Hal CrowtherBiography
Journalist, Essayist
(1945 -)
"Swollen corporations rule more or less unchallenged. When a big one falls as Enron fell, it's like a missing tooth in the blinding corporate smile that mesmerizes America. For a moment anyone who cares to look can see all the infection and corruption in the hungry mouth that threatens to swallow us whole. Expect a brief glimpse, before the Big Smile is repaired by the best oral surgeons money can buy. But what we see, and the way we respond to what we see, is more critical to America's survival than the fate of a million Islamic terrorists."
Hal Crowther’s writing career has had him wearing several hats, including film/drama critic for the Buffalo News, media critic for Newsweek, and writer for Time. He was executive editor for the Spectator in Raleigh, NC from 1984 until 1989. He has written for both film and television, and writes columns forThe Independent Weekly and The Progressive Populist.
Crowther’s essays cover whatever he feels strongly about, and as such his topics run the gamut from the Enron scandal, to living conditions in Cuba, to rape charges against the Duke University lacrosse team. As the issues he writes on vary, so too do the points he makes in each article. His recent trips to Prague and Cuba shed insight on the way Americans, and America as a whole, are perceived by other people. An article recalling the myth of Robin Hood shows the disparity between those who have in this country, and those who have not. His anti-war activism concerning Iraq comes through in powerful prose, as when he writes, “If there ever was a deal-breaker, a faith-breaker between a president and the people who elected him (or, in this case, allowed him to take office when his election was in question), it’s this bloody-minded travesty of a war that Bush concocted out of far-Right obsessions and cooked intelligence, lied flagrantly to legitimize and then pursued to such a tragic, pitiful cul-de-sac. Such poor judgment yoked to such abysmal incompetence is unprecedented in all presidential history known to me.”
Even Crowther’s own profession, journalism, is not above reproach in his critical lens. He recently wrote, “As Murrow demonstrated in 1954 and Moyers is telling us now, any journalism of substance has a moral, judgmental component. Two sides, sure - but rarely two sides of equal merit. And at the point when the side with the power begins to ignore the facts, the laws, and other people’s rights – a point Bush passed years ago – anyone with special knowledge, access or influence is ethically obligated to tell the public what he knows and what he thinks. No matter who proclaims it, “objectivity” that ducks this responsibility is a contemptible sham.”
His essays are not all of a political nature, however. Crowther speaks on the human condition in his 2005 collection of various essays entitled Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South. In one article about writer Thomas Wolfe, he asserts, “As a people, Americans don’t think like Wolfe anymore. They’re hive creatures who network and conform, and practice petty avarice and sell themselves cheap.” Of an essay on sex in the South, he says, “Sex will never be dignified, but it can and should be private…Though we share 99.4 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, our exclusive .006 percent must be responsible for romantic love, idealized marriage, erotic nuance and the hominid novelties we call privacy and dignity.” More information can be found at http://www.halcrowther.com .
My friend Wilbur Ferry used to say that you could classify people by their response to the verse in Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"----"I was walkin' down a ribbon of highway, saw a sign, it said 'No Trespassin'/ But on the other side, it didn't say nothin', that side was made for you and me." If it scandalizes you, you're a Republican; if it makes you smile and want to clap, there's hope for you. What starts a person one way or the other is hard to say. Mencken claimed dissent was in his blood. "My ancestors for 300 years back were all bad citizens," he said once. "They were always against what the rest were for." I came from people like that, dazzled by their own opinions and impervious to nearly everyone else's. My father taught me to resist authority but also, as something of a bully, provided a specific authority for me to resist.
I can't remember when I didn't root for the underdog, whether it was sports, geopolitics or two mongrels scrapping in the street. But my political commitments were theoretical until Vietnam forced everyone to make a choice. If I had one radicalizing moment, it was covering the police riot at Columbia in 1968. Some members of the faculty tried to protect the SDS students who occupied the art building, and I saw tenured scholars get their foreheads split and their eyeglasses crunched into their skulls, and I understood that we're all potential victims, that middle-class privilege doesn't exempt us. If you give in to big lies and sick power, your turn will come. To wake up a young person who doesn't seem to understand, get him to read biographies of Gene Debs and Paul Robeson, see how America looked to them. If he still doesn't get it, you've probably lost him. Bless him and send him on his way. He'll probably be a huge success.
