for him to stop at KSER, a community radio station where I had been DJing in my spare time. This involved picking him up at Seattle's NPR outlet after his appearance there and ferrying him to my station, which gave us about half an hour to talk before we recorded the show.
On the way to my car he made a comment -- I don't remember what it was -- that seemed to assume I agreed with him on some issue where I actually didn't. So, choosing my words delicately, I said, "I guess this is the time to mention that I'm a bit more libertarian than you are."
"You're a libertarian?" he answered. "Oh, good. That means you won't mind if we eat lunch at McDonald's."
That was when I knew for sure that I liked the guy.
I interviewed him again about a year later, in the other Washington. A Chronicles writer had told me the magazine was doing a theme issue on "radical reactionaries, reactionary radicals," and suggested that I contribute a piece. I proposed a profile of Smith, who as a Chestertonian lefty seemed to exemplify the sort of crossover politics they were writing about; besides, I was spending a year in D.C., so he was right in my backyard. The idea was approved, the interview was conducted, and the article appeared in the November 1998 issue, alongside essays on Dwight Mcdonald, William Borah, and Dorothy Day. I had hoped to persuade them to publish the interview itself, but it was too long for the space.
Fortunately, that is no obstacle to publishing it here. Six years late but barely out of date, I give you the Perpetual Three-Dot Column interview with Sam Smith.
Q: The Progressive Review has gone through a number of incarnations...
A: It started out as a neighborhood newspaper on Capital Hill. I became 30 in 1967, so I was too young to be part of the people the 1960s crowd was fighting against and too young to be trusted. Then, in 1968, we had what has been called the Great Consumer Rebellion -- i.e. the riots. Unfortunately, two of the major riot strips were in our circulation area. A certain number of our readers had decided to burn down a certain number of our advertisers. This created a very difficult marketing situation.
Also, following the riots, there was a major change in the relationship between black and whites in this town. Blacks and whites who had worked together no longer did. I was doing public relations work for Marion Barry, who was head of the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I went to one meeting in the basement offices on Rhode Island Avenue, and in walked Stokely Carmichael, who was then the national chair of SNCC. He announced, I thought rather blandly, that whites were no longer welcome in the civil rights movement. That was part of the spirit of the times.
So, trying to figure out what to do, I changed the focus and turned the paper into much more of what you think of as an alternative or underground newspaper. But because of its strange heritage and because of my somewhat odd situation, it wasn't like most other alternative papers. It was much more community-oriented, less hippie.
We ran the first regular column by a person in prison. We ran what I believe was the first urban planning comic strip in America. I mainly wanted to do politics, but my wife, who had actually been a journalism graduate, convinced me that I needed some arts and culture. I said, "If you want me to have some culture in this newspaper, you're going to have to find it." So she went out and did. The first person she got was Tom Shales, who was later the TV critic for the Washington Post. He covered the media and drama for us for some time. After he went to work for the Post he continued to write for us under the pseudonym of Egbert Sousé until one of his bosses discovered this and told him to stop.
Come the middle of the '80s, I was pretty burned out on the local angle. It's like E.B. White once remarked: when he read his stuff, it seemed like he had said it before, only better. That's when The Progressive Review started.
Q: What kind of local issues did you focus on?
A: Well, in the early days the freeway was one big one. The impact of the War on Poverty on our community was another. Then there was building alternative community structures -- a new approach to urban planning, a new approach to urban organization. It's hard to realize, coming to Washington today, that in the 1960s Washington was up there with Madison and Berkeley. It was a fairly radical place. In Adams-Morgan they were trying to grow trout in the basement of a building. This was one of the great efforts in urban agriculture -- which came to a crashing halt when we had our first post-trout brownout. All the fish died, and we went back to eating trout from natural streams.
Q: There still seems to be, in the stuff you write, an interest in local issues, even if they aren't always based in Washington, D.C. There's a localist focus.
A: I think that's philosophical. Martin Marty said we need a place from which to view the world. And one of the things I notice about people in power in Washington is how rootless many of them are. It's been said that they're the sort of people that when they're in a room by themselves, there's no one there. Without a sense of place, it's very difficult to talk in any sensible way about any policy. Because you've stepped out from the real. You've stepped into a totally theoretical world. I've found over and over again that my local experiences have been helpful in writing about national politics.
Q: Could you give an example of that?
A: Well, the sense that just because the federal government is doing something, it's actually happening -- one of the ways I differ from a lot of liberals is that I think if you're going to build a Department of Housing and Urban Development, you ought to have some housing and urban development come out of it. I've proposed, for example, that there ought to be a quota for every employee of HUD. You know: so many houses have to be built for each employee, or else they have to reduce their staff.
If you're at the receiving end of the great federal government, you get quite a different perspective than, say, if you're at the Metropolitan Club or in the editorial offices of the Washington Post or in the upper floors of the department itself.
My major housing program would be a shared-equity program, in which the government would provide funds for people who buy their first house. The program would be funded this way: when the house was sold, the government would get its share of the equity back. Now, the beauty of that is that you don't need a large bureaucracy to run it. You'd have an instantaneous effect on the housing margin. That's the sort of approach I would take.
Q: It seems like you've been more critical of the left in recent years than at the beginning.
A: I was telling some folks in Providence the other day that most people who are alive today have never seen a liberal do anything worthwhile. I'm old enough to remember when leftists and liberals actually did something, which is why I would not describe myself as anti-liberal or anti-leftist. I just think that the current crowd is pretty pathetic.
Back in the '80s I made a rather naive attempt to get involved in Americans for Democratic Action. I thought, Here is a group which has a large national membership and a good deal of money flowing in; maybe it can be turned into something useful. I actually spent a number of years there. I ended up as an executive vice president. Then I helped form something called the Progressive Caucus of ADA. The people in power there didn't appreciate the irony.
Among the things we tried to do was to get the ADA to support an alternative drug policy, one that wasn't based on the premise that it was all right to send young black males to jail for preferring marijuana to daiquiris. On two occasions we passed resolutions at the national convention that represented a significant shift in ADA's thinking.
Well, the powers that be just went up in arms. They buried both resolutions. They were not very pleased. On one occasion Rep. Charlie Rangel, who was the chair of ADA, showed up just to debate that one issue. He was so furious that there were these out-of-control people proposing something other than an entirely punitive approach to drugs.
I mention that because, as you know, ADA hasn't been heard from much of late. But the other day I noticed Amy Isaacson, their director, was quoted standing up for the right of Kramerbooks not to be subpoenaed by Kenneth Starr. I thought to myself, you know, that's the first time I've heard them get involved on a major civil liberties issue. In my mind, the drug issue is somewhat more important than the subpoenaing of Monica Lewinsky's books.
I tend to think of them more as being AWOL rather than being wrong.
Q: ADA, or liberals in general?
A: Liberals in general. They have missed out on a lot of very, very central issues. Such as the War on Drugs. Such as the militarization of society. Things that liberals used to be concerned about. And the left media -- The Nation, Mother Jones -- got themselves in a terrible bind with Bill Clinton that they have yet to get themselves out of. Defending a reprehensible president hardly seems to be the place to position yourself as a political movement.
Q: Hasn't there been a hysteria among liberals towards rural populism? An attitude towards movements like FIJA or the property rights movement or the militias that seems to be based on a fear of what these people in the fever swamps are doing rather than an interest in what might be motivating them to protest?
A: Yeah. I think there's a lot of cultural problems and hang-ups that liberals and leftists have. I don't think a lot of them like Americans all that much, in all their diversified glory. In my mind, being an American is like being a member of a large family, and it means getting along with people you don't agree with as well as those you do. I don't understand the idea that there are groups of people who are beyond the pale. I'm not talking about leaders now, I'm talking about masses of people. One of the things I tell people is: Don't attack followers, attack leaders. If you've got a problem with Rush Limbaugh, take it out on him, but don't take it out on his listeners.
I think it's a form of snobbism. Part of it is political, but -- just as there are a lot of conservatives who feel that they're superior to various ethnic groups, so there are a lot of liberals who feel superior to fundamentalist Christians, or people who grew up in a hunting environment, for example. And all the messages are wrong.
Let's take guns. I'm a product of a Quaker school. I hate guns. I don't have anything to do with them. Part of that is because if I had a gun I'd be dangerous. I proved that when I was in the Coast Guard. I got nothing on my target; the guy next to me got all of his and mine too. But I also know that gun control should be regarded as an urban/rural issue, not a left/right issue. I was interested to see Bob Kerrey talking about this yesterday on C-SPAN, up in New Hampshire. He made a point I've seen very few politicians make in this country. He said in western Nebraska, there's no problem with guns. In Omaha, there is. And you've got to come up with solutions that recognize that.
Well, part of that solution is not to define everybody who comes out of a culture where guns are important as evil. Because it includes people like my wife, whose father was a longtime hunter up in Wisconsin. So I sort of take it personally if the liberals want to knock people who come out of that environment.
I can tell you where the line was drawn in Maine on the gun issue -- physically, one place where it was drawn. It was on the back steps of a suburban house on the edge of a woods, where a woman came out in her white curlers one day and was shot for being a deer. Now that story tells more about the gun issue than anything else. That was a conflict between the two cultures. The woman had no sense that she was in any danger, and the hunter had no sense that he was in an urbanized area.
Q: Do you think there's a link between that sense of snobbery, among conservatives and among liberals, and the sense of abstraction you were speaking about earlier?
A: Yeah. I've been involved in biracial politics for a long time, and I really don't believe that getting people to say the right thing is all that important. I mean, I would like to see people not use prejudiced language. But in a hierarchy of things, if you create a society in which people learn to hide their feelings, you're in a much more dangerous society than one in which you can tell what the problem is. The real danger with politically correct speech, for example, was demonstrated to me when I was on a plane going to Brown to see my son. I was sitting next to a guy from North Carolina. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was going up to see his brother at Brown. I said, "How's he getting along?" He said, "He's getting along pretty good. He's learning how to deal with those liberals." And I said, "How's he doing that?" He said, "By keeping his mouth shut."
I thought that was a wonderful description of what 's wrong with that approach. If the lesson you teach is for people to keep their mouths shut, then you don't change feelings and you don't change relationships. You end up with what I think of as the George [H.W.] Bush Syndrome. You couldn't imagine George Bush ever being rude to a black person personally, but he had a total incapacity to deal with their problems if they became aggregated in any way. So you have on one hand an immense civility, and on the other hand you have a lot of bodies lying around.
One of the buzzwords of the day is "civil society." You know what I think of when I think of civil society? I think of all those seminars, all these private meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, all these talking heads on C-SPAN, all these thoughtful speeches. And then I think of nearly two million dead Iraqis since they started the embargo. That's UNICEF's estimate. It's this conflict between this language of civility and abstraction, and these dead bodies, that gets to me.
I don't know whether that's ideological or not. I sometimes think my politics is just based on a strong dislike of bullies.
Q: Do you think those values are more important than ideology?
A: I got a call recently from Philip Weiss, who's a columnist for the New York Observer, a liberal weekly. Weiss is an interesting fellow because he's one of the few reporters who's really changed his views of Clinton as a result of his reporting. We were talking about Whitewater. He said, "Does it bother you to hang around and be connected to all these right-wingers?" And I said, "No! I grew up in a family with six kids. I'm used to being around people who don't agree with me." It turns out, I was third of about six kids, and I think he is too. that got me started, so I did a little survey -- I wrote to Roger Morris, Chris Ruddy, Sally Denton, and Hugh Sprunt, and did a little anthropological study of people who had investigated Clinton. And you know, I think something like four out of the six of us had come from families ranging from four to 14 kids. Christopher Ruddy is eleventh out of fourteen kids. And that has an effect. That isn't ideological.
I also don't think you'd describe it as ideological if you were raised in a heavily value-oriented community or family. That was something else that came out. Why were Hugh Sprunt and me essentially on the same wavelength on this? Well, when I asked him a few questions one of the things that came out was that he'd gone to a church school, and he had gone to church once a week, which was treated like a class. I went to a Quaker school, and I was going to a Quaker meeting once a week, which was treated like a class. Even though he was reading Ayn Rand at the same time I was reading Martin Luther King, we had this other thing in common.
Ruddy is the son of an Irish cop. Sally Denton is the descendent of someone who was chased out of Utah by Mormon enforcers. And Roger Morris had a grandmother who was around in Kansas City during the Pendergrass machine, and she passed on to him a distrust of politicians. I mention this just to show how many influences there are on people that will lead them to the same position. What appears to be a vast right-wing conspiracy turns out to be a kind of oxymoronic confederacy of the open-minded.
I guess one of the unique situations I'm in is that I'm one of the few genuine apostates in this whole Clinton business. It's one thing to be a right-winger and go after Clinton. but I wouldn't know where to find Richard Mellon Scaife, let alone get any money out of him. I've done some thinking about how I got into this situation, and aside from some of the things I just mentioned to you, I went back and thought about my time at Harvard U., where I graduated magna cum probation. I realized -- going back and looking at some things I had written, so it's not just something I sort of recreated out of this current experience -- that I had gone to Harvard from a Quaker school with the idea that life is something you engaged in, that you made choices about. It was not something to analyze, put into boxes, describe which categories various phenomena belonged to. To my mind, I felt like I was being told that there were these things like the Industrial Revolution or the Freudian Era which my job as an educated person was to slip all phenomena and experiences into. And I just didn't think that way. It was alien to me.
Which is probably one reason why I majored in anthropology. Not only was I sort of a proto-journalist at that point, but I was also interested in anthropology. In both of those fields you start picking up things, every little piece of data you can, and then after you've done that you start to figure out what it all means. It's the reverse of what a classically "well-educated" political science major or English major at Harvard would be doing. The longer I hang around, the more I see that my friends who came out of this sort of background have lost their capacity to experience data fresh. They immediately put it into slots.
That's the sort of experience I'll have when I'll say to someone -- it could be a well-educated reporter or a liberal friend -- "Look, I'd feel a lot better about Vince Foster's death if I knew how he drove to Fort Macy Park without any car keys." And the typical reaction is, "Oh, you don't believe in that right-wing crap, do you?"
Look what happened in that little conversation. I referred to some data. The proper negative response to what I said is, "Well, didn't you know that his keys were found? They were in the bushes three feet away." But if you say, "You don't believe that right-wing crap, do you?" -- then you've completely shifted. Barbara Tuchman would say you've changed an issue of fact into a matter of motivation. I find that happening all the time.
The whole Clinton experience has helped explain something that has been puzzling me all my life: why I don't get along with the Washington mindset, or the so-called intellectual mindset, as defined by the Ivy League and similar institutions. I think life involves constant reinterpretation of what the facts may be. If you decide that you're going to live your life as a Marxist or a Freudian, you may be in for some big surprises.
Q: What do you see around you that gives you hope that things are getting better? Or worse? Or both?
A: I think of this as a great unstable period. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet that things were going to get a lot worse.
But I graduated from college in 1959. We only had two riots during my period there, one of which I helped to start, neither of which had any great meaning. One year later, black students organized the first sit-ins in the South, and the first big demonstrations against the bomb occurred. There's no way I could have predicted that.
One of the things I do these days is talk to groups of younger activists. And one of the things missing today is the idea that seemed normal to me, as a child of the existential period and a product of a Quaker education, that you have to make choices, whether the times are good or bad. I think this is a very central point today, especially among younger people, because the idea of choice and of possibility is beginning to disappear.
I was talking in a bookstore in Maine, and a guy who was about 30 came up to me afterwards. He said to me, "I came in late to your talk, and I heard you talking about choice. And I assumed that you were talking about abortion. You know, you really ought to be careful using that word, because people might misunderstand you."
Q: And you said, "No, I was talking about school vouchers."
A: (laughs) But that really set me off thinking. And I realized, choice for young people is a choice of consumption, a choice of association; the idea that it is a constant moral activity is not very strong. I find there's a lot of will for change out there, but people aren't getting a lot of help in coming up with a philosophy to get them through the hard times. Matthew Arnold talked about living in two world, one dead and the other not able to be born. That's the sort of sense you have of this time. But it can explode.
John Adams said that the revolution occurred before the outbreak of the hostilities -- it occurred in the hearts and minds of the American people. If you read a book like Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution, you see little pieces that went together to create the possibility of the revolution. One of the reasons I'm so enthusiastic about being involved in the Greens is that if you have a movement that has created 70 parties in countries around the world without any central leadership, something's going on in people's hearts and minds. If the Greens had been organized by Richard Mellon Scaife or by Ted Turner, I'd feel quite differently about it. The very fact that it's an almost anarchistic movement that has sprung out of people's own common assessment of what the need is, is really impressive.
Another issue I've talked a lot about that's beginning to get attention is that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to provide equal status for freed slaves. It was not designed to give human status for inhuman corporations. Yet that's the way it's been used. By the 1930s, something like 95% of the cases coming to the Supreme Court under the Fourteenth Amendment involved corporations rather than blacks. I would like to see an amendment to the Fourteenth Amendment that would make it clear that when we talk about persons, we're talking about natural persons. I take a very traditional American view of the corporation, as a creation which is fully within the powers of the state and federal government to license and to regulate and to ensure that it is operating in the public interest and necessity. I think I might've even gotten Adam Smith's vote on that.
Q: I want to close with--
A: Don't close, because we've got to find out why I'm not a conservative, and why I'm not a libertarian.
Q: All right. Why aren't you a conservative, and why aren't you a libertarian?
A: (long pause) I think the bind I find myself in is that too many conservatives want to ignore people who have problems, and too many liberals want to tell them what to do.
I could never be an acceptable libertarian, although I clearly have libertarian streaks, because I believe in community too much. I don't want to live in the libertarian ideal. My ideal is a jazz band, in which I get to take my solo and when I'm through I back up everybody else. A baseball team is another example of the same philosophy. If you think about it, one of the wonderful things about baseball is how much individual freedom people have on their own turf, and yet how beautifully it all works together. It's that combination of freedom and community that's very important to me.
Q: Don't baseball teams play better when everyone wants to play?
A: Yes. (pause) You've scored a point so subtle that I can't figure it out. (laughs) Well, you got me there. What the hell?
Q: (laughs) Well, this is an interview, not a debate, so I wasn't going to move into the full Socratic dialogue--
A: (laughs) Oh, well, do. Help me out on that one.
Q: OK. If libertarianism is based on the idea of voluntary action, whether it's voluntary community or voluntarily acting on your own, doesn't that leave room for jazz bands and baseball teams? Can't coercion get in the way of that kind of cooperation?
A: On what day, in what community, where? that would be my response to you.
See, you've got a paradigm to defend.
Q: So you've caught me in an abstraction.
A: See how much freedom that leaves me?
Now, I will tell you this. You can find in jazz everything from bands that play off of full charts, and then the soloists come in on the lap; to more typically what they call a lead sheet, which is just the melody and the chords; to those who know the song so well they don't need anything.
The other thing about my own thinking that affects me is that I spend a lot of time in Maine. I've had this lifelong experience of comparing the values of one place against the values of another. I'm old enough to have been around to help move a portion of a house of skids, pulled by a tractor. I've helped to jack a barn, to put new stones -- and those stones are still there today, and the barn is still standing. There is a pragmatism, and a sense that anything is possible -- but you have to get through it, you have to do it.
If you apply this to politics, it leads you in certain directions. You become interested in, "Well, does it work?" Nothing is so derided in Maine humor as the person who's all show.
Humor is another important thing. It's about putting things together that aren't meant to be together. A place like Washington runs on keeping things that should be together apart, so that you don't look at Bill Clinton's sex habits along with his foreign policy. to me, they're intimately related. His political approach and his sexual approach are basically the same: he's a Don Juan. He leaves his policies as fast as he leaves his women.
Self-sufficiency, integrity -- I can't tell you how different dealing with people from Maine is from dealing with people in Washington. I once bought a used car for my son over the phone from friend in Maine who ran an auto shop. I figured I'd do better buying a car sight unseen from him than I would going into an used car lot in the Washington metropolitan area. As it turns out, that car made four and a half trips across the United States and went through two sons. There is a value to that sort of relationship that you just can't calculate.
And it's not just an individual thing. I mean, if you go to L.L. Bean's today you will find what will strike you, if you analyze it, as an extraordinary level of trust. To this day, you can return things to L.L. Bean that are 10 years old. You can come up with some cockamamie story and they'll take the thing back. When we got a wedding present of some thermos jugs from L.L. Bean, one of the insides was cracked and we sent it back. They sent us some new thermos jugs, plus we got an envelope with the postage for what it cost to send the stuff back to them.
This is different from living in Washington. So I've been very much affected by that experience, too, which again is not ideological; it's very value-oriented.
Q: You're speaking of Washington as one place--
A: Oh, yeah. It's like talking about "the media." It's a bad habit. I hate it.
Q: There's a theme through a lot of what you write, distinguishing official Washington from the real city.
A: When I'm real sharp I make that distinction, because I mean it. There's a huge difference. People don't understand why anyone would want to live in this place, but this has been a wonderful city for me. It's been a wonderful place to raise kids. One advantage to raising boys in this town is that you can end up with at least two white guys who can jump. Learning how to play decent basketball is worth the price of admission for some people. I think also -- I've noticed this not just with my own children, but with others -- that white kids who grow up in this town are culturally very sophisticated in a street-smart sort of way. And I like the results. I like seeing young people grow up here and what they do and how they think.
Environmentally, it's a nice town. You can actually see the sky almost anywhere in the city, which you can't in New York. And it's got a nice, pleasant pace to it, as long as you're not striving to get too much power or striving to make too much money.
Q: I was going to close with a statement you repeated at the Third Party Summit back in 1995. An activist friend of yours said, "Look, Sam, all I really want to do is sit on my front stoop in the sun, drink beer, and shoot craps."
A: I wrote something a long, long time ago in which I spoke about disliking the abuse of power not only because of the pain it caused, but because it distracted us from enjoying the pleasures of life in all their social irrelevance. It's another way of saying what the guy was saying. The choice we're often put into is that we either find ourselves being members of the volunteer fire department, on constant call, or else we're one of the arsonists. My ideal community would be one in which you devote a reasonable amount of time to civic activity, but not too much, because things would work pretty well. That, of course, was the model of many smaller communities.
I think when a large number of people has to spend full time correcting things, you've got a serious, serious crisis. Then one of the dangers is you might start to enjoy the fire, to push the metaphor to its limits. That's what you find with a lot of the public interest groups in Washington. Environmentalists, civil liberties and civil rights groups, labor organizations -- you see these folks up close, and they are not doing their job.
Of course, this is another reason why I'm in such trouble with some of my friends -- because I say things like that. But it's true. I think any labor union guy or woman who managed to see the lifestyle of the leaders of their unions would be pretty disappointed. You find environmental lawyers essentially operating like ecological Vichy officials. You find women's groups defending Bill Clinton. You find not a single civil rights organization in Washington pointing out that perhaps the most segregated major public institution in our society is the United States Senate. How can you do anything about equality in our society when you have a Senate that is as distorted as ours is? Not just in terms of ethnicity, but in terms of women, geography--
Q: And profession.
A: Profession. Yes. That's a whole other thing we haven't gotten into. I'd love someone to make the argument that lawyers as officers of the court are not allowed to sit in the legislature. That might be the best reform we can come up with.
I first got involved with the Greens at a meeting up in Maine, in which not only were there Greens but there was a guy from the Reform Party and a couple of Libertarians. The fellow from the Reform Party wrote a piece in which he said the difference between the Greens and the Reform Party is largely centered over the issue of property. But then he said that we agree that we don't want this issue decided by the national media or by national politicians.
And that, I thought, was a very profound comment. The things we disagree on do not necessarily have to be decided at the macro level. We can work out our own arrangements, we can have our own debates, and that's a lot healthier.
When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 1954, it gave its Best Picture award to On the Waterfront. You will find that one below, but not at number one:
1. Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes, from a story by Cornell Woolrich
The first time I saw this, I thought it was a comedy. The second time, I thought it was a thriller. The third time, I mostly thought the Jimmy Stewart character was kind of creepy. I was right each time.
2. Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
"Since it's impossible to kill them all, I usually run away."
3. Johnny Guitar
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Ben Maddow, from a novel by Roy Chanslor
I think the films of the '50s tend to be step down from the films of the '40s, but I do like how the westerns got weirder.
4. Wuthering Heights
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel, Julio Alejandro, Dino Maiuri, and Pierre Unik, from a novel by Emily Brontë
I would not be unhappy if every adaptation of a highbrow literary classic was made by a surrealist slumming in the Mexican melodrama market.
5. The Age of Swordfish
Directed by Vittorio De Seta
Here is where the boundary between documentary and neorealism breaks down entirely.
6. Sansho the Bailiff
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda, from a story by Mori Ōgai
"Humans have little sympathy for things that don't directly concern them. They're ruthless."
7. On the Waterfront
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Budd Schulberg
My friend Shawn once asked if I'd ever heard "Noam Chomsky's analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire." I did a double take and said, "What? No, I haven't. What does Noam Chomsky have to say about A Streetcar Named Desire?" Shawn then realized that he'd had a brain fart and that he'd meant to say "Noam Chomsky's analysis of On the Waterfront," which further discussion revealed to be exactly what you'd expect Chomsky's take on On the Waterfront to be. But I still sometimes wonder what ol' Noam thinks of A Streetcar Named Desire.
8. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Aleister Crowley's home movies.
9. Journey to Italy
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Written by Rossellini and Vitaliano Brancati, from a novel by Colette
More or less the opposite of a love story.
10. Track of the Cat
Directed by William Wellman
Written by A.I. Bezzerides, from a novel by William Van Tilburg Clark
Beulah Bondi steals every scene she's in.
Honorable mentions:
11. Illusion Travels by Streetcar (Luis Buñuel)
12. Corral (Colin Low)
13. The Far Country (Anthony Mann)
14. Closed Vision (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin)
15. Islands of Fire (Vittorio De Seta)
16. Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse)
17. Father Brown (Robert Hamer)
18. Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton)
19. La Strada (Federico Fellini)
20. Senso (Luchino Visconti)
Finally, a shout-out to A Lesson in Love. It may be just a mid-tier movie in the grand scheme of Ingmar Bergman's filmography, but how many of his pictures climax with two girls having a catfight in a seedy jazz club?
Of the films of 1954 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Musashi Miyamoto.
FIVE LAWS OF THE CRAZY TREE: The liberal historian Rick Perlstein published an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post about the roots of "the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers." In America, Perlstein argues, "the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and...elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests."
In one way, the article is refreshing: At a time when many liberals have been describing the protests at the health care "town halls" as an unprecedented event, even as a sign of incipient fascism, Perlstein reminds readers that flare-ups like this actually happen fairly frequently in American history. But the article is aggravating, too, and not just because it casually conflates the bona fide kooks with anyone who happens to protest at a tea party or a town hall. Reading the piece you get the impression that the crazy tree grows only on the right, and that the health care battle is a simple case of hysterics attacking enlightened reform.
The first law of the crazy tree is that it's always blooming somewhere. It will always be easy to believe the worst about your political foes, and there will always be people willing to accuse them of conspiracy. This does not only happen at what appear to be moments of liberal ascendancy, and it doesn't only happen on the right. (One of Perlstein's own historical examples -- the anti-Catholic nativists of the 19th century, one of the less attractive products of the antebellum reform era -- isn't easily identified with either the modern right or the modern left.)
The second law of the crazy tree is that lots of people try to exploit it. Consider the narratives we're hearing not just from the health care protestors but about the health care protestors, so frequently derided as either lunatics or pawns. It serves several political interests -- some of them "elite"! -- to paint the opponents of the Democrats' health care changes as a bunch of knuckle-dragging birthers and/or as fakers in FreedomWorks' employ. Once you've defined your opponents as the Other, you have an excuse to ignore their concerns.
The third law of the crazy tree: It has a life of its own. No matter who tries to exploit it, it can easily escape their control. We live in a world where the crank legal theories of the "sovereign citizen" movement, often associated with the racist right, have managed to attract a following in the black underclass, where the ideas were adapted to new ends. I don't know who'll be talking about "death panels" five years from now, but it's easy to imagine many ways the meme might evolve.
The fourth law of the crazy tree: It isn't completely crazy. I don't merely mean that there are conspiracy theories out there that turn out to be true. I mean that the true and the false keep lapping up against each other. Even real conspiracies (say, Watergate or Iran-contra) invariably produce dubious ancillary hypotheses; even the most absurd conspiracy folklore can be a metaphoric way of discussing something real. This is important, because it suggests that a palpably false belief could still deserve our attention.
And that leads us to the fifth, final, and most important law of the crazy tree: It blooms in the center, too. You can't protect yourself from its effects by quarantining the fringes, though Perlstein seems to suggest you can:
It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.
While I share Perlstein's antipathy to the he-said/she-said style of reporting ("Is Gordon Brown an extraterrestrial? Tonight we bring you two views...") I have no nostalgia for the days when the center could write off civic outrage as "extremist" and keep it out of bounds entirely. That was the way the centrist consensus protected itself -- not just against that bizarre (and partly Scientology-fueled) theory about concentration camps in Alaska, but against legitimate criticisms of disastrous programs ranging from urban renewal to the Vietnam War. Such critics weren't just marginalized: They were demonized, in a process that itself resembles the paranoia that Perlstein is decrying.
That process is alive today, even if the media landscape has changed. When defenders of the Democratic health care plans can't make their case without constantly linking their opponents to birthers and fascists, something far more disturbing than heckling is at work.
(cross-posted at Hit & Run in slightly different form)
Daniel Clowes drew this picture's poster, and there's something about the movie that matches his sensibility. Whenever I think back to the dark and funny final scene, my mind distorts the memory so I'm imagining a Clowes comic, not a film.
2. After Life Wrtten and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda
My favorite Japanese movie of the '90s.
3. Rushmore Directed by Wes Anderson Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson
Featuring Anderson and Wilson's best script, one of Bill Murray's best performances, and the best use of the Who on a motion picture soundtrack ever, and yes, that includes Tommy.
4. The Big Lebowski Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
"Fair? Who's the fucking nihilist here?"
5. The Celebration Directed by Thomas Vinterberg Written by Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov
It would be a spoiler to say what this story is about. I'll just note that there are about 10,000 movies on that particular subject, and that this is one of maybe five that treat the topic intelligently.
6. Oz 2 Written by Tom Fontana with Sean Jablonski, Bradford Winters, and Debbie Sarjeant Directed by Nick Gomez, Uli Edel, Bob Balaban, Keith Samples, Kathy Bates, Alan Taylor, Mary Harron, and Jean De Segonza
The second season of HBO's prison series isn't as much of a self-contained narrative as the first year, but there's enough of an arc to earn it a spot on the list.
7. A Simple Plan Directed by Sam Raimi Written by Scott B. Smith, from his novel
Raimi's best movie.
8. Henry Fool Written and directed by Hal Hartley
"OK, you got me outnumbered here four to one and you're gonna kill me here tonight and not a soul in this dimly lit world is gonna notice I'm gone. But one of you, one of you, one of you is gonna have his eye torn out. Period....One of you poor, underpaid jerks is gonna have an eye ripped out of its socket. I promise. It's a small thing perhaps, all things considered, but I will succeed, because it's the only thing I have left to do in this world. So why don't you just take a good look at one another one last time, and think it over a few minutes more."
9. Out of Sight Directed by Steven Soderbergh Written by Scott Frank, from a novel by Elmore Leonard
Part of a great run of Elmore Leonard adaptations in the mid/late '90s, along with Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty and Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown.
10. Kurt & Courtney Directed by Nick Broomfield
Someday I'll write a long essay about what an underrated director Broomfield is and what a crafty little movie he has made. This is supposedly a piece of investigative journalism devoted to the theory that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. But the mystery is a MacGuffin. The film is really a slapstick remake of Citizen Kane.
Honorable mentions:
11. Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes) 12. High Art (Lisa Cholodenko) 13. Pi (Darren Aronofsky) 14. O Night Without Objects (Jeanne C. Finley, John H. Muse) 15. Buffalo '66 (Vincent Gallo) 16. There's Something About Mary (Bobby and Peter Farrelly) 17. Dark City (Alex Proyas) 18. The Truman Show (Peter Weir) 19. The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman) 20. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg)
Yes, Saving Private Ryan. When it's bad it's very, very bad, but when it's good it's great.
N.B.: Henry Fool went into general release in 1998, but technically it was first screened in 1997. I didn't realize that when I posted my '97 list last year, though, and I hate the thought of excluding it -- if all of Hal Hartley's movies were to disappear from the world, this is the only one I would really miss.
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.
I think all ideologies should be held accountable for the crimes committed in their names. I think it makes us better. Now, of course, there are still those on the far left who will insist that all of those crimes were just an aberration--Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot; reality is annoying--and they retreat into their sacred texts. We all know who I'm talking about.
But lately, particularly just in the past few months, I have noticed something similar happening on the far libertarian right, at places like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. It's a kind of a panic, and it comes from the fact that the Bush administration adapted--adopted so much of their rhetoric, the fusing of free markets and free people, the championing of so many of their pet policies. But, of course, Bush is the worst thing that has ever happened to believers in this ideology, because while parroting the talking points of Friedmanism, he has overseen an explosion of crony capitalism, that they treat governing as a conveyor belt or an ATM machine, where private corporations make withdrawals of the government in the form of no-bid contracts and then pay back government in the form of campaign contributions. And we're seeing this more and more. The Bush administration is a nightmare for these guys--the explosion of the debt and now, of course, these massive bailouts.
So, what we see from the ideologues of the far right--by far right, I mean the far economic right--frantically distancing themselves and retreating to their sacred texts: The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose.
Some of us distanced ourselves from Bush long ago, Naomi! But it's nice to hear she reads reason, even if she thinks we're responsible when the president follows the exact opposite of our recommendations. Maybe she saw Johan Norberg's devastating review in our pages of The Shock Doctrine. Her talk does address, or at least brushes against, some of Norberg's complaints:
[Friedmanites] will tell you, when I speak of Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys, China under Deng Xiaoping, or America under George W. Bush, or Iraq under Paul Bremer, that these were all distortions of Milton Friedman's theories, that none of these actually count, when you talk about the repression and the surveillance and the expanding size of government and the intervention in the system, which is really much more like crony capitalism or corporatism than the elegant, perfectly balanced free market that came to life in those basement workshops. We'll hear that Milton Friedman hated government interventions, that he stood up for human rights, that he was against all wars. And some of these claims, though not all of them, will be true.
But here's the thing. Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedman's other life--he wasn't just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the world--China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a "who's who." So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories.
There are so many levels of incoherence and inaccuracy in those passages that I won't try to address them all. Let's just zero in on the contrast Klein draws between utopian theories and real-world practice. It's a fair argument if you apply it properly: that is, if you look at the consequences of Friedman's policy prescriptions where they are put in place. It makes sense, for example, to look at how Friedman's ideas about denationalization and free trade fared in Chile after they were put into effect. It doesn't make much sense to look at Blackwater's contracts in occupied Iraq, because -- try as Klein might to pretend otherwise -- they don't have anything to do with Friedman. (And of course, it's important to examine the ways Pinochet's Chile deviated from Friedman's economic ideas as well as the ways it embraced them.)
At the same time, you have to consider how Friedmanism fared everywhere some portion of it was applied, not just cherry-pick the most unappealing regimes that experimented with it. If the only place that adopted any of Friedman's economic ideas was Chile, then Klein might be onto something when she suggests there's a connection between libertarian economic policies and deeply un-libertarian ideas about torture, censorship, surveillance, and state-sanctioned murder. But the most sweeping free-market reforms of the last 40 years were not adopted in Pinochet's Chile, Thatcher's UK, or anyplace else addressed in Klein's book. They were enacted by the New Zealand Labour Party in the 1980s. Far from fusing economic liberalization with political repression, the Labour government expanded civil liberties: It adopted a bill of rights, decriminalized homosexuality, improved the treatment of the native Maori. And while Pinochet signed on to the CIA's war against the Latin American left, New Zealand strained its relations with Washington by making itself a nuclear-free zone, a policy that effectively barred the U.S. Navy from New Zealand ports. By Klein's logic, these are all effects of Friedmanomics.
It shouldn't be surprising to find market reforms in a variety of political contexts: As Norberg pointed out in his review, almost every country on the planet has liberalized its economy in some way or another over the last few decades. (One of Klein's favorite economic models, the flexible manufacturing networks of Emilia-Romagna, is itself largely a product of market forces -- though not of Milton Friedman.) So yes, it's important to look at how Friedman's theories "actually affect the world." Klein prefers to ignore those parts of world that don't fit her thesis, and to study the effects of measures that violated Friedman's theories instead of advancing them.