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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https://mavmedia.substack.com/

Another Me: Living with an Alter Ego

Eugene Michael Scribner was my journalistic Id, a liberated alter ego whose satire, criticisms and transgressive observations on sports, politics, media, drinking and “mass mental derangement” would appear in newspapers for 27 years. 

By Greg Guma

Sometimes I needed to be someone else to express how or what I really felt. Eugene Michael Scribner began as the central character in a science fiction novella about a disillusioned reporter who uncovers a mind control conspiracy. But he soon escaped from the page and became a separate voice. 

His origin story was written in 1971 while I was recovering from depression, and set in a distant future when computers were assembling a history of the time before they took over. Mainly, it was an extended flashback to an earlier “age of tranquility,” a time when television was erasing the line between illusion and reality, and psychedelic drugs were used for social control.

It expressed a frustration with hypocrisy, stupidity, and my own fecklessness, plus foreboding about the growing ability to manipulate human consciousness. I also imagined encounters with a politician who becomes a media-savvy demagogue. Was it a premonition of Trump, whom I knew in Queens as a teenager, or Bernie Sanders, whom I would encounter for the first time less than a year later? Or just a lucky guess.

Anyway, about two years later Eugene took a step into the real world with a “gonzo” journalism feature about being a stoned young bureaucrat attending a conference on aging. A new journalism experiment published in The Vermont Freeman, an alternative paper, it was inspired by Hunter Thompson’s Rolling Stone stories, and presented opinions and insights I couldn’t comfortably express on the job. 

        EMS, as I called him, was my journalistic Id, a liberated alter ego whose satire, criticisms and transgressive observations on sports, politics, media, drinking and “mass mental derangement” would appear in newspapers for the next 27 years.* Only a very few people, mostly editors, knew I was doing it.

In 1999, his last print byline was on a cover story for The Vermont Times, thanks to its editor, Shay Totten. “Presidential Death Match 2000” was a media analysis of the campaign, complete with fake movie descriptions based on various candidates: Al Gore as a struggling cyborg in “Millenium Man,” Wesley Clark in “Full Mental Jacket,” and Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump, and Ross Perot as a team of oddball independents in “Mission Improbable.” 

It also synopsized an imaginary feature film called Momentum. In this “future blockbuster,” a Trump-like Michael Douglas villain tries to steal the election from Kevin Costner, a senator and former basketball player. Schwarzenegger, here a wrestler-turned-talk-show-host and third party insurgent, saves the day by preventing Costner’s assassination at the convention and impaling Douglas on a replica of the Statue of Liberty. The point was that politics and entertainment were merging, and it might be less dangerous to fund dystopian movie fantasies than continue spending so much advertising money to manipulate reality.

In summer 1978, Eugene burst into the Vanguard Press, initially as a field correspondent for coverage of stock car racing. In a background memo, inserted into the piece, he began with an insult:

“Guma, you party hack, what do you know about racing? I’ve seen you total too many rusted hulks to believe anything you say about stock. This ain’t sizzler racing, pistonhead… Anyway, here are the notes you wanted (and I better be paid this time). 

“First, remember that stock car racing started in the south in the 1940s as a redneck’s way of knowledge; you didn’t need strength, just speed and guts. The south was just about the hottest car buying area in the country then, and it didn’t take long for Detroit to figure it out (and exploit it). Pontiac stepped into stock in ‘55 and soon the Speed Image took over.

     “I hardly have to say that it’s a man’s man’s world to the core. Talking about sexism at the track is like spitting into a hot exhaust.” 

And so on.

EMS was a darker, more uninhibited me, a jaded tough talker who supposedly didn’t care what anyone thought. He was cynical about politics, intrigued by cultural dynamics, and willing to reveal himself in ways I wasn’t. In one of the countless “special” sections we published to attract ads from various business sectors — fashion, cars, kids, and so on, I decided to have him cover as many bars as possible. We called the feature “Sex and Drugs and Disco: Confessions of a Barfly.”

“If news assignments could kill,” it began, “I wouldn’t be sitting up, drunk and stoned, trying to explain why some bars make it and others fade away. But I’m not dead yet, despite an eight-day binge which began at Rasputin’s, a college ‘meating place’ renowned for its long lines, and continued in Winooski and Montpelier. 

“I’m just wasted and still unable to answer the basic question. What are cult bars and who goes to them?”

In a back to school special called ”Into the ‘80s,” I gave Eugene free reign in a long feature about the possible return of the military draft. The subhead telegraphed its viewpoint: “Is this any way to start a decade?”

Eugene’s voice was more blunt and funny than mine at the time; as editor, I often went for gravitas, especially in weekly editorials. EMS embellished versions of my own experiences with a casual, irreverent style.

“I’m not worried for myself,” he confessed, “I long ago went through my own paranoia over being ‘called’ by Uncle Sam. He wasn’t a cliche then, just a bad joke. My initial solution, since I was already in Vermont, was to slip quietly across the border into Canada. Over 50,000 young men took similar routes during the Vietnam era.” 

Later, he revealed how his father had pulled strings to get him a medical deferment, and what he saw during his pre-induction physical. It began with a bus ride “to a place with high fences a lot of guns. There they were put in a classroom and told they were no longer in the United States.” Then he explained what he thought about the history of conscription, proposed “national service” legislation, and War Hawk politicians who wanted “a bigger military, cruise missiles, a freer CIA, and a lot more nuclear bombs in Europe.” 

A righteous, well-documented screed, it concluded with this:

“If you’ve been arrested or are in some way morally or medically impaired, you may not have to worry. But you might want to anyway. You might not want to see your privacy invaded, your occupation selected, and your ‘sacrifice’ for your country determined by the Hawks. After the decade of ME, you might be thawing out from psychic numbness and want to confront the war machine. 

“In the past, we’ve fueled the American Dream with ourselves. Maybe that dream is over. If nothing else, it would be a better way to begin a decade.”

Public Occurrence, 1975
EMS does an interview.

        Despite the extreme opinions, there was little reaction. This suggested that it was possible to say almost anything about national politics. But when the insults were directed closer to home, the reaction could be immediate and threatening. That’s why the Vanguard stopped running restaurant reviews; negative reviews were a headache for the struggling ad department.

        Then Eugene went too far with a story that took aim at multiple targets, including the merchandising of sports, the state’s push for “four season” tourism, and even the town of Stowe. I think it was the last one that really upset the local powers-that-be. 

Top Notch, a popular ski resort, was hosting a high profile tennis tournament for the second year in 1979, and despite enjoying the sport myself as both participant and observer, everything else about the event bothered me. Especially all the related branding and advertising — for beers, cars, wines, tennis gear, jewelry, sneakers, and its prime sponsor English Leather. I headlined the story “The Selling of a Tournament.”

“Stowe is not just a place — it’s a product,” it began. “And this week the product has been marketing its newest line of summer fun.” The goal was satire, but I underestimated how personally residents might take it when I called Stowe “basically a collection of luxury homes and resorts,” a community that didn’t “just have a name — it has a logo.” Specially produced signs were on display all over town. To hammer the point home, I quoted a telling remark overheard in a local bar: “We’ve all got to sell Stowe.”

Since I followed tennis, it was a decent report on several matches, and especially the rivalry between top seeds Jimmy Connors and Tim Gullikson. But my actual targets were the commercialization of sports, tourism’s negative impacts on Vermont, and the owner of the resort.

“As the lady said, we’ve all got to sell Stowe,” wrote Eugene. “And the synthesis of men’s cologne, Jimmy Connors, and a leisure world community in which there is plenty of farmland but few farmers or cows, is a gimmick of tourism whose time has definitely arrived. 

“For that reason, I’m not going to talk about Art Kreizel’s failure to install a permanent service building with showers and toilets for the players, or to obtain approval for a waterline. And I’m not going to dwell on the Top Notch owner’s angry response to Health Department criticisms or the relaxing of environmental regulations by the District 5 Environmental Commission. That kind of muckraking would be in a bad taste.

“Instead I’m just going to mention that the Sweet-Smelling Top Notch Without Snow Jimmy Connors $75,000 Purse is a harbinger of things to come. And the main thing is the selling of year-round fun in the mountains.

“Advantage tourism, farmlands love.”

Within days, The Stowe Reporter issued a scathing editorial, going after the Vanguard and its imaginary reporter.  The Chamber of Commerce took it even further, banning our publication from local distribution. 

It came as a shock, but was also somewhat satisfying to see the strong reaction. The publishers were understandably upset. It was only one town, however, and ski resorts were not yet significant advertisers. Even bad publicity was exposure, as well as a sign that the Vanguard Press was making a mark.

* For a more recent online Scribner article, check out Millennium II: Launch and Casting the President

Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptions

From the Ides of March to mass media’s Big Six: Since 2016, the term “fake news” has been weaponized in a series of misleading attacks. And hard as it is to believe, the targets have been mainly what used to be called mainstream media. But the problem didn’t start with Trump. Here’s an excerpt from a talk on the topic at UVM’s Alumni House.