By HANK ROSENFELD Special to the Daily Press
A warm night and 100 writers in a theater on the Westside talking about the government. What are the chances?
The rare evening was “Writers of the Storm,” presented at the Odyssey Theater by Jayne Lyn Stahl, poet and founder of Writers-at-Large (WAL), a nonpartisan California Arts Council-funded advocacy group for free speech.
The Odyssey setting was perfect. On stage, remnants from “Reapers,” a play by John O’Keefe currently in production: A blown-apart shack and busted high brown fence against a backdrop of storm clouds painted dark and forever. Standing in front of this stage picture were nine embattled, unembedded, “enemy combatants-with-PowerBooks,” including Joseph Bosco, April Smith, Paul Krassner, Catherine Ann Jones, and other authors discussing words to take to the barricades “in the Age of Terror.”
Snowy-haired in serious suit and bow tie, Constitutional law expert Stephen F. Rohde (American Words of Freedom) began by announcing 12 factors taking us on a path to totalitarianism.
“Especially the media being in service of the state,” he brought it home. Accusing writers and journalists of becoming, “a delivery system for government press releases,” Rohde blamed them for failing “to serve the function given to them under the first amendment.”
Final insult he added: “43 percent of Americans say the media has too much freedom. Only 14 percent know that freedom of the press is part of the first amendment.”
David Koff, performer with the street-popular Frogworks Theater, suggested we “educate ourselves, speak out, and organize.” John Daly (The ROIL System: How to Be Well-Informed in A Media- Biased World) praised web logs. Today, “everyone is a journalist,” he said. Blogs like his, he claimed reach up to 100,000 readers every month.
Storyteller/healer Deena Metzger (Entering the Ghost River) considered the moment — Aug. 9, anniversary of the atomic bomb drop on Nagasaki — and asked across the crowded room: “Are we still stunned? Or have we just set it aside?” She called Sept. 11 “our Reichstag,” drawing parallels here to the suspension of civil liberties in 1933 Germany. One editor told her to take any 9-11 references completely out of one of her books.
After Jervey Tervalon, (co-author, Cocaine Chronicles) offered a new civil disobediency idea, “When will the blue states stop paying their taxes?” Rohde shocked the typewriter monkeys again: Sixteen measures of the Patriot Act expected to end this December were all re-upped on July 29. One of Patriot Act II’s clauses, he said, makes activists com-mitting civil disobedience face, “20 years for what used to be a $100 fine.” Huh? How? “If you have caused a risk to life... a change in government policy...” he warned, citizens could face the death penalty under a provision in the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act.” * * * Krassner and Bosco broke their own news. Co-founder of the “Yippies” (Youth International Party) in the 1960s, Krassner was called by Rohde, “an iconic figure since the 1950s.” The author of “Murder at the Conspiracy Convention” and other works said he was “old enough to remember when the word ‘media’ was plural.” His new book is called, “One Hand Jerking: Reports from an Investigative Satirist,” and reveals how some inside the New York Times believe Judith Miller outed Valerie Plame. Why? Joe Wilson’s op-ed column “was in effect an attack on Miller” for what she wrote in the run-up to the invasion.
“Since we seem to have landed in a battle, let us fight!” — — B. Brecht
“There are so many asses being covered,” concluded Krassner, “it’s like a Christo art project.”
April Smith, novelist (Good Morning Killer) and TV scenarist (Chicago Hope), said she worries that, “underneath all the rhetoric is the ancient, ugly American grip of prejudice.” If she’s right, it signals “a core much more intractable than we know.”
Dick Russell (Eye of the Whale) told a story of leaving his job at TV Guide “to study a fish for seven years.” His new book “Striper Wars” changed his life. Take action and keep moving forward he said, via what a friend of his has coined, “ambulatory hopelessness.”
“I’m pissed off,” Joe Bosco broke back in. Raised in a Jim Crow segregated Mississippi, in 1966 he became, “part of a movement that stopped a war and brought down a president.” He praised actor Ed Asner, who was sitting in the theater, for fighting the good fight. “Everyone knows what he stands for,” said Bosco, smiling at Asner and admonishing everybody else. “What about you? Are you sick of it? Then do something about it.”
Bosco said he reveled in being “part of the longhairs, who smoked dope and were part of that movement.” The right wing, he said, is still angry at the movement for taking back the country back then. Krassner said it was “the pioneers and Puritans who founded the country (that) have brought us to the culture wars.” Just returned from covering a “neo-Pagan festival” for The Nation, Krassner called the Pagans, “the canary in the cultural war coal mine,” and cited recent burnings of Harry Potter novels in Florida.
A woman in the theater cried out: “Why is this happening?” Another asked, “Do we have to go down, as a culture in order to remember that it’s not about money and fear?”
“We need to support intelligence,” Terrence McNally, host of Free Forum on KPFK-Pacifica said from his seat. “We need a way to make intelligence more robust, emotionally and physically so that accurate facts and challenging ideas can get through to mainstream Americans and can’t be demonized (by the right) as elitist and ‘foreign.’”
Emotionally, where were the writers’ hearts now? Deena Metzger’s words returned at the end of the confab. “Self-scrutiny is required,” she told her fellow correspondents. “Everyone knows about Abu Graib. It should have taken the government down. But nothing happened.”
Maybe after such an evening, as the cornucopia of writers left the Odyssey and headed back into their own adventures, a bit of John Locke’s philosophy might inspire. “Happiness,” he wrote, “is the weapon I wear in the war of all against all.”
Writers-at-Large is funded by the California Arts Council and is a non-partisan group believing that “an injustice to one is an injustice to all.” Founder Jayne Lyn Stahl says WAL speaks out against censorship, McCarthyism and issues like FCC restrictions on free speech. “Our goal,” says Stahl, is “to have writers’ advocacy groups like this in every city.” The “Writers of the Storm (sic)” event was sponsored by City Lights, Dutton’s, Book Soup, PEN USA and Friends of Writers-at-Large, Ed Asner and Patty Egan. (Hank Rosenfeld is a folk journalist in Ocean Park.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 19, 2005. Read the original PDF.