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The Fallen Nest: A Border Story

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The park’s gates had been ripped down and rebuilt, higher and fiercer than he had seen in the year he had lived near the coast. Barbed wire had been looped in a crown around the fence’s top and iron doors installed at either entrance. The nest had fallen and lay in the park beneath a tree thirty feet from the new fence.

On his daily morning walks he looked inside the park, before and after the fence’s reconstruction. The flat green grass of the park appeared so different than the faded winter brown of trees in a California city.

In the evenings, walking by the fence, he looked in the park out of habit after completing his part-time shift at the library near the border-crossing. However, the nest, a ratty gathering of dead grass, straw, and tangled stems and fibers, had fallen. It held a single gray chick, screaming. He did not know what kind of bird but even in the diminishing light, he saw the chick, plaintive and alone, in the fallen nest.   [Read more…]

A Letter to Duncan Hunter from an Aspirationally Corrupt Admirer

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By Brett Warnke

October 2018

Dear Dunc,

May I call you Dunc?  I want to be familiar with you.  I want to know you.  I’ll tell you the straight stuff:  I want to be a crook.

As it stands, I’m a greedy teacher.  I know!  Children, facts, unions, books!

It’s all so frightfully boring, so paperwork-y and tedious.  Some of my children are homeless.  They live in vans.  Sometimes I show them pictures of your sprawling Alpine home just to make them feel bad about not being born rich, like you.

I’m on my way, Dunc.  With enough practice in the dark arts of shell-game financing, I can be the new you.  True, as it stands, I have to actually go to work and buy my own groceries.  Mostly canned goods.  You golf and have sex with multiple partners around Washington and spend campaign money on yourself. #GOALS.

And, well, that’s why I need your help, Dunc.

I want you to assist me in my sinister mission to be the most awful and corrupt man to pound San Diego County’s crumbling pavement!  (True, I’ll need to save up for decent shoes because of our poor streets, but I digress!)

Now, who would know better how to achieve this than you, right? I must admit it squarely:  I’ve been following you.  But not only you.  Your wife, Margaret, and your many, many lovers.  I may rent a room, a shabby barn of a place, but I have followed you in your “crimes.”

  [Read more…]

Dr. Jen Campbell’s Candidacy in City Council District 2: Is She the Cure?

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Dr. Jen Campbell is not tall, loud, or filled with that busy anxiety of most politicians. But Campbell has a thoughtful quality.  And a talk with her about the city’s problems is much like discussing the ailments of a weary organ.  What seems to rile her most, like any good physician, is the untreated and blase patient.  In this case, the city’s leadership, perpetually reacting to San Diego’s crises rather than responding actively to new realities and opportunities.

Dr. Campbell believes her opponent, current Republican District 2 Councilmember Lorie Zapf, serving on the council since 2010 and hoping for a third term, is part of San Diego’s historical problem of a lack of initiative.

“It’s an old story of San Diego,” Campbell said.  “It’s a city that just doesn’t plan ahead.  Especially on infrastructure.  We’re a city that has constantly gone from crisis to crisis.  Zapf is part of this problem.”   [Read more…]

Listening in Ocean Beach

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“I talk. I mean, I speak … but she doesn’t hear me,” a tall man in Newbreak told his bearded friend, who was writing something to himself and didn’t look up.

For a moment there was a breathless silence. The espresso popped, the door creaked and the drawer jingled coins. The bearded friend, feeling he should respond finally spoke.

“Look, she’s going through some problems…”

His voice trailed into nothing.

“But she thinks I do things. I tell her that it’s all in her head. But she doesn’t listen. She doesn’t listen.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have listened either. I felt I’d intruded, so I stood and left.

But the sadness in the tall man’s voice sat on me like an alp as I walked down Abbott Street through the cool morning.   [Read more…]

Super Blooms, Desert and Death

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When I lost my job, I thought about death. And there is no better place to indulge in grave thoughts than a desert. And there is no better desert in California than in Anza Borrego, the state’s first desert park. So when I was laid off this week, I headed east to the land of cairns and the emergent “super blooms” in the country’s largest state park in the lower forty-eight.   [Read more…]

The Humiliating Ruin of Mitt Romney

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By Brett Warnke

The emperor Tiberius famously retreated to Capri, engaging in every torment and excess imaginable. One of his favorites was tossing his foes off the cliffs onto the rocks while, down below, his soldiers would beat the fallen bodies with oars. Now, two thousand years later, it’s not a revolution or an emboldened left that mercilessly tossed the Bush and Clinton dynasties—along with Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and now Mitt Romney off the headlands and onto the cliff rocks, it was Donald Trump.

Yes, Trump has spent the month assembling his new Wrecking Crew to tear apart 20th century’s progressive gains. And it now appears the smug ugly face of empire will be the hideous mask of Rex Tillerson, a corporate thug and climate change denier with no public service experience who led the most sinister business on earth, Exxon-Mobil. Worth $150 million personally, Tillerson helped filch Exxon $35 billion this year and could not more perfectly personify the Trump era to come.   [Read more…]

Bernie Delegates Walk Out: Day 2 of the DNC

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By Brett Warnke

Delegates who walked out of the convention to protest the DNC host a rally at City Hall. Speakers emotionally describe their commitment to Bernie Sanders despite his having endorsed Hillary Clinton yesterday on the floor of Wells Fargo Convention Center.   [Read more…]

Storm Clouds over Philadelphia: Day 1 of the DNC

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By Brett Warnke

On Monday, storm clouds hung over Philadelphia as Democratic delegates arrived to Wells Fargo Center at AT&T Station south of downtown to a protesting crowd virulently against a Hillary nomination. Over 1,000 protestors, most with Bernie Sanders shirts or stickers, were in high dudgeon after revelations of tilted tables and bias within the DNC.

Gone was the sense of hope and inspiration I’d seen at Bernie rallies in San Diego. What remained were conversations among clusters of Bernie die-hards about “tilted tables” and “election fraud.” The crowd was angry and Bernie signs shook with desperate vigor. But Monday had the feel of a stopped station wagon, a father behind the wheel, screaming at the glaring dead end sign.   [Read more…]

Mr. Trump Gets Fired In San Diego

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By Brett Warnke

With their motorcycles stacked like dominoes beneath the shade of the bright art in Chicano Park, SDPD grimly lined the streets in absurd riot gear in an enormous overreaction to a brief, spirited and peaceful march held on Friday May 26.

Unión del Barrio planned the protest—“Donald Trump: Fuera de San Diego”—which drew over a 1,000 marchers who rallied in the park and walked to the city’s Convention Center. Five or six other groups planned similar rallies. In the merry crush, there were loud and sometimes obscene chants in Spanish and English as bullhorns, posters, and groups vied for a break in the din.   [Read more…]

May Day: The Forgotten Celebration of America’s Labor Struggles

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By Brett Warnke

On the books, May 1st is officially Law Day, whose origins (like the holy portions of the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust”) came out of the Eisenhower Administration’s rhetorical battle against the Soviet Union. Of course, the silent smear was that radical workers lacked respect for a nation of laws. But for those with a sense of history May 1 is and shall be a day of observance for workers mourned after the bloody Haymarket Affair in 1886 which later became memorialized when strikers pushed for an eight-hour work day.

Is it so hard to imagine an era of endless work? Of plutocrats and bought government? Of a used, dispirited and duped population?   [Read more…]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Very Precise Female

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By Brett Warnke

On the trip to Brooklyn, there is a large sign that says “OY.” From another perspective it also spells “YO,” an insider joke to the division of the borough between the Jewish and African-American diaspora population. Christopher Wallace (“Biggie Smalls”) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“The Notorious RBG,”) both were born and raised in Brooklyn. Both grew up in families without much money. And both had to gain respect in a world that had marginalized them.

Just as Justice Stevens was the best decision to come out of the mediocre Gerald Ford administration, RBG was undoubtedly Bill Clinton’s only decision that has had a progressive result.

President Clinton’s goal was to find someone who, when their name was uttered, said, “Yes. Wow. A home run.”   [Read more…]

America Lost One of its Finest First Ladies…in 2011

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By Brett Warnke

I have perfect faith in my husband. But I’m always glad to see him enjoy a pretty girl. And when he stops looking, then I’m going to begin to worry…And he doesn’t have time for outside entertainment. Because I keep him busy.

No, these honest words were not uttered by the recently departed Nancy Davis Reagan. They’re Betty Ford’s.

Mrs. Ford was one of America’s most sincere, independent, and admirable first ladies. At a time of change for women she stood as a proud Republican but one who spoke openly about her own therapy with her psychiatrist, when the social stigma of such a practice could easily kill a career in mid-century America. But Mrs. Ford would not be quiet. She favored a woman’s control over her reproductive cycle, acknowledged the new reality of sex before marriage, and supported the Equal Rights Amendment. She danced, laughed loudly, and smiled broadly through interviews about how smoking a joint was just a part of life. She had a rather chivalrous husband who, despite being an athlete and probably the most physically fit President to hold the office, took a tumble to keep his wife upright. (Could you imagine if he had let her tumble instead?)   [Read more…]

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