An initiative that qualified to be on the ballot in California this fall will get little, if any, coverage in the national media which is operating on reduced staff status because of austerity budgets. In the era of the “smaller is better” philosophy becoming ubiquitous in the political arena conservatives will be obliged to ridicule the idea of dividing (like the loaves and fishes shtick) the California state government up into six groups. The conservatives will be quick to remind voters that mom and pop businesses will need to print new stationary if the change is approved and therefore the little guy can save a few bucks if he (and his wife since women got the vote) defeats this change which is bound t be labeled as just another nutty California idea.
California sends a large contingent of representatives to Congress along with two Senators. If the change is approved, there would be twelve Senators representing the same geographical area that now gets only two.
Isn’t California always depicted as a “stronghold” for the Democratic Party? Obviously if one of the new states included Orange County, they wouldn’t send Democrats to the Senate, but statistics for the whole of California tend to indicate that over the long haul, most of the new Senators would be Democrats thus urging small business owners to save a few bucks and staying with their old stationary would be an economically appealing way to let selfishness determine a difficult and complex issue.
On Wednesday, July 17, 2014, the San Francisco Chronicle, which was once owned by Presidential hopeful William Randolph Hearst, was featuring a story headlined “State of confusion over 6 Californias” on its front page.
Conservative media owners are not going to let the voters become convinced that California needs more Senators than Delaware or Rhode Island, so don’t waste any money betting on the measure passing.
Initially, Berkeley and Venice Beach may seem like identical twins separated at birth but don’t jump to any conclusions before you take a closer look. Political activists in the Venice Beach area are very concerned with the activities of the California Coastal Commission, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the effect global warming will have on raising the tide line. Berkeley has other issues to concern political activists. The Coastal Commission is ignored in Berkeley as an irrelevant diversion. UCB students can vote for a politician who wants to be a Berkeley City Council representative. Decisions regarding the University have a large influence on local residents in Berkeley. Folks in the Venice Beach area let the schools (such as Pepperdine, UCLA, Santa Monica College, and USC) tend to their own business.
Sports fans in the San Francisco Bay area are very different from sports fans in Southern California.
Conservatives who believe less government is best, will want to maintain the status quo so that the huge state has only one government entity to worry about shorelines, forests, prisons, highways and the state parks.
People from outside the area (such as the ones that work on the staff at the New York Times) would do well to skim through Curt Gentry’s book, “The Late Great State of California,” and Jon Winokur’s collection of quotes about the vast and very diversified state (“The War between the State”) before they sit down to write (ex cathedra) an editorial telling California voters what to think on this complex issue.
Literature from California is as diverse as the people and geography. Many critics consider “Grapes of Wrath” to be the greatest novel written in America. Mystery novelist established a cottage industry genre based on a lone detective. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade worked in San Francisco; Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe worked in L. A. County.
A driver can leave San Diego head North and after a full day of driving still be in California. People who live at Lake Tahoe refer to going shopping as “go into the City.” It takes (if memory serves) about four hours to get from the casinos to the cable cars.
Music in Cali is also very diverse. The L. A. sound is best exemplified by the Doors and the San Francisco sound means “crank up the Jefferson Airplane.” What country music fan doesn’t think Bakersfield and Buck Owens are synonymous? Doesn’t Merle “Oakie from Muskogee” Haggard live somewhere in California? In Santa Monica an apartment house once owned by Lawrence Welk dominates the skyline.
Ansel Adams was born and raised in San Francisco.
Didn’t Clint Eastwood become mayor of Monterey? Didn’t Sonny Bono wind up as a Congressman from So Cal? Wasn’t Richard Nixon born and raised in Southern California? St. Ronald Reagan changed American politics starting with his manipulation of the protesters at Berkeley. They were a convenient foothold for his climb to the White House.
Innovation and growth are important when it comes to the people known as corporations, but as far as administering the services needed by the voters in California the conservatives will dust off the references to the wishes of the founding fathers and stress that a lot of expenses for new stationary can be avoided with a “No” vote in November.
If less is more, maybe political activists from California should urge the consolidation of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia into one state?
Dividing California could have dire repercussions. Are there ten local politicians in Delaware or Rhode Island who wouldn’t be glad to become a repetitive in the United States Senate? If a state is so small that it gets only one Congressional district doesn’t it make sense to divide it into six smaller states so that the same geographical area will suddenly have six people in Congress?
The media in New York can’t completely ignore this developing political story because the conservative media owners will want to stifle innovation at the git-go and sending a top notch reporter to cover the bowl of granola aspect of the story will be as good as giving them a big cash Christmas bonus.
People in flyover country (such as Concordia Kansas) love the jokes that make fun of California such as: Why is Los Angeles like a bowl of granola? (It’s all nuts, fruits, andf flakes!)
Since California would (most likely) fit into the Southwest corner of the W. A. (AKA Western Australia), it might be best to quash this break it into smaller pieces political trend right here and now before the voters in Kalgoorlie start to get some strange ideas from America.
[Note from the photo editor: we dug into the archives to find some photos from the Venice Beach area and some tourist type pictures from Frisco to illustrate the point that both areas are far apart physically and (upon closer inspection) politically too.]
William Hjortsberg has written: “The future remains an unwritten book, its cryptic pages blank, and no crystal ball wizard, palm reader or Tarot deck manipulator can accurately provide a sneak preview of what’s coming in the next chapter.”
The disk jockey will play the Doors “L. A. Woman,” the Jefferson Airplane’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” and the CCR (from “near” Berkeley) song, “Run Through the Jungle.” We have to go see where the Buffalo Springfield is playing this weekend. Have a “Point Break” type week.
2014 = Summer of Mandatory Fun?
On the morning of Thursday, July 24, 2014, it looked like the hot topic for weekend round-ups would be a reconsideration of the death penalty because an execution on Wednesday went badly awry but the drawback to addressing a topic that would draw massive amounts of weekend punditry is that to stand out from the crowd, a columnist would have to produce the most eloquent commentary on the topic or else be lost in the crowd like the voice of a member of a choir.
The alternative solution to the challenge is to use the counter-programming solution and pick a topic that everyone else is ignoring but the drawback for that option is that it could turn out to be something so arcane and esoteric that no one will read it.
For example, it seems quite likely that on the weekend when Californians flock to Gilroy for the annual Garlic Festival no reporter, pundit, or columnist in the United States will mention the fact that Kel Richards wrote a retelling of John Bunyan’s immortal story as an item titled “Aussie Pilgrim’s Progress.” Such a hypothetical column would not be bloody well likely to catch the attention of Republicans, Democrats, Yankee, Dodger, or Giant fans and so would languish in the backwaters of the Internet unread and ignored.
Book fans might be intrigued by the question: How did a copy of that particular item, in mint condition, wind up being sold used in Berkeley Ca?
If a columnist were to draw his audience’s attention to the plight of a disk jockey named Peter Choyce, who details his struggles with adversity on Facebook, other people in dire circumstances would resent the fact that they hadn’t been given the chance to be (potentially) catapulted onto the road of recovery by columnist.
Hellé Nice, whose story is told in Miranda Seymour’s book “Bugatti Queen,” was winning car races in France in the Thirties long before Danica Patrick’s parents were born.
We have always known who Nat Hentoff was but we were unaware that he had written a book titled “Free Speech for Me – But Not for Thee,” until we picked up a (n autographed?) copy of it in a bargain bin in Berkley. He examines the irony in the fact that in a country where the young men are sent to die in battle to preserve the right of free speech some words are automatically disqualified from discourse because they are prima face evidence of “thoughtcrimes.”
We had considered writing a column this week that would fit the headline: “Has Fox cried ‘Wolf!’ too often?”
A political influence peddling case in the San Francisco Bay area may cause some nationally known pundits into making some comments generated by this question: “Is political influence peddling a matter of a binary choice or can it be perceived as an illustration of the concept of a gray scale used by photographers shooting black and white style images?
Does a political campaign donation really work as a flat out gift or is it understood that they are given with an implied promise of quid pro quo lurking in the background?
One advantage of doing political punditry as an example of three dot journalism column writing is that it makes the bumper sticker response by tolls a very murky strategy because it won’t be clear which particular item is meant to be refuted by posting a “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” comment.
Could the word “Benghazi” be an intellectual’s inside joke regarding an army (Rommel) out running his supply line? If so, how could that idea be relevant to a discussion about various military actions occurring in the world this week?
As far as using an obscure WWII battle ground name to make a point with today’s rather ill-informed news audience, wouldn’t it be better to say: “Tobruk, Tobruk, Tobruk!”?
Speaking of the Vichy forces, we have been told by a source we consider well informed, that during WWII a submarine working for the Vichy government made a bold play and pulled in New London, C and asked for and received supplies and fuel under that guise of being part of the Free French forces. That SNAFU was fictionalized and became the novel and movie “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are coming!”
Speaking of the Free French Forces, if the World’s Laziest Journalist News organization suddenly goes silent that could mean that our Ford Model T computer wore out or it could mean that we have impulsively gone down to the Going Places office and do some fact checking regarding the 70th anniversary for the liberation of Paris.
We knew a fellow who reported that he and a nurse who spoke French went AWOL from a hospital and went into Paris less than three weeks after the Liberation. In the spirit of thee dot journalism; his succinct report was that they had a good time. At one point, he says, he went into one of Paris’ finest restaurant and had the best meal of his life. The management at that restaurant refused to give him a bill. For a G. I., in Liberated Paris, making it “on the house” was a matter of honor.
There were 64 journalists killed in action covering WWII, and when Edward R. Murrow went on the “What’s My Line” TV show in 1952 (it’s on Youtube) to publicize (and raise funds for) a memorial, the man with one of the Twentieth Century’s most distinctive voices had to switch to a high pipsqueak deliver to fool the panel for a short time.
Recently at the Lox, Stock, and Bagel in Berkeley CA, we overheard a fellow doing an interview about something we consider to be on the top ten list of most intriguing topics from the Twnetieth Century. It took all the self control we could must to restrain our self from jumping into the interview which was about what it was like to deliver copies of Combat newspaper (it was a capital offense) in Occupied Paris.
Will violations of net neutrality ever become a capital offence?
The fact that some members of the German military were authorized to act as judge, jury, and executioner on the spot, brings up another question: Is it too harsh to impose a death sentence on war criminals? That, in turn, brings us to the point where the death penalty must be considered and that brings us full circle because that is the same question that this column had for a starting point.
[Note from the photo editor: An Objet trouvé collage seemed like a good way to illustrate a column featuring a pastiche of facts, history, and trivia.]
In his biography of John Steinbeck, Jay Parini wrote: “But life is plotless, a random onslaught of facts and events that often lack a discernible pattern or arc of development.” He should have added the words: “ . . . until a political pundit comes along.”
Now, the disk jockey will play Weird Al Yankovic’s new album, “Mandatory Fun,” in its entirety, the “Is Paris Burning?” soundtrack album, and “You’ll Never Know,” which was the winner of the 1943 Best Song Oscar from the film “Hello, Frisco, Hello.” We have to go see if there is any bar in the world that still has “As Time Goes By” on the juke box. Have a “such is life” type week.