Hillel Aron

"AFTER THE REVOLUTION I want to be a truck driver." 

So begins Mickey Kaus' 1974 review of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen's second album, Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers' Favorites for the Harvard Crimson. The opening line may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but Kaus uses the review to wrestle with an important idea:

The whole ethos of trucking music runs against a long-standing moral undercurrent of left student politics--the idea that political activity really should be the most important thing in our lives. The implication is that after the revolution this dictum will be institutionalized and we will spend all our time at meetings. But perhaps we have a sneaking suspicion that even then the things that really determine whether we are happy or sad will be the very mundane ups and downs which political life seems to devalue: the people we meet, the jokes we tell, the success we have in meeting our personal goals. 

Robert Michael Kaus was born in Los Angeles in 1951 to Otto and Peggy Kaus. He has an older brother, Stephen. Otto was a judge who served on the California Supreme Court from 1981 to 1985. Robert went to Beverly Hills High, and got to Harvard in 1970. He became a committed Marxist, whose senior thesis was on the inevitable failure of capitalism.

He began covering anti-war demonstrations for the Harvard Crimson in 1971. According to Crimson profile written in 1998, "editors knew they could count on Kaus for coverage when no other reporter had attended a protest because he organized most of them. "

His newsy articles, most of them written in the inverted-pyramid newspaper style, were published under the byline R. Michael Kaus. But he also reviewed rock albums under the name Mickey Kaus. In them, he betrays a nostalgia for the sixties, and an emphasis on social issues. In his 1974 review of Bruce Springsteen's second album, Kaus writes:

The music one hears really does seem crummy these days, and it is not because there are fewer individual talents, although that is undoubtedly true. The social content of rock has changed, and that, it turns out, is really what mattered. What was once the aesthetic and cultural background against which we measured our collective progress has become merely the shifting aggregate of individual talents and trends.... And in form and lyrical content rock is responding to all the changes going down around itself. The enthusiastic anger of "Street Fighting Man," taken seriously in its time, has been replaced by the staged, mechanical rebelliousness of "Smoking in the Boys' Room."

After graduation, Kaus went to Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the California State Bar in 1976. As he said in a 1992 interview:

Then I went to Harvard Law School, then I went and clerked for the state Supreme Court in California. And then I was pretty much of a standard left-liberal product of the '60s, and I wanted to go be a bureaucrat in Washington and get an office with a stapler and some cause. And so I came back and looked for jobs in the Carter administration, wound up at the Federal Trade Commission, working for a guy named Bob Reich, who is now a very prominent economic analyst and big adviser to Bill Clinton, a very smart man who -- I discuss his ideas extensively in the book. While I was at the FTC, I was rooming with Nick Lemann, who was editor of The Washington Monthly at the time, and I had really wanted to -- always wanted to be a journalist. And when he left and there was an opening at The Washington Monthly, I applied for it, got it and bailed out of the government and I've been a journalist ever since.

The founder and editor of The Washington Monthly was Charles Peters, who coined the term Neoliberalism to describe his left-of-center ideology. Peters' many disciples included Kaus, Michael Kinsley, James Fallows, and Jonathan Alter.

While writing for the Washington Monthly, Kaus began writing about what would be a hobbyhorse of his for the next twenty years or so: ending welfare, and replacing it with a WPA-like jobs program. The idea eventually grew into his first and only book, The End of Equality.

His strategy then is pretty much the same one he uses today: Kaus would rather criticize liberals than conservatives. Because of his tone, which is confrontational and often rude, this has earned him a lot of enemies on the left. He's feuded with many younger, lefty bloggers, including Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, who literally threw down a gauntlet on an episode of Bloggingheads after Kaus dismissed Klein as a "young punk toeing the Bob Cutler line." There's even an entire blog dedicated to bashing Mickey called Fire Mickey Kaus, which Kaus gleefully links to from time to time.

Mickey Kaus's blog, Kausfiles, started in 1999, was part of the first generation of political blogs (wikipedia calls it the second, after The Daily Howler), which included Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish and Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit. Throughout the years, Mickey Kaus has attacked illegal immigration, defended Anne Coulter (whom Kaus was at one point connected to socially), lambasted the LA Times, uncovered an Arnold Schwarzenegger interview where he talked about drugs and group sex, accused John Edwards of having an affair (long before the mainstream media acknowledged it), and published excerpts of Ezra Klein's "Journolist," a secret e-mail group. He is an iconoclast, an ideologue of his own ideology, a political reporter living far from Washington, a Venice Beach resident who almost always dresses in black, and perhaps a bit of a contrarian.

Of course, the Marxist revolution never happened, and Mickey Kaus has not become a trucker. But much of what Kaus heralded has come to pass. Welfare Reform was passed by Bill Clinton in 1996. Political blogging, which the New York Times patronizingly called Me-Zine Journalism in 2001, has revolutionized both journalism and politics.

I guess that's the thing about revolutions. You never know what they're going to change. 

Nothing pays tribute to dead celebrities like twitter.

Henry Gibson died late Monday night. He was a cast member of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Nashville, The Blues Brothers, The Burbs, Magnolia, and The Wedding Crashers. Though always a bit player, his career spanned two generations.

News of Gibson's death didn't break until Wedsnday, an unusually long time in the age of TMZ, but of course, Gibson wasn't that famous. In the month before his death was made public, the complete phrase "Henry Gibson" showed up on twitter a total of eight times. (Interestingly, one of those instances was to announce that Gibson himself had joined twitter. The account, which was started in July, was never verified, and may not have really been Gibson, as it posted a tribute to Gibson in the third person on the 16^th.)

The first Twitterer to report Gibson's death was KarmicRelief at 6:11 PM GMT (10:11 am PST). KarmicRelief's real name is Shelley Ackerman, a "celebrity astrologer" of some note (see her website here) who's made numerous appearances on TV.  Her tweet linked not to an obituary, but some sort of astrological chart posted on Ackerman's facebook fan page:

Strangely, a full hour passed between Ackerman's tweet and the next one. Did Ackerman have some sort of advanced knowledge of Gibson's death? Was it written in the cosmos?

I talked to Shelley on the phone. She told me that she learned of Gibson's death through her friend Kevin, an actor. Kevin had posted something on facebook minutes before she had. She noted that the three celebrities that had died early in the week (Patrick Swayze, Mary Travers, and Gibson) all had "degrees between 24 and 27 degrees of Virgo."

She had fond memories of watching Gibson on Laugh-In: "I remember those poems. I was beginning high school. He was unbelievable."

The next tweet came from The Hollywood Reporter, which linked to its own obituary of Gibson. That tweet was re-tweeted four times in the next five minutes. Those tweets were re-tweeted. And so on. For the next hour, Gibson's death was tweeted roughly two to four times a minute.

Many made reference to the large quantity of celebrity deaths lately. Some were funny. Some were in a different language. I liked this one, from Hart Hanson, creator of the TV series Bones. Two hours and twelve minutes after the THR tweet, a friend of mine, Richard Rushfield, tweeted Gibson's death, which is how I found out about it.

About twenty minutes later, @LATimestot weighed in. After that, Gibson-death tweets increased in frequency to about 6 a minute. Over the next day, more than 1,000 tweets mention Gibson's death. According to @trendhistory, Gibson was an off-and-on trending topic that day and the next morning.

Gibson's newspaper obituaries were fairly mundane. His career didn't shatter the earth, like Michael Jackson's. But hearing people's personal memories of Gibson- whether it be from a friend, from an astrologer, or through twitter- was quite moving. Lesser celebrities like Gibson touch people in ways that are more personal. Relating to a minor character in a movie makes you special, makes you different. Everyone loves Humphrey Bogart. Loving the Nazi from The Blues Brothers says something about who you are.

I will remember Gibson mostly from the film Nashville, a movie I always wished I liked more than I actually did (as opposed to Magnolia, a film I relished in disliking). The finale, with Gibson singing, is pretty powerful though; it's such a strange, wonderful moment.

"Y'all take it easy now. This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville! They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of. Come on everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!"

- Haven Hamilton (played by Henry Gibson)