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Things Fall Apart: Filner’s Betrayal and the “Political Circus”

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…the real winners here are the same old downtown insiders who are busy popping champagne corks and laughing at Filner’s implosion and cheering the welcome help they are getting from unlikely sources. 

By Jim Miller

Whatever the end result of the Filner sexual harassment scandal, it’s clear that even if the mayor beats the odds and survives, his credibility and ability to move a bold populist agenda is severely damaged. Hence, San Diego’s first truly progressive mayor may have squandered the opportunity to be a transformative figure, the progressive fighter and game changer we had hoped he would be. Worst of all by engaging in abusive behavior towards women, Filner has betrayed the core principles of any progressive politics by failing to respect the civil rights and humanity of women. We don’t need to hear all of the details to know that this is true–he has admitted as much himself.

Additionally, and equally important, Filner’s actions are a betrayal to all those in the broad, historic progressive coalition who worked to elect him. I have spoken to dozens of my friends in labor and community activist groups over the last few days and folks are universally angry and depressed. His fall from grace will have broad and long-term consequences, disillusioning and discouraging people from hoping for change in our city and, discrediting by proxy those who aggressively contest the entrenched interests that Filner had rightfully been fighting. It will take a long time to recover from this.   [Read more…]

Is Your Vacation Stealing Your Life?

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By Jim Miller

Upon returning from my travels it was with some amusement that I noted the tag at the end of my “greatest hits” series of columns in June: “We’re re-running some of the best of his columns while Jim takes this ‘vacation’ thing we keep hearing about.” I was amused because I hate “vacations.”

Hate vacations? What am I crazy? No, not crazy just not a fan of the way our consumer culture steals our lives and sells them back to us. As Michael Ventura notes in his seminal essay, “Report from El Dorado”:

Our idea of “a vacation” is an idea only about 100 years old. To “vacation” is to enter an image. Las Vegas is only the most shrill embodiment of this phenomenon … People come here to step into an image, a daydream, a film-like world where “everything” is promised. No matter that the Vegas definition of “everything” is severely limited, what thrills tourists is the sense of being surrounded in “real life” by the same images they see on TV. But the same is true of the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park or Yosemite or Death Valley or virtually any of our “natural” attractions.

Indeed, when we consume packaged experiences, even the most beautiful “natural” phenomenon can be drained of any wonder. When all that was once directly lived moves away into the realm of representation, we struggle to escape from the poverty of our experience. Thus, as the Situationists put it back in the 1960s, tourism is “the chance to go see what has been made banal.”   [Read more…]

Why Can’t Mayor Filner Just Be Nicer?: Corporate News as Propaganda, San Diego Style

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By Jim Miller

In this final installment of Under the Perfect Sun media critique greatest hits, I apply the propaganda model to San Diego’s media scene.  Interestingly, it should be noted that while the local press have largely continued the Filner as disruptive narrative cited here, articles in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have recently presented a much prettier picture of Filner as a game changing mayor on multiple fronts.  This is surely an embarrassing development in the House of Manchester, but don’t expect that to change the party line.  

As the historic battle between Mayor Filner and San Diego’s big hoteliers over the tourism marketing deal unfolds, it’s clear where the lines are drawn.

On one side, you have a new strong mayor who is committed to ending business as usual in San Diego and on the other, you have folks like Terry Brown, chairman of the San Diego Tourism Marketing Association who, as Matt Potter at The San Diego Reader has pointed out, is a big time Republican funder as are the crew of business lobbyists, real estate developers, and San Diego Taxpayer Association types who have miraculously found they can love a tax after it has transubstantiated into a fee and serves as a giveaway to corporate interests.   [Read more…]

Corporate Censorship in 2012: All the News They Didn’t Deem Fit to Print

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By Jim Miller

In last week’s column, I discussed Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s propaganda model and noted how it was even more relevant today than it was when they first published Manufacturing Consent in 1988 as the concentration of media ownership they decried in the eighties has only continued to increase dramatically.  I ended that column by referring to Project Censored, an organization that has been monitoring the news media and putting out a list of the top 25 “censored” stories of the year since 1976.

Recently when I mentioned this project to a former journalist friend of mine he objected to the use of the word “censorship” because he didn’t think it applied to the news media, a group of people who, in his estimation, are far more driven by market forces than by the desire to monitor ideas.  With that objection in mind, let’s consider Project Censored’s definition of the term “censorship”

We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets.

Eds. Note: Originally Posted December 10, 2012. We’re re-running some of the best of his columns while Jim takes this ‘vacation’ thing we keep hearing about.   [Read more…]

Beyond the “Conservative Entertainment Complex”

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By Jim Miller

In this column that originally ran in December of last year, I discuss “the conservative media entertainment complex” as conceived of by former Bush propagandist David Frum and note that he only touches on the tip of the corporate media propaganda iceberg.  What follows this is a beginners primer on how to decipher corporate media propaganda.  

In the weeks following the election, David Frum made waves by explaining the shock in conservative circles over Romney’s loss with a bit of interesting media criticism: “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.”

Of course, those of us with a historical memory longer than five minutes found it amusing to hear this from Frum, the author of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech.  Indeed, Frum was one of the central ideologues promulgating lies aboutIraqand demonizing dissent as unpatriotic.  I guess it takes one to know one.

Still, despite the bitter irony of Frum playing the role of truth-teller, he is on to something.  The trouble with his analysis is that it stops at the obvious.  The truth is that the problem with the media is not limited to the universe of Fox News and right wing radio pundits.  The American media landscape distorts the truth not because it is liberal or conservative but because it is corporate.

Eds. Note: Originally Posted in December 2012. We’re re-running some of the best of his columns while Jim takes this ‘vacation’ thing we keep hearing about.   [Read more…]

Why the San Diego Free Press Matters

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By Jim Miller

When Doug Porter asked the writers at the San Diego Free Press to share their thoughts about our project during the first anniversary of this site, I remembered the column I wrote upon returning from a trip up to Northern California where I had learned of the death of Alexander Cockburn.

My reflections on his life’s work made me think about what the Free Press should be, and what I believe it has been at its best…   [Read more…]

Excavating Golden Hill: The Golden Hill Fountain Grotto

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By Jim Miller

For my last Golden Hill piece, I turned to the wisdom of my 9 year-old son Walter, who, in answer to my query about what he liked best about his neighborhood said, “It’s old and grungy, not fake like the suburbs.”  And of all his favorite places in the neighborhood, he chose the Golden Hill Fountain Grotto because, “It’s a ruin.  You can tell it used to be all fancy and now it’s falling apart with graffiti and stuff.  It’s like something they’d find if we became an extinct species.”

Walt also likes the surrounding Golden Hill Gateway Park because, “it’s where the wilderness meets the city.  There are animals that live there and secret paths and canyons that make you forget where you are.”  So off we went to investigate.   [Read more…]

Excavating Golden Hill: Between “South Park” and “the Other Side of the Freeway”

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By Jim Miller

The southern border of Golden Hill is clearly marked by the 94 Freeway that sets it off from what much of the city still refers to as “Southeast San Diego.”

Despite City Council Member George Stevens’s successful effort in 1992 to ban the use of that moniker in any official city business, it lives on in the cultural imagination of San Diego and, for many white suburbanites, stands in for “the bad part of town,” teeming with gangs, crime, and urban squalor.

Indeed, despite years of dropping crime rates and gentrification, the image of the southern part of Greater Golden Hill as a kind of liminal zone between “South Park” and the ‘hood persists in some quarters of San Diego’s culture of fear.

As someone who spent a lot of time visiting friends in the neighborhood back in the day, well before this current wave of gentrification began, I find this to be an amusing but sad phenomenon, as even when Golden Hill was grittier than it is now, it was never rough compared to other big American cities like Los Angeles or Oakland. What distinguishes Golden Hill from other parts of San Diego then is not crime, but race and class, as it is still browner and more working class than downtown, Bankers Hill, or “South Park.”   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Left Found a Haven in Golden Hill During the 1970s

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By Jim Miller

In the first part of my interview with Peter Zschiesche, he discussed Golden Hill past and present and described what he calls “the Golden Hill vibe.”   Much of that feeling came out the politics and culture of the late sixties and early seventies.  In this second and final installment of our interview, Peter talks about that time period and outlines some of the key places and players that made Golden Hill a vital, progressive community.   [Read more…]

Welcome to Golden Park Heights: “A Journey of 1000 Miles Begins with a Single Step”

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By Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller

For those who know progressive politics in San Diego, Carlos and Linda LeGerrette are local legends. Starting with their roles in founding MEChA at Mesa College in the sixties and flowing through their deep involvement with Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement to their local community activism and fine work with the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs in our schools, the Legrettes’ great hearts and regard for their neighbors is boundless.

No one has done more for their community than Carlos and Linda LeGerrette, and they are greatly loved and respected by all those who they have touched over the years. It was our absolute pleasure to interview them on their lives, work, and deep roots in a place they jokingly call “Golden Park Heights.”   [Read more…]

Field of View: A Journey Through the Golden Hill Historic District

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Written by Jim Miller; Photos by Annie Lane

To walk in Golden Hill is to wander through a patchwork quilt of history and wonder.  As a renter in a community full of grand old houses that I’ll never be able to afford to buy, I frequently think of Thoreau’s ruminations on ownership in Walden: “As long as it is possible, live free and uncommitted.  It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

Indeed, the grand old houses of Golden Hill may now be well beyond the reach of most folks in the neighborhood to ever buy, but, if they have eyes to see, they can, as Thoreau says of the poet who truly sees the landscape, own the whole neighborhood.  And I think of that as I watch the working class families out for walks with their kids, apartment dwellers strolling with their dogs, halfway house residents stretching their legs, or even my homeless neighbors lounging on the steps by the manicured lawn and lush garden of some lawyer’s office.   [Read more…]

Excavating Golden Hill: The Japanese American Christian Church

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By Jim Miller

It’s easy to miss, tucked away at the elbow of 19th and E streets just above Interstate 5: the Japanese American Christian Church in Golden Hill. You’d most likely drive past this humble place of worship on the way up Broadway without noticing it, but if you happened to be on a stroll down E Street looking at the nice old houses, you’d stumble upon it after the bigger homes give way to a series of California bungalows. It’s there before E turns right into 19th. Across the street from the church, a chain-link fence lines the sidewalk above the 5 where the homeless set up camp on a regular basis before they are swept out and relocated only to return again when the police shift their attention elsewhere.

Historically, the church itself is a product of a relocation of a different sort. As my City College colleague, historian Susan Hasegawa informed me, it was originally founded as the Japanese Holiness Church by Christian Nikkei (immigrants and their descendents) in 1930 and located on Newton Avenue. Sponsored by the Oriental Mission Society, the church focused its efforts on outreach to Issei (first generation immigrant) farmers.   [Read more…]

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