Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power

by Robert Scheer

Discusses the politics of power in the United States, from the Vietnam War era to the Star Wars era

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Robert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig which is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and is Editor in Chief for the online magazine Truthdig.

Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.

During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.

In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Koreans" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panthers' publication.

After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.

After Scheer left the Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the Nation magazine.

Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW in Santa Monica and syndicated by Public Radio International.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure where I read about this book, somewhere, in someone's blog, but the title caught my attention. And it had to do more with the cover of the book. Cartoonish caricatures of Amerikan politicians from the 60s through the 80s, naked, with large ICBMs between their knees replacing their penises doing the can-can. Republican and Democrat. I am sure you know who I mean. And you may be familiar with the author, Robert Scheer from Truthdig. For many years he was a journalist for the LA Times and the majority of the essays appeared in that newspaper and several other left-leaning journals of the times. Perhaps I could have read all the essays that compose the collection written over a decade; one in this journal in May of 1970, one in the Times in December of 1972, piecemeal as it was. But I was unable to do that with this book today with all of them staring at me when I opened the book. It is divided into four sections: "Pursuing the American Dream," "The Language of Torturers," "Scrambling After Power" and "Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death." I was able to read one essay from each section. That was all, way too depressing in light of where we are in the current day trainwreck of Amerikan foreign policy. Basically, the book tries to understand Amerika's disastrous adventure in Viet Nam and to understand some of the popular culture that ws influenced by that catastrophe. And this quote, from an essay titled "The Lanuguage of Torturers" captures the essence of what Sheer was trying to accomplish. Here it is: "But rather, why did the U.S. government for the past twenty-five years, under four different presidents, systematically and fanatically subvert,obstruct, coopt, pervert, decimate, maim, butcher and kill the Vietnamese people every time they moved to make their own history? That is it, in a nutshell and perhaps someone could do the same thing for what it is we are trying to accomplish in the Middle East. But I doubt it.