Frank Beacham's Journal

Howard Zinn, the People’s Historian, Dies at 87

Many historians are essentially paid hacks who write “history” to favor the rich and powerful. Unfortunately, these magicians with the facts have skewed our nation’s history books and the perceptions of events for millions of Americans.

Then there was Howard Zinn, the author, teacher and political activist whose book—A People’s History of the United States—became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts. Zinn wrote history from the viewpoint of ordinary people, not the wealthy elite.  

A People's History was published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of only 5,000 copies. By 2003, it had sold over a million copies. Adopted by individual teachers against the wishes of the establishment, the book now is taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country.

 Howard Zinn last May at the 92nd St. Y.  Photo by Frank Beacham

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Needless to say that Howard Zinn had enemies among mainstream historians. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Others had much harsher things to saw.

However, Howard Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write objective history, and saw A People's History as a response to traditional works. “There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”

Actors, filmmakers and even Bruce Springsteen, whose Nebraska album was inspired in part by A People’s History, celebrated Zinn. I last saw Howard Zinn on May 13, 2009 at the 92nd Street Y in New York at an actor’s reading from the new young people’s edition of A People’s History.

One of Zinn’s final public writings was a brief essay on President Obama in the Nation. “I’ve been searching hard for a highlight,” Zinn wrote, adding that he wasn’t disappointed because he never expected a lot from the president.

“I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president—which means, in our time, a dangerous president—unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

As usual, Howard Zinn was dead-on accurate. Men of his caliber are far too few. His alternative views in this culture-for-money will be sorely missed.

Beat Poet Gary Snyder Writes Ode to Apple's Macintosh

Since reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as a kid, I've always loved the beat poets and their literature. One of my favorites has always been Gary Snyder. In 1975, at the moment he won the Pulitzer Prize for his great book of poems, Turtle Island, I was driving Snyder, Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg around Gainesville, Florida during a visit there. This led to a lifetime of great relationships and wonderful poetry.

 Gary Snyder in 1975 in Gainesville, Florida. Photo by Frank Beacham

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It was a real surprise this morning to wake up to Gary's new poem, Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh in the New York Times. It seems a Times reporter found Snyder, who lives in the Sierra foothills in Northern California, and asked him to reflect on the digital age. Since Snyder normally writes about nature, this was quite a stretch.

Like myself, Snyder is an avid user of Apple's Macintosh laptop. Snyder, now 79, who doesn’t have a mobile phone and considers texting “abhorrent,” said he loved his Mac. “I like the storage space it has,” he told the Times, “and I like the ability to have back files accessible to me wherever I go.”  Here is the poem:

 

 

A Very Sad Story of Today’s Television Media

As a former television news reporter, I’m always bashing those gutless, blow-dryed wannbees in the modern version of television news who stand for and report nothing. But it’s very rare to see it played out on video in such blatant form. So it's with glee that I present this amazing story.

In this YouTube video, one reporter, who should be celebrated, stands up to not only the University of Tennessee’s athletic PR hack, but to those in his own profession who bow down and roll over to anything the University wants. 

The hero here is Bill Shory, news director at WBIR-TV in Knoxville. It’s at a press conference when Lane Kiffin, the coach of the University’s Volunteers, is about to resign. The school proposes a “pre-presser” that will be done off camera, and then the news photographers can turn their cameras on.

Shory said no. This is a public university in a public building and there are to be no secrets, he declared. One would think his media colleagues would agree with Shory, but they don’t. They support the side of university against their own interests and nearly shout Shory down.

This video is typical of the milquetoast media operating today. Afraid of their own shadow — even fighting with their own to limit what few rights they have.  It’s sad indeed and why few in television news should continue to be believed.

(Thanks to Lost Remote for reporting this story.)

Privacy is Lost in the Age of Social Media

As I have tried to reinvent myself in this age of social media, one change I’ve noticed is especially striking. People, both young and old, are giving away their privacy online more than ever before. Sadly, they don’t seem to know or care about it. 

I’m included—but not willingly. If I google myself, it’s horrifying. I find stuff I wrote years ago that I had long forgotten. It’s also disconcerting to read one of your own articles when searching for new information about a subject. Nothing, and I mean nothing, goes unnoticed on the Internet.

Facebook, growing like a virus on a rampage, is especially scary. One gets “friends” on Facebook—lots of friends. I get people who I’ve never heard of requesting to be my friend. I approve them all because I view Facebook as a marketing tool for a writer such as myself. 

Yet, many users of Facebook don’t see it this way. They blurt out anything on any subject, forgetting that they are broadcasting drivel to everyone on their “friends list.” I don’t know whether it’s loneliness, or just a way to be more social. But many folks don’t realize they are leaving permanent digital track marks on the web.

I’ve had so-called friends ask me personal questions on Facebook. I tell them if they want an answer they must send their private e-mail address. I don’t want to send my personal responses to the masses, nor do I trust Facebook to keep it private. 

 

Owners of these social media web sites have discovered a gold mine. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how they can cash in on the marketing and advertising industries with the personal data they accumulate. Forget their “privacy agreements,” they can do anything they want with that data and they probably will.

This abandonment of online privacy extends to many other areas of our society. One dangerous example is iWatch, the brainchild of Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, who calls his idea a 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association, headed by Bratton and composed of the chiefs of the 63 largest police departments in the United States and Canada, endorsed iWatch at the group’s conference last month. iWatch asks citizens to report “suspicious behavior” of others to the police, using either the web or a toll-free phone number to make reports.

It is remarkable to me how many people, who obviously know little of contemporary history, think this is a good idea. iWatch feeds into the fear-based culture that has been carefully cultivated by government officials since 9/11. It magnifies the prejudices of people.

The privacy problems with iWatch were cited by American Civil Liberties Union policy counsel Mike German, a former FBI agent who once worked on terrorism cases. iWatch, he noted, wants people to report others who engage in relatively common behavior like wearing odd clothes for a season, who ask about building security or who purchase items that could be used to make bombs. 

Most iWatch reports, therefore, will fall back on the personal bias and stereotype of what a “terrorist” might look like to the individual caller. 

“That just plays into the negative elements of society and doesn’t really help the situation,” German told The Associated Press.

 

Though the creators of iWatch insist they are not asking people to spy on their neighbors, that is, exactly what they are doing. It moves the concept of a nosy neighbor up a notch—Internet-style. 

Perhaps even scarier than iWatch are the activities of a new company called Internet Eyes in the U.K. It wants to stream video camera feeds from businesses—or anyone willing to pay Internet Eyes a fee of $30 a month—to video monitors watched by humans around the clock. 

Internet Eyes is signing up average people—anyone off the street—to watch these camera feeds. The “watchers” compete with one another, getting paid up to $1,600 for reporting the most crimes happening on camera.

These citizen watchers—who will monitor four cameras simultaneously—can report a crime in real time using the subscribing company’s Web page. This will send a video frame to the owner of the camera via SMS. The watcher, however, won’t know the location of the cameras, which will change every 10 minutes.

“This isn’t a game—it’s serious,” said Tony Morgan, the managing director of Internet Eyes. 

On that statement, I agree wholeheartedly.

It has long been known that every time a new technology is introduced, there are unexpected, negative side consequences that come with it. It is clear these negative side effects are now revealing themselves with the Internet. 

Social media seemed innocent enough in the beginning. Unfortunately, a new generation—unschooled in the history of privacy violations by the government—doesn’t understand the implications of where we are headed. And we certainly can’t count on the technology companies to educate them.

The ubiquity of Internet video from every mobile phone on the street has the potential to trap and embarrass many people—even when they are doing the most ordinary human things. We, as a society, have never before faced such an intrusion into our personal privacy. It’s certain to turn messy.

The dark side of the Internet culture is being built today—be afraid, very afraid. Life is changing fast and many are clueless as to what is happening. 

"My Dinner With Andre"—Now 30 Years Old—Was a Great Cinematic Experiment that Wasn’t Suppose to Work

Thirty years ago, playwright-actor Wally Shawn sat down for dinner with Andre Gregory, the New York theatre director, and cinematic history was made. It was a “talkie” shot on low-budget 16mm film that no one—except the filmmakers—believed in.

That included most of the family and friends of Shawn and Gregory. But after a tense six weeks of poor box office and scathing reviews by mainstream media outlets, the then new TV critics—Siskel and Ebert—gave My Dinner with Andre a thumbs-up. At that moment, the film’s box office took off.

The two old friends and theatrical colleagues watched their work at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center this week for the first time in a decade. It was part of a tribute to the life of the late Louis Malle, who directed the film. After the screening, both men marveled at how much the world had changed in the past 30 years.

 

The project was proposed by Shawn, who wanted to tell the story in a TV film of Andre’s fantastical journey of enlightenment to Poland at the invitation of Jerzy Grotowski. The pair met for weeks—talking into a tape recorder—as Gregory told the tale and Shawn reacted. They then took the transcripts and edited a narrative, which they later performed in segments before live audiences and on videotape.

“We would never had embarked on this movie if we had known what we learned five to ten years later,” Shawn recalled. “If someone brought me something like this today and asked my advice, I would say it is impossible. If I had known anything, I would have thought it was impossible then. But neither of us knew much about movies. So we had a kind of confidence that was absurd!”

 

French director Louis Malle signed on and the film was made in an old abandoned hotel in Richmond, Virginia. It was in the dead of winter and to turn on the heat would have required heating the entire hotel. That was too expensive. So the two men filmed the entire movie in the hotel’s restaurant wrapped in electric blankets.

They knew their parts so well, the film was shot angle by angle, rather than in sequence. “We knew the script so well we were like trained monkeys,” Shawn recalled.

 

Gregory said playing himself was difficult. “It was confusing almost to the point of my going nuts,” he recalled. “In the rehearsal, I came up with the idea of using four voices. There was Andre with a Peter Brooks voice, there was Andre ‘the spiritual used car salesmen,’ there was Andre the ‘off-the-wall’ rich kid and there was the truthful Andre.”

Malle gave Gregory only only one significant direction in the film—speak faster. “It was the same direction given by director John Huston to his father, Walter Huston, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which won Walter an Oscar. You see Walter Huston, like myself, was a theatre actor. This was a crucial direction. When I spoke faster, I created this character who was a maniacal, egotistical, narcissistic son of a bitch. I didn’t have time to act. Louis realized that the camera is so close that you see what is in the eyes. You don’t have to do so much.”

 

What did the two performers think had changed in the culture since making the movie? “In the film, we don’t talk directly about American politics,” noted Shawn. “We almost would have had to when Ronald Reagan became president.  We both saw television come in. When we were boys there was no television. I missed television until I was about eight years old. The whole idea of people living in a trance and a fantasy world is far less discussed by younger people today than by us.”

Gregory, who at 75 is older than Shawn, grew up on radio drama. “You could say in certain ways that My Dinner with Andre is a radio drama,” he said. “In one place, the Andre character talks about ‘preserving the culture.’ Of course, that’s a passive culture that tells you what to think, what to feel and what to look at. If you go to see a movie like Titanic, it doesn’t leave anything open to your imagination. As audience members, you don’t need to do any work. 

“This film, like certain radio dramas, actually encourages you to think and to feel,” he continued. “It’s a bit like Lawrence of Arabia because the audience has to feel the forest. If you go see Atlantic City, which is the film Malle made just before this, it’s tragic to see the culture crumbling. Old buildings collapsing—an old world film. I was staggered tonight by the people mentioned in the film. We remembered in the 1970s when there would be lines around the block to get into a new Fellini movie or Antonioni movie. An active culture was more alive back then.”

 

Gregory recalled that when his father was 83 they had a discussion about fascism. “My father said if he was younger he would leave America. I asked why? He said because both political parties have become so corrupt that it can only lead to fascism. So, from my point of view, fascism was an ongoing concern. Wally’s play, The Designated Mourner, predicted Bush 10 years before he stole the presidency.”

Shawn recalled being surprised to see in the film that he wasn’t as complacent back then as he had remembered. “I suppose I have become a committed leftist who is much, much more upset about the way things are than I was at that time. I am more a believer in political activism and more aware of the role that bourgeoisie Americans play in torturing and oppressing the poor people who want the world to change. In the film, there’s a dim sense of somebody awakening to that.”

 

Gregory added: “The Andre character said something about ‘global totalitarian Capitalism.’ I used to not mind Capitalism so much. I grew up in the upper middle class and was privileged to have a comfortable life. I think Capitalism—starting with Reagan, who I think was a radical revolutionary—has become absolutely obscene. I have much darker feelings about this country. On the other hand, I’m a much happier person. I adore my wife, Cindy, a very fine filmmaker. I wouldn’t walk further than the local cigar store I’m having such a good time at home. So I sort have become the Wally character.”