A Q&A with David Goodman
interviewed by David Dobbs
© David Goodman
with thanks to the Montpelier Bridge, where it originally appeared
Dobbs: Why Dick Cheney? Doesn’t he have enough problems?
Goodman: We need to show Dick Cheney some love. If it weren't for him, we would just go about our lives taking things for granted. Like the idea that torture is bad. That civil liberties are good. That global warming is real. And that fascism really didn't work out so well for the people who lived under it.
DD: What got you started writing?
Goodman: I started Dave's Press when I was 7 years old. It was an occasional newspaper that chronicled the daily goings on in my household. I sold subscriptions to all my relatives. I had an especially successful approach to bill collection: I would publish the names of my aunts and uncles who had fallen into arrears on their subscription payments. This public shaming was brutally effective. My grandfather complained that an annual subscription to Dave’s Press cost more than Newsweek. I replied that Newsweek didn't print any real news; I did. Around that time I expanded to cover world affairs, as I understood them. Which was pretty well, as I look back. Dave's Press had everything: editorials, cartoons, movie and play reviews, and even irate exchanges in the letters to the editor section between my socialist uncle and my Republican uncle. Later, I became editor of my high school newspaper. I enjoyed that, but when I arrived as a freshman at Harvard, I was totally turned off by the college newspaper scene. It just seemed to me to be a grooming ground for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal--which turns out to be true. So I've been a freelance journalist ever since college, and my former classmates now run the corporate media that I rail against. Some things don't change.
DD: You’ve written on skiing and travel and many other things. How did politics become your front-burner subject? What combination of passion and happenstance drew you to it?
Goodman: I developed three big passions in college: my girlfriend-now-wife, Sue Minter; high mountains; and politics. I was a mountaineering instructor for Outward Bound for a while, which helped satisfy my need for wild places. I was also writing about various mountain adventures, and in the late 1980s, the Appalachian Mountain Club asked me if I would be interested in writing their first-ever skiing guidebook. I was amused: someone was going to pay me to be a ski bum? I was happy to help. Thus was born Classic Backcountry Skiing: A Guide to the Best Ski Tours in New England, a historical guidebook which I thought would be of interest to me, my friends, and about 100 other telemark skiers. Lo and behold, when it came out in 1988, it was the cusp of a boomlet in interest in backcountry and tele skiing. The two-volume sequel, Backcountry Skiing Adventures, followed a decade later. And this winter I'm going around updating it for a new volume that should be out in 2009--some 20 years after I made my first face-plants in search of great wilderness snow.
As for the political writing, Sue and I had been very active in anti-apartheid work in college, and we traveled to South Africa at the height of apartheid in the mid-1980s. I wrote about what we saw for a variety of American and British publications. Those travels led us to move to South Africa for a year in 1996-97 with our then-4-year old daughter Ariel. Nelson Mandela was in the middle of his one and only term as president, and we wanted to experience history as it happened. Experiencing a country as it reinvented itself was thrilling for both of us. Sue is a planner, and she landed in planning paradise: some of the most progressive and creative thinkers from around the world were coming to South Africa to help plot out a democratic, just, non-racist society from the ground up. And I got to meet Nelson Mandela and chronicle the historic transformation of a country. I tell the story in my book Fault Lines: Journeys Into the New South Africa. I also contributed to a book that came out in 2007, No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000, in which I told the story of the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. Nelson Mandela wrote the foreword to the book, which was especially meaningful to me.
Which brings me back to Dick Cheney, and his underling, George Bush. Traveling around South Africa under apartheid, I became intrigued by how a nice country and its good citizens fall under the thrall of fascist thinking. Put simply, why do good people do bad things? Over the years, I met many very kind white South Africans who would express very ugly racist views to me. In Fault Lines, I profiled some of them, including a former secret policeman who was a torturer and government assassin. Nice guy. Did terrible things. Confessed to South Africa's Truth Commission. He's a psychological basket case, and his victims, well, you can just imagine.
So when 9/11 comes along, followed by midnight police raids and round-ups of immigrants, the USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless spying, a war based on lies, and a corporate media acting as a conveyor belt for government propaganda--I had seen it before. As an Armenian man who I recently interviewed told me, "I can smell fascism in a crowd."
My experience in South Africa made me feel especially compelled to write about the Bush years. And since my sister Amy was chronicling the daily outrages on Democracy Now!, we were a great team. In 2004, we wrote The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, and in 2006, came our book, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back. She and I have just finished our third book, which is due out in April.
DD: A dominant political force like the Bush Administration gives the other end of the spectrum something definite to push against. How will your mission and focus change if and when a more moderate administration takes office?
Goodman: My mission won’t change. We don’t have a major opposition party in the U.S. The Democrats have been handmaidens to the disaster created by the Bush Administration. And they continue to enable the whole mess. Let us recall: the majority of Democrats voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2003; they voted for the USA PATRIOT Act; and this fall, the Democratic majority has approved throwing more money down the sink hole that is the Iraq War. A few weeks ago, we learned in the Washington Post that Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, were briefed by the CIA in 2002 about the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding. Not only didn't they object, but some of the Democrats urged harsher treatment. So my mission is the mission that all journalists should have, regardless of who wins the next election: continue going to where the silence is, try to speak truth to power, telling the story through the eyes of people on the target-end of these policies.
I'm hopeful about the future. My optimism (an irrational part of my nature) is based on what I have seen in my travels around this country in the last five years. This is the subject of my next book with Amy. Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times tells the story of the grassroots activists and ordinary people who have stood up and taken courageous stands in the post-9/11 years. There are amazing stories: librarians in Connecticut who successfully fought off the PATRIOT Act; housing activists in New Orleans who are rebuilding after being abandoned by their government; soldiers refusing illegal orders to fight an illegal war; scientists defying White House censors to speak out on global warming. These are the real movers and shakers in our country. I think they will change the way politics is done—for the better.
DD: Let’s talk about music and composition. I’ve sometimes find that a musician’s experience of structure and phrasing can help when approaching problems in writing. Do you ever draw on your musical experience that way?
Goodman: I never thought I was going to be a writer. In high school, I thought I was going to be professional clarinetist in a major orchestra. I was studying music seriously with a clarinet guru in New York City, David Weber. I resumed studying with him six years ago, until his death at age 92 in 2006. I couldn’t do what I do today without what I learned from him. Music taught me self-discipline: how to sit down and work, without anyone telling me to. More importantly, Mr. Weber taught me the meaning of bel canto—striving to express myself with a beautiful sound. Now I try to do that with my writing, as well as my music. But as he always scolded me, I never practice enough.
DD: What has been the most rewarding or funnest part of your writing life so far?
Goodman: Rewarding—Having two high school students in Bristol do an independent study this spring based on my book, Static. We writers are kept humble by the fact that our articles are ultimately used to wrap fish. It was nice to know those words made more of an impact…before being used to wrap fish.
Another rewarding experience came last month. I wrote a column for my local newspaper, the Waterbury Record, about a family struggling raise a daughter with severe disabilities. The community responded by establishing a fund to help support them.
Funnest—I still can’t believe that publishers will pay me to go skiing. Really, they should know better than to support ski bums. It only encourages us.
DD: Most writers have beloved projects it seems they’ll never get to. What’s yours?
Goodman: I would like to write a book about returning to play music after taking two decades off. I discovered that many other people share this experience. I would also like get into the relationships that people have with their mentors. And I would like to write a children’s book. I’ve been inventing and telling stories to my two kids, Jasper and Ariel, since they were little. They’ve been after me to write them down, which I’d love an excuse to do while they can still appreciate them.
DD: For a political writer, the drawbacks to living in Vermont seem fairly obvious -- you’re not exactly in the thick of things. How has living here helped your work writing about politics?
Goodman: Many of my best story ideas come from what I see and hear happening around me in Vermont. For example, I wrote the first article in a national publication (“No Child Unrecruited,” in the Nov./Dec. 2002 Mother Jones) about the provision in the No Child Left Behind Act that forces schools to turn over their entire student directories to military recruiters. It means that Bush’s supposed education law actually launched the largest expansion of military recruitment of young people. I learned about this little known provision from a story in the Times Argus about high school students in Bennington who were objecting to this.
DD: What are the best things you’ve read over the last year or two -- on politics or for that matter on anything else?
Goodman: I read parts of lots of books, so I’m somewhere in the middle of a few. Here’s some of em: Letter to a Young Patriot, by Naomi Wolf; The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein; Quintet, by David Blum; Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben.
DD: What are you reading right now?
Goodman: Reading and correcting the galleys of my next book, which is due back to my publisher in 48 hours!
DD: What’s your favorite Dick Cheney joke? Remember, this is a family newspaper.
Goodman: From Bill Maher: "Afghanistan reported a record opium crop. I think that explains why Dick Cheney came back from his trip saying, 'Hey, they greeted us with flowers. And they blew my mind'!"
