Edward S. Herman’s Life and Work – Part 7

Ed’s post-retirement writings

When Edward S. Herman published Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky in 1988, they were both still full-time professors.  Ed retired the next year, and the next ten years of his life were his most active as a writer.  In 1989, he published The Terrorism Industry with Gerry O’Sullivan and also wrote a chapter of Hope and Folly, on the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO, which Ed thought was one of his best media-analysis efforts. 

In 1990, Ed became the editor of a new magazine titled Lies of our Times (LOOT), which is when my involvement began.  I first heard of Noam in 1989 from a roommate, when Dennis Lee was in jail.  My life had been ruined by then, and I had been radicalized.   In early 1990, I heard of LOOT on a talk-radio show as I commuted to my job in LA.  It was an interview with somebody at LOOT, maybe an owner.  I used to wonder if it was Ed, but it probably was not.  Later that year, I moved to Ohio and my days of study began.  The first thing that I did was subscribe to LOOT, and I was ready for its message.  I subscribed to it until it went out of business in 1994, but the first page of my first issue is the one that I remember best, as I was startled that the New York Times could simply make it up as it went along, with editorial standards below a tabloid’s. 

Noam wrote a monthly column in LOOT, which has been compiled into a book.  I did not know who Ed was when I subscribed to LOOT, but I eagerly read LOOT and slowly learned who Ed was.  He not only edited LOOT, but contributed at least an article to each issue.  I soon read Ralph McGehee’s memoirs, subscribed to Covert Action Information Bulletin, the Christic Institute’s magazine, and those were years of revelation for me.  I began writing publicly in 1991.  I was an eager student, but it still took me about two years to really understand Noam’s political writings, as they were so alien to what I had been taught. 

In late 1992, my wife and I watched the documentary on Noam’s life at Ohio State University.  It never played at mainstream theaters or on network TV in the USA, even though it was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time (which proved Noam’s point).  There is a brief clip of Ed in it.  A few days later, I was driven from my sleep to write a 17-page letter to Noam, and the gist of it was asking why the left rarely covered the energy issue and never free-energy efforts.  I was surprised to receive a letter from Noam about two weeks later.  It is still the most gracious reply that I ever received from the left on the free-energy issue.  Noam soon politely brushed me off, but I didn’t blame him.  He had his hands full.  That memoir by his assistant clearly showed how besieged he was.  In his later years, I read that each day, he would have to decline more than 20 invitations.  It is a wonder that he replied to me at all. 

By 1992, I was deep into studying the history that my formal education never taught me.  I read Howard Zinn’s and David Stannard’s work and learned unsavory truths about American heroes and saints such as Christopher Columbus, Junípero Serra, George Washington, etc. 

When I saw Ed in Manufacturing Consent, I knew who he was by then and was a fan.  I cannot recall any one particular event, but as I read LOOT each month, I began to gain an appreciation for Ed’s writings.  They were clear and straightforward, and Ed’s dry wit was regularly in evidence.  In 1992, Ed published his Beyond Hypocrisy, which was openly humorous, with his Doublespeak Dictionary.  A political cartoonist illustrated Beyond Hypocrisy, which was never the case for Noam’s books. Noam was not that kind of writer.  I thought that Ed was also a better writer than Noam was, and I slowly fell in love with Ed’s work.  When LOOT went out of business in 1994, I then subscribed to Z Magazine, and for the next generation, I looked forward to Ed’s monthly articles in Z.  Ed covered a wide range of topics in Z, but always with an emphasis on the media. 

In 1995, Ed published Triumph of the Market, which was largely a compendium of his Z articles.  In 1997, with Robert McChesney, Ed published Global Media: The Missionaries of Global Capitalism, in which they presciently warned about the rise of the Internet.  In 1999, Ed published The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader, which was again a compendium of essays that Ed published in Z and elsewhere, during that prodigious decade of writing.  Global Media, published when Ed was 72, was the last large book that Ed published in his life.  He concentrated on essays after that and he acquired a permanent co-author soon afterward, David Peterson, who capably carried Ed’s spears for the rest of Ed’s life.  The day before Ed died, he talked with David about future projects.

Ed became my writing role model, and like Ed did, I am trying to get my most time-consuming writings done before I am 70 and the wind starts coming out of my sails.