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2016 Summer Chronicles 4: Bush League Nation

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The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is in San Diego and despite the glaring lack of Padres on the team, many local and visiting fans will be taking in the pricey spectacle in all its corporate glory (confession: I will be there). With a huge Fan Fest, the Home Run Derby and the main event itself, San Diego will be baseball central for the week, at least on paper.

But if you really want to get to the heart of the game, I suggest you go bush league.

Forget the fancy packaging and head down to the minor leagues, the lower the better—and get as far away from the large cities as you can. It’s there on the California League circuit or in a forgotten small town in the Midwest or somewhere else in Lost America that you just might learn to love the game again.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles 2: Last Days of the Honeycreepers and Honeyeaters

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There is something deeply and tragically resonant about extinction in paradise. After returning from a hike on Haleakala where I was lucky enough to have spotted a number of rare birds, I sat on the lanai of my room on the edge of the Maui rainforest and read this from Errol Fuller’s haunting book, Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record:

There are two groups of birds on the Hawaiian Islands that are notorious for the number of extinct species they contain. Although these birds are not particularly closely related, they have names that are similar and this sometimes causes confusion. The birds of one group are known as honeycreepers, and the others as honeyeaters. Both names derive from the fact that many species feed on nectar, although most also eat other things like blossoms, insects or mollusks.   [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicles #1: In the Dark Forest of the Self

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Summer is here and it’s time to take a break from my usual column and stretch the form a little with some chronicles. As I explained last year, the chronicle is a literary genre born in Brazil…

So on this first day of summer, the day after Father’s Day, I will dedicate some time to what my wife calls “the sublime and heartbreaking art of parenting.”

For the most part, being the father of my only, much beloved son has been a delight. He is a smart, good natured boy who does well in school, gets along with other kids, and likes to hang out with grown-ups. Other than the usual daily struggles of parenthood from sleep deprivation to the multitude of anxieties, humbling failures, and moments of deep self-doubt that go with the territory, it’s been a piece of cake.
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A Bad Climate?: The State of Social Justice Efforts in the Labor and Environmental Movements

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Among the stories that you may have missed during the stretch run of the primary season was some significantly bad news out of labor on the national front when several large unions in the building trades came out against a plan by some of the biggest public sector unions to join forces with environmentalist Tom Steyer in order to fund a major anti-Trump get out the vote operation in the fall. The New York Times noted that:

Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election.

The rift developed after some in the labor movement, whose cash flow has dwindled and whose political clout has been increasingly imperiled, announced a partnership last week with a wealthy environmentalist, Tom Steyer, to help bankroll a new fund dedicated to electing Democrats.

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Good Things Progressives Can Do Down-Ballot

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Some Good Things Progressives Can Do Down Ballot

While most of the attention is on the Presidential race this primary season, there are still some important things progressive voters can weigh in on down ballot here in San Diego on June 7th that will do some good.     [Read more…]

Dream Big: Why Voting for Sanders Still Matters, Despite the Electoral Math

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What struck me the most about the recent Sanders rally in National City was how much the crowd embodied the notion of the beloved community.

As opposed to the corporate media caricature of Sanders’ supporters as a group of mostly angry, white “Bernie bros,” this huge gathering of over ten thousand people was diverse in age, gender, sexuality, race, and class. It was also a kind, gentle crowd that fell silent when Sanders, in a moving gesture, stopped his speech when someone fainted and waited patiently for the EMTs to come to the rescue before he continued and interrupted chants of “Bernie Cares” by saying “no, WE care.”   [Read more…]

On Dark Patches and Redemption

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Despite all our best efforts, things don’t always go the way we would hope. Sometimes we are stunned by the unexpected bad turn and left groping for answers…
…Sometimes the hard roads that our students travel get the best of them. Such was the case with the brilliant, shy young man who took his life at the very moment he was supposed to be turning in a final for one of my classes. Instead, he sent a group email to his instructors simply saying, “Goodbye.”

He was a smart, respectful young man who was always impeccably polite. In the classroom he was engaged and frequently smiled in the midst of our discussions. An “A” student who came to the office all the time, he never revealed much about himself. Circumspect, thoughtful, but guarded—no one would have suspected him to be in the grip of despair. As of this writing, nobody knows why he did it. But he did.
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The California Way of Poverty

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Last week, I pondered the obscene spectacle of holding a mega-concert catering to the wealthy in the Southern California desert town of Indio where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. The truth is that events like this that underline the contrast between the heedless luxury of the affluent with the deprivation of the poor are not the exception to the rule, but rather, a basic fact of everyday life in our era of historic economic inequality. It’s just the way we live now.

And in sunny California, San Diego in particular, the poor are accustomed to watching the party from the outside. As a community college professor at City College, I am particularly attuned to the painful realities of economic and racial inequality because I see the costs of poverty on a daily basis in the classroom and in the lives of my students who frequently struggle to balance the hard economics of survival and academic success. Sometimes the choice is between books and groceries or rent; in other instances, it’s between childcare and study time. The list goes on and on.   [Read more…]

Oligarchy Rocks at the Desert Trip Festival

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This easy life knows no pity.

Recently Nelson D. Schwartz of the New York Times did an interesting feature on luxury tourism on cruise ships, “In an Era of Privilege, Not Everyone is in the Same Boat,” that described the experience of travelers as “a money based caste system” catering to the rich rather than the unwashed masses. While there is clearly nothing novel about elite travel, the story noted that “What is new is just how far big American companies are now willing to go to pamper the biggest spenders.”

The remarkable thing about this trend is not what it says about cruise ships but what it reveals about where we are currently with regard to economic inequality and the way it has come to shape the way we live, work, and play—separately and unequal.   [Read more…]

Getting Sandbagged by SANDAG: San Diego’s Failure of Imagination

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Last week Kevin Faulconer got some good press when, “under pressure from environmental groups,” he voted no to putting SANDAG’s deeply inadequate tax measure on the ballot citing San Diego’s Climate Action plan as one of the factors in his decision. Faulconer’s opponent, Ed Harris, was quick to point out that Faulconer’s vote was less about climate change and more about pleasing his anti-tax Republican base…

Harris is clearly right about Faulconer’s opportunism when it comes to the SANDAG plan, and he adeptly points out that the mayor had a very different position not that long ago. With regard to the SANDAG plan, however, he is way off the mark…

The real problem with this political stalemate is that the Democrats on the SANDAG board and too many other Democrats in San Diego county are satisfied to pursue business as usual and act as if they are still committed to progressive values with regard to the environment. By insisting that the current political hegemony in San Diego is unchangeable they are suffering from a profound failure of the imagination…   [Read more…]

What’s the Matter With Corporate Education Reform?

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Last week I reviewed Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? in which he lambastes professional-class Democrats for thinking that there is “no social or political problem that cannot be solved with more education and job training.” This makes perfect sense because, as a class, professionals are “defined by educational attainment, and every time they tell the country that what it needs is more schooling, they are saying: Inequality is not a failure of the system; it is a failure of you.”

But, Frank contends, the only problem with education, for the professional crew, is that it is “not meritocratic enough.” Thus, all that needs to be done is bust the teachers’ unions (whose sin is their outdated belief in solidarity), open charter schools, test our kids to death, and give tax breaks to “innovators.”

Nothing is more illustrative of this aspect of Frank’s critique than the way so many Democrats lined up to support the Vergara decision in 2014 even against the interests of a key Democratic constituency and key Democratic electeds.   [Read more…]

Listen Liberal: What’s the Matter with the Democratic Party?

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Thomas Frank has written the most important political book of 2016, and one that should disturb and hopefully influence progressives for years to come. If you have ever found yourself not just horrified by the lunatic right but also frustrated by the hapless and compromised “left,” Frank is your man. If you want to feel good about “your side” but are still troubled by the fact that economic inequality remains at historically high levels despite the last eight years of Democratic Presidential rule, Frank has some uncomfortable truths for you to ponder.

And it’s not just about those damn Republicans.

In his new book, Listen Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Frank does his usual stellar job of research and analysis where he painstakingly makes his case by using the words of his subjects to illustrate his argument.   [Read more…]

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