History behind Timberline (or “Politics is Hell”)
This novel is largely set in the summer of 1971. What was happening that year?
Ronald Reagan ruled California as a strict law-and-order Governor. His targets included student protesters at Berkeley, agricultural workers unionizing in the vineyard and farm fields, and bikers like the Hells Angels.
President Richard Nixon, finishing his first term, was obsessively plotting covert military operations with the help of his national security advisor Henry Kissinger.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, already 36 years in office, was crusading against the American left, especially the Black Panthers, and the anti-war Weathermen. Hoover’s preferred weapon was a “dirty tricks” branch known as COINTELPRO.
Future Unabomber Ted Kaczynski resigned his professorship at the University of California Berkeley to live as a hermit. Charismatic preacher and future mass suicide fanatic Jim Jones was spreading his ministry around the world from his Peoples Temple in California’s Redwood Valley.
The country was deeply divided over the never-ending Vietnam War but maintained a middle-road conservative worldview, as shown by the continued popularity of right-wing celebrities like actor John Wayne and comedian Bob Hope. A wholesome troupe of young singers called Up with People! sang hopeful songs of peace and freedom while being underwritten by corporations deeply invested in continuing the war.
On the left, the early hope of the anti-war movement had turned sour after so many years of continued fighting in Vietnam. The largely peaceful SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) had morphed into the Weathermen, best known for their terrorist bombing campaigns and a dynamite accident in Greenwich Village that killed many of its members.
The darkly pessimistic mood of the left was best expressed by a proliferation of underground comic books celebrating revolution and anarchism, with titles like Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural and Young Lust, among many others. Timberline is my fictional addition to that list.