With the circus that was the California recall election dominating the news this week, the death of author and media critic Neil Postman didn’t get the attention it deserved. But that wouldn’t have surprised Postman one bit. He wrote one of the great books of media criticism of our time, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” which even when it was published in 1985 all but predicted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood-style gubernatorial campaign and the media frenzy that would accompany it. Postman understood better than anyone that television has inextricably changed the nature of debate, and that in politics entertainment now reigns supreme.

A professor at New York University known for his sense of humor, Postman founded the Steinhardt School of Education’s program in Media Ecology at NYU in 1971. He was chair of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002. During his career, he wrote 20 books on a wide range of subjects. “The Disappearance of Childhood” examined television’s harmful effects on children through the onslaught of information. ‘Technopoly” explored the tyranny of technology. Over the course of his career, in fact, Postman relentlessly questioned technology’s impact on our lives. It was a pursuit that didn’t end at the university walls.

Colleague and friend Terrence Moran this week recalled Postman’s skepticism the day he went shopping for a new car and found that every one had electric windows.

“He said, ‘Why do I need electric windows? My arm and hand work. If I were paralyzed I could use an electric window,’” Moran recalled, chuckling. “Neil would always take what he would call an ecological perspective, a balanced view.”

In Postman’s words, his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is “an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television.” The change didn’t bode well for serious political discourse, Postman thought. As he pointed out, the world of the printed word, by its very nature, demanded rigorous logic. Television, with its emphasis on flashy images, did not. The consequences were far-reaching, and the book explored them in detail.

“It’s very difficult to discuss the impact of popular culture and television without in some way making reference to ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death,’” said cultural critic Neal Gabler, author of “Life: The Movie.” “It’s one of those foundation books that you have to refer to. You cannot write about American popular culture and its influence without addressing that book.”

Given the timing of Postman’s death on Oct. 5, just two days before the California recall election, it’s tempting to think that Postman foresaw the outcome, had understood it all too well, and decided that sticking around for it would offer few surprises.

Indeed, much of what Postman feared about television and politics was being played out in the race.

Take political debates. In the book, Postman recalled the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which the two politicians spoke extemporaneously — and eloquently — for hours. Postman found it noteworthy that the audience remained engaged, even after breaking for dinner. Vigorous debates used to be central to the elective process.

Fast forward to 2003. Schwarzenegger, a candidate to govern one of the most powerful states in the union, announces that he will participate in only one debate. It is a discussion in which the participants are apprised of the questions beforehand, giving them plenty of time to prepare their responses and memorize their lines.

Or take the increasingly fine line between show business and serious business. Postman wrote that television commercials were having a major influence on modern-day politics. Commercials relied on emotion for their impact, not reason. They played to the audience’s needs. Product research wasn’t required to make an effective commercial, Postman noted. What was important was market research.

In other words, increasingly in politics, the facts are taking a back seat.

Postman observed that in a culture in which television dominated the conversation, a candidate’s ideas were trumped in importance by his appearance. William Howard Taft, who weighed 300 pounds when he became the country’s 27th president in a print-dominated cutlure, would not likely be elected to office in the Television Age, Postman observed.

“Indeed,” he wrote, “we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”

At the beginning of “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Postman pointed to two competing visions of the future. The first was George Orwell’s “1984,” in which a totalitarian government subverted a peoples’ ability to think clearly through oppressive measures. The second was Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which the people themselves stopped thinking clearly of their own accord.

The year 1984 came and went in the U.S. without a great Orwellian transformation. But Postman feared that television was still creating our own “Brave New World.”

“[Huxley] believed with H.G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media,” Postman wrote at the conclusion of the book. “For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

Postman, for his part, knew exactly why he was laughing. And he never stopped thinking.

SUVA, FIJI – The call came in at 10:45 a.m. as Fijian magazine editor Yashwant Gaunder was settling into a meeting in his office in Fiji’s capital city of Suva: Less than two miles away, in a brazen coup attempt, masked gunmen armed with AK-47 rifles had just stormed the country’s Parliament building and taken Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and seven cabinet ministers hostage.

Gaunder put the phone down and ran into the editorial room. His tiny staff, which published a glossy political monthly and contributed occasionally to his money-draining fijilive news Web site, had also heard the news and sat frozen at their desks.

“A lot of people were in shock,” he recalls.

Angry mobs would soon be torching and looting businesses just outside his doors, but Gaunder didn’t flinch. The 36-year-old former newspaperman sat down at a computer, pounded out a bare-bones story and loaded it onto fijilive.com, never stopping to consider that only 9,000 of Fiji’s 775,000 citizens can even access the Web.

“I don’t know why,” the tall, mustached editor recalls recently as he takes a break from the coverage in Fiji’s tense capital city, “but my first thought was simply to get the news on the Net.”

Gaunder pauses, leans back in his chair and cracks a smile.

“Amazing, huh?”

What’s most amazing is how Gaunder and his staff, including one reporter who “hardly ever” logs on to the Web and hadn’t checked her e-mail in months, instantly harnessed all their modest resources amid the May 19 chaos and transformed fijilive from an obscure South Pacific Web address into the must-read destination site for everyone in the world seeking up-to-the-minute news of the Fiji coup.

At first, they didn’t even know whether anyone was reading their reports. After all, before the coup, fijilive averaged only 5,000 visits a day. But, late that first night in their office, while filing updates and monitoring the BBC News coverage of the rebellion, Gaunder and his team were surprised to see their Web site’s front page beaming back at him from the television screen.

“That was their graphic because the BBC had no photos,” Gaunder recalls. “After that, everything just went crazy.”

In fact, with most phone lines down or jammed and the country’s only other news Web site, Fiji Village News, not updating for two days, fijilive was at key times the island nation’s only news link to the outside world. And the world desperately wanted in. After the initial BBC report, calls and e-mail interview requests poured in from the BBC, ABC News and journalists the world over.

“All of the reporters were telling us they were getting the news from us and no one else,” Gaunder says.

Indeed, not even Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald maintains a bureau in Fiji. When news broke of the coup, online news editor Richard Woolveridge went straight to fijilive.

“Everybody was patching into their site,” he says. “Until we got our own people on the ground, they were critical.”

Not bad for a Web site that, hours earlier, as Gaunder puts it, “wasn’t a fully dedicated news service.”

Gaunder, a Fijian Indian, usually devotes nearly all of his editorial resources, including his half a dozen reporters and editors, to The Review, a monthly political magazine he launched in 1992 after quitting his editing job at the Fiji Times. The magazine, chock full of ads, is Gaunder’s “bread and butter,” he says.

But last year he built seven Web sites, including a dating site, a humor site, an e-commerce site and fijilive. The small news site, run by a lone editor in The Review offices, published the contents of the printed Fiji Post each day and occasionally featured an original story.

The Coup

Reporter Tamirisi Digitaki, who had been covering a protest march in Suva led by ethnic Fijians, heard an announcement that gunmen had taken over Parliament. She hailed a cab, raced to the building and dialed Gaunder on a cell phone, describing the scene.

Fijilive Managing Director Yashwant Gaunder.

News was sketchy. Inside, Fijian rebels held hostages. Police had blocked all entrances to the building. A mob, it was said, was running toward Parliament.

Back at the office, Gaunder took down notes as fast as Digitaki could deliver the news. As many of his employees raced home for safety, he wrote the story and immediately placed it on the Web site.

“I was worried that the Internet link would go down,” he says.

Then he quickly assembled a team to cover the unfolding drama.

Digitaki would stay at Parliament. Reporters Avin Rahish, Shailendra Singh, Nalinesh Arun and Verleshwar Singh would remain at the office, monitoring radio reports and television coverage and helping to field calls from Digitaki. Driver Rudra Nand would stay, too, and shuttle reporters around the city.

Whether he could hang onto his Web programmer, however, was another story.

At first, programmer Nitesh Chandra, 23, handled the duties without question. But that afternoon, the situation grew increasingly dangerous, and Chandra began having second thoughts.

A mob of ethnic Fijians ran from Parliament through the streets of downtown Suva. From fijilive’s second story window, Chandra and the fijilive staff watched as men and women torched and looted businesses below. Flames and smoke rose from nearby buildings and cries echoed through the streets.

That’s when Chandra received a telephone call from his aunt, demanding that he return home for safety.

Chandra had good reason to worry. The rebel gunmen and violent mob, comprising ethnic Fijians, were targeting Fiji Indians, who make up 44 percent of the country’s population and are mostly descendants of farm laborers imported from India in the late 1800s. Most of The Review’s staff is Fiji Indian, including Chandra. He knew the mob might try to enter the office building.

“If they come in, there’s no escape route for us,” he thought to himself. “There’s only one door.”

Chandra considered calling it quits. Then Gaunder sat him down for a talk.

“A chance like this comes once in a lifetime when we can tell the whole world about the coup in Fiji,” Gaunder told him. “We’ll be a part of history.”

Chandra stayed.

The staff did everything they could to secure their office, drawing the blinds, cutting almost all the lights in the room and locking the building elevator. Meanwhile, at Parliament, Digitaki battled her own fears. As an ethnic Fijian, she wouldn’t be targeted by the rebels for racial reasons, but the situation was volatile, and she knew anything could happen.

“Should I stay or leave?” she asked Gaunder over her cell phone. “I’m worried.”

“If you think it’s getting dangerous,” he told her, “then leave.”

Digitaki stayed and, along with about five other journalists, was allowed to enter Parliament, where she had access to coup leader George Speight and the rebels. She dialed in more reports.

Gaunder, meanwhile, wanted to join her in Parliament. He called Jo Nata, one of Speight’s key advisors and a former Review editor, and asked whether he could be let into the building.

No way, Nata said.

“These guys hate Indians,” he told Gaunder. “They’ll kill you.”

Through the night, Gaunder and his reporters hunkered down in front of their IBM computers, taking calls from Digitaki and monitoring broadcast media.

They broke key stories: Among them, that the Fijian president’s daughter was among the hostages, and that Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, also one of the hostages, had been beaten.

As they finished each story, they saved it on a disk and handed it to Chandra, who popped it into his computer and coded the articles.

“I was nervous,” Chandra recalls. “Everyone was looking at me. I was the only person doing html.”

Still, he calmly finished coding each story, dialed their server on a 33K modem and loaded each piece onto the site.

As the night wore on, the staff battled fatigue, munched on crackers — their sole food source — and continued to write.

Then, at 4 a.m., the server crashed.

The staff stopped typing and slumped back in their chairs.

“Now what?” they asked.

Chandra shakes his head as he recalls the moment.

“We had momentum,” he says, “and it just stopped.”

By then, fijilive had logged an unprecedented 50,000 visits that day, simply more than its server could handle.

Chandra spent the next hour trying to load fijilive’s content onto Gaunder’s businessnews.com.fj. The plan worked.

The staff sent hundreds of e-mails to reporters and readers around the globe, alerting them to the change. (Over the following days, as their Web infrastructure strained under even more visits — 175,000, at one point — Chandra would transfer the content to each of Gaunder’s seven sites, including pacificjoke.com. “People thought it was a joke,” he recalls, chuckling.)

The staff continued to work into Saturday night, operating on no sleep.

The situation inside Parliament changed, and Digitaki grew nervous.

“Some of Speight’s supporters started running around telling us we had to hide because the soldiers would be moving in and turning off the lights,” she recalls. “They moved five of us (journalists) into a small room and told us we couldn’t use the mobile phones.

“It was very very tense. There was one photographer inside. He was so frightened his hands were shaking. He couldn’t’ take any photos.”

Fijilive reporter Avin Rahish worked day and night for weeks covering the coup, often sleeping on the office floor with a pillow and blanket he stored in his desk.

The journalists sat quietly, but when a guard turned away, they huddled together and pretended to talk. Digitaki quietly dialed Gaunder on her cell phone and whispered a report.

Hours later, the group was ushered out of the building, unharmed.

Digitaki, however, was in for more danger. At one point, as she camped out in front of Parliament, shots were fired into the building that put her directly in the line of fire. She knew that a Reuters staffer had been injured earlier. She crouched down to avoid getting hit and dialed Gaunder.

“Tell my parents I love them,” she told him as bullets flew over her head. “I think I’m going to die here.”

But she stayed put and continued dialing Gaunder with reports.

Fijilive, as a result, broke more key stories.

The Aftermath

These days, with the drama now a month old, Digitaki is back in the office, and fijilive is featuring fewer updates.

Gaunder and his team are again devoting most of their time to The Review. The new issue is due out soon, and because revenue from the magazine subsidizes fijilive, it takes priority.

Readers have noticed the downturn in coverage. Some have complained. Gaunder, relaxing in his office, shrugs. Commerce has come to a halt in the country since the coup started, he explains, and he has to make money. Fijilive carries no advertising, so it’s bound to suffer.

He’s worried about the future. His small publishing company is already taking big hits. The staff agreed to a substantial pay cut a few weeks ago, he says, and morale is low.

“Initially, you’re working on raw energy covering the coup,” he says.

“Once the initial euphoria is gone, it’s difficult to keep going. I’ve seen a lot of people around here depressed. [They're] worried about their future.”

Gaunder shakes his head.

“I’m struggling as the managing director. I’m writing stories. I’m talking to the banks to ensure our business survives.”

Even if it does, he says, he may lose many of his writers.

“They’ll go to Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.,” he says. “They have to go where they feel comfortable.”

Indeed, reporter Avin Rahish, 25, has already applied to the Australian government for residency.

He worked day and night for weeks covering the coup, often sleeping on the office floor with a pillow and blanket he stored in his desk.

He is proud of his work, he says, but he doesn’t foresee a future for himself and his wife in Fiji.

“I don’t see life for me getting back to normal in the next year,” he says, his eyes downcast. “I don’t want to waste another year in Fiji.”

All this political and economic turmoil has taken a toll on Gaunder.

“I’m probably the oldest 36-year-old in Fiji,” he says.

Over the years, he has endured countless threats on his life, he says.

With the situation in Suva as tense as it is, he has worried about the safety of his wife, and the security of his home.

“I’ve got a wooden home,” he says, alluding to the recent torching of buildings in Suva. “If you’ve got a wooden home in Fiji, you’ve got to be worried.”

He too could leave his native country, he says, but he has no desire to go.

Years ago, “I could have taken a job in New Zealand,” he says. “I didn’t leave. My heart is here. I’ve never thought of leaving Fiji.”

Besides, he adds, fijilive has achieved great acclaim lately, and that could open new doors.

“Now we’ve got to figure out a way to make it pay,” he says.

It hasn’t paid yet. For the time being, Gaunder’s staff is settling for the sort of rewards that money can’t buy.

Gaunder leans back in his chair and peers into the editorial office, where his staff is busy at work.

“I have to give it to our team,” he says.

Gaunder pauses, then cracks a broad smile.

“We didn’t make any money, but it’s nice to know we made history.”

As editor of the Onion weekly humor newspaper, Robert Siegel has never won a Pulitzer Prize, reported on a third world insurrection or accomplished any of the feats that traditionally have inspired jaded big-city journalists.

In fact, he has never published a real news story.

So when Siegel was invited to the Chicago Sun-Times last year to speak at a luncheon hosted by the city’s venerable Headline Club, he was surprised to find nearly 70 journalists hanging on his every word, more reporters than even Blair Kamin, a local Pulitzer winner, had drawn at a Headline luncheon earlier that year.

“I felt like a visiting dignitary,” Siegel, 28, recalls, grinning. “They just went nuts.”

The Headliners might spend their days chronicling government corruption, murders or presidential elections, but they all wanted to hear from the editor who ushered into the world such ground-breaking stories as “Congress Approves $540 Million For Evil,” “Auto Workers Strike For More Novelty Acrylic Baseball Caps” and “Area Man Confounded By Buffet Procedure.”

Siegel shouldn’t have been surprised by the warm reception, which also included some devotees reciting obscure Onion headlines that not even he could recall.

The Onion lampoons American newspaper writing better than any publication around.

The Madison, Wisconsin-based tabloid publishes all-important hometown hero stories (”Local Airhead Wants to Work With Kids”), insightful economics journalism (”Report: Rich Consistently Outearning Poor”) and, frequently, exclusive pieces about Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in the world of the Onion is nothing short of a rock star (”Greenspan To Play 15 Unannounced Club Shows”; “Greenspan, Entourage Demolish Hotel Room”; “World Gets First-Ever Look Inside Greenspan Fantasy Ranch”).

For years, the Onion’s singular brand of anti-journalism rarely made it beyond the college dorms of Madison, where the free weekly has been circulated since its inception in 1988.

But all that changed in May 1996 with the launch of theOnion.com. Journalists, in particular, discovered the site and embraced the online edition en masse, e-mailing the latest T. Herman Zweibel column or area-man story to colleagues even as their own deadlines for very real news stories languished.

“The Onion is the best source of humor out there,” says CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield, who plans to report on the newspaper soon for the cable network. “I click onto it every week. The way they use the deadpan AP style to report the most outrageous stuff, that’s what makes it so funny.”

Los Angeles Times staff writer Paul Brownfield agrees.

“I think it’s one of the funniest things going,” says Brownfield, who recently wrote a feature about the Onion. “It takes that dull language, that newspaperese, and turns it on its head. That’s probably what a lot of reporters would secretly like to be able to do.”

Actually, it’s what a lot of reporters not-so-secretly want to do. Siegel receives dozens of resumes a week from journalists and communication majors begging jobs.

He has yet to hire a single applicant.

“If I were funny I’d send my resume to the Onion,” Siegel says, “but we just don’t have that kind of system here.”

The Onion has a system unlike any other.

It’s a system that developed organically, staffers say, with local Madison writers, who were friends or University of Wisconsin students, contributing. It’s also a system that allows those same half dozen or so slightly disheveled writers and editors in their late 20s and early 30s to file in to the downtown Madison office at about noon each day.

On its face, the Onion’s operations appear to be slacker-central, but observe the system for long and it becomes clear that the newspaper’s sharp humor does not come quickly or easily.

Writers discard 50 ideas for every story that makes it into the paper. What’s more, they’re perfectly happy to set aside headlines for weeks or even months to mull over the just the right word or phrase that will make a piece sing.

Onion writers, in fact, put far more work into phony news stories than most newspaper reporters put into real stories.

On a recent Tuesday, head scribe Todd Hanson is among the first to arrive in the Onion’s small conference room for the writers’ weekly story meeting. Shelves are lined with comic books, videos, a Herbert Hoover doll. A small frog swims in the office fish tank.

Hanson eyes the floor, which is littered with food wrappers, used soda cans and empty potato-chip bags.

“Oh, that’s gross,” he says, shaking his head. “We don’t buss after ourselves well.”

All Onion stories begin with a headline. Writers scratch down ideas throughout the week, then sit down on Tuesdays to pitch them. Every headline must stand alone as a joke, so if a headline isn’t funny, it’s quickly discarded, and its accompanying story never written.

The Tuesday meeting is critical. To make the initial cut, which is still several steps removed from final approval, a headline must first win laughs from at least two fellow writers.

After returning with a giant trash bag, which he quickly fills with the debris (”This is sick!”), Hanson and writers John Krewson, Carol Kolb, Tim Harrod, Chris Karwowski and Maria Schneider take their places on the sofa, beanbag and chairs.

Writers Maria Schneider, Todd Hanson and Chris Karwowski in story meeting.

“Ideas are hard to cough up, at least for me,” Schneider confesses before the meeting. “I’m always afraid of repeating myself. I’m always afraid of the paper getting too formulaic. It’s hard to do this every week.”

Schneider grins.

“I’m kind of a depressed person.”

The meeting is called to order. Karwowski holds up his long list of headlines, volunteering to read first.

“This better be funny, Karwowski,” Hanson deadpans.

Karwowski smiles.

Karwowski: “Teacher Inspires Student To Become A Teacher.”

Hanson: “Wait, is that funny? I don’t know if it’s super funny or if the concept is funny.”

Karwowski (thinking): “What if it was a gym teacher?”

Hanson: “Maybe that would make it funny: Gym Teacher Inspires Student To Become Gym Teacher.”

The other writers shrug, unimpressed.

Karwowski: “New Teddy Bear 20 Percent Cuddlier.”

Hanson: “We did the dog being cuddlier already.”

Karwowski: “Sportscaster Inspires Fan’s Obsessive Devotion.”

Hanson: “No.”

Karwowski: “Man Stands Up Only To Sit Down Again.”

Hanson: “How could you make that funnier?”

Karwowski (moving on): “Clinton Decides To Fix White House Sink Alone.”

Hanson: “That’s funny. It’s got to be presented as anti-humor, not as a serious joke, only because every sit-com does it.”

The other writers nod.

Karwowski: “Microwaveable Dinner Almost Too Much Work.”

Hanson: “That’s perfect. That’s the perfect Onion joke.”

After two dozen or so more pitches from Karwowski, the group takes a lunch break for sandwiches. Writer Krewson looks at the OJR reporter and raises an eyebrow.

“So,” he says accusingly, “is it going to be hard to fit our quotes into your paper’s pre-conceived agenda?”

The meeting resumes. Hours pass, and hundreds of ideas are rejected. A few make the cut. Among them: “Rare Quarter Worth 26 Cents.”

Afterward, Hanson takes a cigarette break in the stairwell.

“I remember when I was in college, hanging out with journalism school people, and I thought, what is it with the J-school that teaches you not to write?,” he says. “The inverted pyramid style is just a formula for writing the least interesting way possible. It’s a format for making the reader not want to finish the article.”

Hanson smiles.

“Now we get to make fun of it.”

Hanson worked as a dishwasher on the side for years just to pay his bills. He credits the Onion’s lean, humble beginnings with its success, which has recently led to the publication of two books, as well as Onion radio spots on stations throughout the country.

“We were washing dishes, so the financial benefits never entered into it,” he says. “It sounds very purist, but if you’re washing dishes, you’re not thinking, how can I make money off these jokes? You’re saying, ‘How can I make my life interesting?’ ”

Writing for the Onion, he says, was the answer, and despite the paper’s recent surge in popularity, the same rules hold true.

“The Onion is different from other things people see,” he says. “Everything on television is censored. Everything made for a mass audience is censored. The Onion is outside of that system.”

Cloistered in Madison, far removed from coastal trend-setters, Onion writers can freely take shots at American culture. Lately, though, Hollywood has shown an increasingly big interest in the Onion’s talent pool.

Hanson says he’s in no hurry to head west.

“It’s not that we’re above selling out, because I think we’re all looking forward to that,” he says. “But we’ve been hesitant to leave Madison because we’ve all heard horror stories about the entertainment world. If we leave, we won’t get this back.

“For me, this is a dream job. I’ll always look back on this time as being a miracle.”

Siegel, seated in his cramped office decorated with a Trix cereal box, among other things, agrees that Onion staffers have many reasons to be thankful.

Siegel is particularly thankful for the emergence of the Web.

When theOnion.com went up in 1996, it received roughly 20,000 unique visitors a week. These days, the site averages about 675,000 unique weekly visitors.

(It’s very profitable. Publisher Peter Haise predicts that the Web site will make at least $2 million in banner ads alone this year.)

Editor Rob Siegel.

“We put the Web site up originally thinking people reading it were getting a little cheated,” Siegel says. “You know, you have to feel the paper and all that. But over time, the Web site has come to feel like the real thing. Now I don’t feel that readers are getting a second-class version.

“Web news as a medium has really evolved over the last few years. When we first put it up, there really wasn’t a standard. Now there’s sort of a format you can imitate: CNN.com or the NewYorkTimes.com. We really look a lot more like a news Web site.”

With one big exception, of course: The Onion is pure comedy, and every headline is a joke.

That fact, Siegel says, makes the Onion perfectly suited for the Web.

“It’s just a list of jokes,” he says. “You click onto the site and you immediately have it.”

Soon, Publisher Haise says, readers may have more.

“I think you’ll find the site will expand in the next few years to offer the readers much more,” Haise says. “We’ve got a lot of different things planned. In some form, the Onion will probably have daily updates. I kind of see things changing for us, and we’re really close to a pivotal time now.”

But all that’s in the future.

For now, at the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and countless other newsrooms around the country, journalists continue to click onto the Onion every week, forgetting about real news and real deadlines for a few minutes, and laughing, perhaps more than anything, at themselves.

“Journalists tend to get very self-important,” CNN’s Greenfield says.

Reading the Onion, he adds, is the perfect antidote.

By Jim Benning
Los Angeles Times

Ask most politicians if they plan to run for reelection and you probably will not get a straight answer. Ask Hermosa Beach Mayor Robert (Burgie) Benz and he will tell you straight out: “I will if the rock group thing doesn’t work out.”

Benz is one mayor who marches-and slam dances-to a different drummer.

The wisecracking, 36-year-old mechanical engineer frequently strolls into City Council meetings wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops. He sponsors an annual Fourth of July beer-chugging and vomiting festival, and he is probably the only mayor in America who freely admits to smoking marijuana.

Between beers, Benz will tell you he is a Jeffersonian constitutionalist. Between belches, he’ll invoke William F. Buckley and rail against government regulations.

Now the man who once sang “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” in a Hermosa Beach jail cell after he was arrested for throwing an unruly Christmas party has set his sights on rock stardom: Benz is recording a punk-rock album and plans to tour college campuses next spring.

“It’ll be really cool,” says Benz as he breaks into laughter. “I’ll lecture to political science classes during the day and play in my band at night.”

Benz’s face slapped across an album cover would be only one of a number of wacky twists for the boyish mayor who scorns the notion of political correctness.

Since he was elected to the City Council in 1991, Benz has blasted the local school district’s anti-drug policy, guzzled beer on the beach in violation of city laws and told Christians advocating a City Council prayer that their idea was stupid.

Some residents would rather see Benz behind bars. Many say he is a poor role model for Hermosa’s children, and some have tried unsuccessfully to oust him from office through two recall campaigns. “He has a harmful effect on children, and he’s detrimental to the people of Hermosa,” complains activist Parker Herriott.

Benz, a self-proclaimed “intellectual punk,” snickers at the criticism. “If people think role models should be toeing a politically correct line, then I’m no role model,” he says. “A true role model questions authority.”

If he likes to cut loose and throw parties occasionally, Benz says, that’s his business. Besides, he sometimes works 70 hours a week on his mechanical engineering business and he needs an escape. “You gotta do it or you get stale,” he says.

Residents should not be surprised by Benz’s antics.

Benz, who moved to Hermosa Beach after he graduated from Oregon State University in 1980, gained fame as host of “Burgie Live,” an offbeat, cable call-in show styled after “Saturday Night Live.”

The show’s off-the-wall science experiments and goofball skits attracted a loyal following. Benz, wearing dark sunglasses, took calls from smart-aleck teens and often belted out the “Burgie Rap,” a song about surfing down a mammoth wave. He frequently broke out laughing in a characteristic, high-speed nasal chortle. The show ended each week with a rendition of “Partytime Is Anytime.”

But like Benz, the show had more than slapstick antics and a rollicking party atmosphere. One skit satirizing police crackdowns on local bars was designed to depict Benz’s belief that too much government regulation inhibits business.

*

And a bumper sticker on Benz’s desk that stated “Save Hermosa, drown a meter maid,” reflected Benz’s belief that the city’s reputation for overzealously enforcing parking meter regulations drives customers away and hurts the economy.

“Burgie’s really sharp, really bright,” says former station manager and “Burgie Live” producer Doug Nielsen. “But his real talent is that he presents himself in a manner where people don’t take him too seriously, and he has a way of letting people know he’s kindhearted.”

Benz, a libertarian, says his interest in government and love for Hermosa Beach led him to seek office. He lost a campaign for a council seat in 1989, but won a seat two years later when he argued that the city’s budget was more important to residents than his party-animal image. If there is one town where that line would work, it is Hermosa Beach, which has attracted a far larger proportion of freewheeling hippies, surfers and bikers than the more conservative beach cities that surround it.

As a councilman, Benz has tried to keep his zany antics outside City Hall. He has yet to light a marijuana joint or break into a verse of the “Burgie Rap” during a meeting. He even wore long pants to the council meeting in August when he took over the mayor’s seat, a largely ceremonial position that is rotated among council members every nine months. And he has consistently argued for change.

Benz has called for easing restrictions on alcohol sales, and has hounded the council to reduce government regulations.

He coined an expression that he calls “Burgie’s Law.” Says Benz: “Show me a regulation that was drafted to address a problem, and I’ll show you how it caused more problems.”

Though Benz sometimes sounds surly, he has a charisma that rubs off on some of his toughest critics, says Councilman Sam Y. Edgerton. Benz and Edgerton sometimes play golf together. Benz plays barefooted.

“One thing about politics is it attracts big stuffed shirts,” Edgerton says. “Here you have a guy whose only fault is that his flip-flops might look a little worn. He represents the common man who, in Hermosa Beach, is an ex-surfer sitting on the sea wall watching the sunset.”

Sometimes Benz the politician and Benz the beer guzzler meet. When Benz bought beers for several city officials at a local bar after a recent council meeting, he flopped down on a bar stool and engaged a boisterous man sitting a few stools away in a political debate.

When the man argued that “bureaucracy was good,” Benz took a swig of beer, grinned and fired back: “I am bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is evil.” The man was not convinced, but the charismatic Benz still won him over. The man later told Benz: “I like you. I’d vote for you.”

Benz may have picked up a little charisma and iconoclasm from his mother, Dolores. Burgie Benz recalls a stormy morning in Portland when his mother had a run-in with the local police. Dolores Benz, who was driving young Burgie, his sister and three brothers to church in the family’s ‘62 Chevrolet station wagon, ran a stop sign as she chugged up a hill in a blizzard because she was afraid the car might stall. She had seen a police officer in her rear view mirror and hoped he would not pull her over. But he did.

“She said, `What the hell’s the matter with you, you damn jerk, I saw you behind me,’ ” Benz recalls. “In the end, not only did she not get a ticket, but she got the cop to push the car up the hill.”

It is a memory he takes with him to the council meetings and his mechanical engineering business.

Benz sits in his El Segundo office among scattered papers, empty soda cans and stacks of newspapers. He does much of his thinking there, surrounded by books with titles such as “Managerial Economics,” “Dynamics of Propulsion” and “Titanium.”

Benz, whose father also is an engineer, has been putting in extra hours lately. He recently developed a device that reduces pollutants emitted from boilers, and he has been installing the device for companies throughout the country.

On a trip to a carpet mill to inspect his work, Benz pulls up to the factory, scrubs his teeth with a toothbrush he keeps on his dashboard and spits toothpaste onto the asphalt. As a security guard eyes the foaming mess and grimaces, Benz replaces his flip-flops with a pair of sneakers and heads into the factory.

Once inside, Benz high-fives a worker, then turns serious. He quietly taps on a computer keyboard and tinkers with the mathematical equations flowing across the computer screen. Moments later, satisfied that he has solved the problem with a boiler, Benz heads back to the office.

As Benz motors back, his face lights up as he considers his forthcoming punk-rock album. “The only bummer is all the engineering work I have,” he says.

A record producer hopes Benz can put some time aside for a college tour. “Burgie could really catch on with the college audience,” says Mark Cutsforth, president of Absolutely Free Recordings and an old friend of Benz. “I see Burgie as a cross between Pee Wee Herman, Albert Einstein and (punk-rock star) Henry Rollins, and he’s got great stage presence.”

At a plush Southland recording studio, Benz screams into a microphone as an engineer tinkers with buttons on a soundboard. When the song ends, Benz takes a swig of tequila, belches into the microphone and complains that his voice sounds too raspy.

Cutsforth laughs. “We just love that Burgie’s the mayor of Hermosa,” he says.

Cutsforth hopes to release the album to record stores in February. Soon after, Benz plans to tour college campuses, discuss politics and perform songs. Right now, Benz calls the recording an experiment.

Later, he might have to decide whether to run for reelection or pursue more punk albums.

Bus driver Vicky Lindsey writes poetry about life and death on the harsh streets of South-Central Los Angeles, about gangbangers killing gangbangers, and about friends killed before their time.

Her poetry speaks of a harsh world, and it has been read at dozens of Los Angeles funerals. She prayed she would never have to write a poem eulogizing one of her own children.

But she was forced to do just that this week. Her 19-year-old son, Lionel E.L. Whiteside, was gunned down after he attended a high school football game in Compton.

Never has the sound of Lindsey’s words–words of anger, grief and loss–meant as much to her as they will today, when they are read at her son’s funeral.

“It’s devastating,” she said Friday. “He was a boy in South-Central who wanted to live, but living killed him.”

Like any mother, Lindsey hoped for the best for her son. She had raised him in a tough neighborhood, an area in Compton where gangs and gunfire are a way of life. Whiteside’s father, also named Lionel, was shot to death years ago in Los Angeles.

To combat that violence, Lindsey took an active role in community organizations such as Mothers Against Gangs in Communities. She even wrote inspirational poetry to her son. She urged him to “plan for a positive future” in a poem she penned when Whiteside graduated from Compton High School last year.

But her most precious gifts–her words–were not enough to save her son.

Whiteside was shot to death about 9:45 p.m. Nov. 9, several blocks away from the high school. A car carrying four men turned down the street he was on and someone in the car opened fire, striking Whiteside in the chest and leg, police said.

No one will say whether the shooting was gang-related. Police have made no arrests, and they say they are still investigating the shooting.

*

Said Lindsey: “I don’t feel that he was in a gang, but sometimes you don’t know your own kid.” She took a deep breath and added: “He was a boy in the ‘hood.”

Life in tough Los Angeles neighborhoods has been a constant theme in Lindsey’s poetry. She drives her Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus from the Los Angeles County Jail near Downtown on a route to Redondo Beach, and she often scratches notes for her poems on the back of passenger transfer pads during breaks.

She once wrote a poem about a passenger who was shot to death after stepping off her bus and landing in an altercation with police.

In fact, she has an entire volume of poems she has written for others’ funerals that she calls “Last Writes.” But those were poems about other people’s losses. Those words described the pain we all feel upon hearing about tragic, violent deaths.

It is something else to write about the death of one’s own child.

Words often flow easily onto the page when Lindsey is creating a poem. But they did not come quickly this time.

Whiteside was killed on a Thursday. On Friday, no words came. Nothing on Saturday or Sunday, either. Lindsey said she was shocked by the news, overcome by anger. Her mind was blank.

“I got a bit mad at God,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t deserve this after all the things I’ve been doing in the community.”

Then, Monday morning, all that changed. The words came rapidly. Among them:

*

“Lionel, you know how mad I get, because of the stupid things you’d do; you felt I was being too overprotective. Baby, it was just because I wanted you to live. I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I was sure you were all right. I protected you for as long as I could, but you just had to hang out in the ‘hood.”

Those words will be read today at the funeral.

Lindsey often recites her own poems in public, but she does not know whether she will be able to read those lines today.

Before Whiteside was slain, Lindsey told a Times reporter that she was motivated to write poetry because “my boys are black boys in South-Central L.A. I want to keep them alive.”

In the language of poetry, those words now seem to offer an ironic foreshadowing of her son’s death.

But her 7-year-old son, Lijuan, still lives, and Whiteside’s girlfriend is expecting to give birth to his baby boy, who also will be named Lionel.

After the funeral, Lindsey plans to hold a press conference to discuss violence and her son’s death. She also intends to get her poetry published and to read her work more often in public. “I realize now that the poetry has to get out there,” she said. “God is saying, ‘Vicky, it’s time.’ “

Seated at her desk near a giant “Brady Bunch” movie poster, Michelle Durbin takes a swig of mountain-spring water, adjusts the black scarf tied around her neck, then speaks carefully into her telephone headset. “Hello, guys,” she intones, planting a recorded message on the Cenex Casting hotline. “I’m booking ‘Melrose Place’ for Monday. I need all-ethnicity guys to be ad agency employees looking 25 to 40 years old. I also need a hospital patient. You must have your own pajamas, robe and slippers.”

From its headquarters in a pink-and-white office building on Burbank Boulevard, Cenex places nonunion extras–at rates starting at $41.20 per day–in the background of TV shows and movies. This afternoon, Durbin and nine other casting directors are working to fill the orders: “ER” needs about 40 extras, “Melrose Place” more than a dozen. Thousands of actors registered with the agency dial the hotline daily. I made the same calls not long ago–I signed up after I saw an extra stumble past the camera on “Seinfeld” (Hey, I could do that), but the best Cenex could muster was a role as a squatter on “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” complete with full facial dirt. As I baked in a wool cowboy suit under a punishing sun, I abandoned any aspirations of background stardom.

Durbin punches a string of buttons on her jumbo desk phone. She speaks to each caller with the mildly sympathetic air of a well-adjusted 911 operator. “What’s your Social?” she says, bypassing any pleasantries. She types the extra’s Social Security number into a keyboard and watches as the caller’s photograph appears on her monitor. Extras on “Melrose Place” require a special look, even if they only dart past Heather Locklear. Durbin describes it thus, pausing after each word as though revealing a timeless casting truth: “Upscale. Short hair. Cleanshaven.” She likes the look of a young Mel Gibson type with cropped hair and a blue-collared shirt. She anoints him an office worker on “Melrose,” then transfers him to a recording with directions to the set.

By late afternoon, Durbin’s “Melrose” order is almost complete. She punches another man’s Social into the keyboard only to see a gaunt, pale face with long, stringy hair appear. She puts the caller on hold and shakes her head. “See,” she says, pointing to the hair. “That’s just not going to work on ‘Melrose.’ ” She taps a button on the phone. “Sorry,” she says into her headset. “I can’t use you today.” Durbin leans back in her chair and sighs. Then she looks at me. “Now you,” she says, “you would be perfect . . . .”

Marion Linnert has never played forward for the Chicago Bulls or starred in blockbuster movies or any of the other glitzy stuff some people write books about, but she figures she has a story to tell just the same.

So several times each week, the 81-year-old former school administrator sits in her San Clemente den, puts pen to paper and weaves together the stories of her life.

She won’t make a dime off her book. In fact, it’ll cost her money to publish. But no matter. Linnert is among a growing number of ordinary, aging Americans who are painstakingly writing and publishing their life stories for a niche market: friends and family.

It’s hard to say just how many have decided it’s time to write their memoirs, but those involved say the trend is unmistakable. Memoir-writing classes are popping up more often in community colleges and recreation departments, and some entrepreneurs have started their own publishing companies to ride the wave of popularity.

While explanations for the phenomenon vary, many memoirists say they simply hope to pass along a bit of hard-won wisdom and tell their kids and grandkids how it was in the days before television and cars and computers changed the world.

Or, as Linnert put it in her memoir: “(My) goal is to preserve a part of our heritage before memories vanish and we can no longer join the past with the present … so that you might realize how you connect with those who have gone before and the legacy that is ours.”

LINKING PAST AND PRESENT

Many legacies wind up in the hands of Mary and Don Decker.

The Laguna Niguel couple, both retired teachers, have taught nearly two dozen courses on memoir writing in recent years and have edited and published nearly 50 memoirs.

“We used to do one book at a time,” Mary Decker says. “Now we do six or eight at a time.”

The books often are fascinating, she says, because their writers “have lived through almost the entire 20th century. No other generation in history has experienced so many changes.”

Through the Deckers, Beatrice Whittlesey published her memoir about how she overcame an infection in her leg to travel the world, climb mountains and raft down exotic rivers.

Whittlesey desribes a childhood experience in a lightning storm near Yosemite Valley that shaped her outlook on life.

She writes about the beginning of the storm:

“If my mother had said, `Come put your head on my lap and don’t be afraid,’ I probably would have feared the storms, but instead of that, she went to the window, threw it open, and said, `Come children, see how beautiful.’

“I have never been afraid since.”

Dana Point real estate agent Martha Ray published her memoir about life in the coastal town and how she used psychic powers to match a client to a house.

Ray writes about how she studied philosophy and astrology, and about how she subtly tried to learn a client’s birth month.

“Then I’d know if they’d like a house on the top of a hill or down in a valley or if they had to be on the water,” she writes. “If they were earth people, I’d try to find a place with shrubs, trees and gardens.”

On the last page of her memoir, looking back over her life, Ray concludes:

“I’ve decided I’ve had a fun and exciting existence in my life. It’s been one great minute after another. I can’t even say day after day or hour after hour. My whole life can change in five minutes.”

The Deckers, who taught college English and history before starting their second career, say the memoirs are important because they help young readers connect with their families.

“A lot of young people seem to be rootless, floating around,” Don Decker says. “The world is confusing. (A memoir) gives you some personal perspective because it’s written by (a relative).”

SHAPING STORIES

Bob Joyce also specializes in personal perspective.

Joyce, 60, helped his mother write her memoir four years ago. When they finished, he started his own memoir editing and publishing company, Hawthorne House, in his Santa Ana condominium.

Since then, Joyce has helped nearly 40 people shape their memoirs.

Sometimes writers come to him with their manuscripts finished, and Joyce simply publishes the stories. More often, he goes several steps further.

For several thousand dollars, Joyce interviews a client, transcribes and edits their stories on his IBM computer and designs and publishes their books.

Through Joyce, Florence Paul of Tustin published her book, “He Never Pulled the Trigger,” about her husband, New York City police officer Les Paul.

In it, she describes Paul as a ruggedly handsome policeman “who left the station house wondering what was cooking in that spicy mulligan stew _ his beat.”

Paul, who later retired from the force, died nearly four years ago.

Not all the memoirs are great works of art, Joyce says, but for the first-time authors and their families, the books are often priceless.

“These folks are sometimes in tears when they get their books,” he says, holding a copy of one volume. “They rub their fingers over the spine. They look at their name and they think, they did it. They wrote a book.”

Joyce enjoys helping people record their personal stories.

“I feel very honored. If I wasn’t there to help them, maybe they wouldn’t have written their story.”

LIFE LESSONS

Linnert, who frequently works on her memoir in her San Clemente home, plans to pass her stories on to nearly a dozen nieces and nephews.

She often retires to her den and listens to the gentle rumble of waves crashing along the nearby shore as she looks to her past and writes her stories. In her stories, Linnert emphasizes the importance of overcoming adversity.

Linnert suffered from a debilitating bone infection at age 11 that kept her bedridden for two years and forever changed her life. Over the past 70 years, she has undergone surgery nearly 30 times.

Linnert describes some of her pain:

“Whenever the infection appeared _ and this was before sulpha and penicillin _ the pain took command. I had no pain pills other than aspirin, so I learned to endure pain at a very early age. When the pain was too bad at night, I would cry out plaintively, `Mother. Mother.’ My sister, who was in an adjoining bedroom, said for years my calling for mother haunted her.”

She also describes some of her joys. Linnert remembers sitting at the long counter in Watson’s Drug Store in Orange as a child, “debating which flavor I wanted put in my 5-cent fountain `Coke’ … lemon, cherry, chocolate …”

Writing about her life has been therapeutic, she says, and at times surprising.

“It’s amazing how much you remember,” she says. “Things come out of the past.”

CHANGING TIMES

The catalyst for the memoir trend is tough to pinpoint.

Some credit the popularity of personal computers and printers, which make it easy for novice writers and publishers to turn out their work for relatively little cost.

Others, including Claremont McKenna College Professor Jay Martin, emphasize social and economic changes they believe contributed to the trend.

When times are tough and money is scarce, people emphasize communities and the need for cooperation, he says. But when neighbors live comfortably, as many do now, relationships are based on emotions, not economics, and many highlight their own individual experiences.

One way to do that is through memoir writing.

Also, Martin says, the world is changing rapidly these days, and it’s difficult to predict the future. In times of transition, people often look toward the past.

By writing about their personal histories, some memoirists say they hope to help others prepare for an uncertain future.

Through their stories, many will be remembered long after their own lives reach their final chapters.

For that reason, Marybeth Chapman, 49, of Laguna Beach, is glad she encouraged her mother to write her memoir.

Her mother, Marybeth Weber, earned her pilot’s license at 22, Chapman says, and later traveled the world with her first husband, who was a secretary for traveler and collector Robert Ripley, founder of the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museums.

When Weber died last year at 84, Chapman placed a copy of her memoir, “How I Spent the Twentieth Century,” in her mother’s casket.

Weber was proud of the book, and Chapman is delighted to have the story to pass on.

The family ordered hundreds of copies of the book, she says, enough for generations to come.

Chapman looks forward to passing on her mother’s words. Among them:

“It’s not the things that you do in life that you regret, it’s the things that you don’t do.”

(CHART-LIST)

WANT TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIRS?

Here are tips on starting your life story from Mary and Don Decker, who have edited and published nearly 50 memoirs.

To get started, write about any experience in your life. Describe your first house or your first memory of your mother.

To help jog your memory, look at old photographs, letters, postcards and scrapbooks.

Continue writing regularly, every day if possible.

Keep pads of paper beside your bed or next to your favorite chair to jot down memories.

Don’t worry about spelling or grammar at first. Instead, try to maintain a smooth flow as memories come to mind.

Consider organizing your stories chronologically, or by topic, or both.

After you have completed a first draft, invite a friend to read it for clarity. Does the reader have questions? What more could be added?

Author Chalmers Johnson was asleep in his San Diego-area home on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the telephone rattled him awake.

Metropolitan Books publicist Tracy Locke was on the line from her Manhattan office two miles from Ground Zero. The previous year, she had promoted Johnson’s book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which warned that U.S. policies abroad were creating the potential for retaliatory attacks. “Blowback” is the term the CIA uses to describe the unintended consequences of covert actions.

The book had generated only modest interest when it was published, but with the events of the morning, Locke knew that was about to change. Before rushing home, she spoke into the telephone in a voice flattened with shock, telling the author, “Turn on your television. The World Trade Center has just been hit. The worst kind of blowback has happened.”

Johnson was stunned. He hadn’t exactly predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the book, but he had come close. “World politics in the twenty-first century,” he wrote, “will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century — that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.”

Blowback shot up bestseller lists and was reprinted thirteen times as Americans struggled to make sense of the attacks. Impressed with Johnson’s prescience, the German magazine Der Spiegel labeled him the “California Cassandra” after the mythological Greek prophesier who often went ignored. Johnson had more to say, however. In January 2004, his follow-up book hit stores and soon landed on bestseller lists. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic rails against America’s vast military presence abroad and warns that more harm is on the way, including perhaps the end of the republic itself, if the nation does not rein in its military and change its aggressive posture.

Neoconservative thinkers behind the Project for the New American Century would beg to differ with Johnson’s analysis, of course, but many others have embraced the book. The Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune praised it, and writers as diverse as William Greider of The Nation and James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly have voiced their enthusiasm. Wrote Fallows: “Chalmers Johnson’s relentless logic, authoritative scholarship, and elegantly biting prose distinguish the Sorrows of Empire, like all his other work.”

Author Noam Chomsky agrees. “I think his work is excellent,” he told CityBeat. “He’s picking up the most important topics.”

Suddenly, at the age of 72, the retired political science professor finds himself a leading critic of U.S. policies abroad, and a strong new voice from the left. In recent months, Johnson has published articles in Harper’s and the Sunday Los Angeles Times opinion section. He has traveled the West Coast, speaking to standing-room-only crowds. At his home overlooking the Pacific, he fields questions from journalists the world over inquiring about his perspective on the American empire — a term Johnson insists must now be used.

“Americans may still prefer to use euphemisms like ‘lone superpower‚’” he writes, “but since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible.”

Empire Revealed

It’s an unexpected personal transformation for a man who once worked as a consultant for the CIA, supported the Vietnam War as a professor at UC Berkeley, and who described himself just 15 years ago as a staunch “cold warrior.” If the turnabout isn’t unlikely enough, Johnson is carrying forth his message from San Diego County, which is hardly a hotbed of dissent, or even modest countercultural enthusiasm. “In Berkeley, they put up mildly obscene statues,” Johnson remarked recently. “You come down here to San Diego and the idea of public art is an anchor painted white lying around on the grass somewhere.”

Yet, on a cool January evening, there was Johnson at The Book Works in Del Mar, a mile from the historic racetrack, facing a crowd of eager listeners. At least 100 locals had endured rush-hour traffic to hear him speak. They filled rows of chairs and stood elbow-to-elbow at the bookstore’s coffee counter. They collected several deep in doorways and peered in through the front window. Steadying himself with the help of a cane, Johnson waited in the wings as his literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, introduced him.

“In these times especially, we need angry people,” she told the audience, made up largely of men and women well into mid-life. “We need people… who will call a pig a pig…. If you saw Chalmers’ L.A. Times op-ed recently, you saw that it said next to his name ‘Cardiff-by-the-Sea.’” She paused and scanned the San Diego crowd, then added with satisfaction, “It shows that people can have radical thoughts by the sea.”

As the audience broke into applause, Johnson approached the microphone. Wearing gray slacks and a dark sweater, with short dark hair and piercing eyes behind big round glasses, he looked every bit the retired university professor. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice of his longtime support for America’s military during the Cold War. He noted his consulting work for the CIA during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was asked to critique intelligence estimates. If anyone doubted Johnson’s cold-warrior credentials, or wanted to dismiss him as an old Berkeley lefty, he wasn’t about to hear it. The former Navy officer eyed the audience, cracked a sly smile and said, “Anybody who wants to play security clearance with me, I’ll beat you.”

With that, Johnson launched into a critique of the Bush administration and U.S. foreign policy: How could President Bush have asked Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” He needed only to look at members of his own administration, Johnson said, who had served in previous administrations that supported the likes of Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. “It’s a remarkable litany of characters we have decided have worn out their usefulness for us,” he said.

Johnson spoke of the many military bases the U.S. maintains around the globe and the animosity the bases engender in so many countries. He could understand such a strong global military presence during the Cold War, when the U.S. needed to contain the spread of communism. But why did the U.S. continue to maintain such a vast military presence at such a high cost? There was only one answer, he said: empire.

How would Americans feel, he wondered, if they found themselves in the position so many citizens of other countries are now? “If we had a division of Turkish troops in San Diego,” Johnson said, “we’d have a few patriotic young [American] men who would kill a couple [of Turks] every weekend.”

Johnson said he fears America’s aggression will come back to haunt the country. He spoke of the rise of China and the costs of the U.S. military bases. He invoked the fall of the Roman Empire and recalled how rapidly the empires of Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union had fallen in his own lifetime. He worried about the military industrial complex, which he fears will only grow stronger and more dominant in guiding U.S. policies abroad in the years to come. “I’m 72 years old,” he said. “Given the pace of events, I think there’s a good chance I’ll live to see the end of the American empire.”

When Johnson asked for questions, one woman wondered how he could offer such a grim forecast with so little hope. Johnson nodded. He had heard the complaint before. “My wife keeps saying to me, ‘You cannot go on without ever having a hopeful message,’” he said. The truth is, Johnson isn’t too optimistic, but he maintains a sense of humor.

“Plan your escape route,” he has joked. “Think about Vancouver.”

Johnson conceded, however, that all is not yet lost. He said he believes change would have to come from the grassroots level. He spoke of the anti-globalization protests that began in Seattle in 1999, as well as the millions around the world who protested the war in Iraq. There is still cause for hope. “It’s not to say that this couldn’t be turned around,” he said. That, after all, was one of the reasons he wrote the book.

New Information

Fifteen years ago, Johnson wouldn’t have dreamed of delivering such a talk. On a sunny afternoon several days after his bookstore appearance, Johnson sat in his living room in Cardiff, surrounded by Asian art he had collected over the years, and discussed his transformation. During much of the Cold War, Johnson was a political science professor on the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California. He specialized in China and Japan, and wrote more than a dozen academic books on the region. Although many of his Berkeley students protested the Vietnam War, he backed it. He continued to support America’s containment policies throughout the Cold War. “I regarded the Soviet Union as a menace,” he said. “I felt that it was a matter of national security for us to counter it.”

Then came 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union. “I was shocked by our country’s reaction,” he said. “I expected a much larger peace dividend. I expected a demobilization of our massive Cold War apparatus. I believe we behaved outrageously, in the sense that our government began immediately to search for a replacement enemy: China, instability, drug wars, terrorism, damn near anything they could find.” Johnson reassessed where he stood. “It raised the question,” he said, “Was the Cold War a cover for a deeper and more fundamental American imperial project?”

He concluded that it was, and he changed his views on a wide range of issues, including the Vietnam War. Johnson has a favorite explanation for his reversal. “When someone once accused the economist John Maynard Keynes of being inconsistent, Keynes responded, ‘When I get new information, I change my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?’” Johnson grinned. “That is the point,” he said. “I got some new information.”

Johnson’s willingness to change his views impressed many who know him. “You could go through those years since the Vietnam War looking for people of his background who had reversed their positions on Vietnam and not find any,” said Tom Engelhardt, Johnson’s editor at Metropolitan Books.

One of Johnson’s former Berkeley students, E.B. Keehn, 48, now a clinical psychologist, is equally admiring. “Chalmers is that rare public intellectual who bases his views on information and striving for the truth, and who is willing to adopt new views,” he said.

Keehn recalled Johnson as a wildly popular professor whose classes filled quickly and who routinely attracted long lines of students outside his office. “It wasn’t just that he could answer any question thrown at him,” Keehn said, “but his answers would always include a thorough presentation of all the possible theories and conclude with which theory was most likely. People would sit back and say, ‘Wow, I don’t have an intellect like that.’”

That uncannily sharp mind is no less apparent these days. Back in his living room, holding forth for a moment on what he sees as the sorrows of globalization, Johnson complained that policies at institutions such as The World Bank are tied too closely to U.S. interests. Without missing a beat, he said, “The World Bank is located at 1818 H Street Northwest in Washington, not far from the Treasury Department.”

Ace of Bases

Johnson retired from academia in 1992 and founded the Japan Policy Research Institute, over which he still presides, publishing books and academic papers. It was in Japan in 1996 that Johnson had another revelation that would shape his worldview. He traveled to Okinawa at the invitation of the island’s governor to speak about the U.S. presence after a 12-year-old Japanese girl was raped by two American marines and a sailor. The U.S. has maintained a military presence on Okinawa since 1945. Even though Johnson had studied Japan extensively, he hadn’t paid much attention to U.S. bases on the island, or to U.S. bases anywhere. “I was shocked by what I saw,” he said.

Johnson was surprised to learn that the U.S. maintained 38 military bases on Okinawa, an island smaller than Kauai. Military personnel had exclusive access to beaches, golf courses and other recreation facilities on prime real estate, Johnson said. If that wasn’t enough, Johnson discovered that, but for the age of the girl, the recent rape wasn’t an aberration. The rate of sexually violent crimes committed by American troops leading to court marshal on Okinawa, he said, was averaging about two per month and had been since 1945.

The Japanese he spoke with were openly resentful of the U.S. presence, and Johnson could see why. “There were 1.3 million Okinawans living cheek-by-jowl with war planes, the Third Marine Division and environmental pollution,” he said. “I am not anti-Marine. I attended assault boat school at Camp Pendleton in 1954. But in my view, we shouldn’t be there.”

Johnson believes the U.S. shouldn’t be in a lot of places. He suspects many in the Bush administration who are crafting the nation’s foreign policy are operating on misconceptions about the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. became the dominant power. “I believe they erroneously concluded that we had won the Cold War,” he said. “We simply didn’t lose it as quickly or badly as the Soviet Union did because we were inherently richer. But I personally believe that we are today afflicted by many of the same problems that brought down the Soviet Union.”

That conclusion led Johnson to write The Sorrows of Empire, published as part of Metropolitan Books’ The American Empire Project, which also includes Noam Chomsky’s latest book, Hegemony or Survival.

Angered by the Bush administration’s aggressive response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, as well as the large number of bases the U.S. continued to maintain around the globe, Johnson set out to explore U.S. militarism and its dangers. The distinction between the military and militarism is critical, he said. He supports a strong military.

“But militarism doesn’t mean the defense of the country,” he said. “It means a deep fundamental vested interest in the military as a way of life, as a way of making money, as a secure form of state socialism, of expansion into areas usually thought of as off the reservation for the military.”

In researching the book, Johnson studied the Department of Defense’s Base Structure Report and other government documents to gauge the extent of the military presence abroad. According to the Defense Department, as of September 2001, the U.S. was deploying 254,788 military personnel in 153 countries, Johnson writes. It maintained 725 foreign bases in 38 countries. The reports paint a portrait of a nation dominating the globe through military force to a degree most Americans fail to appreciate, Johnson believes.

“Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe,” he writes. “They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire.” The nation’s military dominance extends well beyond planet earth these days, Johnson hastens to add, because the U.S. is now militarizing outer space.

This imperial quest did not begin with the current Bush administration, Johnson said, but he believes the situation has grown more dangerous since the World Trade Center attacks, and particularly since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “The Bush administration is now creating conditions in which any nation on earth has got to think, if the U.S. juggernaut starts to come after us, what will stop them?” he said. “The conclusion they’re inevitably drawn to is that what was wrong with Saddam Hussein was not that he had weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t have them. When a nation actually has them, the U.S. pays attention, as in the case of North Korea.”

That fact, Johnson fears, will inspire other nations to develop nuclear arms for self-defense. “These policies have produced a catastrophe of nuclear proliferation around the world,” he said.

The end of the republic could result from four potential consequences of all this, Johnson believes: The Pentagon could play an increasingly prominent role in foreign policy, which could lead to perpetual war and more terrorist attacks. As security becomes a greater concern, U.S. citizens would lose more of their constitutional rights. To counteract declining morale, propaganda glorifying war and power would increase. And, finally, the escalating costs of the war machine could simply drive the nation into bankruptcy.

Not surprisingly, some critics take issue with Johnson’s analysis, or at least aspects of it. Andrew J. Bacevich complains in the Washington Post that The Sorrows of Empire muddles history and fails to clarify who is responsible for the rise of American militarism. “Thus, history considerably complicates the question of assigning responsibility for what Johnson clearly views as a perversion of U.S. policy,” Bacevich writes. “Indeed, it suggests the possibility that a militarized policy may not be a perversion at all, but an authentic expression of American statecraft.”

Writing in Foreign Affairs, G. John Ikenberry argues that Johnson sees imperialism in everything the U.S. does. “Ultimately,” Ikenberry writes, “it is not clear what the United States could do — short of retreating into its borders or ceasing to exist — that would save it from Johnson’s condemnation.”

Johnson concedes that he could be wrong about all this. Perhaps U.S. militarization doesn’t pose a threat. Maybe the United States will indeed spread democracy and prosperity around the globe until all nations coexist peacefully. Johnson doubts it, but if he is proven wrong, he said, that’s just fine with him.

Leaning back in his chair, the “California Cassandra” glanced out the window at the fading afternoon light, considered the possibilities and smiled. “If I’m mistaken, you’re going to forgive me,” he said. “You’re going to be so pleased I was wrong.”