FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American Newspaper by Richard Rodriguez the INTELLIGENCE FACTORY How America Makes Its Enemies

Home , Herb Caen, Scott Newhall, Stanton Delaplane

November CAN Subs cover Final2rev 9/29/09 8:19 AM Page 1

ANDREW J. BACEVICH: THE UNWINNABLE AFGHAN WAR

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009 $7.95

◆ FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American Newspaper By Richard Rodriguez THE INTELLIGENCE FACTORY How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear By Petra Bartosiewicz PROSPEROUS FRIENDS A story by Christine Schutt Also: Frederick Seidel and Mark Kingwell ◆ ESSAY

FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American newspaper By Richard Rodriguez

scholar I know, a woman who is ninety- postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen, whose six years old, grew up in a tin shack on column I read immediately—second section, Athe American prairie, near the Cana- corner left—invited me into the provincial cos- dian border. She learned to read from the pages mopolitanism that characterized the city’s out- of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room school- ward regard: “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer house. Her teacher, who had no more than an Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?” eighth-grade education, had once been to Chi- cago—had been to the opera! Women in Chi- ewspapers have become deadweight cago went to the opera with bare shoulders and commodities linked to other media long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Ncommodities in chains that are coupled Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and ex- she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the ecutive vice presidents and boards of directors in Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by offi ces thousands of miles from where the man Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, Several generations of children learned to read once the Chronicle’s archrival. The Hearst Cor- from that text. The schoolroom had a wind-up poration has its headquarters in New York City. phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glo- According to Hearst, the Chronicle has been los- ry, and one record, from which a distant female ing a million dollars a week. In San Francisco voice sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” there have been buyouts and fi rings of truck driv- ers, printers, reporters, artists, editors, critics. Is it better to have or to want? My friend says With a certain élan, the San Francisco Chronicle her teacher knew one great thing: There was has taken to publishing letters from readers who something out there. She told her class she did remark the diminishing pleasure or usefulness of not expect to see even a fraction of what the the San Francisco Chronicle. world had to offer. But she hoped they might. When a newspaper dies in America, it is not I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; when I was in high school and lived ninety miles a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from Chronicle is near death—and why else would school, twenty-fi ve cents bought me a connec- the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and tion with a gray maritime city at odds with the why else would the editors devote a week to

Richard Rodriguez is an editor at New America Media in San Francisco. His most recent essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The God of the Desert,” appeared in the January 2008 issue.

30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3rev.inddFinal3rev.indd 3030 99/29/09/29/09 8:03:148:03:14 AMAM feature articles on fog?—it is because San Fran- Nineteenth-century newspapers draped bunting cisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing. about their mastheads and brandished an infl ated diction and a Gothic type to name them- Most newspapers that are dying today were born selves the Herald, the Eagle, the Tr ibune, the in the nineteenth century. The Seattle Post- Mercury, the Globe, the Sun. With the passage Intelligencer died 2009, born 1863. The Rocky of time, the name of the city was commonly at- Mountain News died 2009, born 1859. The Ann tached to the name of the newspaper, not only Arbor News died 2009, born 1835. It was the to distinguish the Alexandria Gazette from the pride and the function of the American newspa- New York Gazette but because the paper described per in the nineteenth century to declare the the city and the city described the paper. forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough he Daily Dramatic Chronicle, precursor to to have news. Frontier American journalism pre- the San Francisco Chronicle, was founded served a vestige of the low-church impulse to- Tin 1865 by two teenage brothers on a bor- ward universal literacy whereby the new country rowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Charles and Mi- imagined it could read and write itself into exis- chael de Young (a third brother, Gustavus, was tence. We were the Gutenberg Nation. initially a partner in the publishing venture) had come west with their widowed mother from St. Louis. In Califor- nia, the brothers invented themselves as descendants of French aristocracy. They were adolescents of extraordinary gumption at a time when San Francisco was a city of gumption and of stranded young men.

Karl Marx wrote that Gold Rush California was “thickly populated by men of all races, from the Yan- kee to the Chinese, from the Ne- gro to the Indian and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European.” Oscar Wilde seconded Karl Marx: “It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be in San Francisco.” What must Gold Rush San Francisco have been like? Melville’s Nantucket? Burning Man? An arms bazaar in Yemen? There were Russians, Chileans, Frenchmen, Welshmen, and Mexicans. There were Aus- tralian toughs, the worst of the lot by most accounts—“Sydney Ducks”—prowling the waterfront. There were Chinese opium dens beneath the streets and Chinese opera houses above them. Histo- rians relish the old young city’s foggy wharves and alleyways, its frigates, fl eas, mud, and hazard. Two words attached to the lawless city the de Young brothers moved about in. One was “vigilante,” from the Spanish. The other was “hoodlum”—a word coined in San Francisco to name the young men loitering about corners, threaten- ing especially to the Chinese.

Illustrations by Andrea Dezsö ESSAY 31

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3131 99/24/09/24/09 2:23:252:23:25 PMPM The de Young brothers named their newspaper natural echo in the canyons of the Sierra Ne- the Daily Dramatic Chronicle because stranded vada. The miners loved opera. (Puccini reversed young men seek entertainment. The city very the circuit and took David Belasco’s melodrama early developed a taste for limelight that was as of the Gold Rush back to Europe as La Fanciulla urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were del West.) competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dra- In 1860, San Francisco had a population of 57,000. matic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered By 1870, the population had almost tripled, to free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and 149,000. Within three years of its founding, by reading rooms. San Francisco desperately ap- 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle would evolve preciated minstrel shows and circuses and melo- with its hormonal city to become the Daily Morn- deons and Shakespeare. Stages were set up in ing Chronicle. The de Young brothers were in their gambling halls and saloons where Shakespearean early twenties. Along with theatrical and oper- actors, their velvets much the worse for wear, atic listings, the Chronicle then published news of ships sailing into and out of the bay and the dollar equivalents of treasure in their holds, and bank robberies, and saloon shootings, and gold strikes and drownings, an extraordinary number of sui- cides, likewise fi res, for San Fran- cisco was a wooden city, as it still is in many of its districts.

It is still possible, very occasion- ally, to visit the Gold Rush city when one attends a crowded the- ater. Audiences here, more than in any city I know, possess a wit in common and can react as one—in pleasure, but also in derision. I often think our impulse toward hoot and holler might be related to our founding sense of isolation, to our being “an oasis of civiliza- tion in the California desert,” in the phrase of Addison DeWitt (in All About Eve), who, though a Hollywood fi gment, is about as good a rendition as I can sum- mon of the sensibility (“New York pointed to a ghost rising at the back of the house: critics”) we have courted here for one hundred Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. and fi fty years. And deplored.

An Italian who came to San Francisco to study The nineteenth-century city felt itself surrounded medicine in 2003 swears he saw the ghost of a by vacancy—to the west, the gray court of the forty-niner, in early light, when he slept and then Pacifi c; to the east, the Livermore Valley, the San woke in an old house out by the ocean. The Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevada range. Shipping forty-niner was very young, my friend said, with and mining were crucial to the wealth of the city, a power of sadness about him. He did not speak. but they were never the consolations the city He had red hair and wore a dark shirt. sought. The city looked, rather, to Addison DeWitt—to the eastern United States, to Europe, We can imagine marooned opera singers, not of for approbation. If there was a pathetic sense of the second, perhaps not even of the third rank, insecurity in living at the edge of the conti- enunciating elaborate prayers and curses from the nent—San Francisco proclaiming itself “the Italian repertoire as they stumbled among the Paris of the Pacifi c”!—the city also raised men of pebbles and stones of cold running creeks on visionary self-interest who squinted into the dis- their way to perform in Gold Rush towns along tance and conceived of opening trade to Asia or the American River. It was as though the gran- cutting down redwood forests or laying track diose nineteenth-century musical form sought its across a sea of yellow grass.

32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3rev.inddFinal3rev.indd 3232 99/29/09/29/09 8:03:358:03:35 AMAM eaders in other parts of the country were Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting fascinated by any scrap of detail about to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded Rthe Gold Rush city. Here is a fragment and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reason- (July 9, 1866) from Bret Harte’s dispatch to read- able cause. ers of the Springfi eld Republican (from a collection of such dispatches edited by Gary Scharn- When he died in 1925, Michael de Young be- horst). The description remains accurate: queathed the ownership of the Chronicle to his four daughters with the stipulation that it could Midsummer! . . . To dwellers in Atlantic cities, not be sold out of the family until the death of what visions of heated pavements, of staring bricks, the last surviving daughter. of grateful shade trees, of straw hats and white muslin, are conjured up in this word. . . . In San San Francisco gentility has roots as shallow and Francisco it means equal proportions of fog and wind. On the evening of the Fourth of July it was a as belligerent as those of the Australian blue gum pleasant and instructive sight to observe the popu- trees that were planted heedlessly throughout the lation, in great-coats and thick shawls, warming city and now confi gure and scent our Sunday themselves by bonfi res, watching the sky-rockets walks. In 1961, Holiday magazine came to town to lose themselves in the thick fog, and returning so- devote an entire issue to San Francisco. The three berly home to their fi resides and warm blankets. living daughters of Michael de Young were photographed seated on an antique high-backed cau- From its inception, the San Francisco Chronicle seuse in the gallery of the old M. H. de Young borrowed a tone of merriment and swagger from Memorial Museum their father had donated to the the city it daily invented—on one occasion with city to house his collection of paintings and curi- fatal consequences: in 1879, the Chronicle ran an osities (including a scabrous old mummy beloved

MEN, USUALLY MEN, WHO ASSUMED THE SOLE PROPRIETORSHIPS OF NEWSPAPERS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WERE THE SORT OF MEN TO BE ATTRACTED BY THE WAY A NEWSPAPER COULD MAGNIFY AN ALREADY FATTED EGO

exposé of the Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, a of generations of schoolchildren—now considered recent arrival to the city (“driven forth from Boston too gauche to be displayed). For the same issue, like an Unclean Leper”) who had put himself up Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, widow of Adolph, as a candidate for mayor. The Chronicle recounted was photographed taking tea in her Pacifi c Heights Kalloch’s trial for adultery in Massachusetts (“his mansion in what looks to be a fur-trimmed, fl oor- escapade with one of the Tremont Temple choris- length velvet gown. The Spreckels family donated ters”). Kalloch responded by denouncing the to the city a replica of the Palais de la Legion “bawdy house breeding” of the de Young boys, d’Honneur in Paris to house a collection of Euro- implying that Charles and Michael’s mother kept pean paintings and rooms and furniture. One a whorehouse in St. Louis. Charles rose immedi- Spreckels and three de Youngs make four Marga- ately to his mother’s defense; he shot Kalloch, who ret Dumonts—a San Francisco royal fl ush. recovered and won City Hall. De Young never served jail time. A year later, in 1880, Kalloch’s son In 1972, the museum donated by Michael de shot and killed Charles de Young in the offi ces of Young merged with the museum created by the the Chronicle. family of the man who tried to murder Michael de Young to become the Fine Arts Museums of “Hatred of de Young is the fi rst and best test of a San Francisco. gentleman,” Ambrose Bierce later remarked of Michael, the surviving brother. However just or en, usually men, who assumed the unjust Bierce’s estimation, the de Young brothers sole proprietorships of newspapers in lived and died according to their notion of a Mthe nineteenth century were the sort newspaper’s purpose—that it should entertain of men to be attracted by the way a newspaper and incite the population. could magnify an already fatted ego. Newspaper publishers were accustomed to lord over cities. In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and William Randolph Hearst was given the San the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, af- Francisco Examiner by his father, a mining mil- ter the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar lionaire and U.S. senator, who may or may not

ESSAY 33

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3333 99/24/09/24/09 2:23:262:23:26 PMPM have won it in a poker game in 1880. As it met with William Randolph Hearst Jr. to collabo- happened, young Hearst was born to run a news- rate on what they called the San Francisco News- paper. He turned the Examiner into the largest- paper Agency. The Agency was a third entity circulation paper in San Francisco before he designed to share production and administrative moved on to New York, where, in 1895, he ac- costs. The papers were to maintain editorial dis- quired the New York Journal. Hearst quickly cretion and separate staffs. In addition, an inco- engaged in a yellow-journalism rivalry with Jo- herent Sunday edition shuffl ed together sections seph Pulitzer’s New York World. Both Hearst and from both the Chronicle and the Examiner. The Pulitzer assumed political careers. Hearst served terms of the publishers’ agreement eventually fa- in the Congress of the United States—served is vored the afternoon Hearst newspaper, for it was not quite the word—as did Pulitzer, briefl y. soon to fall behind, to become the lesser newspaper in a two-paper town. The Examiner neverthe- We remember Joseph Pulitzer not as a sensation- less continued to collect half the profi ts of both. alist journalist but as the philanthropist who en- dowed an award for excellence in journalism and In January 1988, Phyllis Tucker, the last surviv- the arts. We remember William Randolph Hearst ing daughter of Michael de Young, died in San because his castle overlooking the Pacifi c—fi fty Francisco. Tucker’s daughter, Nan Tucker Mc- miles of ocean frontage—is as forthright a temple Evoy, managed to forestall the sale of the paper to grandiosity as this nation can boast. And we for several years. But in 1999, the founding pub- remember Hearst as the original for Orson lisher’s posthumous grip was pried loose by a ma- Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles portrayed Charles jority vote of family members to sell. At that

THE SAGA OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BECAME A STORY OF CHILDREN

AND GRANDCHILDREN AND LAWYERS. MCCLATCHY, SCRIPPS-HOWARD, COPLEY, GANNETT— NEWSPAPER CONSORTIUMS FORMED AS FAMILIES SOLD OFF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Foster Kane with the mix of populism and ego- time, the Hearst Corporation was desirous of re- mania audiences of the time easily recognized as claiming the San Francisco market. Hearst paid Hearst. Kane the champion of the common man $660 million to the de Young heirs for the San becomes Kane the autocrat. Kane builds an opera Francisco Chronicle. house for his paramour. Kane invents a war. To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice De- Citizen Kane told the story of a newspaper pub- partment, the Hearst Corporation sold the still- lisher’s rise and fall in one generation. A more ac- extant San Francisco Examiner to the politically curate rendition of the American newspaper saga connected Fang family, owners of Asianweek, would require an account of the long dissolution the oldest and largest English-language Asian- of the nineteenth-century enterprise. Although American newspaper. The Hearst Corporation Charles Foster Kane has a son—we briefl y see the paid the Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run boy, and we see that he will most likely be his the Examiner. Florence Fang placed her son, mama’s boy—the son is removed from the narra- Ted Fang, in the editor’s chair. Within a year, tive early on (he dies in a car crash with his Florence Fang fi red her son; Ted Fang threat- mother). We can only imagine that Kane’s son, ened to sue his mother. In 2004, the Fang fami- grown to manhood, might have resembled Otis ly sold the Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scat- Chandler, the utterly golden publisher of the Los tershot entrepreneur from Colorado who Angeles Times, who, in retirement, was unable to defl ated William Randolph Hearst’s “Monarch prevent family members from selling the paper to of the Dailies” to a freebie tabloid that gets de- the Tribune Company in 2000. The saga of livered to houses up and down the street twice American journalism in the twentieth century a week, willy-nilly, and litters the fl oors of San became a story of children and grandchildren and Francisco municipal buses. lawyers. McClatchy, Scripps-Howard, Copley, Gannett—newspaper consortiums formed as fam- he day after I was born in San Francisco, ilies sold off the nineteenth century. my tiny existential fact was noted in sev- Teral of the papers that were barked The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco through the downtown streets. In truth, the Examiner were both losing money when, in 1965, noun “newspaper” is something of a misnomer. Charles Thieriot, grandson of Michael de Young, More than purveyors only of news, American

34 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3434 99/24/09/24/09 2:23:262:23:26 PMPM newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of For nearly two decades the city that prized its public record—papers were daily or weekly cu- singularity was entertained by idiosyncratic mulative almanacs of tabular information. A voices. At the shallow end of the Chronicle’s newspaper’s morgue was scrutable evidence of roster (under the cipher of a coronet) appeared the existence of a city. Newspapers published Count Marco, a Liberace of the typewriter obituaries and they published birth announce- who concerned himself with fashion and ments. They published wedding announce- beauty and l’amour. At the deep end—a snug ments and bankruptcy notices. They published corner at Gino and Carlo’s bar in North weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where Beach—sat “Charles McCabe, Esq.,” an eru- on most days the weather is optimistic and dite connoisseur of books, spirits, and failed unremarkable—fog clearing by noon). They marriages. Terrence O’Flaherty watched tele- published the fi re department’s log and high vision. Stanton Delaplane, to my mind the school basketball scores. In a port city like San best writer among them, wrote “Postcard”—a Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and travel series with charm and humor. Art Hoppe departures of ships. None of this constituted concocted political satire. Harold Gilliam news exactly; it was a record of a city’s mundane prog- ress. News was old as soon as it was dry—“fi shwrap,” as Herb Caen often called it.

Unwilling to forfeit any fraction of my quarter, I even studied the classifieds— unrelieved columns laid out like city blocks: Room for rent. Marina. No pets. File clerk position. Heavy phones. Ticket agent for busy downtown box office. Must be bonded. Norman, we’re still here. Only once did I find the titillation I was looking for, a listing worthy of a bar- bershop magazine, an Argosy, or a Mickey Spillane: “Ex- Green Beret will do anything legal for cash.” Newspapers were sustained by expounded on wind and tide and fog. Alfred classifi eds, as well as by department-store ads and Frankenstein was an art critic of international automobile ads. I admired the urbanity of the reputation. There was a book column by Wil- drawings of newspaper ads in those years, and I liam Hogan and a society column by Frances took from them a conception of the posture of Moffat. Allan Temko wrote architectural criti- downtown San Francisco. Despite glimpses into cism against the grain of the city’s sensibility, the classifi ed life of the city, despite the hauteur a sensibility he sometimes characterized as a of ad-art mannerism, the Chronicle offered some liberal spirit at odds with a timorous aesthetic. assurance (to an adolescent such as I was) it All the Chronicle columnists and critics had would have been diffi cult for me to describe. I constituents, but the name above the banner will call it now an implied continuity. There was was Herb Caen. continuity in the comics and on the sports page, but nowhere more than in the columns. Herb Caen began writing a column for the Chronicle before the Second World War. At During Scott Newhall’s tenure as executive edi- that time, Caen was in his twenties and proba- tor, from 1952 to 1971, the Chronicle achieved bly resembled the fresh, fast-talking smarty- something of a golden age. Newhall was fl am- pants he pitched his voice to portray in print. boyant in ways that were congenial to the city. Item . . . item . . . who’s gotta item? In 1950, he was At a time when the Los Angeles Times was at- lured over to the Examiner at a considerable hike tracting admiration from the East Coast for its in salary, and circulation followed at his heels. fl eet of foreign bureaus, Newhall reverted to an He knew all the places; he knew the maître d’s, eighteenth-century model of a newspaper as fi rst- the bartenders, the bouncers, the fl ower-sellers, person observer. the cops, the madams, the shopkeepers—knew

ESSAY 35

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3rev.inddFinal3rev.indd 3535 99/29/09/29/09 8:03:588:03:58 AMAM them in the sense that they all knew him and fluence of rock music, they were effectively knew he could be dangerous. In 1958, Caen covering a revolution. In New York, writers returned to the Chronicle, and, again, circula- were cultivating, in the manner of Thackeray, tion tilted. a self-referential point of view and calling it the “New Journalism.” In San Francisco, Roll- Each day except Saturday, for forty years, Caen ing Stone was publishing a gospel “I” that found set the conversation for San Francisco. Who was itself in a world without precedent: Greil Mar- in town. Who was in the hospital and would ap- cus, Cameron Crowe, Patti Smith, Timothy preciate a card. Who was seen drinking cham- Ferris, Hunter S. Thompson. I remember sit- pagne out of a rent boy’s tennis shoe. His last ting in an Indian tea shop in South London in column began: “And how was your Christmas?” 1970 (in the manner of the New Journalism) He persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers and being gripped by envy potent enough to be (crowded on buses, on the way to work) that his called homesickness as I read John Burks’s ac- was the city we lived in. Monday through Friday, count of the Stones concert at Altamont. It Caen was an omniscient table-hopping bitch. was like reading a dispatch from the Gold On Sunday, he dropped all that; he reverted to Rush city. an ingenue—a sailor on leave, a sentimental fl a- neur infatuated with his dream “Baghdad-by- One morning in the 1970s, the Chronicle began the-Bay.” The point of the Sunday perambula- to publish Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the tion was simple relish—fog clearing by noon; City—adding sex and drugs and local branding evidence that the mystical, witty, sourdough city to the nineteenth-century gimmick of serial fi c- had survived one more week. tion. At a time when American families were trending to the suburbs, Maupin’s novel insisted After a time, Caen stopped writing Sunday pan- that San Francisco was still magnetic for single egyrics; he said it was not the same city anymore, lives. In those same years, Cyra McFadden was and it wasn’t. He wasn’t. Los Angeles, even San writing satirically about the sexual eccentrici- Jose—two cities created by suburbanization— ties of suburban Marin County in a series (“The had become more infl uential in the world than Serial”) for an alternative newspaper called the the “cool grey city of love,” a George Sterling Pacifi c Sun. line Caen favored. The Chinese city did not fi g- ure in Caen’s novel, except atmospherically— In those same years, Joan Didion wrote, in The lanterns and dragons, chorus girls at the Forbid- White Album, that for many people in Los An- den City, Danny Kaye taking over the kitchen at geles “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, Kan’s, that sort of thing. The growing Filipino, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of Latin-American city did not fi gure at all. the (Manson family) murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfi re through the community.” In Caen’s heyday, the San Francisco Chronicle re- To borrow for a moment the oracular deadpan: fl ected the self-infatuated city. But it was not the In San Francisco, the Sixties came to an end for city entire that drew the world’s attention. In the many people in 1977, when Jann Wenner packed 1950s, the version of San Francisco that inter- up and moved Rolling Stone to New York. As he ested the world was Jack Kerouac’s parish—a few departed, the moss-covered wunderkind griped North Beach coffeehouses habituated by beat- to a young reporter standing by that San Fran- niks (a word Caen coined) and City Lights cisco was a “provincial backwater.” Bookstore. By the time I was a teenager, the path to City Lights was electrifi ed by the mar- What no one could have imagined in 1977, not quees of topless clubs and bad wolves with fl ash- even Jann Wenner, was that a suburban indus- lights beckoning passersby toward red velvet trial region thirty miles to the south of the city curtains. Anyway, the scene had moved by that contained an epic lode. Silicon Valley would, time to the fog-shrouded Grateful Dead concerts within twenty years, become the capital of No- in Golden Gate Park and to the Haight Ash- where. What no one could have imagined in bury. A decade later, the most famous neighbor- 1977 was that San Francisco would become a hood in the city was the homosexual Castro bedroom community for a suburban industrial District. San Francisco never seemed to grow old region that lay thirty miles to the south. the way other cities grow old. Don’t kid a kidder. Herb Caen died in 1997. In 1967, the Chronicle’s rock and jazz critic, With the loss of that daily hectoring voice, Ralph J. Gleason, teamed up with a renegade the Chronicle seemed to lose its narrative cherub named Jann Wenner to publish Rolling thread, as did the city. The Chronicle began to Stone magazine. What this disparate twosome reprint Caen columns, to the bewilderment of intuited was that by chronicling the rising in- anyone younger than thirty.

36 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3636 99/24/09/24/09 2:23:262:23:26 PMPM f you die in San Francisco, unless you are personal sounds and her texting apparatus that judged notable by our know-nothing newspa- she stepped off the curb and was mowed down Iper (it is unlikely you will be judged notable by a honking bus. unless your obituary has already appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times), your In this morning’s paper there is a quote from an death will be noted in a paid obituary submitted interview San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin New- to the Chronicle by your mourners. More likely, som, gave to The Economist concerning the like- there will be no public notice taken at all. As lihood that San Francisco will soon be a city much as any vacancy in the Chronicle I can point without a newspaper: “People under thirty won’t to, the dearth of obituaries measures its decline. even notice.”

In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the rela- The other day I came upon a coffeehouse that tionship between observer and observed was re- resembled, as I judged from its nineteenth-cen- ciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the tury exterior, the sort of café where the de Young newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who brothers might have distributed their paper. The were curious about the strangers that circumstance café was only a couple of blocks from the lively had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is gay ambience of upper Market Street yet far re- incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chron- moved from the clamorous San Francisco of the icle has become remiss in its obituary department. nineteenth century. Several men and women sat Of four friends of mine who died recently in San alone at separate tables. No one spoke. The café Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or advertised free wi-fi ; all but one of the customers any other public notice taken of his absence. This had laptops open before them. (The exception seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsi- was playing solitaire with a real deck of cards.) bility of living in a city and as good an explanation The only sounds were the hissing of an espresso as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my machine and the clattering of a few saucers. A friends requested cremation; three wanted their man in his forties, sitting by the door, stared at a ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Per- screen upon which a cartoon animal, perhaps a haps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the dog, loped silently. newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city. I should mention that the café, like every coffeehouse in the city, had stacks of the Bay Guard- We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or ian, S.F. Weekly, the Bay Area Reporter—free the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in and roughly equivalent to the Daily Dramatic the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline Chronicle of yore. I should mention that San of newspapers has been the result solely of com- Francisco has always been a city of stranded puter technology or of the Internet. The forces youth, and the city apparently continues to pro- working against newspapers are probably as varied vide entertainments for youth: and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth- control pill. We like to say that the invention of Gosta Berling, Kid Mud, Skeletal System El Rio. the internal-combustion engine changed us, 8pm, $5. Davis Jones, Eric Andersen and Tyler Staf- changed the way we live. In truth, we built the ford, Melissa McClelland Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7. Model-T Ford because we had changed; we want- Ben Kweller, Jones Street Station, Princeton Slim’s. 8:30pm, $19. Harvey Mandel and the Snake Crew ed to remake the world to accommodate our rest- Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16. Queers, Mansfi elds, lessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be Hot Toddies, Atom Age Bottom of the Hill. lost because technology will force us to acquire 8:30pm, $12. information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle The colleague I am meeting for coffee tells me or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no (occasioned by my puzzlement at the wi-fi sé- longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann ance) that more and more often he is fi nding sex Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digi- on Craigslist. As you know better than I do, one tal cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with goes to Craigslist to sell or to buy an old couch “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 or a concert ticket or to look for a job. But also bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I to arrange for sexual Lego with a body as free of can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Re- narrative as possible. (Im bored 26-Oakland-east.) cife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnec- Another friend, a journalist born in India, who tion from body, from presence, from city. has heard me connect newspapers with place once too often, does not dispute my argument, A few months ago there was an item in the pa- but neither is he troubled by it: “If I think of per about a young woman so plugged into her what many of my friends and I read these days,

ESSAY 37

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3737 99/24/09/24/09 2:23:262:23:26 PMPM it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and for- without obituaries, but the famous will achieve warded in bits and pieces on email—a story immortality by a Wikipedia entry. from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffi ngton Post, something from National newspapers may try to impersonate the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a gi- regional newspapers that are dying or dead. ant newspaper being assembled at all hours, (There have been reports that the New York from every corner of the world, still with news Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon pub- but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need lish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We al- a sense of place anymore.” ready live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis sus- So what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The pended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Hol- contemptuous reply.) Cities are bricks and mortar. iday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies. In Chi- airport weather. We fl y from one CNN Head- cago, women go to the opera with bare shoulders. line News monitor to another. We end up where we started. Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and An obituary does not propose a solution. online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe echno-puritanism that wars with the want for themselves? They want exactly what body must also resist the weight of paper. they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, TI remember that weight. It was the overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They weight of the world, carried by boys. want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. Late in grammar school and into high school, I de- (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheap- livered the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper that was, er.) They want to go shopping on Saturday after- in those years, published in the afternoon, Monday noons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want through Saturday, and in the morning on Sundays. the pages of their New York Times all kind of My route comprised one hundred and forty sub- greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café scribers—nearly every house in three square blocks. table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of The papers were barely dry when I got them, Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century warm to the touch and clean—if you were caught bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, short, you could deliver a baby on newspaper. The they want to fl oat down the Nile in a felucca; smell of newspapers was a slick petroleum smell of they want fi ve-star bricks and mortar and do not ink. I would fold each paper in triptych, then snap disturb signs and views of the park. And in or- on a rubber band. On Thursdays, the Bee der to reserve these things for themselves they plumped with a cooking section and with super- will plug up your eyes and your ears and your market ads. On Sundays, there was added the mouth, and if they can fi gure out a way to pump weight of comics, of real estate and automobile episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening sections, and supplements like Parade and the corridors of your brain as you expire (add to television guide. shopping cart), they will do it. I stuffed half my load of newspapers into the canvas We will end up with one and a half cities in bag I tied onto my bicycle’s handlebars; the rest America—Washington, D.C., and American went into saddlebags on the back. I never learned to Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., throw a baseball with confi dence, but I knew how where the conversation is a droning, never ad- to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my vancing, debate between “conservatives” and mark from the sidewalk—one hand on the handle- “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. bar—with dead-eye nonchalance. The paper fl ew We will not read about the death of salesmen. over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open We will not read about prize Holsteins or new sprinklers to land with a fi ne plop only inches from novels. We are a nation dismantling the struc- the door. tures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book re- In the growling gray light (San Francisco still viewers and art critics and essays about what it has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chroni- might mean that our local newspaper has died. cle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must sub- We are a nation of Amazon reader responses scribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fi c- the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. tion”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are three together equal what I remember. ■

38 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009

RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3838 99/24/09/24/09 2:23:262:23:26 PMPM