President Bush came to the steps of the Capitol yesterday for a Second Inaugural do-over. Here is the text of his revised speech:
ON this day, when we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution, we must remember: Constitutions don’t work for everyone. It’s not a one-size-fits-all type deal.
We are led, by recent events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the repression of liberty in other lands.
Once I thought my daddy was a wimp for cuddlin’ up real close with dictators, tradin’ stability for freedom. But now I gotta admit, that’s a darn fair trade. As I told Mushy last night on that cool, high-tech videophone I got in the Sit Room, the best hope for expanding peace is expanding dictators.
In America’s ideal of freedom, we are ennobled by a heart for the weak. But we must also have a heart for the strongmen.
Sometimes when the soul of a nation speaks, we must listen. But if that soul is housed in a bunch of trial lawyers wearing identical dark suits and calling my man Mushy a “dog,” I say, bring on the batons. Police tear-gassing lawyers is really just a foreign version of tort reform, which I support.
Those lawyers should be in jail. Mushy told me they were reckonin’ to represent Osama when General-General catches him. Which will be any day now. He’s a man of his word.
I don’t blame Mushy for dissolving that disloyal Supreme Court. When I needed to subvert the democratic process during the 2000 recount, my Supreme Court was totally supportive.
House arrest for that fired chief justice sounds very relaxin’, especially if he’s got a feather pillow.
I think Mushy should put Benazir Bhutto under house arrest in Karachi. They call her “a kleptocrat in an Hermès scarf.” I call her a chaos magnet.
She’s slippery. One minute she’s overlooking Mushy’s flaws, the next she’s appalled by them. I’m not even sure what nickname to use. Her friends called her Pinky at Harvard and Bibi later. I think I like Pinky. From the day of our foundin’, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.
But I looked into Mushy’s eyes and saw a master, a man committed to helping us fight terror. And sometimes we must fight terror with tyranny. He promised me he’d be a more low-key autocrat, stop wearing that scary uniform — at least when he’s playing tennis.
From now on, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of tyrannical movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending democracy in our world so liberty can thrive.
We will persistently clarify the moral choice before every ruler and nation: Choose oppression, which can work, as we see with our Arab allies, or freedom, which — O.K., I admit it this once — we can’t make work in Iraq.
America’s influence is not unlimited. And unfortunately for the oppressed, Mushy’s open defiance is helping to further undermine America’s influence. But we will use what influence we have left to pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains and that human beings aspire to live at the mercy of bullies.
I’m gonna have to sweet-talk Laura on coming around on Burma. I might even have to kiss her hand, like Sarko.
Condi was very worried about Mushy suspending the Constitution, but Vice says Constitutions are for sissies. He doesn’t see anything wrong with Mushy’s press blackout. He thinks we can learn a few lessons from him.
Vice says if we had someone decisive like Mushy in Iraq instead of those floppy Iranian puppets we put in power, we’d be a lot better off.
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will ignore your oppression and excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will not stand with you.
The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to mistrust them. Stop your journey of progress and justice, and America will not only walk at your side, we’ll give you billions of dollars and lots of big-ticket stuff, like F-16s — no strings attached. And we’ll take you at your word that you have no intention of using them against India.
In the long run, there is justice without freedom, and there can be human rights once the human rights activists have been thrown in the pokey.
Three years ago, I believed that the most important question history would ask us was: Did our generation advance the cause of freedom?
But now I am older and wiser. I know that the most important question history will ask us is: What’s a little martial law between friends?
Only a couple of years ago, Firefox was the little browser that could — an open-source program created by thousands of contributors around the world without the benefit of a giant company like Microsoft to finance it.
Since then, Firefox, which has prospered under the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, has grown to be the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 15 to 20 percent of the browser market worldwide and higher percentages in Europe and among technology devotees. It is the most popular alternative browser since Netscape, with about three times as many users as Apple’s Safari.
Part of Firefox’s appeal was its origins as a nonprofit venture, a people-powered revolution involving the most basic Internet technology, the Web browser. Also, because the core code was open, Firefox could tap into developers’ creativity; they are encouraged to soup up the browser, whether by blocking ads from commercial Web sites, a popular add-on, or by creating “skins” to customize the browser’s appearance.
But in trying to build on this success, the Mozilla Foundation has come to resemble an investor-backed Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog. Siobhan O’Mahony, an assistant professor at the School of Management of the University of California, Davis, calls Mozilla “the first corporate open-source project.”
The foundation has used a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, to collect tens of millions of dollars in royalties from search engine companies that want prominent placement on the browser. And by collecting that money as a war chest to compete against giants like Microsoft and Apple, the foundation has, at least temporarily, moved away from the typical activities of a nonprofit organization.
“The Mozilla community has been a bit hybrid in terms of integrating public and private investment all along — its history is fairly unique in this respect,” Professor O’Mahony said.
So far, the many contributors to Firefox seem pleased with its financial success. The bigger question is what Mozilla will do with all its money.
According to Mozilla’s 2006 financial records, which were recently released, the foundation had $74 million in assets, the bulk invested in mutual funds and the like, and last year it collected $66 million in revenue. Eighty-five percent of that revenue came from a single source — Google, which has a royalty contract with Firefox.
Despite that ample revenue, the Mozilla Foundation gave away less than $100,000 in grants (according to the audited statement), or $285,000 (according to Mozilla itself), in 2006. In the same year, it paid the corporation’s chief executive, Mitchell Baker, more than $500,000 in salary and benefits. (She is also chairwoman of the foundation.)
Ms. Baker, a lawyer who has worked for Silicon Valley companies since the mid-1990s, said her compensation “is yet another example of Mozilla as a hybrid,” adding that it made her “a poor stepchild, not even,” compared to the leaders of other equally influential Silicon Valley companies.
Ms. Baker says it was the community, not Google’s money, that made Firefox a player in the field. “Mozilla is successful because we have this giant set of people who care about it,” she said. “The fundamental infrastructure piece that keeps Mozilla independent from even a single source of income like Google is the diverse set of people.”
She added: “No amount of money would have allowed us to be as successful as we are.” Then, referring to Microsoft, she said, “We cannot outspend them.”
The rise of Firefox can be seen as an extension of the Netscape-Microsoft battle of the mid-1990s. After Microsoft largely wrested control of the market, Netscape decided in 1998 to release its code to the public, and immediately developers took up the challenge.
By 2003, AOL, which had acquired Netscape, released the browser code to the newly created Mozilla Foundation, and by November 2004, the first version of Firefox was released. At the time, it was promoted as pursuing the goals of being user-friendly, able to work on different operating systems and more secure. The corporation was created in 2005.
The browser’s other, unstated advantage, shared with other open-source projects, was A.B.M: Anybody but Microsoft.
“Firefox is able to tap many different audiences. Not everyone cares about keeping Web standards open, but a significant part of the contributing population fears that if Firefox loses share, then Web standards could become the purview of Microsoft alone,” Professor O’Mahony wrote in an e-mail message.
Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer, noted that the market still showed a marked preference for Explorer, but he did concede that Microsoft, for structural reasons, could not show the enthusiasm Firefox developers have.
“We are much more reserved about thinking out loud as we make the browser better,” he said. “I can go through and talk about all the innovations we have made, but we don’t talk about them until they are done. People make very important decisions based on what Microsoft says; we have a responsibility about what we say out loud.”
Looming over Mozilla’s future, however, is its close connection with Google, which has been writing most of the checks that finance the Firefox project through its royalty contract.
When the connection with Google was revealed more than a year ago, the question on popular tech Web sites like Slashdot.org was whether Mozilla was acting as a proxy in Google’s larger war with Microsoft and others.
The foundation went so far as to directly address the issue, writing recently, “We do not vet our initiatives with Google,” and adding that it made sure that Google “understood the separation between a search relationship and the rest of our activities.”
Yet lately, the concern among Firefox users and developers about the Mozilla-Google relationship focuses more on what would happen if Google were to walk away, create its own browser or back another, like Safari. This discussion of life after Google represents an unexpected twist: the fear is that instead of being a proxy for Google, Mozilla may have become dangerously reliant on it.
Wladimir Palant, a longtime contributor to Firefox and developer of the popular Adblock Plus add-on that removes ads from Web pages, said he was pleased that the foundation had so much money saved up. And while he rattled off a number of priorities that he was glad the foundation had been pursuing, including improving the infrastructure and hiring more staff, he said No. 1 was, “Save some of the money for later.”
He said, “This will keep them independent of market tendencies and companies like Google.” If Google were to make an unreasonable demand, he said, “Mozilla will still have enough time to look for alternative money sources.”
Ms. Baker said that while she tried “to stay away from” that kind of speculation, “I take the view that we are doing something fundamentally important, and as that becomes clear, there could be other entrants.” She added: “Google is on everyone’s mind, but it could come from China, who knows?”
A Google spokeswoman would not comment on any of the issues raised by the Google-Mozilla relationship, but issued a statement: “Mozilla is a valued business partner because many users utilize Firefox to access Google products and services. We will continue to work with a variety of technology providers, including Mozilla, to ensure our mutual users have the best experience possible with our products and services.”
To an outside observer like Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia who focuses on the Internet, the alliance still makes a lot of sense.
“We’re living in a cold war between open and closed systems, and Google is happy to lend support to entities that it sees as allies,” he said.
While acknowledging that he does not know the secret terms of their contract, he said, by way of analogy, “No one is surprised that Turkey would get aid from the U.S. during the cold war.”
NBC informed the nonwriting staff of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that it will be laid off at the end of next week in the wake of the show shutting down for the writers’ strike. Jay Leno
And with Leno still refusing to cross the picket line, the show is looking at coming back on the air Nov. 19 with guest hosts so that it can save the jobs of the nonwriters.
“All sorts of things are being discussed, including guest hosts,” Tonight Show executive producer Debbie Vickers said. “Our preference is that we return to production of The Tonight Show with Jay as host as soon as possible.”
B&C also learned that the same timetable has been given to the staff of NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien. That show’s nonwriters also face layoffs at the end of the week of Nov. 12.
But Vickers also wants to save the jobs of her nonwriting staffers.
“We want to protect the staff, who have been loyal to this show for decades, in the same way that Johnny Carson reluctantly returned without his writers in 1988,” she said.
Late-night shows have gone into repeats since the strike began Monday as the hosts walked out in solidarity with their writing staffs.
With the shows shut down, networks can cut costs by laying off most of the rest of the staff.
And Leno’s chief writer doesn’t expect Leno back anytime soon.
“I talk to Jay every day, and he will not be the first [late-night host] to cross the picket line,” said Tonight Show head writer Joe Medeiros, also a strike captain for the Writers Guild of America. “So they are looking at guest hosts as one possibility so all those people don’t have to lose their jobs.”
Medeiros on Friday expressed anger at NBC for pulling the plug on the staff so quickly.
“This is the way that NBC treats the No. 1 late-night talk show that makes them $50 million a year and has been No. 1 for 12 years?” he said, noting that NBC even turned off his NBC e-mail account.
Even prior to the strike taking effect, many knew that the nonwriting late-night show staff members from all networks would probably begin to see layoffs within two to three weeks if their hosts did not resume their on-air duties.
The hosts are compelled to return without their writing staffs to save the jobs of all of the nonwriters, which can number more than 100 per show.
There is precedent for hosts to come back sans writers, as Johnny Carson and David Letterman both did during the 1988 strike.
Medeiros also spoke in animated fashion about NBC’s decision to replace Leno with Conan O’Brien in 2009.
“And all this after they already kicked the man out the door,” Medeiros said.
CBS has already said that The Late Show with David Letterman will remain in repeats the week of Nov. 12.
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live continues to run in repeats, as its host has backed the writers not only by stepping aside, but even driving a taco truck around to picket sites in Los Angeles. Leno has also been a constant presence at picketing around town.
Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades
reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur with such
books as “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song” died
Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.
Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s biographer.
From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary
journalism as “The Armies of the Night,” the two-time Pulitzer Prize
winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was
pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest
from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant
terrible.”
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious,
streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six
times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken
party.
He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New
York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew
gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan
YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore
Vidal and crusaded against women’s lib.
But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, “in the end it is the writing that will count.”
Mailer, he wrote, possessed “a superb natural style that does not
crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and
characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great
openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the
need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era.”
Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923 in Long Branch, N.J. His
father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who
ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn —
later described by Mailer as “the most secure Jewish environment in
America.”
Mailer completed public schools, earned an engineering science
degree in 1943 from Harvard, where he decided to become a writer, and
was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an
infantryman, he saw enough of Army life and combat to provide a basis
for his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” published in 1948 while
he was a post-graduate student in Paris on the G.I. Bill.
The book — noteworthy for Mailer’s invention of the word “fug”
as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original —
was a best-seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed
the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.
Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early
1950s counterculture — defining “hip” in his essay “The White
Negro,” allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the
leftist Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two
more novels, “Barbary Shore” (1951) and “Deer Park” (1955), neither
embraced kindly by readers or critics.
Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention
for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece,
“Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” had made the difference in John F.
Kennedy’s razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon.
While Life magazine called his next book, “An American Dream”
(1965), “the big comeback of Norman Mailer,” the author-journalist was
chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington,
the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon
shot.
His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, “The Armies of
the Night,” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was
described as the only person over 40 trusted by the flower generation.
Covering the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper’s
magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or
joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown.
“I was in a moral quandary. I didn’t know if I was being scared or
being professional,” he later testified in the trial of the so-called
Chicago Seven.
In 1999, “The Armies of the Night” was listed at No. 19 on a New
York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the
century.
Mailer’s personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a
party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife,
Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was
not until 1997 that she revealed, in her own book, how close she had
come to dying.
In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor on a “left conservative”
platform. He said New York City should become the 51st state, and urged
a referendum for “black ghetto dwellers” on whether they should set up
their own government.
Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for
being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the
Pentagon protests. While directing the film “Maidstone” in 1968, the
self-described “old club fighter” punched actor Lane Smith, breaking
his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn’s ear in another scuffle.
Years later, he championed the work of a convict-writer named
Jack Abbott — and was subjected to ridicule and criticism when
Abbott, released to a halfway house, promptly stabbed a man to death.
Mailer had views on almost everything.
The ’70s: “the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on.”
Poetry: A “natural activity … a poem comes to one,” whereas
prose required making “an appointment with one’s mind to write a few
thousand words.”
Journalism: irresponsible. “You can’t be too certain about what happened.”
Technology: “insidious, debilitating and depressing,” and nobody
in politics had an answer to “its impact on our spiritual well-being.”
“He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive.
He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on,
and everything he had was so original,” said friend William Kennedy,
author of “Ironweed.”
Mailer’s suspicion of technology was so deep that while most
writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500
words a day, in what Newsweek’s Sokolov called “an illegible and
curving hand.” When a stranger asked him on a Brooklyn street if he
wrote on a computer, he replied, “No, I never learned that,” then
added, in a mischievous aside, “but my girl does.”
In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women’s liberation
movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with
what he said was feminists’ need to abolish the mystery, romance and
“blind, goat-kicking lust” from sex.
Time magazine said the broadside should “earn him a permanent
niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs.” Mailer later told an
interviewer that his being called sexist was “the greatest injustice in
American life.”
Two years later, he wrote “Marilyn” and was accused of
plagiarism by other Marilyn Monroe biographers. One, Maurice Zolotow,
called it “one of the literary heists of the century.” Mailer shot
back, “nobody calls me a plagiarist and gets away with it,” adding that
if he was going to steal, it would be from Shakespeare or Melville.
“He could do anything he wanted to do — the movie
business, writing, theater, politics,” author Gay Talese said Saturday.
“He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He’d go anywhere and
try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully
confident, with a great sense of optimism.”
In “Advertisements for Myself” (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not.
Among other notable works: “Cannibals and Christians” (1966);
“Why Are We in Vietnam?” (1967); and “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”
(1968), an account of the two political conventions that year.
“The Executioner’s Song” (1979), an epic account of the life
and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won
the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “Ancient Evenings” (1983), a novel
of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.
“Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1984) became a 1987 film. Some
critics found “Harlot’s Ghost” (1991), a novel about the CIA,
surprisingly sympathetic to the cold warriors, considering Mailer’s
left-leaning past. In 1997, he came out with “The Gospel According to
the Son,” a novel told from Jesus Christ’s point of view. The following
year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology “The
Time of Our Time.”
Mailer’s wives, besides Morales, were Beatrice Silverman; Lady
Jeanne Campbell; Beverly Bentley; actress Carol Stevens and painter
Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
Mailer lived for decades in the Brooklyn Heights townhouse with
a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop “crow’s
nest,” and kept a beachside home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent
increasing time in his later years.
Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that
forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for
writing and in early 2007 released “The Castle in the Forest,” a novel
about Hitler’s early years, narrated by an underling of Satan. A book
of conversations about the cosmos, “On God: An Uncommon Conversation,”
came out in the fall.
In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement
at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the
“withering” of general interest in the “serious novel.”
Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become
anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired
to screenwriting or journalism.
When he was young, Mailer said, “fiction was everything. The
novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway
… I don’t think the same thing can be said anymore. I don’t think my
work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me.”
“Obviously, he was a great American voice,” said a tearful Joan Didion, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer’s death.
Lennon said arrangements for a private service and burial for
family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a
memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months.
___
Associated Press writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
FOR
ONE reason or another, there won’t be a member of the band at the
first major university conference on the legacy of the Grateful Dead.
But Woodacre’s Dan Healy is the next best thing.
“Someone asked me why we didn’t have a band member,” says band
historian Dennis McNally, an organizer of the Nov. 16 to 18 event at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “My answer was, ‘We have
Healy.’ After (Grateful Dead lyricist) Robert Hunter, he’s the next
guy who was considered a member of the band.”
Healy will be among the panelists at “Unbroken Chain: the Grateful
Dead in Music, Culture and Memory,” presented in conjunction with the
graduate history seminar “American Beauty: Music, Culture and Society,
1945-’95”; and the undergraduate course “How Does the Song Go: the
Grateful Dead as a Window into American Culture.”
“It’s probably an excuse to get together and have fun,” Healy says
with a laugh. “I don’t want it to be too technical, so I’ll probably
talk about the roots of the band, how we stumbled together and what it
meant in terms of the San Francisco music scene and our philosophy as
a group.”
In the world of the Grateful Dead, Healy is famous as one of the
designers of the band’s legendary Wall of Sound. McNally
describes him as the “famed enabler of the Dead’s improvisational
style” and considers his sound system “like another instrument” in the
band.
“It’s an intimate, powerful and complex role to mix a band’s sound,
and Healy did that for 22 years,” he says. “In some bands, the sound
engineer is just a technician. But in the Grateful Dead, he was as
much a part of the philosophical bent to the music and how they
approached it as any band member.”
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the
Wall of Sound was the largest portable sound system ever built.
In his book “Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful
Dead,’ McNally describes it as “not merely a sound system, it was an
electronic sculpture. To walk into a facility for a Dead concert was
to see something like the pylon on the moon in Stanley Kubrick’s
‘2001,’ something so grand, so elegant, so utterly preposterous, that
words simply failed. The Wall was 604 speakers I using 26,400 watts of
power from 55 McIntosh 2300s.”
Phil Lesh, the band’s bassist, said it was like “piloting a flying
saucer, or riding your own sound wave.”
The 62-year-old Healy shrugs it off as no big deal. Quick-witted and
articulate, he’s a voluble, heavy-set man with a reputation for not
suffering fools gladly.
He ended his association with the Dead shortly before Garcia’s death.
Nowadays, if you’re looking for him, you’ll find him where he’s always
been – in the studio. He spends most of his time in “the Shack,” a
recording studio he built on a San Geronimo Valley horse ranch.
“If you’re me, you continue on,” he says. “What I do hasn’t really
changed at all.”
A proud gear head, he thinks of himself as “a Gyro Gearloose type,”
but he wants people to know that he brought more to the table than
mere technical expertise.
“I don’t want to just be in the Grateful Dead legendary soundman bag,”
he says, sitting at the studio’s mixing board one recent afternoon.
“My role in the Grateful Dead was a lot bigger than the outside world
saw me. I was also involved in determining where and when we played,
and I had a lot to do with the administration and business part of
it.”
When he isn’t in the studio, he manages to find time to play guitar in
West Marin’s Sky Blue Band, and he produced and recorded the group’s
CD, among several other recording projects. With Marin’s Harold Jones,
the drummer in Tony Bennett’s band, he’s making plans for an
instructional video on drumming.
As a sideline, he oversees an antique radio-restoration business he
calls Classic Radio.
Healy is a wealth of inside information on the Grateful Dead and,
whether he likes it or not, he’ll always be revered by Deadheads as
the band’s legendary sound man,
Of all the band members, he was closest to the papa bear himself,
Jerry Garcia, working with him on numerous albums and on “The Grateful
Dead Movie.” Every conversation about the Dead always begins and ends
with the beloved Garcia.
“Jerry and I worked in the studio for years and years,” he recalls. “I
spent tens of thousands of hours in the studio with him.”
Healy says he may never have reached his potential or achieved what he
achieved if it hadn’t been for Garcia’s gentle encouragement.
“The one thing I’ve gotta say about Jerry: As far as perceiving
potential, he was a master at that,” he explains. “He would have made
a great movie director. He made you feel good about taking your best
shot even if you didn’t feel that sure of yourself. He pulled that out
of you. He enabled peoples’ creativity. He would look at you and say,
‘I know you can do it, so just go do it.’ That kind of magic exists in
life.”
Healy came into the orbit of Garcia and the Dead in 1965, after they’d
been together for a year. At the time he was a novice sound engineer
learning his trade in a studio in San Francisco that specialized in
commercial jingles and radio spots. He was living on a houseboat in a
slough of the Corte Madera Creek in Larkspur, a bohemian enclave for
musicians and artists.
Through a neighbor, he met John Cipollina, guitarist with Quicksilver
Messenger Service, who introduced him to Garcia and the Dead.
“We were all teenagers and in our early 20s,” Healy remembers. “Nobody
had any money. So, if your guitar amp broke, it could mean you didn’t
play a gig. If you broke a string it could stop you. No one had a
spare chord or strings or any of that stuff.
“When they discovered I knew about electronics and how to work in the
studio, it was, ‘Hey, Dan, fix my amp.’ So I started doing things like
that.”
Garcia used his powers of friendly persuasion to enlist Healy in the
band’s creative vision and philosophy. As he describes it, he was
“being thrust into becoming a recording engineer at the onset of the
San Francisco music scene.
“It launched me, or rather slung me, into it big time,” he says. “It
was the birth of sound and music becoming one thing. That’s how it
started with the Grateful Dead and me.”
By the end of the ’60s, Healy had done pretty much all he could do
“hot rodding,” as he puts it, the old-school technology available in
sound at the time.
“I had a lifelong vision that I wanted to be have everybody in the
audience perceive the sound quality as equivalent to being in their
own living room in front of the most expensive stereo system known to
man,” he explains. “In other words, the dream was to go to the show
and hear the heavenly choir, so to speak, through the heavenly sound
system. That was the dream. The question was: Is it possible to do
this? Can we pull this off?”
A high school dropout, Healy knew he couldn’t pull it off without a
basic technical education.
“In my mid 20s, I spent four or five years schooling myself, checking
books out of the library,” he says. “I had no idea how uneducated I
was, and education was necessary.”
Given carte blanche by Garcia and the band, he made the dream real in
1973 with what famously became known as the Wall of Sound.
“Without the Grateful Dead, I could never have done it,” he admits.
“No other band would have put what amounted to 90 percent of its total
earnings into this. There were times when we spent the money on
speakers and nobody got paychecks, from Jerry on down. It was a
devotion and commitment based on my dream, which may have not even
been reliable, but nonetheless people still took a chance on it. When
I think of it, gratitude is the word that comes to mind.”
It took four semi-trailer trucks and more than 20 crew members to haul
and set up the system, which weighed 75 tons. It had its own monitors
facing toward the back of the stage so that the band could hear
exactly what the audience was hearing.
“The work was pretty intense,” recalls crew member Richie Pechner.
“Now you would say that it was high stress, but at the time we were
young and dumb and energetic and we didn’t know any better. It was
idealistic and hard and painful on one level, but you could sit behind
Garcia’s Fender Twin (amp) and listen and it would heal you.”
Pechner remembers Healy as an older brother-like figure who taught him
everything he needed to know. “He was the smartest electronic guy,” he
says. “He knew more than anybody. He had the best knowledge of how to
make it work.”
The Wall was viable for only about a year before it was “retired”
because of high fuel costs brought on by the gas crisis of the ’70s
and the rising personnel costs of the crew.
“We were working for the machine, literally,” Healy says. “We had
gotten to the point where the very reason where we were there, the
music, had lost focus. We got to where we were slaving for this ideal.
It was either retire the Wall of Sound or stop playing music.”
After the Wall came down, the Dead took a break for six months or so,
and the Wall became a colorful footnote in the band’s history.
“The truth is, the Wall of Sound’s purpose was to cultivate new ways
of doing things,” Healy says now. “And that’s all it was. It was never
meant to be an end product. It was solely moving us out of the
limitations of existing sound equipment. It was an experimental
workshop.”
From then on, using what the Wall had taught them, Healy and his
allies in a San Rafael company called Ultra Sound put together more
practical and efficient systems that could travel around the country
from show to show without instigating bankruptcy proceedings.
Healy stayed with the Dead until just before Garcia, suffering from
the ravages of drug addiction and decades on the road, died in a
Forest Knolls drug treatment facility.
“In the last year of the Grateful Dead, I bowed out,” he says.
“Technically, they said they fired me, but I quit. I couldn’t go on. I
would go back to the hotel after a show in tears. I saw Jerry, a man
who I had great love and respect for personally and professionally,
killing himself. And there was nothing any of us could do anything
about except ride it out. But the emotional strain was more than I
could bear.”
These days, Healy lives within walking distance of the Shack with
Patti, his wife of 33 years. He’s proud of his 38-year-old daughter,
Ambrosia. a former vice president of worldwide marketing for Capitol
Records who now works as a publicist for major rock bands.
In this digital age, he’s as enthusiastic and excited about his work
as ever. He raves about the infinite possibilities of digital
recording and sound technology.
“It couldn’t happen fast enough for me,” he says with a smile.
While the rest of the blogosphere concerns itself with the worthy task of choosing the all-time best blog posts, I’m keeping my focus where it belongs: on the all-time worst blog posts. And thanks to help from my commenters, plus commenters over at FDL and John Cole’s place, we now have an official list of nominees.
Coordinated
antiwar protests in at least 11 American cities this weekend raised
anew an interesting question about the nature of news coverage: Are the
media ignoring rallies against the Iraq war because of their low
turnout or is the turnout dampened by the lack of news coverage?
I find it unsettling that I even have to consider the question.
That
most Americans oppose the war in Iraq is well established. The latest
CBS News poll, in mid-October, found 26 percent of those polled
approved of the way the president is handling the war and 67 percent
disapproved. It found that 45 percent said they’d only be willing to
keep large numbers of US troops in Iraq “for less than a year.” And an
ABC News-Washington Post poll in late September found that 55 percent
felt Democrats in Congress had not gone far enough in opposing the war.
Granted, neither poll asked specifically
about what this weekend’s marchers wanted: An end to congressional
funding for the war. Still, poll after poll has found substantial
discontent with a war that ranks as the preeminent issue in the
presidential campaign.
Given that context, it seems remarkable to
me that in some of the 11 cities in which protests were held –
Boston and New York, for example – major news outlets treated
this “National Day of Action” as though it did not exist. As far as I
can tell, neither The New York Times nor The Boston Globe had so much
as a news brief about the march in the days leading up to it. The day
after, The Times, at least in its national edition, totally ignored the
thousands who marched in New York and the tens of thousands who marched
nationwide. The Globe relegated the news of 10,000 spirited citizens
(including me) marching through Boston’s rain-dampened streets to a
short piece deep inside its metro section. A single sentence noted the
event’s national context.
As a former newspaper editor, I was most
taken aback by the silence beforehand. Surely any march of widespread
interest warrants a brief news item to let people know that the event
is taking place and that they can participate. It’s called “advancing
the news,” and it has a time-honored place in American newsrooms.
With prescient irony, Frank Rich wrote in
his Oct. 14 Times column, “We can continue to blame the Bush
administration for the horrors of Iraq.… But we must also
examine our own responsibility.” And, he goes on to suggest, we must
examine our own silence.
So why would Mr. Rich’s news colleagues deprive people of information needed to take exactly that responsibility?
I’m
not suggesting here that the Times or any news organization should be
in collusion with a movement – pro-war or antiwar, pro-choice or
pro-life, pro-government or pro-privatization.
I am suggesting that news organizations cover the news – that they inform the public about any widespread effort to give voice
to those who share a widely held view about any major national issue.
If
it had been a pro-war group that had organized a series of support
marches this weekend, I’d have felt the same way. Like the National Day
of Action, their efforts would have been news – news of how
people can participate in a democracy overrun with campaign platitudes
and big-plate fundraisers, news that keeps democracy vibrant, news that
keeps it healthy.
Joseph Pulitzer, the editor and publisher
for whom the highest honor in journalism is named, understood this
well. In May 1904, he wrote: “Our Republic and its press rise or fall
together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press … can
preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham
and a mockery.… The power to mould the future of the Republic
will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”
It’s time for the current generation of
journalists – at times seemingly obsessed with Martha Stewart,
O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the like – to use
that power more vigilantly, and more firmly, with the public interest
in mind.
• Jerry Lanson is a professor of journalism at Emerson College in Boston.
The New York Herald Sun 