- Title: Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
- Author: Sean Howe
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Hachette
- Pages: 432
Alternative news, conspiracy-peddling, a march on the U.S. Capitol, guns, bombs, paranoia, domestic terrorism. … When it comes to recent events south of the border, reading Sean Howe’s Agents of Chaos can feel like entering a kind of mirror world.
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s, by Sean Howe.Supplied
But the era it depicts is the late sixties to late seventies, and the anti-establishment violence and resistance is coming from the left, not the right. Importantly, the precipitating circumstances are real, not concocted – namely, the Vietnam War and the continuing fight for civil rights.
Plenty of books have been written about that time and its dominant players – the Yippies, Hippies, Zippies, Weathermen, Panthers Black and White et al. – but few capture it in such daily, granular detail. Even for those who think they know it, the darkness and unrelenting mayhem may come as a surprise.
Though the name is less familiar than Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin, a revolutionary-minded rabble-rouser named Tom Forçade (a pseudonym tellingly pronounced “façade” – his real name was Gary Goodson) was at the centre of that chaos for much of a decade, until his suicide by gunshot in 1978 at the age of 33.
Forçade first rose to prominence as head of the Underground Press Syndicate (its confusing acronym: UPS), a consortium created to bring the many, and proliferating, counterculture newspapers then extant under one umbrella with the goal of sharing editorial content and securing national advertising deals (the sole survivor is Vancouver’s venerable Georgia Straight).
Slippery, mercurial, controlling and brimming with contradictions, Forçade was a natural showman. In early days, his uniform of choice was a broad-brimmed hat, moccasins and all-black (later, all-white) suits. He rolled up at the 1970 presidential commission on obscenity, where he was to speak, in his stretch Cadillac limo, which he’d painted the colours of the Viet Cong flag, dressed as a priest and calling himself “the Reverend Thomas King Forçade.”
Sixty-two books to read this fall
Despite his studied flamboyance, he became apoplectic when people tried to take his photograph. (Photos do exist of him, but a disappointment of Howe’s book is that, despite its eye-catching cover art, it has no photographs at all.)
Forçade was an early adopter of pie-throwing as political action (the first of these, fittingly for the times, was made of cottage cheese; shaving cream and fruit came later), and of the gonzo journalism that would become associated with Hunter S. Thompson, who once threw the Forçade off a yacht – which they’d chartered with the intention of disrupting the America’s Cup in Newport, .R.I. – for “being too outrageous.”
He kept a strategic toe in both counterculture and capitalist realms. He was adamant that Abbie Hoffman should, on principle, give his stick-it-to-the-Man Steal this Book away for free, but he also demanded a $5,000 editorial fee for his help with it. When Hoffman made a counteroffer of $1,500, Forçade was livid, declaring “I don’t work for hippie wages.” The two became enemies for life.
Behaviour like that, combined with the fact he had a business degree, had served in the air force and kept short hair under his ostentatious hat, meant he was often suspected of being an undercover agent.
When, by the mid-seventies, the underground press found its clout waning – the result of the Vietnam War ending and the mainstream media appropriating its tactics during Watergate – Forçade founded marijuana-advocacy magazine High Times and started smuggling actual drugs from Mexico and Colombia. Combined, these ventures made him a fortune.
Still, he kept making forays into other realms. Besotted with the nascent punk scene, Forçade used stalkerish means to woo Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious into making a documentary about the Sex Pistols’ first U.S. Tour. Put off by his intensity – which is saying something – both rebuffed him (Rotten assumed he was CIA).
As much as he’s the focus, Forçade feels as elusive in the pages of Howe’s book as he apparently was in real life – a life that ended early and tragically, following extreme bouts of depression. That sense of absence comes partly from the fact that Forçade’s words are mostly given to us indirectly, through the reminiscences of friends, associates, ex-wives and FBI files (which show that his lifelong paranoia about surveillance was well-founded).
Forçade has nevertheless had a specific, enduring impact on American journalism. When CNN sued the White House to reinstate reporter Jim Acosta after his credentials were revoked during Trump era, key to the network’s eventual success was a suit Forçade brought 40 years previously demanding access for oppositional journalists.
Agents of Chaos is completist, and, as such, often a dense read not easily undertaken in long stretches. Someone with just a passing interest in the era may find it overwhelming. But for those happy to get into the weeds – both kinds, in this case – it can be immersive, eye-opening dip into a world discombobulatingly like our own, and yet so different.