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This phrase apparently induces your humble narrator to, inadvertently, squirm in his chair. Singer responds with a Mephistophelean grin. He's seen that before. "You bristled. So many journalists do."
In this town, there are plenty of people who bristle. There are plenty of people who say vile things about Singer. But it's more of a challenge to unearth someone who'll call him an out-and-out liar. That'd be missing the point. "Sam drinks the Kool-Aid and that way he serves his clients better," says a former employee. "I followed Sam's lead and I drank the Kool-Aid, too." Adds a longtime government official, "Sam believes what he says. But he doesn't make any bones about the fact he's being paid to say it."
So, Singer says, "decorum" prevented him from pissing on a rug that, after all, he co-owned. "Decorum," however, didn't rule out buying a bottle of Heineken, marinating Kamer's office with it, and passing it off as urine. In the end, that worked out even better. "This goes to my belief that a good mindfuck is as good as the real thing," he says, beaming.
And this belief is a longstanding one.
In junior high, Singer would often arrive home after school to find a person whose name he would never learn yammering away in the kitchen. His mother, Margaret Singer, was an in-demand psychoanalyst. She believed therapy shouldn't be embarrassing; nobody should take on the stigma of going to some highfalutin' office for sessions. Patients sat down and talked to Margaret at her unpretentious kitchen table in the Berkeley hills.
The kid raiding the refrigerator in the background never gleaned who these people confiding their strange fantasies to his mother were. But he did pick up a lot about how to deal with them. From his mom, Singer says, he learned how to be "a hand-holder." This is why he elicits a skill for comforting a distraught CEO who knows his philandering-spurred divorce will ding his company's stock price and irk his shareholders.
But that's hardly all Singer learned from his mother. Her turn as an analyst was just a side gig. Margaret Singer's real work was serving as a UC Berkeley professor and expert on the inner workings of cults. She testified on behalf of the defense in the 1976 Patty Hearst "Trial of the Century"; she subsequently railed against the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, the Rev. Jim Jones' People's Temple, the Branch Davidians, and legions of other predatory, messianic outfits. The persistent and unchallenged narratives made by powerful manipulators, she wrote, broke men and women. This was the case with both American prisoners of war and cultists throughout time.
By the time of her death in 2003 at age 82 — she outlasted decades of death threats and related incidents, such as the release of dozens of live rats into her home — Margaret Singer was considered one of the world's leading authorities on brainwashing.
And, so, it's more than a bit jarring to hear her son boast that inducing journalists to adopt the narratives he's carefully framed — even parroting his exact words — "is a rush that's similar to sex and drugs and music."
This is not lost on Singer. But, in the self-narrative he carefully frames, he's appropriated his mother's lessons for only the noblest ends. Rather than limit the general public to one version of the truth, his work on behalf of accused corporate bad actors and alleged criminals provides the aforementioned "multiplicity of voices" necessary to allow people to make up their minds. Singer puts forth that he has co-opted the techniques of brainwashing to actually prevent brainwashing.
Well, that's a novel description of the role of a public relations specialist. A multiplicity of voices can, in this line of work, provide reasonable doubt of a client's guilt or culpability. But, more ominously, when one narrative — let's say Singer's client's preferred one — drowns out the others, that mitigates the concept of a multiplicity of voices. Then things begin looking a bit more like the situations Margaret Singer spent a lifetime researching.
And that extends to Singer's personal narrative, the one he tells your humble narrator. And himself. In Singer's view, there's no discrepancy in his relentless defense of his client, Chevron, when it blew up the city of Richmond, and relentless attacks against PG&E for two years prior blowing up another client — the city of San Bruno.
These are the facts as Singer sees them.
The city of Lata, the provincial capital of the Solomon Islands' Temotu province, is not much of a city at all. Located on the island of Nendo, it is home to 550 people, an irregularly served airstrip, and a similarly languid post office. It is one of the world's more remote locales.
And yet, in the early days of January 2008, the flickering image of Sam Singer was beamed onto its television sets. The news of an enraged tiger on Christmas Day leaping out of its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a boy, and savaging several patrons in a horrifying frenzy before expiring in a hail of police gunfire was that big.
Most stories involving escaped zoo creatures are, by definition, atypical. But Singer's subsequent campaign to clear the zoo's name is a textbook example of his aggressive style.
And this, too, Singer learned from the master. In a 2002 San Francisco Chronicle feature, 80-year-old Margaret Singer shared tumblers of Jameson's Irish Whiskey with reporter Kevin Fagan and gleefully recalled using the "necktie takedown" to pull a thuggish hockey fan to the ground before stomping on his face. "Damage control is putting fires out," says the younger Singer with a chuckle now. "But making fires for your opponents is a far nobler goal."
San Jose brothers Kulbir and Amritpal Dhaliwal were mauled in the encounter with Tatiana the tiger that left their 17-year-old friend Carlos Sousa dead. Then things got nasty.
The first task Singer undertook when summoned by the San Francisco Zoological Society was to search for dirt on the Dhaliwal brothers. It wasn't hard to find. In the coming weeks, he'd push stories about the ill-fated zoo visitors drinking, smoking pot, and behaving badly prior to the lethal encounter. But that would come in due time. Singer's opening gambit was to suggest a subtle but powerful signage change when the zoo reopened on Jan. 3. Visitors to the park on that day were greeted by written instructions urging them not to tease the animals.
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