Two Teachers
A Tribute to Terry Kandal and Michael Parenti
In the fall of 1993, inside the Cal State Los Angeles university bookstore, I was drawn to a particular volume. The title was Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America. It was on the required reading list for a sociology course taught by Terry Kandal. I enrolled in the course because of my curiosity about that title.
Kandal, who taught sociology at Cal State LA from 1968 until his retirement in 2010, treated intellectual development as a matter of genuine concern. His lectures were rigorous and alive. He had spent decades inside the sociological tradition, and every lecture showed it. His lessons were not what set him apart, however: he was interested in each student, and that matters. He wanted to know what you thought, where you were headed. Four years later, when I was applying to UCLA for graduate study, he made time to talk it through with me. Not every student arrives with the social capital to know which doors exist, let alone how to open them. A professor who takes students seriously can offer what neither background nor family can.
In his 1996 essay “Gender, Race & Ethnicity: Let’s Not Forget Class,” Kandal argued against the displacement of class analysis by identity politics, not by dismissing gender and race as categories, but by insisting that neither could be understood outside the logic of capital accumulation on a world scale. He cited my other inspiration, Michael, author of dozens of books, in his own bibliography. The two men were, in this respect, working the same problem: Kandal through the classroom, Parenti through a body of work that the mainstream press largely declined to review. These were lessons that have made a lasting impression.
It was through Kandal’s course that I first encountered Parenti’s work. I was struck by the quality of his prose. Difficult ideas were conveyed in direct language—not simplified, but unobscured.
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media dismantled the mythology of a neutral press with methodical force. Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment extended that argument into popular culture, tracing how ideology operates not only in newsrooms but in the stories a society tells itself for pleasure. Against Empire trained the same unflinching attention on U.S. foreign policy, refusing the language that dressed imperial conduct in respectable clothes. Blackshirts and Reds interrogated the Cold War categories that much of the left had inherited without examination. Dirty Truths, America Besieged, and History as Mystery — all published in the 1990s, worked the same problems from different directions: who holds power, how that power is legitimated, and what it costs those who refuse to look away.
Parenti did not dress his conclusions in false equivalence. What his work taught me, across decades of my own scholarship, was that rigor and political commitment are not opposing forces. The obligation of both is the same: to make visible what institutions prefer to obscure. That is the standard I have tried to bring to my own writing.
In 2014, I traveled to San Francisco to meet him. The man I met bore no resemblance to the caricature that his critics preferred, the doctrinaire ideologue, the uncompromising polemicist. He was warm. He listened as much as he spoke. He had spent decades paying the professional costs of his convictions, denied tenure, dismissed from positions, and ignored by the mainstream press, and none of it had curdled into bitterness. He remained a kind and gentle soul.
I reflect on these experiences because both Kandal and Parenti have passed. Terry Kandal died in July 2012 at the age of 71. Michael Parenti died on January 24, 2026, at the age of 92.
Looking back to 1993, I realize that a younger version of me did not fathom that a fortuitous encounter with a compelling book title would beckon me down a path of my own life’s work in academia — all inspired by these two great teachers.