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.”
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| Public Occurrence, 1975 EMS does an interview. |
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
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