I once knew a man,
A very talented guy
He’d sing for the people
And people would cry
“My Man,” Eagles, On the Border
I once knew a man,
A very talented guy
He’d sing for the people
And people would cry
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I once knew a man, A very talented guy He’d sing for the people And people would cry Alternate history can be a challenging subgenre for any writer. Setting the story in near-future America and extrapolating from recent history to express what the mainstream may consider radical political concepts raises the bar that much higher. While John Miglio’s Sunshine Assassins proceeds from an interesting and colorable premise, its execution prevents it from clearing these hurdles. Sunshine Assassins posits an America in which fundamentalist Christians and multinational corporations have joined forces to control the country. Most authority and power flows from the federal Department of Morality Enforcement. A descendant of the Cold War’s MK-ULTRA program, the DME has no compunction against using drugs, brainwashing or even assassination to achieve “Corporate Christian conformity.” At the heart of the beast is a shadow government, the Sunshine Council, comprised of representatives of conglomerates and right-wing fundamentalists. The result? A nation in which 10 percent of the population, all self-professed born again Christians, holds 90 percent of the wealth. There is, of course, an opposition. The National Underground is an amalgam of dissidents, progressives and revolutionaries who oppose the fascist nature of the government and the stratification of society. Their lack of resources and government’s use of the media and technology for conditioning and controlling the populace have rendered it largely ineffective. Among the leaders of the movement is the story’s protagonist, Frank Corso, who cut his teeth in the counterculture and protest movements of the 1960s. All this, of course, serves as excellent fodder to urge viewpoints and policies common to modern dissident literature. Miglio expresses these ideas not only in the change the Underground seeks but also in the impact of events from the Cold War through the current conflict with Islamic fundamentalism. While Miglio tries to avoid the pedantry found in some works in this political genre, he is fixated on equating the Underground’s goals with Jeffersonian ideas, particulary the concept of a nation with an economy based on small companies and individual entrepreneurs. While much of the espoused philosophy does find root there, other parts can be found in the platforms of the Libertarian Party (legalization of all drugs) or the Green Party (phasing out fossil fuels and nuclear power). The literary aspect of the work — and ultimately its political impact — is undercut by dialogue that sounds contrived and unnatural. Similarly, some chapters come off as little more than set pieces. There is the obligatory escape from the jaws of the beast. There is the “let me tell you how we got to this point” chapter. There is the scene victimizing an otherwise honest and well-meaning family. There is a romance the reader can see coming a mile away. And while Sunshine Assassins is alternate history, it often requires wholesale suspension of belief unnecessary to depict this future. For example, in the first chapter Corso not only escapes from custody in the center of DME headquarters, he kidnaps the DME’s second most powerful man in doing so. A couple chapters later, he kills two assassins sent after him. He accomplishes both feats single handed. Not bad for a former journalist and college professor who is nearly 65 years old. We also see crucial DME personnel converted to the Underground’s aims as a result of single experiences. Finally, the core of the story revolves around a Mission Impossible-type plan to foment revolution by exposing the Sunshine Council and the truth behind it via the government-controlled media. Given the schisms in this country arising from economic status, globalization, attitudes toward fundamentalism and the traditional conflict between left and right, Miglio’s premise is certainly worth exploring. In the final analysis, though, his storytelling keeps Sunshine Assassins from really succeeding as either alternate history or dissident prose. [F]or the most part, the counter-culture generation became seduced by money and power and eventually sold out to the establishment. John Miglio, Sunshine Assassins For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. “The End of Authorship,” John Updike Seems the “new” website for South Dakota’s Judicial Accountability Initiative Law (J.A.I.L.) is back to being updated. As history would indicate, the new material contains a healthy dose of new lies. This time J.A.I.L. is attacking South Dakota Supreme Court Chief Justice David Gilbertson and the news media. J.A.I.L. relies on and links to the minutes of the December 8, 2005, meeting of the State Bar Commission. (Disclosure: I served on the Bar Commission from June 2001 to June 2004). It claims Justice Gilbertson violated the judicial canon of ethics at that meeting and the press has refused to report that. Here’s the J.A.I.L. version of that meeting:
(Emphasis added). First, there is nothing improper about Justice Gilbertson attending the Bar Commission meeting. Any member of the South Dakota Bar can do so. But that’s an insignificant point because the minutes of the meeting demonstrate the falsity of the italicized sentence. Here is what the minutes actually say:
To say that $30,000 was “immediately requested” after Justice Gilbertson spoke (actually, “commented briefly”) is a lie, plain and simple. Yes, the Bar Commission did approve $30,000 to oppose J.A.I.L. but it was not “immediately” after Justice Gilbertson spoke nor at his request. The next paragraph of the minutes reflects that State Bar Secretary-Treasurer Barnett discussed the cost of a campaign against J.A.I.L. and he requested a $30,000 budget. That request was then supported by State Bar President Bob Riter. Nothing indicates Justice Gilbertson said a word about the request. It was only after Barnett and Riter’s discussion of J.A.I.L., the budget request and its potential impact on Bar Association dues that the Bar Commission approved Barnett’s request. As J.A.I.L. has a copy of the minutes, it knows the sequence of events and that their statement is false. Equally false is the assertion that Justice Gilbertson’s actions were “a clear violation of several judicial canons.” (I would invite J.A.I.L. to specify those violations but I don’t want to take them away from their months-long yet still apparently unproductive effort to respond to my repeated requests that they identify specific South Dakota cases demonstrating the need for J.A.I.L.) The canons of judicial ethics provide: “A judge may speak, write, lecture, teach and participate in other extra-judicial activities concerning the law, the legal system, the administration of justice and non-legal subjects” in compliance with the canons. The commentary to that rule notes that because judges are “in a unique position to contribute to the improvement of the law, the legal system, and the administration of justice,” they are “encouraged to do so, either independently or through a bar association, judicial conference or other organization dedicated to the improvement of the law.” (Emphasis added). In addition, judges “may participate in efforts to promote the fair administration of justice [and] the independence of the judiciary[.]” J.A.I.L. attacks and seeks to gut each of the items addressed in the commentary. It may also be worthy to note that while the Bar Commission is not an arm of the executive or legislative branch, the canons allow a judge to appear before public entities or officials on “matters concerning the law, the legal system or the administration of justice.” If Justice Gilbertson could speak to the Legislature or the Governor about J.A.I.L., he can certainly speak to the governing body of the Bar Association. Finally, no one can claim Justice Gilbertson’s actions are improper because they indicate a predisposition on how he might rule on the amendment. Section 22 of J.A.I.L. says: “No judge under the jurisdiction of the Special Grand Jury, or potentially affected by the outcome of a challenge hereto, shall have any jurisdiction to sit in judgment of such challenge.” Thus, the J.A.I.L.ers have made sure that neither Justice Gilbertson nor any other state court judge in South Dakota can ever rule on the measure’s constitutionality or legitimacy. Here we are just past the first day of summer and the lies already seem to grow more desperate. With all the falsehoods the J.A.I.L.ers keep spewing, this series could end with triple figure installments by election day. With [their] eyes open, knowing the consequences, [they] entered the territory of lies without a passport for return. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter It began in the late 1960s in a bohemian, artistic enclave in the canyons near Los Angeles. It spawned the singer-songwriter era of rock music and produced what would be called “the Southern California sound” and “country rock.” It essentially ended in the 1970s as commercial success and millionaire lifestyles led to the disintegration of an edifice symbolized by “Hotel California.” That song title also serves befittingly as the title of Barney Hoskyns’ exploration of that era. While subtitled “The True-life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends,” the book is far broader. Hoskyns, a British music writer and critic, traces the history and development of what began as a mellow, acoustic and literate style of introspective music. Hotel California begins where the music did — in Laurel Canyon. There, musicians influenced by rock, folk and politics gathered into what would become a melting pot of styles and sounds. Among the first trends to emerge from this mélange was the singer-songwriter. According to Jackson Browne, who would be among those to epitomize the sound, when Neil Young and Joni Mitchell released their debut albums in 1968, “you started to get songs that only the songwriter could have sung — that were part of the songwriter’s personality.” But the songwriters weren’t alone in developing and promoting what would broaden and eventually become known as the Southern California sound. Managers David Geffen and Elliot Roberts played a huge role, with Geffen founding Asylum Records in 1971. Asylum, which would eventually merge with Elektra Records, had a stable of artists synonymous with the genre, such as Browne, Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles. Hoskyns notes that things were so laid back at that time, Browne and the Eagles didn’t even have lawyers when they signed their contracts. Close behind in popularizing the music were Mo Ostin and Joe Smith at Warner-Reprise. They initially signed Mitchell and also released albums by Young, Ry Cooder, Crazy Horse, Gram Parsons and James Taylor. Whether considered part and parcel or an offshoot of the singer-songwriter style, Laurel Canyon and Topanga Canyon also fostered the emergence of country rock. Depending on how narrowly the genre is defined, country rock may not have been as widely popular or as long-lasting. Still, it reflected the roots and troubadour nature of canyon counterculture. Yet even occasional commercial success didn’t make country rock a record label favorite. When the Eagles moved from the folk-rock balance of their debut album to the explicit country rock theme of Desperado, Atlantic Records label president Jerry Greenberg reacted: “They made a fucking cowboy record.” Hoskyns details the rise and success of the artists and interlocking family of musicians who fostered and helped create the genre. Yet he also explores the commercialization of the music and its ramifications. Commercial success and the resulting influence of record labels moved many of the most popular artists from idealistic minstrels performing what Robert Plant called “hippie rebel music” to millionaires producing “more commercial and sugary” music. The vast sums of money, combined with equally vast quantities of alcohol and cocaine, also led to the labels and many artists becoming a reflection of the almost implacable greed of mid-1970s L.A. As one contemporary observer told Hoskyns, “These people had been broke and had cared and had sung about it. And now they were twenty-four or twenty-five and they had a lot of money. What were they gonna sing about?” Although remaining a singer-songwriter, Mitchell incorporated more jazz stylings, often to the dismay of her fans and record labels. The Eagles reduced their country stylings for a more straightforward rock sound and stardom. Crosby, Stills and Nash (and occasionally Young) moved from political and activist music to more mainstream sound. Thus, much of what stemmed from this era is heard today largely on nostalgia-type tours. Still, introspective singer-songwriters are more widely accepted as a result of this era and country rock was a fertile seed for today’s alt-country. Because Hoskyns covers such a wide range of material and artists, Hotel California occasionally seems unfocused and wandering. At the same time, Hoskyns isn’t simply rehashing old quotes or interviews with the artists and record executives. Hoskyns bolsters this extensively sourced work with dozens of his own interviews with individuals such as Browne, Ronstadt, Cooder, Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, J.D. Souther, Mitchell, Geffen and Roberts. Thus, this is not some People magazine-like survey fixating on celebrity and gossip. It is a thoughtful evaluation of people and events. Those interested in the corporatization of rock music can find stronger works, such as Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill. Likewise, if all you want is details about particular artists, there’s plenty out there, such as James Mcdonough’s biography of Neil Young, Marc Elliot’s history of the Eagles, David Crosby’s autobiography or the “authorized biography” of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Hotel California, though, strikes a readable balance among the business, the personalities and the music. In selling their souls for fame and riches, the stars of the 1960s and 1970s helped create a world where passive consumerism replaced emotional engagement and political commitment. Barney Hoskyns, Hotel California |
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