The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Sometimes, like when it rains for three days and nights without stopping and I get a little tired of being cooped up in an RV space the size of the average efficiency apartment in Tokyo, I vow to simply curl up on the futon mattress and rest, sleep and dream.

There’s nothing to be done in the great outdoors when it rains like this in the Mid-Atlantic region, so like all my friends in the Deep South who have to remain indoors for six months out of the year to hide from the heat in the air conditioning, when it rains here we simply rest and sleep. Sometimes for 12 hours at a stretch.

I’m sure it happens to a lot of people, not just me but maybe not everybody, yet sometimes when the outdoors are unapproachable I read something online and then a long buried memory bubbles up to the surface of my short term memory, and emerges in a dream.

Long ago and far away, well before I ever read The New York Times or dreamed of working there as a reporter, I was just a kid in the suburbs who graduated from comic books to MAD magazine, around the time Richard Nixon was being investigated by the House and came under pressure to resign the presidency.

MAD magazine’s oldest active artist is still spoofing what makes us human

I had no idea what the Watergate was, but somehow I could relate to Alfred E. Neuman. “What, me worry?”

Since I took up playing the drums in the junior high school band around that same time, I also started reading Rolling Stone, long before I ever read the hefty Sunday Washington Post in the university library.

Hunter S. Thompson was doing his fear and loathing thing back then, hanging at the swimming pool at the Watergate with a case of Bass Ale, a land line phone with a very long cord, and a typewriter, smoking ganja and dropping acid and writing about the president of the United States as “a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president.”

As he wrote in Nixon’s obituary when he died in 1994, “the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.”

But as a political animal and a criminal president, Nixon was a choir boy compared to Donald Trump, and there is only one publication that can claim to have beaten up on Trump like Thompson beat up on Nixon. There is no print edition to copyright in the Library of Congress. If there is a such thing as a university journalism historian in the year 2050 — no guarantee considering the pace of global warming and the acceleration of obsolescence on what’s left of college campuses especially since Covid – someone will figure out that I was right, operating independently online in the New American Journal.

I called Trump a fascist dictator the day he was elected, accurately predicting that he was on his way to being elected, along with Michael Moore. I commissioned this art work BEFORE the 2016 election. The artist wanted it to be Hillary. I insisted on Trump as the model for the corrupt politician being chased by the watchdog press.

Fascist Dictator Donald Trump Stuns American Establishment, Defeats Hillary Clinton for President

It took Joe Biden nearly two years in office to finally come up with the phrase pseudo-Fascist to describe Trump and his MAGA following, and there was not one single so-called objective news outlet in America which dared use the term until then.

“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point,” Thompson argued in Better Than Sex in 1994. “It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”

I think Thompson was wrong about that, defining objective journalism like everybody else as what passed for it in the past half a century, this gentlemanly “fair and balanced” bullshit that was not exactly what Adolph Ochs had in mind in 1896 when he bought the failing New York Times then and invented objective journalism and hired the first real science reporter.

Calling Trump a fascist dictator wannabe was and is quite objective, from a scientific point of view.

But I will save more of that discussion for my upcoming documentary on the history of objective journalism, if and when I can find someone with the courage to fund it and make it.

Now Back to Memory.

I remember picking up a copy of MAD, Rolling Stone and Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” for summer album in a TG&Y store, and it had to be early in the summer of 1972, because that’s when the album came out. Which means I was 13 going on 14-years-old.

While my dad was hanging out in the church parking lot on Sundays smoking cigarettes and pretending to be on the Parking Committee, I was sneaking out the other side of the building and going to the Krystal just down the street and buying a pack of Salems for .50-cents a pack out of the machine. Me and a friend who will remain nameless would sneak back into the church balcony during the benediction, just in time to catch the ride home for Sunday dinner or the trip to my grandparents house in Shoal Creek Valley near Asheville in St. Clair County, Alabama.

I rarely think of those days now. But every once in awhile, something will trigger a memory in a dream and I will wake up thinking about the kid I was then, breaking into adolescence just as the “cultural revolution” was happening out west in San Francisco and the Hippies were gathering on the National Mall protesting the war in Vietnam.

Sometimes in this life, I have been ahead of my time, like when I opened the first San Francisco style newsstand, book store and coffee bar on the Southside of Birmingham in 1986 at the age of 29. In 1998, I was the editor of one of the first magazines published online in Knoxville, Tennessee.

At other times, I feel like a number of people I know who feel somehow we were born in the wrong time and place. Oh how things could have turned out so differently if only . . .

But like they say, you can’t choose or change these things, like family and timing, so you have to deal with the reality right in front of you.

Besides, why should I complain? I’ve had a hell of a run in this life. Coming of age in the 1970s was a revolution, a time of great freedom. Yes, beginning with Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority, that freedom has gradually been taken away from us, bit by bit.

But we did have the 1990s too, the computer revolution and the early days of the internet, and so what if Bill Clinton got a fucking blowjob in the Oval Office? What good did George W. Bush do us, but get us into two wars and nearly crash the global economy?

And, we got to live through the glory years with the first African Americans in the White House, a time of relative peace and prosperity. Did we take it for granted, and not work hard enough to prevent Trump from sneaking into the White House and turning our own government against us? Yes.

Somehow we beat back the tide of fascism and got Biden into the White House in 2020, and held onto a majority in the House and snuck a majority in the Senate too. But some days he looks like the kid with his finger in the dike, holding back the anti-progressive tide threatening to engulf the world. Look what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine, in Brazil, in parts of Europe.

Right-wing fascist dictators are using Trump’s “fake news” playbook to take over their countries, and democracy itself is now on the international defensive, not on the march as it should be. All while the political unrest distracts from what should be the prime directive at this time: Putting all of our attention and resources into fighting climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation.

NASA can show us pictures of the universe, and take us back to the moon and consider a mission to mars.

But that is not going to save humanity in time unless we start immediately to save this planet from all the destruction that will be caused by the massive heat building up, melting the glaciers, causing sea level rise, and warming the oceans and spawning destructive storms like Hurricane Ian.

Speaking of memories, I spent two weeks in two summers in a row vacationing with family in Fort Myers, Florida, and once played a big rock club there and took a driving tour of Sanibel Island. I would not want to see the place now. It would break my heart.

Oh, and in case you missed it in Politico or Rolling Stone, former D.C. Metro cop Michael Fanone is an American hero. The fact that he dismisses the title makes it even more so.

Michael Fanone Is Not Your Fucking Hero

He almost lost his life defending the Capitol on Jan. 6. Now, he’s a #resistance star — and he hates it.

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