The Way We Wuz -- Umberto Tosi

   L.A. Times Newroom 1963, the day JFK was shot

Once again, I dwell in the alternate history of a work to which I keep returning. Maybe it's a novel, maybe a novella, maybe a string of stories I'm trying to unravel. Meanwhile, what we call reality looks more and more like science fiction or a Borges reality.

Indulging fatalism and its first cousin cynicism might be easier at my advanced age but for family. My concerns are both abstract— for humankind and our furry friends and real for the younger hopeful members of the mixed heritage and gender choice clan to which I belong. As I write this we await the momentary arrival of little Nora, who will be my fourth great grandchild, expected baby of my granddaughter Fiona Reynolds in San Francisco.

 Granddaughter Fiona & mom Alicia 

 

More than ever, I see us handing a shabby future to little Nora when we could have done— nay, we have to do— so much better. I always took the works of Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, George Orwell and such to be cautionary when I read them so many years ago. Now they seem more predictive than ever. Not that many of my generation sat idly by. We fought— often at great cost— I can testify— just not effectively, or enough of us.

Seventies U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill is usually credited with saying "all politics is local." For a very long time now, I've felt that all politics is personal. Members of my own immediate, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered industrious family operate on that premise. We face real consequences.

 UPI Teletype Machine C. 1959

Time shiftiness comes with the territory of age, I suppose. The longer I live the more I think about time. Past time stretches beyond the horizon behind me. My earliest recollection of personal consciousness is a childhood milepost that is vivid, but by no means among my earliest memories. 

I was maybe seven, walking to school in a quiet, Los Angeles neighbourhood, Red Ryder lunch pail in hand, examining cracks in the sidewalk when a voice that I recognized as my own informed me: "Here I am." 

That was some eighty years ago. Time stands still today, while moving by at light speed. It's like that endless split second when an onrushing train passes directly in front of you

Meanwhile the future rushes toward us from another horizon beyond which I cannot see. Undeterred I continue to grasp at the best available hypotheses and educated guesses that I hope I will have the wisdom to discard as proven erroneous. 

Although not a surprise, perhaps naively, I never really believed that America would choose authoritarianism. Yet here millions of my fellow citizens standing on the brink of MAGA fascism, willing to toss away their troubled but long-established experiment in representative government over the prices of turkey and Halloween candy— choosing cheap dictatorship and Orwellian oppression rather that tackle eminently solvable problems.

Even a close call would be disgraceful. The arc of the moral universe is fogged in. "Progress is our most important product," went the 1950s General Electric slogan. And progress as a "product" was exactly the problem. The Information Age monetized data before it could evolve into knowledge. I'll write a book about it soon as I figure out how. 

The writing has been on the wall for a long time. MAGA fascists and their enablers have grown in political clout and aggressiveness despite commanding a diminishing minority of popular support. America's tail wags the dog. Their third of voters is the loudest, most threatening and wields disproportionate power thanks to rip tides of dark money from oligarchs here and overseas.

I got a taste of right-wing resentment politics sixty years ago on my first newspapering job as an editorial assistant on the news desk of the Los Angeles Times. I worked nights helping the morning paper's editors produce the bulldog edition. That was in 1960. I kept raw news flowing from banks of clattering, wire service Teletype machines whose constant output I sorted and distributed to appropriate desks— international, domestic, local and features. 

It was a night job. With the switchboard closed. It also was my job to field outside calls to our news desk. In that sense, I was the still-wet-behind-the-ears voice of the mighty Times. 

Most calls were from readers asking for info— often to settle bar bets. But for several harried weeks I found myself on the receiving end of a telephone blitz by right-wing John Birch Society supporters. They accused the paper and its new publisher, Otis Chandler of treason! My jaw dropped. Otis? The athletic scion was my seldom seen boss, scion of the powerful, generational Times-Mirror Corporation family who practically invented LA as a real estate bonanza. 

The right wing shock troops on the phone delivered the same message by cult-like rote. Otis was a Communist— a Manchurian Candidate brainwashed by the Chinese. The Chandler family should depose him immediately. The paper should also retract a series it had recently published about the John Birch Society as commie propaganda. 

I had to laugh when I read the series. It had run only in the paper's suburban Orange County and was an innocuous accounting of this recently organized militant, hawkish Republican activist group. The series apparently didn't pay the Birchers the homage they expected. Neither did it note the still extant Birch Society's conspiracy theories and irresponsible paranoia about communists— in the style of red-baiting once formidable Joe McCarthy, disgraced only a few years past at the time. 

My cigar-chomping news desk superiors had to laugh. Otis was no Communist. He took journalism seriously however. He was to quickly steer the formerly rabid right wing LA Times into a respectable centrist lane and embark on an editorial expansion that was to develop it into one of the most respected journals in the country for better than a decade. 

There was a lot wrong with that Times city room where I worked in 1960, at the end of the Ike era, when John F. Kennedy was still a democratic presidential candidate. It was wall-to-wall white men. It took the first Watts insurrection to nudge the paper into at least token integration. There were many struggles to come. 

Those long-ago Birchers sounded as self-righteous and deluded as today's MAGA-fascists. Today's Trump-believers are better armed and more physically threatening. But despite their arrogance, they do not represent a majority American view— nowhere near that, thirty-five percent at best. No longer capable of winning elections on  merits, they resort to the Nazi-style tactics of intimidation, gerrymandering, bullying and disruption. 

Watch out what  you wish for. Like Hitler in 1933, they don't need a majority to seize power (or have it handed to them). Today's fed-up majority supports a progressive agenda and is— or should be— fed up with these arrogant MAGA-fascists. A growing body of opinion sees them as the dog who caught the car and is about to be flattened by it. The question is: will a complacent majority get angry enough to hold them and their corrupt demagogues accountable in time? Maybe then little Nora would have the chance of a positive future— although already at a high price.

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Umberto Tosi's books include the highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus books Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been publishe in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. He went on to become  editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead, out in August, 2022.

 
 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen.