Steve Wasserman: Berzerkeley Heretic

Born on the West Coast, educated at Cal, and now at the helm at Berkeley’s Heyday Books, Steve Wasserman has crafted a name and a career for himself over the past several decades as a polemical writer, brilliant editor, savvy publisher and as an (aging) enfant terrible who has declared cultural war on Berkeley, on California and on the American left. He has also carried on the good work that Malcolm Margolin began at Heyday. As a native of the Golden State, and a child of the Sixties, no one is better suited than Wasserman for the work of demolition that he has laid out for himself.

One long time Berkeley radical and a writer for The Movement newspaper, told me, “sometimes it seems like Wasserman wants his cake and to eat it too; that is he wants to be recognized for his many friends and experiences in the radical world, but at the same time to be able to castigate what he now sees as errors, excesses etc. “

In a recent interview with Berkeleyside, the online publication devoted to all things Berkeley or “Berzerkely,” as it has been called, Wasserman described the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the home of People’s Park as “the La Brea Tar Pits of the counterculture.” Touche! He can turn a nifty sound bite when he wants to, though he might have added that the Sixties counterculture no longer exists, not in Berkeley or anywhere else that hippies congregated.

The essays collected in Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie were originally published in The Economist, The Progressive, the New Republic, The Nation and elsewhere. They provide an unparalleled opportunity to track the author’s history, ideas and values. They also invite readers to tell the author something, anything, even if it’s a lie.

In the Berkeleysde interview, Wasserman added, “one of the great failures of the American left and sadly of Berkeley and the people I otherwise admired was a failure of language.” Sixties rhetoric could be toxic, though Wasserman’s own language can borrow clichés, as when he writes for example of the 1968 election for the presidency: “the looming tsunami of reaction engendered by Nixon’s victory based on a campaign of restoring ‘law and order,’ should give us pause.” Looming tsunami, and give us pause – give me a break.

Of course, 1960s folk were among the first to point out the excesses of Sixties’ rhetoric. Folk singer Phil Ochs, who regaled Sixties protesters with “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” as potent an anti-war song as any from that era, hipped us to the paucity of hippie and movement lingo before the Sixties was history.  Ochs was a poet and cared about language.

Readers might ask, “Don’t people on the left need writers and thinkers such as Steve Wasserman to make them aware of the pitfalls and flaws of the anti-war movement and the Sixties counterculture?” They surely do, but Wasserman’s criticisms seemed to be baked in bile and to spring from a personal desire to make amends for his own radical past. From youthful passions he has moved on to middle-aged second hand and third hand thoughts and from California dreaming to a kind of California skepticism.

In one of the 30 essays published in Tell Me Something, Tell me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie, which is subtitled “A Memoir in Essays,” Wasserman writes that the state of California “privileges forgetfulness over remembrance,” and that it’s a place “where historical amnesia reigns supreme.” True, the Golden State can seem at times to erase the past, though it clearly honors the collective memory of its writers, from Jack London and John Steinbeck to the Beats and beyond. It also reveres the places they wrote about, from Salinas (at the National Steinbeck Center) and North Beach (at the Beat Museum) to Big Sur (at The Henry Miller Library.)

In Tell Me Something, Wasserman urges readers to remember the political and cultural movements and organizations of the 1960s and 1970s as egregious false steps that ought not to be repeated. He might have remembered that William Blake, one of the most often quoted poets for 1960s folk, noted, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Blake added, “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

“The wounds suffered by the New Left were largely self-inflicted,” Wasserman writes in the essay titled “Exit Stage Left.” Not a word does he utter about the wounds inflicted by the FBI and police departments around the country. Law enforcement deserves some of the credit for the unraveling of the New Left.

In the introduction to his essays, Wasserman says

”The truth is, I’m a talker, not a writer.” That might be false modesty. After all, the essays In Tell Me Something demonstrate his talents as writer and as a polemist. Joyce Carol Oates says that his hook is “Highly recommended.” Hilton Als says, “What a gift.” Viet Thanh Nguyen calls the author “a troublemaker of the good kind since his youth.”

For years, Bay Area literati have experienced Wasserman as a talker who interviews San Francisco and Oakland celebrities like Tommy Orange, the author of There There and Wandering Stars, and Adam Hochschild, the author of King Leopold’s Ghost and American Midnight.

Not long ago, I served with Wasserman on a panel about Jack Kerouac on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of Kerouac’s birth. “He was a bad writer and a bad man,” Wasserman told the audience at Bird & Beckett Bookstore. Still, he allowed that he would have published On the Road in 1957 had he been a publisher at that time and had the manuscript arrived on his desk.

For decades, Wasserman has read the zeitgeist accurately and has recognized potential bestsellers including Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great when he sees them on the horizon. He bravely published Don Cox’s memoir. Just Another Nigger: My Life in the Black Panther Party. When Black bookstore sellers complained about the “n” word in the title, Heyday changed it to Making Revolution. A wise decision.

Cultural and literary critic, Vivian Gornick, the author of The Romance of American Communism, gushed, “If ever a man was in love with The Movement—that is, the peace and liberationist movements of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—that man is Steve Wasserman.” She added that his essays “pay full respect to that honorable devotion.” True, Wasserman fell in love with the peace movement when was a student in the 1960s at Berkeley High School where he protested against the war in Vietnam and campaigned for Robert Scheer who ran for Congress in 1966.

He was, he explains in Tell Me Something, “hell-bent on making history.” So were Mark Rudd and Tom Hayden, Bernardine Dohrn and Huey Newton. The Sixties was all about breaking with the past and making history. Now he’d like to unmake some of Sixties history. Wasserman was also, he says, “inspired by the promise of the [Cuban] revolution and by the internationalism and martyrdom of Che Guevara.”

Somewhere along the way disillusioned set in. He has lost faith in the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro and the American Left. He was not the only one to be so afflicted. Some of my former comrades in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who once harvested sugar cane in Cuba now denounce the regime in Havana and have supported the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Where, one might ask, have the former wanna-be revolutionaries landed?

Wasserman writes that, “1968 might be regarded as the death knell of a counterculture whose conceits would be shredded by the ultimate victory of a conservative backlash — a backlash which would go on to mount a depressingly successful fifty-year struggle to drive a wooden stake through the heart of the hard-won achievements of the New Deal.” The backlash has not been entirely successful. We still have social security and  it’s still worth remembering Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.”

In Tell Me Something, Wasserman describes what he calls “the Procrustean suffocations of Berkeley in the late 1960s,” and his own need to escape from them. The hagiographers of the Black Panthers, he argues, have “refused to acknowledge the party’s “crimes and misdemeanors.” Not a word about Panther achievements: their Ten Point Program, their breakfasts for children, their gospel of Black Power and their beneficial alliances with white radicals.

In “Rage and Ruin,” Wasserman calls Huey Newton and Bobby Seal “brash upstarts.” They seemed that way to many Blacks in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but they were also savvy students of Black history and American jurisprudence. Wasserman is too quick to call Eldridge Cleaver “the joker in the Panther deck.” Edridge’s evocation of “pussy” power was indeed sexist and laughable, but Soul on Ice was a brilliant albeit flawed book that reached millions of readers and encouraged young whites to feel good about their radicalism.

Yes, Berkeley could be suffocating, as Wasserman insists, but after the Sixties the Berkeley gestalt reinvented itself as a Mecca for foodies. It helped to educate a couple of generations about organic farming, healthy eating, the pleasures of cooking and what Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters called “the revolution of the senses.” Ever since 1960 or so, Berkeley has had several acts.

At times, Wasserman sounds as though he’s still attached to his former radical self. Indeed, he wants to be remembered for some of the ideals he once embraced. In an essay in which he writes about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn, two memorable contemporary American writers, Wasserman says that if he had a “bias —and I did – it was toward paying attention to the unknown, the neglected, the small but worthy (and all too often invisible) authors whose work readers would otherwise not have heard about.” If only that were so.

Granted, he has written about Lisa Williamson,

aka Sister Souljah Sister, but she hasn’t been invisible and unknown ever since President Clinton rebuked her for her remarks about race. Wasserman has tended to play it safe when it comes to publishing, promoting, publicizing and reviewing contemporary authors, including W. G. Sebald— the German novelist and poet famed worldwide for Austerlitz—whom he calls “about as un-Californian an exercise in literary achievement as one could imagine.”

Sebald is no more un-Californian than Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, European émigrés who made their homes in California and expanded California consciousness even as their own consciousness was expanded by time served in California.

In an essay about Christopher Hitchens, whom he calls “Hitch” and for whom he affirms his undying “love,” Wasserman heralds Alexander Herzen, Rosa Luxemburg and Victor Serge as “heretics of leftist orthodoxy.”

You may  remember that Hitchens supported the US invasion of Iraq. “No one made a better case for American intervention in these benighted lands than you,” Wasserman writes. Still Hitchens’ stance was and still is ignominious, and seems more and more so with every passing year.

On the subject of orthodoxy and heresy, it might be useful to observe that one person’s heretic can be another person’s hero. In lefty circles I’ve known, Herzen, Luxenburg and Serge are as honorable as Trotsky, Che and Emma Goldman.

Wasserman might want to be remembered as a heretic. If so, let him revolve in the orbit of heresy. Thanks, Steve for baring your soul and allowing readers to see you and know you as you really are. That’s a lot more than many of the icons of the Sixties have permitted.

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