Maverick Origins: What’s in a Name?

Although the slide toward autocracy has been my recent focus, I’m also revising and releasing selections from Witness to the Fall, a collection of relevant previously published work — autobiographical reminiscences, as well as essays published in recent years. The introduction is below, followed by links to several chapters.

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I’ve been publicly sharing research and my views on local, national and global issues for more than half a century. At first in a high school paper and university magazine, then professionally in newspapers, magazines and online. My earliest regular column, for a Vermont daily, appeared in 1969 in the midst of the Vietnam war and cultural revolution of that era. I called it “Polarities in Our Time.”

About nine years later, when an “alternative” weekly was launched in Burlington, I tried again in a column called “Immediate Release.” It leaned more toward reportage — enterprise journalism and interviews — but continued to reflect subjects of personal interest, regardless of whether they were attracting public attention at the time. When I became editor of that paper, I dropped the column but wrote editorials weekly.

In 1983, after leaving the Vermont Vanguard Press, I syndicated a column that appeared in several newspapers — until taking a break, and an extended journey across the country and through Mexico. It was time to reflect and rethink my assumptions. 

More than a decade passed until I wrote an ongoing column again. The opportunity emerged when I returned to Vermont after several years in New Mexico and California, plus travels and life in Denmark and Germany. This time it was for another weekly. I called the reports “Maverick Chronicles.”

The name was chosen for several reasons. In 1985, I’d launched Maverick Bookstore and Gallery, which became a lively oasis in Burlington’s Old North End for several years during the Sanders era. The name felt appropriate, philosophically and also because the Lloyds, my son’s family on Robin Lloyd’s side, were actually related to the Maverick clan in Texas. 

Samuel Maverick was a pioneer with a big personality and the origin of the modern usage of the word. The official story is that he won a ranch in a card game and afterward declined to brand his steers. Unbranded steers became known around San Antonio as mavericks.

The TV show Maverick was pure fiction, but Brett Maverick was a cheeky anti-hero and personal favorite in my youth. There was also a real and large, real Maverick clan. Lola Maverick married Robin’s grandfather, who became famous briefly as a so-called “Communist millionaire.” Lola helped organize the Ford Peace Ship before World War I and co-founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Some of their children were activists as well, including Robin’s dad Bill. I would eventually become editor of Toward Freedom, the publication he founded in 1952.

 

So, when I thought about launching an independent business, as well as continuing my journalism and peace work, using Maverick to help define it felt apt. On the first anniversary of the bookstore, a group of modern Texas Mavericks sent a ceramic calf as a gift.  Since running the bookstore, which later relocated downtown and eventually merged with the local peace center’s book business, I have used it as a handle and publishing imprint. In 1997, “Maverick Chronicles” began a two year run as a weekly column in The Vermont Times, a weekly successor to The Vermont Vanguard Press. 

In the decades since then, I’ve written hundreds of essays for a variety of outlets, online and in print. You can find many of them on websites like the Center for Global Research, Toward Freedom, Truthout, VTDigger, ZNetwork, Muckrack and UPI. Books are available from Amazon. Now, along with the current series of posts released on Substack, I’m reviving Maverick Chronicles as a kicker and framework one more time.

A Writer’s Life

Even back in grade school, I felt the urge to communicate. Art and music came easily enough, but writing was irresistible. It felt like a compulsion. Over time, through economic and social necessity, I added the roles of editor and manager to the mix, and at times agent of change. Taking shape gradually, my goal was responsible advocacy, informed by a search for truth and a commitment to social justice and right livelihood. Those efforts, beliefs, commitments, and aspirations led to memorable encounters, journeys and insights I try to share — before I forget.

As Bill Maher once said, “With age comes wisdom, but only if you can remember it.”

I started writing stories at about 10, mostly short plays and satirical skits, performed in classes at holidays or special events. Next, as editor of The Lance, the student paper at Holy Cross High School, I took an early shot at opinion writing. Before graduating, reviews were appearing in a Long Island daily. At Syracuse University there was some newswriting and a supplement for the Daily Orange, plus essays and satire for Vintage, the campus magazine I designed and edited. 

In Bennington, still 21, it was a stretch to manage the daily newspaper’s darkroom and write everything from accidents to features on a deadline. But ultimately the Bennington Banner was a priceless training opportunity, time to get past any writer’s block.

After that on-the-job training, also an invaluable introduction to Vermont life, I was hired by Bennington College, where I mostly wrote press releases and covered promotional events, but also edited a quarterly, and experienced professional alienation for the first time. Luckily, the job didn’t last long and was followed by a mentally healthy shift into counseling and public service. Before long, however, the management at Champlain Work and Training Programs figured out that I could also write grants, which led to consulting work with school systems. Eventually, I wrote a federal grant for myself, which led to a campus office and graduate degree at the University of Vermont.

By 1975, I was teaching journalism and planning skills at the fledgling Burlington College, and running a local used bookstore called The Frayed Page with other members of a collective. The store was an organizing center for the growing anti-nuclear movement and spun off a magazine, culminating in a people’s history of the state. That eventually grew into Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History. I also freelanced for news services, magazines and community papers until a group of UVM grads launched two alternative weeklies in one year. The second presented a golden opportunity to use much of what I had learned about journalism and Vermont so far.

During my years with the Vanguard Press, I produced more than 50 cover stories and hundreds of news stories and features. For the first time since college I could experiment with New Journalism and test boundaries, trying anything the publishers allowed, writing first drafts of stories that would stay with me, developing and evolving for years. I also exposed public and private misdeeds, and interviewed everyone from prisoners and protesters to presidential wannabes.

Beyond that, I was part of a movement that transformed Burlington, produced a new Vermont political party, and launched the career of Bernie Sanders. That story was retold in two books, The People’s Republic and Managing Chaos. For decades my work has included an eclectic mixture of freelance assignments and investigations, trips, trials and profiles, syndicated columns, study guides, documentary scripts, candidate speeches, ad campaigns, position papers, conference addresses, radio broadcasts, legislative testimony, quarterly and annual reports, and grants for just causes from immigrant rights to nuclear sanity and environmental justice. Persuasive communication was part of almost every job.

Eventually, there were also 15 books, which rarely paid that well. My favorite is Spirits of Desire, a paranormal mystery set in the 1870s. In contrast, ghost writing was lucrative, though sometimes frustrating. After spending months looking deeply into a subject, despite being Buddhist it was tough to stay unattached when someone else took the credit.

Since February I’ve been thinking and writing about the slide toward an American-style autocracy. Going forward, some essays will continue to look at current events, but there will also be selections from Witness to the Fall, a collection of previously published work for periodicals and websites. I’ll share autobiographical reminiscences from the 1970s and 1980s, and articles developed and published during the last 15 years.

New essays on current events will be posted as the struggle to preserve democracy and human rights continues.

Witness to the Fall — Chapters

Unstuck in Time: When “The Plan” Blew Up

Bennington, Vonnegut and a Campus Breakdown

Consciousness & Conscience: Finding Right Livelihood

Lessons of Buddhism, Bernie and Public Service

The Rise of the Electronic Messiah, Part One

The Rise of the Electronic Messiah, Part Two

Democratic Distemper: Carter and the Trilateral Commission

Coming Up: Conspiracies and Reagan Myths

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Beyond the Abyss: Facing Denial and Dictatorship

As I was finishing Nuclear War, Annie Applebaum’s troubling book on what the descent into an apocalyptic nuclear exchange might look like, a movie variation aired on Showtime. In the movie, The Sum of All Fears, rookie CIA analyst Jack Ryan, played by a young Ben Affleck, survives a nuclear attack on Baltimore and saves us from World War III at the last minute. He does it by speaking frankly with Russia’s president. Sure, that could happen.

In the book’s granular and more realistic scenario, civilization is destroyed after North Korea initiates a “bolt out of the blue” — aka surprise — attack. It’s a dire warning about the utter insanity of such an unwinnable war.

This reminded me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s lament, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.” His point was to warn about the danger of fixating on the negative, losing perspective and becoming too cynical about what we see. These days we need to take that to heart.

On the other hand, it’s also dangerous not to recognize uncomfortable realities that stare us in the face. Despite the relief we might feel when engrossed in the Hollywood version of a catastrophe averted, most people sense that in the real world no hero will come to the rescue. Such wishful thinking is a temporary escape into denial. Unfortunately, millions choose that.

 

Denial often distorts how we address modern problems, important things like preserving what remains of democracy across the planet. Even before Trump’s re-election, at least 70 percent of the world's population — about 5.7 billion — was living under dictatorships, according to a report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute. This should be shocking, but it’s mostly just ignored.

The late 1980s and early 1990s did bring on a surge in democratization movements, which challenged many dictatorships and led to a transition to more democratic governance in several countries. But since then dictatorships have been on the rise worldwide.

Democratic decline has been most dramatic in the Pacific region, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It’s a sad fact that the number of countries currently experiencing democratic setbacks, or becoming autocracies, has increased since 2010. One popular euphemism is illiberal democracy.

On most lists, more than 50 countries are now classified as dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. It may sound like an exaggeration, but here’s a list —  from the more to least free: Mali, Mauritania, Kuwait, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Angola, Iraq, Jordan, Nicaragua, Gabon, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Russia, Niger, Qatar, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Republic of the Congo, Cambodia, Rwanda, Comoros, Eswatini, Guinea, Myanmar, Oman, Vietnam, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, Togo, Cameroon, Venezuela, Djibouti, United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Guinea-Bissau, Belarus, Sudan, Bahrain, China, Iran, Eritrea, Burundi, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Yemen, Tajikistan, Equatorial Guinea, Laos, Turkmenistan, Chad, Syria, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and North Korea. You may dispute the order, but few would call them democracies.

The thing is, you won’t find the United States on such dictatorship lists. But at this point it ought to be. That’s another example of denial. Despite the mounting evidence, most Americans persist in believing we simply have very conservative leadership at the moment, or that it might become a “constitutional crisis.” They think that diplomacy, compromise and orderly transitions remain possible, even with those who no longer believe in these ideas. 

Both President Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance have made their position quite clear: the most dangerous enemies, they say, are the  “enemies within.” As a result, it seems foolish not to realize that they and faithful members of the MAGA movement will do just about anything to defeat, prosecute, jail or even eliminate these “threats.” And the list is growing.

The real question is what kind of dictatorship we have, and where things go from here. We don’t know for certain that Trump and Vladimir Putin have a formal alliance, but there is little evidence to contradict, and much to confirm that grim conclusion. The latest clue is Trump’s so-called “final” proposal for Ukraine’s acquiescence to one-sided peace terms with Russia. 

This new partnership also appears to include Hungary, Turkey, Israel and other client states. Accepting that there is a new global authoritarian alliance, a veritable league of despots, is painful but necessary. The main lingering question is how China fits in.

Maybe the confusion stems from the fact that America’s tyranny is not one of the more typical kinds. It’s not a military dictatorship or a one-party state, controlled by the leadership of a single political party. Republicans have congressional majorities, but no longer much practical influence. Instead, the nation has drifted into a personalist dictatorship, one controlled by a single individual who claims absolute power, defies the courts, ignores congress, dismantles agencies and institutions, rejects equality and human rights, and enforces his will through fear. He doesn’t govern, he rules — however it suits him day to day. And we also have state media in the form of Fox news, excusing and rationalizing most of it.

It looks like a throwback to Roman or Russian empire style. Or if you like, old England. In what is known as the Eleven Year Tyranny, from 1629 to 1640, King Charles I was an absolute monarch who paid no attention to parliament. In fact, during the third year of his reign, he dissolved it. Charles had reached a simplistic conclusion: as long as he avoided war, he didn’t need a legislature.

Like Trump, King Charles thought he had the right to make and change laws at will. Assuming he had a divine right to rule, he believed that those who disagreed with him were in contempt of God. But his refusal to take advice or follow any laws eventually undermined his popularity and led to a horrific civil war, the bloodiest ever fought in Britain.

Another example of denial is the idea that Trump is incompetent and impulsive, with no overarching game plan. Maybe that’s comforting for those who think he’s not capable of being an effective tyrant. When Bill Maher recently met with him, the comedian expressed pleasant surprise to find that Trump wasn’t crazy. “A crazy person doesn't live in the White House,” he reported glibly on his show. “A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.” Is that any better? In fact, it’s probably more dangerous. It makes him a high functioning sociopath.

Maher’s account suggests that nothing Trump says and claims to want can be trusted. He was apparently seduced, however, coming away with the feeling that Trump might even “accept me as a possible friend.” Mission accomplished. But sociopaths don’t have friends, or any regard for others. Their characteristic behaviors are lies, law and ruling breaking, and a lack of concern for the safety of anyone else. In this sense at least, Trump is consistent.

The good news is that, more than likely, it won’t end well for America’s wannabe king. He may not be assassinated, but there are many ways to exit as ugly as he arrived. 

The average length of a dictator’s reign is from 10 to 13 years. Some cling to power for decades, but most are overthrown much sooner, and a few die of natural causes. Military dictatorships are usually less stable, tending on average to last only about five years. Trump’s reign will probably run for at least eight, not counting his Mar-a-lago interregnum.

In 1649, Charles I was ultimately sentenced to death and beheaded in public. About a century later, in Russia, Peter III was likely assassinated, and, in 1917, Nicholas II was gunned down by soldiers with his wife, four daughters, and son before the revolution. 

Italy’s Benito Mussolini remained in power for more than twenty years, but was shot, then hung in public in 1945. As WWII ended, Japan’s Hideki Tojo, Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and Romania’s Ion Antonescu were all tried and executed for war crimes. Hitler avoided that fate by committing suicide; his “1,000 year reich” had lasted only twelve.

During the 1960s, Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo Molina was gunned down; his assassins included one of his generals. In South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem was bayoneted and shot. In the 1970s, Park Chung-hee of South Korea was also shot — by a former friend during a dinner party. Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea was tried for genocide, embezzlement, and treason, then executed.

Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza was ousted, but then shot down in 1980 when guerilla gunmen caught up with him. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was ultimately put on trial for crimes against the state and publicly executed in 1989. In the next decade, Liberia’s Samuel Doe was tortured for 12 hours before he was killed.

The big three unhappy endings in the 21st century so far have been Laurent Kabila, the Congo ruler who was shot by one of his own bodyguards; Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was convicted of war crimes in Baghdad and hung; and Muammar Gadhafi, who ruled Libya for 42 years before being toppled by rebels, tracked down and executed on sight.

This is by no means a complete list, but does illustrate how things could go for Trump. More likely, he’ll attempt to hold onto power after his legal term ends, but find that resistance and civilian rule make that difficult. There could be a civil war; his most fanatic followers already wanted that after he lost in 2020. But it’s equally possible, based on his countless abuses of power, that he’ll ultimately be forced to face his own dark abyss, or perhaps flee to a safe haven in another tyrant’s domain.

Thinking Inaugurally: Wisdom, Weather and Warnings

Preview from Witness to the Fall, Part Three

Center for Global Research, January 2017

Most of the pageantry involved in the inauguration of a US president has nothing to do with the Constitution. All it actually says is that president is supposed to take the oath of office. Even the idea of swearing on a bible is just a custom, and the oath doesn’t include “so help me, God.” 
      George Washington decided to invoke God at the last minute. One president, Franklin Pierce, actually refused to swear on the “Good Book.” 
      So, technically Donald Trump could be sworn in on The Art of the Deal.
     

     The inaugural speech is also just a custom. It started when Washington thought it might be a wise idea to say a few words. He wasn’t speaking to “the people,” by the way, he was talking to Congress. But giving a speech stuck as an idea, and eventually the show was taken outside – where for the next century most of the audience couldn’t hear a word the president was saying.
     At least the world will get to hear and read Trump's address. If only everyone had been allowed to vote.
     One president died as a result of giving an address. It was 1841, and William Henry Harrison, who was 68, wanted to prove he was fit and gave his speech on a bitterly cold day without wearing an overcoat. The speech took more than two hours – the longest on record – and Harrison caught a cold. A month later he died of pneumonia.
     Aside from Lincoln, Kennedy, and Garfield, most inaugural speeches haven’t been very memorable. At times they’ve been downers. In 1857, for example, James Buchanan attacked abolitionists for making a big deal about slavery. Ulysses Grant complained about being slandered. Warren Harding and others were simply boring.
     There have been some memorable lines. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said Franklin Roosevelt. Kennedy, with an assist from several others, came up with “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
     And let's not forget George H.W. Bush, who compared freedom to a kite. Not a very high bar.
     According to scholars who have analyzed the speeches, the form has evolved. In the old days, presidents talked quite a lot about the Constitution. Now we have more “rhetorical” presidencies, meaning that the chief executive bypasses the constitution – and congress – and appeals directly to the people. The problem, which was recognized by the founding fathers, is that this can lead to demagoguery – appeals to passion rather than reason. And since Nixon we’ve had several inaugurations with leaders who offer mainly platitudes, emotional appeals, partisan and anti-intellectual attacks and human interest stories rather than evidence, facts and rational arguments.
     Since Nixon we’ve also had professional speechwriters, and an emphasis on getting as much applause as possible. Meanwhile, the reading level has dropped. The early speeches were written at the college level. Now they require only eighth grade comprehension. 
     We don’t hear much about the presidency of James Garfield, who was elected in 1880. One of the reasons was that he was shot after only four months in office, and died about two months later. But before he was inaugurated, he read over all the previous addresses to decide what to say. He found Lincoln’s speech to be the best. Who could beat this closing:
      “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
    Partway through his own research, Garfield considered not giving a speech at all. But he pressed on, and boiled down the task to the following: first a brief introduction, followed by a summary of topics recently settled, then a section on what ought to be the focus of public attention, and finally, an appeal to stand by him in the independent and vigorous execution of the law. The speeches haven’t really changed much since then. Normally, they serve to reunite people after the election, express some shared values, present some new policies, and promise that the president will stick to the job description. 
     To put it mildly, Trump is expected to break with that formula.
     In the end, Garfield’s speech didn’t match Lincoln’s. But it was eloquent and remains relevant today. He started with history, noting that before the US was formed the world didn’t believe “that the supreme authority of government could be safely entrusted to the guardianship of the people themselves.” Moving through the first century of US history, he concluded that after the Civil War people had finally “determined to leave behind them all those bitter controversies concerning things which have been irrevocably settled, and the further discussion of which can only stir up strife and delay the onward march.” 
     It was a case of wishful thinking. “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship," he continued, "is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the constitution.” But the Black vote was still be suppressed, especially in the south. So he warned, “To violate the freedom and sanctity of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which, if persisted in, will destroy the government itself.”
     A prescient warning as it turns out. With the installation of President Trump, the US faces serious threats to the freedom and sanctity of the right to vote, and other dangers that could ultimately destroy this system of government – secrecy, abuse of power, impunity, abandonment of the rule of law.
     Garfield also made another point worth repeating: No religious organization, he noted, can be “permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the National Government.”  He was talking about the Mormon Church, which was exerting considerable influence out west at the time. But there are contemporary implications.

     Apparently not yet.

     “Enterprises of the highest importance to our moral and material well-being unite us and offer ample employment of our best powers," Garfield hoped. "Let all our people leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward, and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union, win the grander victories of peace.”

      His concluding words about the end of slavery perhaps still resonate best:

        “We do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of the past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided on their opinions concerning our controversies,” he predicted. “We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation. Is it not possible for us now to make a truce with time by anticipating and accepting its inevitable verdict?”

                                                   

                                                      Witness to the Fall

                            Maverick Chronicles from Watergate to Autocracy

A progressive journalist shares stories from his youth, and explores forces that have produced a cultural counterrevolution and the rise of autocracy over the last 15 years 

After working for an exclusive college during a student revolt, Greg Guma began a journey in the 1970s that took him from government service to progressive politics, and from Watergate and the Trilateral Commission to travels across Germany and Nicaragua during the Cold War and to Fiji after a Coup. 

He edited, managed and wrote for newspapers, magazines, syndicates, radio, TV and websites for more than 50 years. Witness to the Fall contains a small selection of his work, with a focus on national and global issues. After sharing anecdotes from his 20s and 30s, Greg explores forces that have produced a cultural counterrevolution over the last 15 years — Immigration fears, disinformation campaigns, persistent racism, conspiracy theories, militarism, narcissism, religion, and social media. Along the way, he examines events that propelled Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, changes in mass media, historical whitewashing, world citizenship, the threat of cyberwar, and geopolitical misadventures from Congo to the Ukraine.

A lively synthesis of history, commentary and memoir, Witness to the Fall (formerly Maverick Chronicles) finishes with a startling investigation into an MK-ULTRA mind control program — a case study with a real victim and his CIA-funded doctor, plus a touching final essay about fatherhood.

Forthcoming

If you’d like to read and review the book prior to publication,

please email Mavmediavt@gmail.com for a PDF copy

(Content subject to change)