STEPHEN DAVIS:

“Wrongful Death” Author Criticizes Orthodox View of AIDS

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The cover of Stephen Davis’s novel Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial is appropriately bright and arresting: in front of a red background, a blindfolded figure of Justice (from a sculpture by artist Dennis Taylor) holds a set of balance scales with a cascade of AZT capsules falling from one side. The copy on the back cover is equally intense: “How bureaucratic lies and incompetence, gross medical malpractice, and unbridled greed by a drug company cost 300,000 American lives in just 10 years — five times the number killed in the entire Viet Nam war!”

But behind the lurid cover lies a gripping John Grisham-style courtroom drama that vividly and entertainingly presents the case Davis has to make — that HIV cannot possibly be the cause of AIDS; that AZT, the first drug ever approved for AIDS treatment (in 1987), was a brutally toxic chemotherapy that killed most of the people who took it; that the discovery and claimed “isolation” of HIV were fraudulent; and that the modern-day treatments seem “better” than AZT only because they’re marginally less toxic. What’s more, though ostensibly a work of fiction, it ends with 71 pages of references so readers can check out for themselves what he’s saying in the book.

A former Arizona state senator and physician’s assistant, Davis has had a widely varied background which he discusses below. Since he published the book earlier this year, he has been active in the alternative AIDS movement, attempting to bring its disparate groups together for a unified publicity campaign to make more Americans aware that there is another way to look at AIDS besides the simple-minded “HIV = AIDS = death” equation we’ve been propagandized to believe since HIV was first politically proclaimed to be the cause of AIDS at a press conference in April 1984.

Davis is also working on a new novel exposing the inaccuracies of standard HIV antibody tests, pointing out that there are at least 64 possible causes of false-positive results documented in the scientific literature — among them such common infections as hepatitis, herpes, malaria and flu, as well as pregnancy, especially in women who have been pregnant before. He’s hoping to organize public opinion against the recent recommendation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to have people tested for HIV antibodies as part of their routine medical examinations — which he fears will mean millions of falsely identified “HIV positives” being subjected to pressure to take unneeded anti-HIV medications that will only speed them to their graves.

To buy Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial, click on the link at www.healsd.org, the Web site of a local alternative AIDS organization co-founded and chaired by this author, or visit Davis’s own Web site at www.theaidstrial.com

Zenger’s: Why don’t you start by giving me some of your background? The blurb on you in the book is quite fascinating: “Former Arizona state senator, commercial pilot, captain of a whale and dolphin research ship and founding member and musical director for Up with People.”

Stephen Davis: Yes, Mark, I’ve had quite a varied and interesting life. I’ve had an opportunity to do a lot of things, and I got into the AIDS/HIV question from a result of my experience in government and in medicine, as a physician’s assistant. That was what allowed me to, first of all, understand some of the studies that have been done by actually reading the studies themselves, rather than taking the media’s word for what they said. It also provided me with a fairly high level of skepticism about what was being told to the American public.

Zenger’s: What about your experience in government conditioned you to look with favor on alternative explanations of what’s going on in AIDS?

Davis: Well, when I got elected in 1974 I was 28 years old. I was very naïve about government, and, like everyone else who talked to me, I thought that if you wanted to make any changes, you would do it from the inside. So while I was lying on my bunk in Viet Nam one day, I decided that I would try to run for office and see if I could change the situation, and hopefully make sure something like Viet Nam would never happen again.

When I got into government as a state senator, and was very intimately involved in the whole process, I discovered that government was not the solution; that, indeed, it itself was the problem. I didn’t actually even like being a senator. I did run for re-election. I’m really not sure I could tell you why, but I was literally very happy when I lost. I just didn’t feel like that was where we were going to make a difference.

Having seen the way government operated, and the forces at work within government dictating what could and could not be done, I just really believed, when Robert Gallo stood up on April 23, 1984 on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services and announced that he had found the probable cause of AIDS, it just didn’t fly. It was just another piece of propaganda. I consider it to be very much like the Warren Commission. I don’t think a lot of people anymore believe that John F. Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman with a magic bullet. I didn’t believe that HIV causes AIDS. It was as simple as that.

Zenger’s: So at the time that Gallo made his announcement, it was more just a gut-level feeling, based on general skepticism that government could actually get the answer to a momentous question like this right?

Davis: It was partly that. It was partly because Margaret Heckler, who was then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, had no medical or scientific experience. She was put into that position by Ronald Reagan because of her business and management expertise. Reagan was a big one on making government “efficient,” and I’m not being critical of Margaret Heckler or her appointment, but she had no basis on which to judge any pronouncement by Gallo, or even to ask Gallo any intelligent questions, before she stood up and announced to the world that the United States had found the cause of AIDS.

Also, I was skeptical because this hadn’t been even submitted for peer review by Gallo, which is the normal medical/scientific process of making a discovery: you send it out to your peers so they can test your discovery to see if they can verify it. Then you publish it. This was medical diagnosis by press conference. That’s unprecedented in the history of medical and scientific research.

Then, from my medical experience, I did not believe that a retrovirus could cause the kind of damage that was evidence with AIDS. And, of course, in 1990, Dr. Luc Montagnier [co-discoverer of HIV with his laboratory assistant, Françoise Barre-Sinoussi] verified that himself when he said that HIV could not cause AIDS [without a co-factor] and that a retrovirus had never caused harm in a human being, much less killed the numbers of cells that were necessary in order to bring on AIDS. I was sure HIV couldn’t possibly cause AIDS, but I could not prove that because I had not studied it. It was not until 1996, when I read Peter Duesberg’s book Inventing the AIDS Virus, that I began to see that the scientific evidence also supported my gut feeling.

As I said earlier, we have been told many, many things by the government and by the media — and by the medical profession, to be honest with you — about studies they claim say this or that. And, honestly, when you go read the studies themselves they don’t say this or that. As a matter of fact, most of them say exactly the opposite of what we’re being told. I had the chance and the ability to read these studies for myself and make my own decision, rather than buying the propaganda that was being disseminated.

Zenger’s: When I heard about the press conference, my gut-level reaction was simply that AIDS seemed to be a collection of so many varied phenomena — it struck so many people so differently; some people lived for years with it, some people died almost immediately; some people got one set of diseases, some people got another set — that I greeted the news with a kind of shrug and said, “Well, that’s one possibility.” But I really didn’t think that a condition that had so many possible outcomes, so many different symptomatologies, could possibly have a single cause.

Davis: And that was almost easier to swallow back then than it is now, since the CDC has expanded the definition of AIDS to include diseases that have nothing to do with immune deficiency. One of the things that I talk about in my book is the fact that we really need to be talking about four entirely separate classes of “AIDS,” which each have their own causes. We keep lumping them together into one big soup, and not only does this not make sense, it amounts to medical malpractice to diagnose people with “HIV” and tell them that they’re going to get and die of this lethal disease called “AIDS,” when in fact, in Africa for example, you don’t have to have HIV to be diagnosed with AIDS.

But, of course, in the United States we keep hearing on radio and television about “AIDS in Africa,” and nobody in this country knows that AIDS in Africa doesn’t mean what it means here. You don’t have to have either HIV or immune deficiency to be diagnosed with “AIDS” in Africa. All you have to have is a persistent cough, a persistent fever, diarrhea and lose more than 10 percent of your body weight [within a 30-day period]. It’s literally insane and very illogical to be talking about AIDS as a specific disease and linking it to a specific virus or retrovirus called HIV.

Zenger’s: When [University of California at Berkeley microbiology professor] Peter Duesberg published his first paper against HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1987, his argument in a nutshell was, “For 10 years we have researched retroviruses as possible causes of cancer because they do not kill their host cells. They need their host cells in order to survive themselves. Now we are saying that a retrovirus causes a disease in which massive numbers of the host cell die.”

Davis: Yes, but unfortunately, by that time it was already too late, wasn’t it? It was just like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the start of the Viet Nam war. We now know that the incident normally called the Gulf of Tonkin didn’t happen, but President Johnson could get on national television and say, “We were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, and therefore we are going to war in Viet Nam.” Well, that attack never occurred, and yet it was just not until a couple of years ago, I think, maybe even shorter than that, that the actual paperwork, the actual memos and classified documents were released showing that that was all a fake story as well.

Now, we lost 58,000 people, Americans, in Viet Nam. We’ve lost 500,000 to AIDS from the same kind of fabrication — fantasy, if you will — from the government. So I’m wondering when the American people are going to wake up and see that this happens over and over and over again, and that we’d better start questioning the things that are being told to us, both by the government and the media.

Zenger’s: Or another more recent one: the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were told that Saddam Hussein’s government was an imminent threat to us; and also, while the President and the people in his administration never actually said that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks on 9/11, over and over again they used “Saddam Hussein” and “Iraq” in the same sentences as “al-Qaeda” and “9/11,” and people made the connection, which didn’t exist.

Davis: Absolutely. Did you hear Bush the other day flat-out say, “Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda at the time”? I think he probably spoke without thinking of what he was saying, but that was what he actually said. I saw it on CNN; he actually came right out and said that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and al-Qaeda for 9/11. But once a story gets started, it’s hard to stop it, especially when money gets involved. And now, of course, AIDS has become a multi-billion dollar business throughout the world, and people’s livelihoods depend on HIV causing AIDS

When I was in the Arizona state senate there was a law that I was prohibited from voting on or participating in any legislation in which I had a direct financial interest. That is not only ethical but logical and proper, and I would expect the same kind of ethics and logic from the people involved in the AIDS industry. Those whose livelihoods depend on the HIV/AIDS hypothesis literally have no business saying a word about this; and, when they do, what they say cannot be trusted. That’s the bottom line.

Zenger’s: You said that you really got interested in the alternative point of view on AIDS after you read Peter Duesberg’s book Inventing the AIDS Virus in 1996. What was your reaction to that?

Davis: I sat down and read that cover to cover in three days. My specialty has always been to take difficult, complex concepts and rewrite or rephrase them in simple three-letter words so that I can understand them, and hopefully others will as well. So I immediately took Peter’s book, and a couple of other studies that I read at the time, and I wrote a 10,000-word paper called “AIDSGate” and published it on the Internet, Remember, this was 1997, so it was an outline of AIDS and HIV and AZT as we knew it up to that point.

In that paper, I specifically asked people who were HIV [positive] or families of those who were HIV positive, who had lost a loved one to “AIDS,” to file a class-action suit against Robert Gallo, against the FDA, against the Department of Health and Human Services, and [AZT manufacturer] Burroughs Wellcome, as it was called at that time —now GlaxoSmithKline — file a class-action suit for the wrongful deaths of their loved ones, based on the fact that all the studies show that HIV does not cause AIDS — AZT, on the other hand, does — and that these people died first of all from a misdiagnosis, and secondly, iatrogenic causes of being prescribed this lethal chemotherapy.

I couldn’t do anything about that myself. I’m not HIV positive. I frankly never knew anyone — and still don’t — who had AIDS or died from it, so in legal terms I had no standing. I had no ability to be involved in such a suit. But I certainly hoped others would file that kind of suit. I thought it would be helpful to have a court case in which the truth comes out. The answers to specific questions are provided in sworn testimony, like, where’s the proof that HIV causes AIDS, when in fact the proof is obviously that HIV fails every medical and scientific test to be called the cause of AIDS — or to cause any disease, for that matter. Where’s the proof that HIV has even been isolated? Where’s the proof that the HIV blood tests have been validated? They have never even been demonstrated to prove HIV antibody reactions, much less HIV reactions. So all these are questions that I had hoped would come out in a class-action lawsuit.

I thought that at that point I was finished with this issue. I had done my thing. I had explained this so that almost anybody could understand it. I had put out a solution for it, and I thought I was finished with that issue and I was moving on. Unfortunately, no class-action suit was ever filed. There were private suits filed, I was told, and settled by GlaxoSmithKline for a lot of money, but also with the stipulation that nothing ever be made public about the settlements. Therefore, the general public has never had the benefit of hearing this.

When no class-action lawsuit over AIDS, HIV and AZT happened, I had the idea about three years ago, 2003, to write a movie script as if that court case had actually happened. It turned out to be a two-part, four-hour made-for-TV movie called Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial, Now, obviously, this was a fictitious court case, but I made sure that every word of testimony, every witness, every statement made in that movie was absolutely factual and based on medical and scientific research. That screenplay came in second in a screenwriting contest. But of course nobody was going to produce it. So last year a friend of mine talked me into rewriting that screenplay as a novel, and hence my book, Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial. That’s how all that came about.

Zenger’s: I noticed reading the book that you based it largely on Peter Duesberg’s writings and also on the reporting of John Crewdson, which I found rather ironic because, while Crewdson did a great job of exposing the shenanigans around who discovered HIV and how the blood test was developed, he’s as staunchly committed to HIV as the cause of AIDS as anybody. His book contains a lot of sneering references to alternative points of view, saying for example that Montagnier discredited himself and dealt himself out of the world of serious AIDS research when he made that speech in San Francisco in 1990 suggesting that HIV needed a co-factor. So did you have any qualms about melding these two perspectives: Peter Duesberg’s that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and John Crewdson’s that it does, but we were lied to about how it was discovered and who invented the test?

Davis: Not all of us can get everything right all of the time, and Crewdson got some stuff right some of the time. I wasn’t about to throw that out simply because he got other stuff wrong. I even disagree somewhat with Peter [Duesberg] in some of his conclusions about the causes of AIDS. I’m one of those who staunchly adhere to the theory, which was held by the CDC for the first three years, from 1981 to 1984, that amyl nitrite and its derivatives, butyl nitrite and isobutyl nitrite, were the actual cause of AIDS.

Now, when we say that we are talking specifically about the “AIDS” that sprang up in the homosexual community in the early 1980’s, which was specifically an immunodeficiency disease syndrome, with KS [Kaposi’s sarcoma] of course being the hallmark disease. At that time, there was a lot of proof that KS was linked directly to poppers, and that poppers indeed destroyed the immune system and indeed turned many classes of antibiotics into carcinogens.

So Peter’s probably right in one sense, that there was a lot of antibiotic use as well in the homosexual community, and the combination of the antibiotics with the amyl nitrite wreaked havoc, but I don’t just go to a generalization of recreational drugs [as the sole cause of AIDS]. There’s another movement that says it has to do with simple stress in the immune system, “oxidative stress” is what it’s called. And that’s fine. I’m not saying there’s a single cause of AIDS. I think there are four different kinds of AIDS, each with their own causes.

But it’s not like I swallowed everything Peter said, or swallowed everything Crewdson said, or John Lauritsen [journalist and author of Poison by Prescription and The AIDS War], or anybody. I jfelt that they all had some very good contributions to make to the understanding of this disaster, this tragedy, and that the place we ought to be focusing our attention now is on what we continue to do today to people who are diagnosed as “HIV positive,” especially looking at the blood tests that make the diagnosis.

Zenger’s: You’ve mentioned a few times that you think what’s called “AIDS” is really four different syndromes. Could you briefly run down what you think each one is?

Davis: Yes. I call the first kind “classic AIDS.” That is the kind of AIDS that sprang up in the homosexual community, with the first cases being identified by Dr. Michael Gottlieb in L.A. in May 1981. I believe these cases are linked directly to the use of poppers in the homosexual community. There’s so much documentation about the widespread use of poppers, and their side effects, that I think the link is actually pretty clear.

The second kind of AIDS is what I call “iatrogenic AIDS,” “iatrogenic” meaning caused by a doctor, a hospital or a drug. We were very familiar with iatrogenic immune deficiency prior to the advent of AIDS, because that is exactly what cancer patients get: iatrogenic immune deficiency from their chemotherapy and radiation therapy and so forth. Most cancer patients, as I understand it, die of opportunistic diseases they get from their therapy, rather than dying of the cancer. So immune suppression caused by drugs was not a new thing at all.

But what we started doing in 1987 is giving this very lethal drug called AZT, proven to destroy the immune system, not only to people who were sick with AIDS, but who were HIV positive but had no symptoms. They were perfectly healthy human beings. What happened is, of course, those people developed AIDS from the immune suppression caused by AZT, and they died.

Zenger’s: My recollection is that AZT was originally marketed only for people with actual AIDS diagnoses, and it wasn’t until 1989 that Burroughs Wellcome won approval to sell it to so-called “asymptomatic” HIV positives as well.

Davis: That is correct. It started in 1987, and as a matter of fact the actual FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approval in 1987 was based on the stipulation that they would only give it to very sick AIDS patients. However, in 1988 they started giving it [to asymptomatic HIV positives] without approval, and in 1989 they got that approval. You’re correct.

You have to remember that Burroughs Wellcome also held the patent on amyl nitrite [the active ingredient in poppers]. When amyl nitrite was being threatened in the first three years, 1981 to 1984, by the CDC’s belief that it caused AIDS, Burroughs Wellcome very much wanted to get the attention off of amyl nitrite, and therefore totally supported the idea that it was a virus instead.

Plus they were not the ones that created AZT. That was created in a cancer lab in Michigan back in 1964. Burroughs Wellcome or someone found it on a back shelf, but Burroughs Wellcome put no money whatsoever into the development of AZT. They simply took AZT from someone else who developed it, ran it through some tests and came out saying that it killed HIV. Well, of course, it also killed every other, healthy cell in the body as well. In fact, they lied at the FDA approval committee and said that it only killed one healthy cell for every 1,000 infected cells, when in fact the ratio was 1,000 times that.

Zenger’s: What are the other two kinds of AIDS, as you see them?

Davis: The third kind of AIDS I call “AIDS by definition,” and that is because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed the definition of AIDS many, many times between 1981 and 1993. Each time they did that, they would add more diseases. The latest addition was cervical cancer, which obviously itself is not an immune-deficient disease, and has no relationship to HIV. But that was done solely because HIV was failing the first epidemiological law of viral and microbial diseases, which means that a virus cannot differentiate between men and women, and has to affect them fairly equally.

Well, up until 1993, 90 percent of the AIDS cases were men. And that didn’t sit very well. So they added cervical cancer to begin to include more women, and now I believe it’s only 83 percent men and 17 percent women. But there’s no other logical reason for cervical cancer to be included on a list of AIDS-defining diseases.

Zenger’s: As I recall, the reason given at the time was, “We find a lot of cervical cancer in women who test HIV positive; therefore we believe there is a connection, and therefore we consider it part of the syndrome.”

Davis: Oh, well, over the years they have come up with lots of different justifications and rationalizations for the things that they do. I don’t believe that for an instant. I don’t think there’s any science to support that, either. But it is simply one example of how the CDC has changed the definition of AIDS over the years. Now it includes 30 different diseases, many of which are not opportunistic and therefore not dependent upon an immune-deficient environment. So you have this whole class of people getting “AIDS” simply by definition. That’s what that class is. And the fourth group of AIDS is —

Zenger’s: [Ph.D. chemist and alternative AIDS researcher] David Rasnick pointed out that one of the things they did in 1993 is allow you to be diagnosed with AIDS if you were not sick at all. If you have an HIV positive test result and a T-cell count below 200, then you can be considered an “AIDS” patient.

Davis: Yes. That’s part of the AIDS by definition, absolutely.

Zenger’s: Rasnick also said that he looked very closely at the proportions of AIDS patients, according to the CDC’s records, based on what their AIDS-defining condition was. He said that as of 1997, two-thirds of all new AIDS diagnoses in the United States were in that category of people who were not sick, who simply had an HIV positive test and a T-cell count under 200. After 1997, the CDC stopped providing that information.

Davis: [Laughs.] That’s great. I love that. I had not heard that, Mark, but that’s so typical of what’s happened in this whole tragedy. It’s so typical. Just like, in 1991, when the CDC was embarrassed that there were thousands of AIDS cases with no evidence of HIV or the HIV antibodies, they created the new disease ICL, “idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia,” so that from that point on, anyone with AIDS symptoms who were HIV negative would be reclassified or rediagnosed with ICL instead. Therefore, since 1991, there has been a direct relationship — caused by definition — of HIV and AIDS. This is part of the game they play.

They actually played this earlier. This has some precedent. In the polio era, after the Salk vaccine came out, if anyone came to hospitals with polio symptoms, and they had had the vaccine, they were reclassified as “aseptic meningitis” instead of polio, so that no one got “polio” after the vaccine. They’ve played this game for a while, and it is a game. I consider it to be medical malpractice myself.

Zenger’s: And the fourth kind of AIDS?

Davis: AIDS in Africa, which we’ve already discussed. So it’s “classic AIDS,” linked to amyl nitrites; iatrogenic AIDS, linked to AZT; AIDS by definition, linked to the CDC; and AIDS in Africa. I’m not saying that there aren’t other factors involved. I’m not saying that there can’t be other immunosuppressive drugs that might be causing the classic AIDS. I’m not saying that there can’t be other HIV drugs, in addition to AZT, causing the iatrogenic AIDS. I’m just simply saying that these are the major factors that I have found to be involved.

Zenger’s: In 1996, of course, we had the big splash at the Vancouver AIDS conference, the introduction of the protease inhibitors, the three-drug cocktails, and everybody in the establishment was saying, “This is a great triumph. These are life-saving drugs. We have finally turned the corner on this. Thanks to these wonderful new drugs, AIDS is going to be a chronic, manageable disease and people will be able to live long and fairly healthy lives. They just have to take the drugs for the rest of their lives.” And the AIDS death rates did indeed go down. What do you think happened?

Davis: Well, we got people off of AZT monotherapy, full-strength AZT. That’s why those drugs, the new drugs, were life-saving, because they stopped 1,500 milligrams of AZT on a daily basis. They were life-saving, but only because they didn’t do the kind of damage that AZT was doing. They could not create AIDS in at least the intensity or the numbers that AZT had done, killing 300,000 Americans from 1987 to 1997. That is what cut down all the cases, starting in 1996 — I think the drop from 1995 to 1996 was 50 percent and the drop from 1996 to 1997 another 50 percent, as we began to get AZT off the market.

Now, my question is whether the remaining 600 milligrams of AZT in, for example, Trizivir and Combivir, are still lethal. It would be very difficult to determine, because how would you in fact separate the effects of one of the drugs in that cocktail in that study? But AZT, of course, is still being given in very special circumstances and in these two cocktails, and frankly, we just don’t know whether in fact it is still killing people or not.

All we know is we still have 15,000 deaths from AIDS each year. We also know that there is still use of poppers in the homosexual community, because poppers have never been blamed or linked directly to AIDS since 1984, and so we may still be seeing some effect of that. And, of course, as David Rasnick says, of the 15,000 deaths per year, we still have people who were totally asymptomatic but were HIV positive with a depressed T-cell count who were then started, they were put on these new HAART drugs — Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy — which indeed themselves have lethal side effects, such as liver damage, severe liver damage.

Zenger’s: At the 2004 AIDS conference in Barcelona it was admitted that at that time the number one cause of AIDS deaths was liver fatalities that could be traced to the anti-HIV drugs. Of course, the reason that doesn’t bother the AIDS mainstream is they make the assumption that without treatment, anybody with HIV will inevitably progress to AIDS and a premature death.

Davis: Yes, that’s one of their good rationalizations. Again, it has no basis in fact, because there’s no study to prove that. As a matter of fact, the studies that I’ve read say the opposite: that people do better off placebos than they do on the HAART drugs.

On August 5, 2006, the Lancet published the longest and largest study of this kind on HAART. It included 22,000 patients over 10 years. What it did — and this is a little tricky — what it did is it compared the first year of HAART therapy by calendar year. In other words, they started in 1996 and they took people who went on HAART for their first year in 1996 and compared them to the people who went on HAART for the first year starting in 1997, and on up.

The results were quite clear. While there was a definite decrease in viral load — in other words, there was a betterment in viral load testing — there was also a decrease in CD4 cell count in the later years. And there was no improvement in longevity. In other words, the HAART drugs that are being given today actually are worse than the drugs being given in 1996. They produce worse effects, other than a better viral load test. People are getting AIDS faster. The onset to the first AIDS event is shorter. Their immune systems are worse off and, as I said, there is no increase in longevity. That study has just been released, and it is, in my mind, very powerful.

Zenger’s: In fact, one of the quirkier things I have noticed about this issue politically is that there are a few voices on the Right, particularly the Libertarian Right, who have been willing to question AIDS and HIV, but on the Left it has become kind of an article of faith, and a test of your level of concern about African people, people of color, Queer people, etc., that you go down the line with HIV and you join all these campaigns to raise money to buy AIDS drugs for the Third World, where you have “these millions of people who are living with HIV who are going to die unless we get them these lifesaving medications,” blah blah blah. Any thoughts you might have on how the politics of this plays out: why so many people go along with it, and in particular why so many Leftists, who ordinarily pride themselves on questioning big government and big business, go along with HIV?

Davis: Well, a couple of personal opinions. One, of course, “show me the money.” We know for a fact that Magic Johnson is on the GlaxoSmithKline payroll, and therefore will not say a word about his AZT experience, or even what he’s actually doing today, and allows his picture to be used in connection with Combivir ads — although the ads are very careful not to attribute what they say to Magic Johnson. They just put his picture there.

Also, there is such an assumption in the liberal community that this shows compassion: “We care about these people.” Bill Clinton -— I don't know whether Bill Clinton is on the GlaxoSmithKline payroll or not, but he always likes to feel other people’s pain, and so here is a cause of compassion and caring. And that’s all that people see. They don’t understand that other people, like us, care just as much and are just as compassioniate, and believe that actually the best thing we could do for people would be to get them off these drugs and clarify the whole situation surrounding HIV.

But that’s not the way we’re perceived, as a matter of fact. I’m sure you’ve seen [Robin Scovill’s film] The Other Side of AIDS, where [Dr. Mark] Wainberg has some not-so-nice comments about the personality of Peter Duesberg. So we have been painted as people who want other people to die. This is actually very common in public health. Let me go specifically to the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City. You’ve seen “Guinea-Pig Kids”?

Zenger’s: I know the Incarnation Children’s Center story quite well, because I interviewed Liam Scheff, who broke it. [The story dealt with an orphanage in New York City that housed children with HIV who were wards of the state, either because their parents were dead or had lost custody due to recreational drug use. The children were enrolled, without the consent of their parents or surviving family members, in HIV drug trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health in association with pharmaceutical companies. In some cases, the kids were operated on and gastrointestinal tubes were inserted surgically so their doctors could force-feed them the HIV medications being studied.]

Davis: The video is very disturbing. I came away from watching that video wondering how in the world people could do that to children. When I mean “that,” I mean surgically insert stomach tubes and then force-feed them these dangerous, lethal medications. I didn’t know how those people sleep at night. I finally realized they have to have convinced themselves that they’re doing good in the name of public health. First of all, they could never have read any scientific studies themselves. And they have to believe that they’re doing the best for that child. To me, this is the tragedy, because people are accepting what they’re told by the authorities, by the government, by the media, by the public-health officials, and they really must feel that this is the best thing for that child.

I couldn’t ever go there. No matter what I believed, I could never think or justify surgically inserting a stomach tube in a one-year-old and feeding him medication. That’s beyond me. But I think it marks the sad state of affairs in medicine and science these days. And, according to a study by Gary Null, more people in the United States die from iatrogenic causes — that means by the doctors and the hospitals and the drugs — than by cancer or heart disease, anyway. In other words, iatrogenic causes is the leading cause of death in the United States. That’s how bad medicine has gotten. And I think we’re going to have to have a major revolution.

In fact, we are having a major revolution in terms of people’s faith in their doctors. When the truth breaks out about AIDS and HIV and these HIV blood tests and the HIV drugs, I think it’s going to bring the wall down, and we’re going to see major changes in our social structure.

Zenger’s: You’ve mentioned several places your forthcoming book, which is specifically about the HIV antibody tests. Could you tell me a little about that project? Is it going to be another novel or a nonfiction work, and what’s the gist, basically?

Davis: Yes it is, actually. It is going to be a novel and it’s going to use the same lead character, the health reporter from the Arizona Tribune, from my original book, Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial. Her name is Sarah Meadows. Sarah embarks on this Erin Brockovich-style research concerning the HIV blood test and the fact that they have not been validated, there are so many false positives, that the proteins that are used in the test have never been specifically linked to HIV itself, that there are 10 different criteria used around the world to judge the results of the test, and on and on and on, and even every test manufacturer puts a disclaimer in their test kit that this test kit may not be used to diagnose the presence or absence of HIV.

This book will deal with her research about the people who are diagnosed as “HIV positive” as the result of these arbitrary and capricious and fraudulent HIV blood tests. It will include half a dozen or so actual true-life stories of HIV positives and what the diagnosis meant in their life, and what they’re doing about it, and what the HIV drugs are doing to people. It will specifically focus on the HIV positives who are not taking drugs and are doing well without them.

I want to end by referring you to a Web site called www.staynegative.org. If you look at the banner on this site there are people with diapers, people with distended bellies from lipodystrophy, people with sunken cheeks from facial wasting. This is a perfect example of how they’re spinning this story. Anyone going to this Web page is led to believe that these men are examples of what HIV can do.

But lipodystrophy is not a symptom of HIV, or even of AIDS. It’s a proven side effect of the HIV drugs that HIV positives are forced to take. The title of this Web site is “HIV — not fabulous.” The scientifically correct title would be, “HIV Drugs — not fabulous.” Frankly, it is false advertising to blame HIV, rather than the HIV drugs, for the condition of these men. This is criminal, and I hope to bring this to court one day.

“Another Crack in the Wall”

Song of the George W. Bush Administration; sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”

We don’t need no Constitution
We don’t need due-process laws
We already know who’s guilty
Ask us how, we say, “Because … ”
Hey! Judges! Leave our trials alone!
All in all, it’s just another crack in the wall.

We don’t need no separation
Church and state, they should be one.
America’s a Christian nation
Or else the terrorists have won.
Hey! Judges! Leave that cross alone!
All in all, it’s just another crack in the wall.

We don’t need no bans on torture
We need all information
Never mind if they are lying,
Waterboarding sure is fun!
Hey! CIA! Make those ragheads moan!
All in all, it’s just another crack in the wall.

We don’t need no free elections,
No polls with long lines in the sun,
We’ve got out-of-date computers,
Diebold tells us who has won.
Hey! Voters! You can just stay home!
All in all, it’s just another crack in the wall.

We don’t need no reconstruction,
We don’t need no New Orleans,
God has swept away the poor folk,
God will keep our cities clean.
Hey! Losers! Soon you’ll all be gone.
All in all, it’s just another crack in the wall.

— Mark Gabrish Conlan, September 15, 2006
(inspired by Bill O’Reilly and dedicated to Philip Paulson)

“Planet of Slums” Author Mike Davis Speaks

Gives Audience Bleak View of World’s Urban Future

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

You don’t go to a Mike Davis lecture expecting to have a good time or to hear a rosy, optimistic vision of the future of the human race. The best-selling author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Under the Perfect Sun came to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest September 13 to present the ideas in his latest book, Planet of Slums, and express a grim view of humanity’s urban future. According to Davis, not only does the majority of the world’s human population now live in cities instead of rural environments — for the first time in human history — but up to one-third of those city dwellers live in environments so squalid, and lead lives so far removed from the organized economy, that he feels it’s legitimate to describe them as living in slums.

“We’re accustomed to think that the earth is well explored, but until recently we’ve known as little about this new urban planet as our ancestors in the 1830’s and 1840’s knew about the slums of their time,” Davis explained. Most of what we do know about the worldwide slum environments, he added, comes from the studies of a United Nations program called Human Habitat, which regularly commissions case studies documenting the levels of income, poverty and deprivation in various human environments.

The group recently released a report called The Challenge of the Slums and held a global summit meeting in Vancouver two months ago. This study, said Davis, “gives us our first look at the new urban reality, comparable to the historical audits of the slums of London and New York, all this a testament to how invisible the poor are,” But if you rely for your information on America’s mainstream media, you never heard of the report or the meeting held to discuss it. According to Davis, neither the New York Times nor the Los Angeles Times published one word about this.

Davis also cited as a source “a Yugoslavian economist who works for the World Bank, who has sampled census data and done household surveys around the world, including the former Soviet Union and China.” This economist, Davis explained, came up with something called the GENI Index, which measures the distribution of wealth and income and thereby quantifies the gap between rich and poor both nationwide and worldwide. According to Davis, the current GENI Index for the world is 0.66 — “which is what would result if one-third of the world’s people consumed everything and left the other two-thirds with nothing at all.”

According to the U.N. Habitat report which Davis used as his primary source for Planet of Slums, “no fewer than one billion human beings currently live in slums. The U.N. report doesn’t get distracted by political correctness. It defines a ‘slum’ as a neighborhood or community of anywhere from 200 to half a million people characterized by substandard housing and basic lack of infrastructure: potable water, electricity or sewage.” Davis added that “the 19th century reporters also characterized slums as dens of vice and criminality,” but that isn’t necessarily true of today’s slums — and when it is, Davis added, it’s usually the result of the slum population’s economic marginality and what its residents have to do to survive.

“Not all people who live in slums are poor, but at least 90 percent are,” Davis explained. “The number of the actual urban poor, defined as those who make less than $2 a day — or the extremely poor, defined as making less than $1 a day — is larger because not all urban poor live in slums.” Davis compared the one billion slum dwellers described in the U.N. Habitat report to the people Dickens and Gorky wrote about in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and said the report “puts the problem of the slum at the top of the list of problems the human race will face.” Davis said the one million figure is, if anything, an underestimate. For example, he explained, the report says only 16 percent of urban Mexicans live in slums — a figure he questioned because Mexico is one of the few slum environments outside the U.S. he’s actually visited and he’s convinced it’s far higher.

One of the points Davis returned to again and again is that the world’s slum population exists outside the formal economies of the world as a whole or the individual country where they live. He explained that the reason earlier generations of slum dwellers were able to work their way out of poverty through what he called “sweat equity and hard work” was that they had the option of “squatting” on unused land around the city perimeter. Today, he explained, the earlier generations of squatters have become the new slumlords; once they acquired legal title to their properties, they began to rent them out to the new urban migrants.

What’s more, Davis added, the formal economies of the poorest areas of the planet, where the fastest population growth is occurring — like sub-Saharan Africa, particularly its southwest coast — are producing almost no new jobs. “In urban Africa, job growth is almost entirely outside the organized economy,” he said. “People create their own employment by renting a rickshaw or a pushcart from somebody. In certain parts of Africa they open a shabeen to sell beer from their living rooms, and have their kids work in trades based on child labor. In Taiwan rural women are turning to prostitution. Criminal activities and street gangs are universal parts of the subsistence economy. The U.N. found that the total number of people worldwide involved in the underground economy to be about equal to the total number of people living in slums.”

Davis put the blame for the world’s growing slum population squarely on the Right-wing economic philosophy variously known as globalization, neoliberalism or the “Washington consensus,” and on its international enforcers: the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). “In the 1970’s former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became head of the World Bank at a time when the world was overflowing with surplus petrodollars parked in banks which were eager to loan it to the Third World,” he explained. “The IMF ceded part of its role to the World Bank, which became intensely involved in lending money and then, when the countries went into debt around 1980, the World Bank and IMF started imposing ‘structural adjustment programs’ (SAP’s) to force Third World countries to readjust their economies according to the Washington consensus.”

That “consensus,” Davis said, “was that big government had failed and international lenders should give smaller amounts of money to the poor themselves.” That wasn’t such a bad idea in and of itself, Davis admitted, but it came attached to a wide variety of other demands imposed on these countries. They had to decimate their public sectors, slashing social services and closing “unprofitable” publicly owned industries that had nonetheless employed large percentages of these countries’ populations. Even worse, they had to revamp their agriculture, abandoning the cultivation of food crops to feed their own people and instead producing export crops that could be sold on the world market to help pay the countries’ debts.

“SAP’s shrunk both public employment and home market-based employment,” Davis explained. “People came to the cities when the job market was collapsing, the infrastructure was collapsing and the governments were abandoning any plans for new housing. This was when the slum explosion occurred.” This, Davis argued, put the Third World countries in a continuing cycle of dependency in which they were essentially in the same place, economically, they had been when they were still formal colonies of the European powers. Today liberal reformers still talk about “microfinance” and “microcredit” programs as the way to lift Third World countries out of poverty — but, Davis said, “the success stories of microcredit are dwarfed by the scale of the problem.“

Part of the problem, Davis added, is that the informal economy can only support a limited number of people. “It consists of a very small number of niches in which a large number of people try to fit,” he explained. “There can only be so many rickshaw drivers or street vendors. The economic competition among the poor is increasing as more and more people compete for the same scraps. This will not go on endlessly. Eventually there will be rules that only people who are Moroccan, or Muslim, or members of one political party, will be permitted to work. Thus the informal economy breeds sectarianism.”

It’s the dynamic of slums and the disappearance of virtually all opportunities for poor people to advance economically, Davis said — not a so-called “clash of civilizations” between the U.S. and Islam — that’s responsible for the resistance in Iraq, both its persistence against the U.S. and the increasing sectarian violence rocking Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. “I’m not claiming al-Qaeda, which generally consists of alienated middle-class Saudis, as part of this problem,” Davis said, “but nobody in the world today has anything serious to say to 15-, 16- or 17-year-olds in cities who are waking up to the kind of future they face.”

Towards the end of his talk Davis took two audience questions, one from this reporter and one from Activist San Diego founder Martin Eder, both of which gave him a chance to focus on what could be done to deal with the slum problem — and the sheer unlikelihood that what has to be done will in fact happen. “The only way the human species will survive this century and the environmental disasters brought about by indiscriminate capitalism is to make the cities our arks,” Davis said. “The only way to mobilize resources on a finite planet is to construct public spaces. If you’re a wealthy professor, you can buy books every day on Amazon.com, but my library will never be as utopian as a great public library. Privatized consumption turns us all into addicts of wealth. It can’t meet the sorts of needs public institutions can. So much of the literature points to a very dire destiny, but cities also have the potential to bring people together for public purposes.”

The Science of Sleep: Frustrating Dream Movie

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The Science of Sleep — a French-Italian co-production from the world’s oldest continuously existing motion picture company, Gaumont, with a title rather awkwardly translated from the French La Science des Rêves (The Knowledge of Dreams would be closer) — begins as a real charmer. Basically it’s a remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, drawing on both James Thurber’s marvelous short story of the man who couldn’t stop daydreaming and the 1947 film version, for which screenwriters Ken Englund and Everett Freeman made Mitty a proofreader for a pulp-fiction publisher (thereby immersing him in the same man-of-action clichés that fueled his dreams) and involved him in a real adventure story as far-fetched as anything in his dreams or his employer’s publications.

In this version, written and directed by Michel Gondry — who directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and co-wrote its story with Charlie Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth, only to see the reviewers hail Kaufman as that film’s auteur because he wrote the actual screenplay — the Mitty character is Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal). The product of a Mexican father and a French mother (though in that case, why does he have a French last name?), he went to live with his dad when his parents broke up. As the film begins he’s just lost his father to cancer and mom (Miou-Miou) has summoned him to Paris with the promise of a job that will tap his skills as an artist and a graphic designer.

As things turn out, the job is about as mindless as one could imagine: he’s going to be doing pasteup for office calendars manufactured by a company headed by one M. Pouchet (Pierre Vaneck) — a name that seems a calculated pun on “poulet,” the French word for “chicken.” He’s totally uninterested in the job and relatively uninterested in his motley group of co-workers — except for Guy (Alain Chabat), who insists on giving him dubious advice on how to meet, relate to and seduce women — and he’s living in a building owned by his mom, where he meets two potential girlfriends, neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her friend Zoë (Emma de Caunes). He’s first attracted to Zoë but soon shifts his affections to Stéphanie, partly because she’s actually there in the same building with him and partly because Gondry has set it up that way and signaled his intentions to us by giving them such similar first names.

Nothing in Stéphane’s waking life, however, matters anywhere near as much as the world he enters when he dreams. We first see him hosting a faux TV show called “Stéphane TV,” which he seems to imagine as a cross between Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Wayne’s World, with cheerily mock props: the “cameras” are cardboard boxes with tubes stuck on the front to simulate lenses, the monitor screens in back of him are also cardboard with TV-shaped holes cut in them, and the sound baffling is made from egg crates. Gondry has clearly thrown far more imagination into the dream sequences than any other part of the movie; the dreams range from hard-edged realism to animated cardboard models and everything in between (the one in which he tries to flee the police in a cardboard car is especially charming), and they’re continually interesting visually in a way the rest of the film is not.

At first we’re genuinely charmed by Stéphane’s character — especially as compared to the hard-bitten, unscrupulous, ambitious aspiring actors Bernal played in Bad Education and dot the i — and we want to see him learn what he has to from his dream world, mature as an adult human being and end up with Stéphanie at the end. The problem with this film is that he doesn’t: he doesn’t grow, he doesn’t change, he doesn’t do anything. He just slacks off more and more on his job and alienates Stéphanie with gross physical references to her body in the manner of an eleven-year-old boy on a school playground taking out his first twinges of puberty on the girls his age. As the movie progresses — or at least unreels — Stéphanie gets more and more alienated by his boorish immaturity — and so does the audience, until by the end both she and we are glad to be rid of him.

Gondry’s inability — or unwillingness — to let his central character grow up makes it impossible to enjoy The Science of Sleep, despite its visual elegance and funny gags. It may seem strange that a sophisticated Latin American actor like Bernal comes off as more of a boor than Jim Carrey did in a similarly themed film by the same director, but that’s what happens. The characters in Eternal Sunshine, with their desperate desires to regain the memories artificially pumped out of them, touch the audience in ways that Gondry’s puppets in Science of Sleep do not. Gondry came to film directing via music videos, and it shows in his airy indifference to dramatic sense and his willingness to move his story in any direction that momentarily suits his desire for striking visual images — but whereas other music-video directors who’ve attempted feature films have had a problem with keeping their characters consistent, Science of Sleep errs in the opposite direction: Stéphane is too consistent, and we get tired of seeing him make the same mistakes over and over.

Buster Keaton’s 1924 Sherlock, Jr. remains the greatest dream comedy ever put on film; like Stéphane, Keaton’s character is a naïf, unable to relate normally to women (or anyone else), who assumes an air of potency and power when, falling asleep while running a movie in a small-town theatre (he works as the projectionist), he literally dreams his way into the movie he’s showing. As director, writer and star, Keaton shows a dazzling imagination far beyond Gondry’s, shooting his character’s dream with real-looking people and props that make the tension between real-reality and dream-reality that much more excruciating and hilarious. Gondry has a real sense of atmosphere — in his evocation of what a publishing company looked like before personal computers and scanners, with pasteup boards and stat cameras, you can practically smell the foul odors coming from the photographic typesetting machines and the chemicals that developed their output into usable galleys — but his movie isn’t anywhere nearly as entertaining as it would have been if he’d just have let Stéphane grow up a little.

Hollywoodland: Marvelous Truth-Based Neo-Noir

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

On June 16, 1959, actor George Reeves — a journeyman contract player at Warner Bros. in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s who’d had a minor role in Gone With the Wind, served in World War II, come back to a town that had passed him by, moved to New York, done live TV and landed a role in the filmed series Adventures of Superman that turned him into an icon — was found shot to death in the upstairs bedroom of his home while some friends of his were partying downstairs. The police officially ruled Reeves’ death a suicide, and that’s what most of the people who knew him thought. Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on the Adventures of Superman show, said he thought Reeves was depressed because he wanted to appeal to adult audiences and the only people who came to his personal appearances were children. But rumors have persisted that he was actually murdered, and that his killing had something to do with his long affair with Toni Lanier Mannix, wife of MGM’s second-in-command Eddie Mannix.

That’s the factual basis behind the new movie Hollywoodland, which opens September 8. Directed by Allen Coulter — who’s never made a feature film before but has done a large amount of work for TV, including such edgy series as The X-Files, Millennium, Sex and the City and The Sopranos — and written and co-produced by Paul Bernbaum, another TV vet with just one previous feature credits (something from 1998 called Family Plan), Hollywoodland uses Reeves’ death as the basis for a modern-day film noir about greed, lust, the lure of stardom and the enveloping fog of protectiveness the major studios wrapped around their operations from the 1930’s to the 1950’s to make sure that nothing came out in the media that might deglamorize the stars and discourage moviegoers from paying money to see their films.

Hollywoodland is basically two movies in one. It’s a biopic of the last eight years in the life of Reeves (Ben Affleck) that picks him up as a studio-system reject, follows him through his unexpected — and unexpectedly humiliating — stardom as Superman on TV, and grimly contrasts his off-screen drinking, smoking and screwing with the clean-cut image he was expected to maintain as the living embodiment of “truth, justice and the American way.” Intercut with this story is the tale of seamy (and fictional) private detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody, top-billed) who, reduced to working out of a motel room for only one client, latches on to the Reeves case as a way of making megabucks and gets Reeves’ mother (Heather Allin) to pay him to investigate the case as a murder.

Cynical tales about Hollywood and its denizens are nothing new on screen — indeed one might say that Hollywoodland was made for the moviegoers who liked Chinatown and L.A. Confidential — but Hollywoodland is a richer and better film than either of those. It doesn’t wear its cynicism quite so obviously on its sleeve, and writer Bernbaum is careful to give his central characters at least some points of audience appeal and sympathy. Simo may be in it for the money, but he’s also saddled with an ex-wife (Molly Parker) and a son (Charlie Lea at age 5, Zach Mills later) who idolized Reeves as Superman, then burned his Superman suit — an earlier present from daddy — in a fit of disappointed rage after Reeves died. As for Reeves, he becomes something of a pathetic figure, torn between being the boy-toy of Toni Mannix (Diane Lane) and his lust-at-first-sight relationship with fiancée Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney) and also hating the part of Superman even as it gives him something of the stardom he’s long craved.

Hollywoodland is occasionally too sluggish in its pacing, too brown-toned in its physical appearance (a common failing of modern films set in the recent past) and sometimes confusing in the time sequence: often we don’t know which storyline a scene is part of until we see whether Brody or Affleck is in it. But most of Coulter’s direction is tight and involving, and the cast members seem so “right” for their parts it’s amazing that anyone else was even considered for this film (which they were: among the actors up for Simo were Benicio Del Toro and Joaquin Phoenix, while Hugh Jackman and Kyle MacLachlan were on the list to play Reeves). Brody proves that there is indeed life for him after The Pianist; he gives his character the right mix of seediness and underlying integrity, and at times seems to be taking as much punishment here as he did as a man hiding out from the Nazis. Lane is equally adept at playing the seductress in her opening scene and the still good-looking but aging woman at the end who has to face not only the loss of her boy-toy to someone younger but the evidence in her mirror. Affleck, after his recent string of flops, seems all too right for the role of a star on the skids; though he’s not as tall as the real Reeves (who, in his early days at Warners, competed for “B” leads with another tall, fair and gangly young actor, Ronald Reagan), he otherwise looks uncannily like him and brings dimension to a part far more complex than any Reeves himself played.

One especially noteworthy aspect of Hollywoodland is its illustration of how destructive the wrong kind of fame can be. Reeves shows up for the Superman audition sure that the show will never be aired and he’ll get a quick, one-shot paycheck that won’t do long-term damage to his career. When he gets the role and starts actually shooting, he’s forced to wear a padded costume to look more muscular and to do his own stunts, taking a bone-jarring fall from the wire harness that’s supposed to make it look as if he can fly. When he performs as Superman live before an audience of kids, one aims a real gun at him and threatens to shoot him, sure that the bullets will just bounce off the way they do on TV. When Reeves finally lands a role in a big, classy movie, From Here to Eternity, the preview audience giggles when he comes on and wags in the crowd titter, “That’s Superman!” — and he’s cut out of the film. (The real Reeves is visible, barely, in From Here to Eternity, but he was purged from its credits.) And when the Superman series is dropped after seven seasons, the only job his manager can line up for him is wrestling.

There’s a good deal more dark and sinister about this story. Though the film never takes a position on whether Reeves’ death was suicide or murder, it includes real people in the dramatis personae, notably Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins, totally suppressing his British accent and talking like an East Coast Jew), who rose from bouncer at the Palisades amusement park in New Jersey to second-in-command behind Louis B. Mayer at MGM; and Howard Strickling (Joe Spano), who spent his life at MGM covering up everything from Clark Gable’s drunk-driving arrests to the suicide of Jean Harlow’s husband. (The real Strickling turned down seven-figure offers to write a tell-all memoir and took his secrets to his grave.) At its height, the studio system — under which even the biggest stars were long-term employees of a single company, contractually barred from choosing their own parts or working anywhere else — was paternalistic but also often brutal in the way it exploited the up-and-coming and disposed of the down-and-falling. In the 1950’s this system was down but not yet out, and the aura of evil that surrounds Mannix and Strickling as they’re depicted here stems from the studios’ determination — aided by a far more cooperative media than today’s — to quash all adverse publicity and present the great stars as epitomes of glamour and morals off screen as well as on.

Allen Coulter and Paul Bernbaum have taken a potentially great story and achieved just the right mix of elements. Tragedy, absurdity, pathos and rage alternate in a plot in which nothing is quite as it seems and the efforts of the characters to achieve a normal life in the Hollywood hothouse — particularly Simo’s doomed efforts to patch his family back together while still dating his secretary (who’s seeing someone else, just as Eddie Mannix’s wife feels entitled to take Reeves as a sort of male mistress because Mr. Mannix has an extra-relational sex life of his own) — are simultaneously exasperating and moving in a twisted sort of way. Even the ending leaves it unclear whether Simo has found himself, sold out or both. Hollywoodland — filmed under the even more ironic working title Truth, Justice and the American Way — dredges up a sow’s ear of Hollywood scandal and turns it into a silk purse. It’s a movie not to be missed.

Response to editorial, "Is Your Life Worth a Stem Cell?," Espresso, September 2006

Dear Editor:

It’s indicative of the silliness that has come to surround the stem-cell research issue that your editorial, “Is Your Life Worth a Stem Cell?,” focuses on refuting the bizarre and dumb idea that somehow the embryos created en masse in fertility clinics — most of which end up being defrosted and destroyed anyway — constitute human lives worthy of protection from being “exploited” by stem-cell researchers. It’s really unfortunate that the stem-cell debate has taken place almost entirely around this issue of scientific progress and the potential for effective treatments of some of humanity’s most catastrophic diseases versus the presumed “right to life” of blastocysts and fertilized eggs.

The irony is that there are other, more significant and entirely secular reasons, not necessarily to oppose stem-cell research but certainly to be skeptical of whether to spend the enormous amounts of money being requested by the scientists interested in this research and make the ongoing commitment to it contemplated by the stem-cell bond measure California voters passed nearly two years ago. These reasons include:

1) It may not work. Stem-cell research is based on some quite elaborate speculation in human biology. It’s true that there have been some promising research results in animals, but the history of medical science is littered with seemingly viable therapies that looked good in animal tests and didn’t do jack in humans. Stem-cell research may turn out the way gene therapy did: another highly promoted, heavily hyped high-tech scientific “advance” that not only didn’t effectively treat the genetic diseases it was supposed to but actually hastened the deaths of the poor unfortunates who underwent it. The voters of California were hoodwinked into believing that effective therapies based on stem-cell research already existed and needed only the money from the proposed bond measure to bring them to market. The science is actually at a far more theoretical, “iffy” level than that.

2) Even if it works, it’s likely to be unaffordable. The California stem-cell initiative contained no guarantees that any treatments developed with this enormous pot of taxpayer money would be offered to the public at a price ordinary working-class and even middle-class people could afford. It also contained no guarantees that the profits from publicly funded stem-cell research won’t go exclusively to private pharmaceutical companies. Surely even the most passionate advocates of stem-cell research don’t want a repeat of the fiasco of AIDS research, in which highly toxic, expensive therapies have been developed at great expense from public funds, given away to individual drug companies who obtained patent monopolies on them and therefore were able to sell them at sky-high prices to the very people who’d paid taxes to develop them in the first place.

3) Why are we spending enormous amounts of money on stem-cell research when over 40 million Americans have no access to health care at all? If the test is really “the greatest good for the greatest number,” wouldn’t the billions of dollars it will take to get stem-cell therapies from theory to actual treatments be better spent on ensuring that more Americans have access to basic care that we already know helps save lives?

4) Reproductive cloning. Just about everyone on both sides of the stem-cell issue agrees that one thing they don’t want to see happen is “reproductive cloning” — the creation of genetically engineered “designer babies” à la Aldous Huxley’s classic novel Brave New World and the film Gattaca. The problem is that one of the most highly touted forms of stem-cell therapy, at least in theory, is “therapeutic cloning,” the deliberate creation of a cloned embryo in order to grow replacements for diseased cell tissues or body parts — and once the scientists figure out how to do therapeutic cloning, they will also automatically know how to do reproductive cloning as well. The knowledge of how to do one will get you the other as well — and so far there hasn’t been a technology in the history of science that political and social institutions have been able to control so that only the good, not the bad, potentials of it are realized.

The above points aren’t arguments against doing stem-cell research — after all, unless we actually do the research we won’t ever know whether it will work or not. But they are arguments for a greater humility about the issue, probably a smaller public investment and tighter controls to make sure that if American taxpayers spend billions of dollars developing treatments based on stem-cell technology, they actually get their investment back in the form of access to the treatments and royalties from them instead of having the profits all go to Big Pharma the way they have with publicly funded treatments for AIDS, cancer and all too many other diseases.

Sincerely yours,

Mark Gabrish Conlan

The Pride Beatings

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Saturday, July 30, shortly before the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Festival closed for the night at 11 p.m., at least five people leaving the festival were attacked with baseball bats. One of them was also stabbed. But this isn’t an article about the beatings themselves, but about how the city government, the police department and the Queer community itself responded to them.

On the surface, the response was just fine. Mayor Jerry Sanders, formerly San Diego’s most Queer-friendly chief of police ever, sounded like he was still a police chief when he gave a press conference the next day and said, “I have a few choice words for the criminals who committed this vicious attack — and for any others who are contemplating perpetrating such a crime: You’re cowards! Make no mistake about it: if you commit such a crime, we will do everything within our power to catch you.” Within three days of the attack, three suspects were in custody — a far better performance than the city gave the last time the Pride events were attacked, when a tear gas canister was thrown into the reviewing stand at the parade in 2000 and, despite two years of assurances by then-police chief “Cowboy” Dave Bejarano that they were on the point of solving the crime, no one was ever arrested or charged.

But Zenger’s associate editor Leo Laurence heard a different story from one of the victims, 34-year-old Paul Mullins from Cincinnati, when he interviewed Mullins for an article in the August 13 San Diego Metro Weekly. Mullins told Laurence there were at least five assailants, and that when he used his cell phone to call 911 and inform the police that he and others had been attacked with baseball bats near the festival grounds, the 911 operator “didn’t know where I was.” The operator didn’t know the geography of Balboa Park or the exact location of the Pride Festival, and Mullins was on hold when he heard the sounds of more people being attacked.

“I heard someone yelling for help,” Mullins told Laurence. “I ran into another person. I don’t know who he was. ‘What are they doing? Are they beating up Gay people?’ the man asked.” Mullins said they were and told the man to get some of the Pride Festival’s own security people and the police officers assigned to the event — without success. The police officers were sent home at 10:30, just before the attacks occurred, and the uniformed guard who identified himself as the head of security for the festival told Mullins, “First of all, we don’t get paid enough to get involved like that and chase people.”

Judging from the pathetic response of the 911 operator — who kept Mullins on hold even as he was witnessing more victims being attacked and pleading with the operator to send some officers to the scene — and the lackadaisical attitudes of both the police and private security people on the scene, it’s clear that the attitude of the top city leaders that this is an event to be protected and nurtured hasn’t filtered down to the rank-and-file. Relations between the Queer community and the police have never quite recovered from the days in which sex between same-sex partners was illegal and the police regularly raided Gay bars, arrested patrons, released their names to the media and frequently provoked them to suicide.

As police chief, Jerry Sanders was a leader in doing outreach and education programs for his officers and training them to be sensitive to the Queer community. But programs like this can only go so far in erasing long-standing homophobic prejudices among many police officers. There are still too many stories of Queer crime victims reporting assaults, robberies and the like to the police and being patronized, disrespected and sometimes even threatened with arrest themselves.

What’s more, as noble as the statements by city leaders and the speed with which at least some of the assailants were arrested may appear on the surface, there are also elements of damage control. Mayor Sanders may be a decent man and as Queer-friendly as we could hope for in a man of his position and background, but he was also motivated by the fact that — as he stressed in his public statements of support for the Pride events before they occurred — the events bring in $21 million annually to San Diego, most of it from out-of-towners like Paul Mullins. Especially in a city as economically dependent on tourism as San Diego, Sanders and the city government don’t want to jeopardize that windfall by letting the word get out that it’s unsafe to attend San Diego Pride. Also, Laurence told Zenger’s he did the interview with Mullins just an hour before all the victims received calls from city officials telling them not to talk to the media — a pretty persuasive hint that the city has something to hide.

The Queer community is also in damage-control mode. At least two weeks before Pride, “Papa” Tony Lindsey of the San Diego League of Gentlemen was sending e-mails alerting the people on his address list to a wave of hate crimes in Hillcrest. The local Queer media (including this one, I’m ashamed to say) ignored his warnings. That in and of itself should have made people aware that there was a good chance for a Queer-bashing attack on Pride and that this was not a year for “business as usual” with disinterested security people and clock-watching police. Since Pride other attacks have been reported on Queer individuals and businesses in North Park and even Linda Vista — and they’ve been reported, if at all, as individual events despite the fact that the suspects arrested in the Pride attacks were all members of a gang called the “Lowlifes.” To me that suggests a strong possibility that the attacks are part of a coordinated criminal assault on our community and its people — but no one’s talking about that because it would be bad for business.

In 1991, when John Robert Wear was killed on the streets of Hillcrest near the Obelisk Bookstore, the community organized. It held meetings at Rich’s and formed a Citizens’ Patrol of community volunteers to drive through the streets of Hillcrest and North Park and alert the police immediately at any sign of potential danger. Fifteen years later, the community leadership is staging meaningless feel-good rallies in front of the Center instead of actively organizing for self-defense. Is it going to have to take another murder to goad us into acting to protect ourselves?

REDENTOR “RED” GALURA:

UCSD Student Comes to Terms with His Bisexuality

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Redentor “Red” Galura is a slim, dark-haired, outgoing, energetic UCSD student who knew there was something different about his sexual orientation even before his family moved here from his native Philippines when he was 15. “I always knew I wasn’t straight, but I couldn’t quite put what it was, because back in the Philippines we didn’t have a term for bisexuality,” Galura said. “It was just you’re either Gay, Lesbian or straight.”

Despite the ostentatious project over the last decade or so of renaming the Queer community itself and virtually every organization in it with the unlovely acronym “LGBT” — for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender” — all too many Queer folk still divide humanity into “Gay, Lesbian or straight.” Too often Bisexual people like Galura are still called “fence-sitters” and even nastier epithets by people who’ve worked their way into an exclusively homosexual identity and have a veiled — and sometimes not-so-veiled — contempt for those who can’t or won’t restrict their sexual interests, attractions, desires and acts to only one gender.

In addition to majoring in physiology and neuroscience at UCSD and pursuing a career goal to work with animals, Galura is also heavily involved with the UCSD LGBT Resource Center, where he will be one of eight student interns this school year. Zenger’s caught up with him one August afternoon after a summer-school midterm and he discussed his experiences as a student, a Resource Center volunteer and a budding Bisexual with a desire to find a nice boy or girl and settle down.

Zenger’s: I just wanted to get some of your background and how you came to an awareness of your own sexuality.

Redentor “Red” Galura: I’m a student at UCSD, going into my third year. Before that, I originally came here from the Philippines when I was 15 years old and lived in Daly City, which is right next to San Francisco. Growing up, I always knew I wasn’t straight, but I couldn’t quite put what it was, because back in the Philippines we didn’t have a term for bisexuality. It was just you’re either Gay, Lesbian or straight. So when I had these attractions to males and females, I was very confused. When I came to UCSD and visited their LGBT Resource Center, I found out about the LGBT community and put a term onto what I was.

Zenger’s: What’s your involvement with the LGBT Resource Center?

Galura: For the past year I was just involved in all the various clubs and student-run organizations that we have. I was a newbie to the community, so I came to the Resource Center to learn about all the other stuff I could get involved with, LGBT-wise. They gave me a list of all the orgs. I joined a bunch of them and found which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t, and stuck with the ones I liked.

At our Resource Center we have so-called student interns, and there’s about eight of them. I applied for one of the internships, and so for school year 2006-2007 I’m going to be the Speakers’ Bureau intern. Basically what we do is gather a few LGBT-identified students on campus, and basically we come into classes or RA’s, residential advisors’ events for their dorms or whatnot, and just speak about our lives, our experiences. We hope that through that we raise awareness and acceptance in the community.

Zenger’s: Could you tell me a little about the new facility at UCSD?

Galura: I like it. Compared to our old Resource Center, it’s a mansion, about six times as big as the last one. From what I hear, it’s the largest LGBT resource center in a public institution of higher education. Our Resource Center is a really important facility for everyone on our campus, LGBT-wise. It’s a place for us to hang out between classes or just relax. It gives a safe and secure environment for LGBT-identified students to just come and be themselves; for student orgs to meet. It’s especially important for our coming-out groups, male and female alike, as like I said, it provides this really safe and secure space where hopefully they feel welcome enough to come in so we can help them out.

I remember the grand opening. It was early, on a Saturday morning, and it was at the very end of what we call at UCSD our “Out and Proud Week,” a full week where we dedicate ourselves to being visible. I remember the chancellor was there, and various LGBT-identified faculty and staff were there, some of whom I’d never met before. It was quite surprising to see that many, because I’d never seen them at the Resource Center before. Students were there. It was just a great time. I guess. Everyone was waiting for the new one to open up since the old one was closed for a while and there wasn’t really any space to go to, so I guess, yeah, that showed how important it was to us, I guess.

Zenger’s: How do UCSD’s non-LGBT-identified students react to all of this?

Galura: I remember there was an article in the Guardian, which is the UCSD student paper. I remember at first there was just a picture, and I was actually in the picture on the front page of the paper. A week after that, my roommate wrote an article for the Guardian on the grand opening, so everybody heard about it. I haven’t really heard direct reactions to the new LGBT Resource Center opening. Nothing negative or positive from my non-LGBT-identified friends or whatnot.

Zenger’s: I was thinking of the horror stories that I’ve heard from the students at San Diego State, where they had their rainbow flag stolen. At their LGBT Visibility Week they’ve been hassled and confronted. I was wondering if anything like that was happening on UCSD as well.

Galura: At our Resource Center we have this historical binder that I read over. I don’t exactly remember the details, but occurrences of harassment have occurred in the past, but not lately. I haven’t really heard any outright or blatant attacks on LGBT students whatsoever, so I would guess the UCSD campus is relatively pretty open.

During the school year I had my own rainbow flag out in the balcony of our apartment. When I was first thinking about putting it up there I talked to my straight apartment-mates first because I guess I was just being pessimistic about hate crimes and such. I was just being careful, not wanting them to be affected by my decision to be out and proud. But they were fine with it, and my flag was never taken down or ripped off. Our apartment was never egged, or anything like that.

I lived in the single room, which is right next to the main walk that sees our balcony, and I never heard any negative remarks about the flag. Although Once there was this lady who came to our apartment to talk to me, because she saw the flag and apparently she thought, since I had that flag, that would be supportive of this project she had to try to get President Bush out of office. I don’t know why. But that’s the only reaction I’ve got to it so far.

Zenger’s: How did you decide to identify as Bisexual rather than Gay?

Galura: That was during the last two years of high school, I guess. I always knew I liked guys, but I liked girls as well. I couldn’t really explain why that was until I moved here and learned about the term. I came out to myself in the senior year of high school, but didn’t really come out to anyone until towards the end of my senior year in high school. Ironically enough, I came out to a girl I had a crush on back then, and she was fine with it.

Zenger’s: How did you come out to your parents, and how did they respond?

Galura: I came out to my parents last Thanksgiving, 2005. It was really scary at first. I was sort of expecting that if I came out as Bisexual, my parents would ask me, “Why don’t you just choose girls over guys, then?” or something like that. My parents were really religious, Catholic, and that’s how I was brought up, so I was sort of expecting that reaction from them. But it turned out that was very wrong.

I sat my parents down at the table a few hours before I drove back down to San Diego, and I told them, “Mom, dad, I’m Bisexual.” There was just silence at first, and then my mom turned to my dad and asked him what “Bisexual” meant. There was a little chuckle from both of them, and then my dad explained what Bisexual meant to my mom, and she just ent, “O.K.” Then my dad turned to me and asked me why I came out to them. Was it because I needed help, or because I just needed them to know? I told them it was just for their own information. He was fine with it, and he just started asking me about other stuff.

I told a Gay friend of mine about it on the drive back to San Diego. He told me his own experience, where at first his parents were very open to it, but then in the following months they just started acting weird. He told me to give it six months, to see how they reacted long-term. They haven’t really changed their views or treated me any differently. I think we’re even closer now, because I can openly tell them about my involvement at the Resource Center and all the other extracurricular stuff I do besides school — and I can tell them about my crushes.

Zenger’s: How have the other people at the Resource Center responded to you? Have they been supportive? Have you gotten any of the “fence-sitter” epithets?

Galura: The majority of the community has been very supportive, because we do have a number of Bisexual students as well. I’ve only experienced these stigmas from one Gay student. I remember it was at our “Non-Sexist Dance,” where it’s not supposed to matter what sex you dance with. and his partner noticed that for the whole night I was mostly dancing with girls. At the end of the night he asked me why was that, and I told them it just happened that way. I wasn’t really looking for anyone or anything that night. I just wanted to have fun.

Then his partner asked me, “You identify as Bisexual, right?” I said yes, and the partner said, “Oh, Red, don’t play that card with me.” I asked him, “What card?” He said, “Oh, you know. I had a friend back in Ventura who identified as Bi at first, but then he was only attracted to guys. He was one of those ‘Bi now, Gay later’ people.” That really hurt, especially coming from someone I thought was a friend. It felt like he was making me deny a part of me that was attracted to girls, but what am I supposed to do with that? It is there, and it’s not going to go away.

Zenger’s: If you had a chance to have a rational conversation with that person, what would you want to say to him?

Galura: He was really drunk at the time, so I just sort of dismissed it, but it didn’t hurt any less. But if I were to talk to him again, I’d tell him I actually believe that everyone’s inherently Bisexual to some degree. Some people are more towards heterosexual attractions and some people are more towards same-sex attractions, but I think everyone has that capability to be Bisexual. What I’ve learned from our Resource Center is that your sexual attractions now aren’t necessarily going to stay the same as you grow up. They might be the same, but sometimes they will change, and that they will change again. Sexuality is just very fluid that way.

Zenger’s: It’s occurred to me that if we could break down all the homophobia, all the anti-Queer prejudices, we probably wouldn’t have that many more Gay or Lesbian people, but we’d have a lot more Bi people.

Galura: That’s what I think, too.

Zenger’s: Based on people you’ve known and talked to, do you think that women accept bisexuality more readily than men do, especially the potential of their own bisexuality?

Galura: I would say for the time being that’s true. Right now in our society, our American culture, one of a straight guy’s fantasies is to see two women going at it. You see that represented in commercials, in movies, especially in porn. I don’t really know why. I guess it’s just part of that whole homophobia, where it’s O.K. for women to do that but for males, you always have to keep this front of being masculine and strong. Stereotypically speaking, Gay men are seen as feminine or whatnot, and when even like just one same-sex encounter happens, a man will see that as a sign of their masculinity being less or something like that. Unfortunately, our society is still very patriarchal, and any sign of weakness in a male is seen as bad.

Zenger’s: That’s what the late Albert Bell was getting at when he said, “Homophobia is misplaced sexism” — that a society that looks down on women, and looks down even more on men who “take the role of women” by being Gay, by having sex with men.

Galura: That’s interesting, because last week I sat in at one of the psychology classes on human sexuality, and the topic was on sexual orientation. One of the things the professor said was that the struggle LGBT rights is really tightly interconnected with other civil rights movements, especially issues of gender. She said that sexuality and gender are intricately connected; our society has this idea of what’s “male” and what’s “female,” and it automatically assumes that if you’re not one, you’re the other, when that’s not necessarily true. I guess that translates to being straight and being Gay. If you’re a “man” you’re supposed to just like women, and the stereotype is that if you’re male and you like men, you must be a “woman.” It doesn’t really add up.

Zenger’s: Apropos of that comment that the struggle for LGBT rights is interconnected with other civil-rights struggles, one of the obstacles our community is running into is that a lot of people of color, who have gone through their civil rights movements, are also socially conservative and therefore come out as anti-Gay. People of color, for example, have been more likely than whites to vote against same-sex marriage when those initiatives come up, and we’ve had a lot of groups, for example the African-American churches, mobilizing very heavily to oppose Queer rights. I was wondering, as a person of color, do you find any of this in your own community, any social conservatism that gets in the way of their being able to accept LGBT folk and the idea that LGBT folk should have rights?

Galura: In the Filipino community, you mean? When I was growing up in the Philippines, relatively speaking it was pretty open. We had Gay celebrities and Gay TV hosts, and there’s not really that big an opposition against being Gay. But since it’s a primarily Catholic country it’s still looked down upon by some people. Hate crimes do still happen, though I guess not on a grander scale than here in the U.S. Same-sex couples still can’t marry back there.

At the UCSD Resource Center we actually have a group for Queer People of Color formed recently, around 2000 or 2001. We call it “Q-POC,” and it’s a place where our intersecting identities, whether it be our sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality or religious affiliation, no matter what, we know that those identities might conflict with each other, but we try to intersect them anyway. It’s one of the more activist groups out of the ones at UCSD.

DAVID ROVICS: Political Singer to Play in San Diego September 8

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

In the early years of the 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a combination labor union and revolutionary political organization, published a red-covered, pocket-sized songbook — mostly of radical political lyrics to traditional hymn tunes — which they called “Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.” America’s political folksingers have been fanning the flames of discontent ever since, from the IWW’s Joe Hill (convicted on trumped-up charges and executed in 1915) to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the 1940’s, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs in the 1960’s, Utah Phillips and Fred Small in the 1980’s, and now Roy Zimmerman, Dave Lippman, Charlie King, the Prince Myshkins — and David Rovics, who’ll be bringing his songs and stage raps to San Diego Friday, September 8, 7 p.m. at the Sherman Heights Community Center, 2258 Island Avenue.

Rovics has been active in political music since the early 1990’s and has played San Diego before in benefits for local independent media organizations. This time he’s coming on behalf of Activist San Diego and also to promote his new CD, Halliburton Boardroom Massacre, due out September 5. He’s released seven previous CD’s and one cassette, mostly on his own Ever Reviled Records label, and both his commercial releases and more than 200 free downloads (alternative versions of songs from his CD’s as well as some he hasn’t otherwise recorded) are available from his Web site, www.davidrovics.com

Zenger’s: How did you get interested in being a political folksinger?

David Rovics: I grew up in a musical family. My parents were both classical musicians, and so I’d been playing music since I was young. I got exposed to notions about all not being right with the world at a fairly early age, starting with the anti-nuclear movement when I was 12, right after Three Mile Island. I was going to this camp where there were anti-nuclear activists coming through, so that was kind of the beginnings of my political consciousness. It all came together for me when I first heard a whole bunch of musicians around the same time: Utah Phillips, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Jim Page, Buffy Sainte-Marie. I liked this stuff, so this was what I wanted to be doing.

Zenger’s: What was the last name you mentioned just before Buffy Sainte-Marie?

Rovics: Jim Page, who’s actually the least-known and the best of all the songwriters that I would ever mention. He’s phenomenal. He’s from Seattle and he’s been at it since the late 1960’s, and never achieved a great degree of fame outside of Ireland.

Zenger’s: When did you start writing and performing songs yourself?

Rovics: I started writing when I was around 19 and go more serious about it in my early 20’s. Many people accuse me of being in-your-face and not very subtle now, but it was a lot less subtle then. I think it developed a bit of three-dimensionality from me after1993, when my friend Eric Mark was killed. We were down in the Mission District in San Francisco on May Day, hanging out with Maoists, which I used to do quite often, spray-painting buildings with revolutionary slogans. There was a gang war going on between two different Mexican gangs, that none of us were aware of, not actually being very proletarian. Maoist kids didn’t know what the proletariat was up to around there, really.

Members of one gang hit up Eric and another guy for money, and then for whatever random reason, after having their money, were going to shoot the guy Eric was with. Eric stepped in front of the gun, in between the gun and the other individual, and they blew his head off. I was three stories up in an abandoned building, not able to see what was going on in any detail. All I could see was the gunshot, and I knew somebody had been killed but I didn’t know who.

Zenger’s: The stereotype is a conservative is a liberal who gets mugged. Why didn’t the murder of your best friend swing your politics towards the Right?

Rovics: It swung my politics towards three dimensions, really. I think this happens to a lot of people, somehow or other. There’s definitely the liberal-that-gets-mugged phenomenon, that’s for sure. We’ve seen that many times. But there’s also the phenomenon that you have a certain degree of understanding reality, and then it sort of punches you in the face and you understand it a little better and a little more intimately, a little more personally. So that’s the effect it had for me.

I wasn’t stupid. I was an active young radical and I knew the social conditions that people in the Mission District were coming out of, in theory. I knew that the District was and is largely populated by refugees from Central America who are escaping horrible war zones. I knew about the ways our Army taught their soldiers how to torture, and how many torture survivors, dealing with horrible traumas, are in San Francisco living as refugees. I knew about all that, but to be suddenly confronted so intimately with that reality actually for me made the suffering of people around there just a little more personal.

Also, I’m not a liberal, right? From the viewpoint of people who would call themselves radicals of one form or another, the term “liberal” is an insult. To me, it refers to people who talk a sort of semi-radical line in order to confuse the public and get their votes. People like Hillary Clinton. Somehow or other a lot of people think she’s against the war, but she’s not. She’s actually completely supportive of Bush’s invasion, but people have this idea about her that has nothing to do with her actual politics.

So maybe the liberals who get mugged and then become fascists are the ones who didn’t have much of a grasp of reality in the first place: the ones Phil Ochs wrote about in “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” the ones who like Black people as long as they don’t move next door, that sort of thing.

Zenger’s: In the early 1990’s, what issues were you singing about, and how does that differ from what you’re singing about now?

Rovics: The things that were catching my attention in the 1990’s were actually not that different from the things I’m concerned with now and writing about now. They tend to fall into three vague categories: the global justice movement, the anti-war movement and the environmental movement — all of which, of course, were happening then as they are now, and as they were five years ago, but in very different forms in all those different periods.

I was a big fan of Noam Chomsky and was really wondering why there weren’t more people in the streets confronting the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] after reading so much about what they were doing, and how opposition to these institutions is potentially something that could unite people so much around the world, because they stand for everything that’s wrong with the sort of modern monopoly capitalism. I was so excited when finally in the United States in 1999 that global movement against these institutions for a more equitable, just economic division in the world started up in a big way in the streets of Seattle and elsewhere. But that’s something I’d already been writing about for a while.

Then there were the sanctions on Iraq. The anti-war movement, to the extent that it existed then — which was not much at all — was chiefly concerned with the sanctions on Iraq that were killing hundreds of thousands of people. So I was writing and thinking about that a lot, and about the deterioration of the environment, and global warming. That’s something I write about a lot: suburban development, sprawl, “Song for the Earth Liberation Front.”

Zenger’s: I noticed that on the compilation CD Behind the Barricades: The Best of David Rovics you had a number of what I might call “wise-guy songs” on that disc, like “Song for the Earth Liberation Front” and “Song for the Biotic Baking Brigade” [a group of anarchist vegans who threw pies at political and corporate leaders]. You don’t seem to be quite so much of a wise guy anymore. Have you really moved away from that kind of songwriting, and why?

Rovics: I guess I’ve moved away from it. I do a bit less of it, proportionately. I like songs like that, but their only real audience is the activist community. It’s fine to write songs for that audience, but I’m more interested in and more thinking about writing songs that have more of a potential for universal appeal and understanding, things that are more based out of things that people know about.

I’m also doing less of it as a reaction to the global justice movement in the U.S. pretty much collapsing after 9/11. Certainly it’s going strong elsewhere, but I’m mostly in the U.S. writing about stuff that’s happening in the U.S., and that movement is not doing the kind of inspiring things in the U.S. that it had been doing around 1999, 2000, which was inspiring more “Go get ’em, fight!” songs. After 9/11, it just seemed harder to write these kinds of flippant songs. The atmosphere in the country changed, really, so joking about some things just became less funny somehow.

Zenger’s: A number of your songs are about subjects and stories that most people have never heard of. For example, the song “St. Patrick’s Battalion” was about an event I had only read about in two sentences in a book about Mexican history. [They were a group of Irish-American soldiers in the U.S. army in the 1846-1848 war against Mexico that deserted and joined the Mexican side.] I had to ransack the memory tapes when I first heard that song to remember what that was about. How did you find out about the St. Patrick’s Battalion, and what moved you to write a song about it?

Rovics: It was in a lecture by Howard Zinn, author of the book A People’s History of the United States, and I think I read about it when I read that book many years ago. I thought, “Wow, what a neat story,” and I did a search on it on the Web. There were a number of Web sites dedicated to the memory of the San Patricios, and they’re quite well known on the Left in Mexico and among Republicans in Ireland. I thought it was just a great story, really right, just perfect ballad material for a song.

With a song like that you can just tell the story and people learn something new. There are a lot of basic archetypes involved: the notion of having so much dedication to a cause that you not only desert from your own army but join the opposing army, simply because they’re the ones being invaded — not even because you have some kind of a commitment to their country or to their government, which was at times really tyrannical, but just being willing to die for the lesser of two evils, when it comes down to it. It sends chills down my spine just to think about it.

Zenger’s: One other song that struck me about a more recent event, the “Spanish Journalists’ Strike.” I think of myself as well informed, and I hadn’t heard of that. [It was a protest against the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, which then included Spain, deliberately targeting and killing journalists.]

Rovics: Yeah, that was another obscure event. I think it was headlines in Spain and other places, and it certainly made the news in the U.S., but if it made it into the New York Times it was probably somewhere at the very end of the World News section. But yeah, that was a neat little event; there’s something about the concept of people who are actually the news reporters not reporting the news.

Aznar [then the prime minister of Spain] was about to give his major national address, and just as he’s about to do this all the people with the cameras, all the people with the notebooks and pens, all the people with the microphones, just put them down on the floor and turned around and walked out of the building. I loved it. It was beautiful. And nobody was there. The entire room emptied out, and they all went over to the U.S. Embassy and had a protest, because of course the U.S. had just killed a number of journalists in one day, in different locations, fairly clearly on purpose.

Zenger’s: I’ve noticed that recently you’ve been writing quite a few songs about the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation. How did you get interested in the Palestinian situation, and what have you gone through to be able to turn that into material for songs?

Rovics: I first became aware of what the reality of Palestinian and Israeli history through reading Noam Chomsky when I was a teenager, but it became more of an intimate thing for me after I did a tour in Israel, organized by the Israeli Folk Music Society. I was kind of suspicious of them in the first place. I felt like I was doing a tour of apartheid South Africa and only playing for whites. I was already aware of the situation, but I thought I’d do it anyway, just to see what it was like.

I hadn’t written any songs about the Palestinian struggle at the time. I had written songs against the bombing of Iraq, but I hadn’t done anything about Palestine. So I was kind of undercover, in a way, and after my experiences there, especially with Israelis, I realized it is the most racist society I’ve ever come across. I’ve been in quite a few, but that really took the cake in terms of the way that people refer to Arabs — and of course the Palestinians don’t exist in the minds of the Israelis. They’re just “Arabs,” and the way that they talk about them just reminds me of the way the typical whites might have talked about Black people in Alabama in the 1960’s.

It was just the next year that [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon, the butcher of Shatila, on the anniversary of the massacre went to visit the al-Aqsa mosque that set off the second intifada. I was in Europe at the time, and unlike the American media, the European media you were seeing bloody images of children being gunned down by Israeli soldiers with machine guns. It always helps to have that really graphic kind of media coverage to start writing a decent song. Having the images there is not as good as being there, but having been there and having seen these images, I wrote a song about it called “Children of Jerusalem.”

That started the process, because suddenly I started hearing from lots of people who hate the song — and then, about a week later, lots of people who love the song wrote. It trickled out to different circles at different times, but it quickly got to both the Israel supporters and the Palestinian intifada supporters. Then I started meeting more people from the region, especially Palestinians, and hearing their stories about their lives, which are so powerful, horrific and very well told, and so intimately related to U.S. foreign policy and also so intimately related to my own family history.

My father is Jewish, and I grew up hearing about the Holocaust and hearing about how we shouldn’t treat people badly, and how supportive Jewish people of their generation were of the civil-rights movement in the U.S. and Israel. And to see what such an abomination [Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians is]. There were so many Palestine songs.

Zenger’s: Have you ever thought of doing a totally non-political album: Another Side of David Rovics, as it were?

Rovics: I have thought about it, but I don’t know when or if I’ll ever get around to it. I’d do it if somebody wanted me to. I’m only doing one CD a year, and I don’t know if I’ll ever make a non-political album enough of a priority to do a whole CD of love songs, but I have thought about it and I’d kind of like to do it. I agree with what Dick Scoggins says that they’re all love songs, and I’ve written a song to that effect as well. But I think at the same time there are songs that are really not political: songs about life and personal experiences.

I tend to like to combine them more. I think that’s a nice way to deal with it. But I’ve thought of doing a non-political album mainly because I don’t like the way I combine them. I much prefer the way Jim Page combines them. With him it’s more like two-thirds political, one-third non-political; and of the two-thirds that are political, many of them are more personal stories too. I think that kind of songwriting really does it for me. His body of work, the way it varies like that, is great. I wish I wrote more like that.

Zenger’s: Especially since I think it’s when you have written like that that you’ve done your best songs, like “The Key” on the Return CD or “Four Blank Slates” on the new album, where you can bring the issue home emotionally and show how it affects real people, how it tears people apart.

Rovics: Right, making it personal, making it relate to things that people can relate to, because just living on the planet, you know, songs like “Jenin” and “The Dying Firefighter,” songs that are about actual people in situations that are familiar, like in “Jenin,” a kid going to high school and just having all these things happen. People can relate to that because he’s a kid going to high school.

Zenger’s: I particularly liked the song “I’m a Better Anarchist” because we’ve had experience with those people just trying to top each other on all the different numbers of things they’ve been against. My partner had joked that you score brownie points in the anarchist community by the sheer number of things you can be against, and your song was basically the same joke, set to music.

Rovics: Absolutely. I love these young people and their dedication, but they are definitely worth teasing and they definitely need to maybe take life a little less seriously — not necessarily take life less seriously but take themselves a little less seriously. They think they have the last word on everything, and it’s typical teenage-type stuff, but it’s well worth teasing people about having that kind of attitude. It has a detrimental effect on groups that people are trying to work with. Too often people feel like they’re just stabbing each other in the back and feeling betrayed and bogged down in ridiculous little discussions about every detail of everything that’s happening. I can understand where they’re coming from, of course, but it’s got to be poked fun of. Plus I wrote another song teasing the Communists, called “Vanguard,” so I felt I had to have one to balance it out and tease the anarchists.