Dear Readers:
In October, we were putting the final touches on our latest issue of The Baffler magazine, which looked at failing and inept humanitarian efforts around the world. As we were going to press, the indiscriminate killing spree in Israel and the Gaza Strip began piling up the dead bodies and magnifying grief. An unbearable humanitarian crisis was upon us, as Israel relentlessly bombed a population with no means of escape, cut off from food and water and all the rest.
One of the threads running through our articles was about how weak “humanitarianism” can be when governments are militarily powerful, brutal, and corrupt. The Red Cross can’t just drop in and tell the autocrats “you’re not serving the people, now get the hell out.” The UN can’t say “you’ve violated basic human rights so you must cede power.” Instead, the decent, well-meaning humanitarians move in to try to ease what suffering they can. Often they make things worse—as when UN peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti—and often they unwittingly assist corrupt regimes in holding onto power, as if humanitarians are subcontracted to deal with misery so the rulers can focus on their arsenals and their own enrichment.
I hate the role the United States plays in bolstering those arsenals, in fueling military destruction in regions our leaders decide are strategically vital. Yet, there was President Joe Biden in a nationally televised address last month telling us not to worry about all the weapons we’re selling to Ukraine and Israel—we’re making plenty of new ones in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, he noted. It’s good for American workers! Biden has spent a lot of effort cultivating an image of down-to-earth decency. I got a warm feeling from seeing him support autoworkers on picket lines in September. When he went to Israel and embraced the corrupt militarist Benjamin Netanyahu, and then announced his support for another $105 billion in spending on weaponry, I wondered for the millionth time whether this nation could ever produce a president who didn’t ardently believe in war as the only way to achieve peace. Well, some readers on this list aren’t going to approve of this, but I castigated Biden in a Baffler column entitled “The Masters of War.” Yes, I realize his likely Republican opponent next year would be worse in a hundred ways. But right now Biden is the one who is watching with apparent approval while Palestinian children are being blown to bits.
While we’re on the subject of uplifting journalism, I’m thinking of writing an end-of-the-year column on what a golden age of political corruption we’re living through. We’ve got all the trials of Trump, of course. And the recent headlines about New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, suspected by the FBI of accepting bribes, which led to a raid on his home and the discovery of lots of cash stuffed into coat pockets, as well as, hmmm, a couple of heavy gold bars. And the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, is now in hot water with the FBI for apparently conspiring with foreign agents for illegal campaign donations. There’s also the George Santos story, which has been as much a gift to comedy as to the annals of political corruption. I’ll be a little sad to see Santos, the Liar of Long Island, go. There’s something fascinating about this fellow, who appears to have come one hundred percent unmoored from the normal person’s assumption that words and actions have actual meaning.
I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year tuning into the corruption trial of the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. That’s the one that, for me, has it all. The financial impropriety, the use of public power to benefit business cronies, and the once-secret mistress, all rolled up in a political persona of high devotion to Christ and the greatness of Texas. They tried to impeach him in the Texas Senate, but the Republican majority gave Paxton their blessing to go on with his merry ways.
This brings me to what I meant to write about last month: a few important notes about journalism in Texas. We were graced with a lovely essay by Karen Olsson in the September/October issue of The Baffler. It tells the story of one of those near-death experiences that my former employer, The Texas Observer, experienced last spring. Karen focuses on the twin legacies of two of the guiding lights at the Observer: Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor, and Molly Ivins, the one-of-a-kind talent who enhanced the magazine’s national reputation in the 1970s, before going on to become a national columnist and, as she always put it, an arthur of books. The story about “the best little magazine in Texas” is right here and you have my 100 percent guarantee you will not regret kicking back and giving it a read.
Karen left a few things out, of course. Somehow she failed to tell the story of my own high-risk efforts to produce an arresting cover for our issue in the summer of 1988 that we handed out in Atlanta at the Democratic National Convention. We wanted Democrats to be mindful of Jim Hightower’s famous warning that “there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” It fell to me to produce the image. So, while driving the highways of East Texas, at work on a story about the politics of Bowie County, I determined that we needed an armadillo that was clearly dead, but also not smashed to a pulp. It would likely be on the side of the road, so I was prepared with a shovel to get it into position, and heavy gloves. (I had heard armadillos can carry leprosy.) But also, I wanted it to be on a road with a Texas highway sign. So . . . I found the right specimen of roadkill, shoveled it onto a black garbage bag in the back of my car, and drove it to just the right place on a quiet country road. Then, I arranged it next to the center stripe and took the photo. While doing a little archival work when editing Karen’s essay, I set that issue next to another one of my favorites, the 30th anniversary issue, with cover art by Tom Ballenger. The 1988 issue on the right shows the new logo that was designed by Patrick JB Flynn, whose distinguished career includes stints at The New York Times, The Progressive magazine, and The Baffler. I always loved that logo. After that photo shoot, did I move the poor creature back to the side of the road? I don’t recall! Of course, these days the whole thing could be done with Photoshop, and no risk of leprosy.
In promoting Karen’s story about the Observer last month, our Baffler newsletter writer Kelly Dickinson noted:
Earlier this week, Nieman Lab reported on a recent paper that revealed a positive link between the presence of nonprofit news outlets and prosecutions for public corruption. Reporters at these outlets enjoy relative editorial independence—which allows them to serve as watchdogs, sniffing out corruption. . . . The Texas Observer followed that mandate since its founding in 1954, both in Austin and statewide.
The concern that “democracy dies in darkness” is a real one in “news deserts” around the country. The model for supporting local newspapers mostly with classified ads and display advertising has been failing for a while now. Some lucky vicinities have new upstarts that are turning to a non-profit model, depending on patrons, foundations, and subscribers. (Two examples in Massachusetts: The Provincetown Independent and the soon-to-be-launched Plymouth Independent, both run by experienced journalists who understand just how the chain-owned newspapers have failed their communities.)
Recently I saw an especially moving example of how hard it is to keep a local newspaper going—and how heartbreaking it can be when nobody wants to continue that work. My friend Paul Stekler, the documentary filmmaker, shared with me a short film (38 minutes) about the Canadian Record. It tells the story of Laurie Ezzell Brown, an independent-minded newspaper publisher/editor in the West Texas town of Canadian. I remember that we subscribed to the Record when I was at the Observer; it was a beacon of light from a place way up past Lubbock and Amarillo, practically in Oklahoma. In this past year, Brown has found it especially hard to keep the newspaper afloat. Founded in 1893, the paper suspended printing last March. A film by Heather Courtney called For the Record does an excellent job of showing the viewer why it matters. It’s been screened at some film festivals, but Paul tells me it’s pretty tough to find national distribution for something like this. Anyway, here’s the two-minute trailer:
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/824913530
It takes a hardy individual to do what Laurie Brown has done all these years. It takes the kind of person who is known as a maverick—a term first used, according to my Dictionary of Etymology, in 1867 to denote the unbranded cattle of Samuel Maverick. One of the most memorable and admirable persons I met in my Texas days was Maury Maverick Jr.; Samuel was his great-grandfather. Maury had a long career of standing up for civil liberties and opposing U.S. wars. He once mentioned to me that his lineage went back way further than that famous great-grandfather, all the way to New England revolutionary days. Here’s an excerpt from Jan Jarboe’s remembrance of Maury, which is worth reading in full:
To find the roots of Maury’s liberalism—and perhaps to understand why Texas liberals equate courage with being outnumbered—you have to go to New England. I realized this one cold spring day in 1984 when Maury came to see me in Boston, while I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Together, the two of us visited the grave of Samuel Augustus Maverick—a distant cousin who, in 1770, at the age of seventeen, was one of the first five men who gave their lives for this country at the Boston Massacre. When we came upon the grave, Maury was very moved, and he leaned against his cousin’s tombstone and wept. By then it was snowing hard, and the tears froze on Maury’s face. Finally, we made it across the street and into the warmth of King’s Chapel, where we sat in a pew and thawed out. “God,” he whispered, “it just takes a few people to change history, doesn’t it?”
Sometimes people like to read about mavericks, oddballs, malcontents, the people who don’t go-along-to-get along. That’s my conclusion, anyway, from something surprising that happened in September. I mentioned it in the last newsletter, but after many years of gathering notes, I finally got around to writing about the baker I once worked for in Wisconsin, Ted Odell, and his unlikely success as the creator of the Guerrilla Cookie. To my shock, the story caught on and found a national readership, thanks in part to a boost from the ever-excellent Longreads newsletter. Last week, Madison scribe Doug Moe jumped in, with a column that hits the highlights of this odd tale. Sorry to report that none of my political fulminations have ever found as wide a readership as this story. This one ranks up there with the 2017 article I wrote for the Boston Globe Magazine on the Last Days of Lanes & Games. So, let’s see . . . I found readers by portraying an eccentric baker, and the dying culture of an old bowling alley, and also with that story the Atlantic published in 2011 about attending the Dick Ritger bowling camp. Is the world trying to tell me I should get out of the overcrowded field of political journalism and instead seek to find the roads less traveled?
Another quality Texas aphorism! “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” The photo you took was perfect, and you suffered nobly to get it, but we might also see something else in it. For most of the Eocene armadillos (xenarthra) lived in Antarctica, before crossing a land bridge (with yellow stripes?) into South America. Then around 6 million years ago the panamanian isthmus formed and they crossed into Central America, before arriving to that highway in Texas. They look helpless and disoriented, but they've been on the highway for so long, and covered so much more distance than our species has, the photo could be diorama in the natural history museum, showing them on the road, as always.