Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Detroit writer Marc Etter’s novel “The Young Maestro” came out this week. Published by Westphalia, it’s now available on Amazon.

On an introductory page, Etter wrote:

IN MEMORY OF…

 Dr. John Watanen, Jr. (1936-1998)

Professor of English

Northern Michigan University

Etter was one of my Bohemian buddies at Northern in the late 60s and Dr. Watanen was my professor, too — a giant of a man of Scandinavian descent with arms like Viking warship oars and the wild red beard of the Finnish tribes of Rus, where the word Russia comes from.

Everybody called him “the Professor.” He took us young wannabe writers under his wing, often joining our late-night bull sessions at our favorite off-campus bar.

It was the Professor who first suggested that I might want to consider becoming a newspaper reporter after graduation. He said lots of famous writers started out that way… Hemingway, Vonnegut. He said it was a good place to learn the most important thing about writing — how to do it when you don’t feel like doing it, or your mind is blank, like when you’re hung over bad, approaching deadline, and the city editor is watching you and keeps glancing up at the clock.

Now fast forward a half century and it’s Saturday morning here at the World Headquarters of Westphalia Publishing in a Denver suburb on another hot, cloudless day. The rivers are drying up. The air is heavy with the smoke of fires in the mountains and along the front range. It’s worse in Europe where they don’t have air conditioning.

Deadline for my weekly column is not until midnight Wednesday, but already I’m feeling the pressure. I’m not hung over. It’s just that I don’t know what to write about, what to say…

That it’s Culley Jane’s birthday today and now she’s as old as me?

That the cats are looking out the window?

That we’re expecting company?

I’ve been thinking about writing about Karl Marx.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been struggling through the density of Gabriel Rockhill’s 2025 book, “WHO PAID THE PIPERS OF WESTERN MARXISM,” subtitled, “The Intellectual World War: Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry.”

The book is mainly about Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979), whose 1964 “One-Dimensional Man” was required reading in my political science class in college and in all the revolutionary movements taking shape in the late 60s, from the Panthers and the SDS to the SLA and SNVCC (Snick) and to the hippy communes, collectively known as the “counterculture,” or the “New Left.”

Marcuse was the guiding light of it all. He was featured in all the mainstream press. He mentored Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman. Unlike the “Old Left” of Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” which cooperated with the bourgeoisie to build the transportation, energy and school systems you needed in order to enjoy an “advanced industrial civilization” with air conditioning and color tv, Marcuse said to tear it down. Women burned bras. Guys burned draft cards. Demonstrators burned cities. Rage against the Machine.

The machine was advanced industrial civilization, itself, destroying the environment to make new shiny objects of desire for the price of going along to get along, ticky tacky houses all in a row for the price of your discriminating soul and mind.

Although a self-avowed Marxist, Marcuse was no friend of communist Russia, either. There, too, he insisted, the ruling machine oppressed, only there, he said, the bourgeoisie  maintained control through violence and gulags instead of carrots at the end of a stick.

Little did I know at the time that Marcuse was part of an Anglo-American psychological warfare operation funded and run through official government channels and major foundations and that he had been connected ever since first joining the OSS early during WWII where he got to know the Dulles brothers.

I didn’t know any of this hidden element of the dialectic before I started reading Rockhill’s book. Now I don’t know what to say, like speechless with deadline approaching and the city editor is glancing up at the clock.

Like AI-generated content on Facebook, or our President getting ready for the Fourth-of-July, what’s real? That Culley Jane’s birthday is today? That we’re expecting company?

The computer screen in front of me is a perfect reflection of my mind — blank.

I don’t know how I’m going to make deadline this week. I hope the Professor was right and I can just get 'er done, so's long as I keep it between the lines.