Author spotlights humor in politics with new book
By Catherine Billey
Liberals have been the rootless drifters of American politics since McGovern fell to Nixon in the 1972 presidential race, says author Tom Waldman in the book he had long dreamed of writing, Not Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America.
He didn’t want to explore the subject through charts and graphs. Instead, interlaced with his own analysis, Waldman has created a trenchant collection of political stories through interviews with Southern California politicos – such as Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky – who were shaped by the transformative 60s, the disheartening 70s and the stifling conservatism of recent decades.
“I really wanted to tell what it was like to be a liberal during the time when conservatism was getting so powerful,” said Waldman, who is Chief of Staff for LAUSD Board Member Tamar Galatzan, in a recent interview at Art’s Deli in Studio City. “I also wanted to capture some of the humor of politics, because politics can be very funny and we can forget about that.” For instance, he believes that right-wing commentators who act aghast when Sen. Barack Obama doesn’t wear an American flag pin on his lapel are putting on a show. “And the only way to deal with the show is to laugh at it.”
In Waldman’s view, the absence of debate in America is a media problem. “I think television has played such an important role in every aspect of political lives now. Any debate becomes fodder for television. So you have more and more people on both sides hired for their ability to…make politics entertainment – over-the-top entertainment,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of substance behind it.”
Humor is a good strategy here too, he added. “With someone like Ann Coulter, liberals try to either act like ‘this is so horrible that someone like that is so popular’ or they try to argue with her,” he said. “I think the third option is to just see how ludicrous she is and treat her that way.”
But liberals have lacked the strength and resolve to resist the pummeling of political bullies, Waldman says. “Blustering, anti-intellectual, right-wing media stars have dominated the debate today because liberals are confused, embarrassed and ashamed.” Some have even gone into hiding, he said, and others have called themselves progressives to avoid the dreaded “L-word.”
His book, released last month, provides some context for how this came to pass – and it’s not all the fault of right-wing pundits.
Waldman is uniquely qualified to write such a book. He has been an historian, journalist and political aide – all of which inform his favored current role as author. Though he says it’s not a crippling regret, he wishes he had started writing books earlier in life.
Now 51, Waldman was 41 when his first book came out. Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ‘N’ Roll from Southern California (co-written with David Reyes) was followed by The Best Guide to American Politics: Easily Accessible Information for a Richer, Fuller Life, and then, We All Want to Change the World: Rock and Politics from Elvis to Eminem.
Waldman grew up in the 1960s at a dinner table where educated conversation about contemporary politics regularly took place. His face lights up whenever he recalls his parents, Nancy and the late Theodore Waldman, who fostered political awareness and dialogue as far back as he can remember and remain his greatest influence.
Politics – for someone who grew up in the 60s – was not filtered through television as it mostly is today, but experienced firsthand. Waldman said he felt more anxious than scared on the day in 1962 when a notice for parents was passed around his elementary school about what to do in case of nuclear war. Later he connected it with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In 1969, when his father, a professor of philosophy, was teaching at an experimental college in Berkeley, Waldman remembers pepper gas drifting into his classroom (ordered by then-governor Ronald Reagan), a police car burning during the People Park riots, and the bystander who was shot down from a Telegraph Avenue rooftop.
He received his Masters in Journalism at the University of Southern California and worked as a full-time reporter for the San Gabriel Tribune and the Jewish Journal in the 80s and also freelanced for publications such as the Los Angeles Times Magazine and the LA Weekly.
One day in 1992, a former editor called to ask whether he’d like to work for Howard Berman, who needed a more vocal media presence and wanted to hire a press secretary. “I thought, yeah, wow, that’s like the other side,” Waldman said with a smile. “What working in politics has done is you get a sense of the daily tensions – anxieties and rewards – of being an elected official, and it helps you get perspective on why they do what they do.”
Politics is not Waldman’s exclusive passion, however. With an unapologetically playful smile, he said that although he can’t exactly date his interest in theatre to the time he was 15 in London, “it was certainly a good start” when he saw Diana Rigg in a brief full-nudity scene in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.
He treasures a collection of New York Times theatre reviews from 1920 to 1970, found at a used bookstore in San Francisco, which reveals how some of the great plays of the 20th century like Waiting for Godot and Streetcar Named Desire were reviewed the very next morning in the so-called “paper of record.”
He somewhat reluctantly admits that of the journalists on the scene today he most admires, Christopher Hitchens is the one he reads most. “I think a genuine wit among journalists is rare, and I appreciate it whenever I see it,” he said. “There’s no holding back.”
But his greatest admiration is reserved for the late Dwight Macdonald, journalist, social critic and political radical who wrote for Politics in the 1940s. Waldman prizes a collection of Macdonald’s columns that he found in a used bookstore in Riverside.
John Lennon is Waldman’s foremost celebrity hero because of his music, his sarcasm, and his tendency to say whatever he thought. “I think a hero is a person who is someone who is brutally honest with themselves and willing to be brutally honest in how he or she leads his or her life,” he said.
By that standard, Waldman has taken a heroically candid and unflinching look at the state of liberalism today in Not Much Left, which, as the risk of sounding “practiced,” he deservedly calls his greatest achievement.
Tom Waldman lives in the West Valley with his wife and two sons.
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