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What to the Working Class is the Fourth of July?

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On this day when we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, it’s important to remember Jefferson himself believed that each new generation needed to make the American creed their own. And everyone from slaves to women to working people did just that as we see in Frederick Douglass’s great speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”, the early feminist manifesto “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls,” and the much lesser known “Working Men’s Declaration of Independence.”

This last is centrally important to remember because while Americans are largely aware that the battle for inclusion involved long and heroic abolition, civil rights, and women’s movements, struggles around issues of class have all-too-frequently been relinquished to the dustbin of history. Such is the case with the early Working Men’s Party that was railing about what Bernie Sanders calls “the billionaire class” well before the time when many historians mark the beginning rustlings of the American labor movement.

Indeed, what the early Working Men’s Party history shows is class rebellion is as American as apple pie and was seen as a fulfillment of the Jeffersonian project. How so?   [Read more…]

Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind…| Summer Chronicles 2018 # 3

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Dead and Company are heading to San Diego this Friday as Bob Weir continues the long, strange trip of the Grateful Dead into his old age.  Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the group understands that perhaps more than any other band that started in the 1960s, the Dead are associated with psychedelia and the American Counterculture.  For decades, their shows have carried the legacy of the Acid Tests (for which they were the house band) and served both as an inspiration for new generations of Deadheads and a convenient target for the DEA.  

In his fascinating new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan touches on the history of the Acid Tests, noting their unintended origins as a result of a CIA funded experiment   [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #2: Learning to Be No One

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Alone on the plane, I had the same thought that I always do: “we could crash and my life might end at any time.”  As always, images of the moments before death subsumed me. I imagined the faces of my fellow passengers contorted in horror.  I heard the weeping, the screaming, the voices futilely attempting to leave last messages for their loved ones on their cellphones, all to no avail.  

My fantasy was real enough that amidst a banal announcement about expected turbulence, I came close to tears as I thought of never seeing my wife or son again and went on to consider the weight of the collective losses of all the souls on the plane.  

But, in this case, what used to be a source of physical anxiety gave way to a feeling of absolute groundlessness.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #1: Scattering Ashes

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This much I know about love: scattering my Mother’s remains in the lonely Pacific at dawn, I knelt, felt the sand on the rocks by the shore grind into my knees, bent over close enough to let the water splash my face, and gently shook the bag to release her to the sea, tiny bits of bone, still solid, dropping and fine particles of ash sticking to my hands until I rinsed them, rubbing the last traces of her into the ocean.  

My mother was disabled by polio at a young age not long after giving birth to my older brother.  The story goes that she heard him calling when he was a small boy and could not get up. She fought as hard as she could, but her legs wouldn’t work.  

Her body failed her, and she never forgave it. At base, there was always a part of her that refused to accept herself, forgive herself for her own limitations, forgive us for not being able to save her. We could never seem to make things right.  She drove people away and then mourned their absence. This made for a hard love.   [Read more…]

Thoughts on the Midterms: Defeats for Big Money and Democrats’ November Hopes Somehow Survive

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Thud!  What’s that sound?  It’s the unceremonious crash landing of tens of millions of dollars of Charter Schools Association money in the Governor’s race backing Antonio Villaraigosa.  

Never has such an obscene amount of money been spent on a bad cause with so little to show for it.  The good news here is that their efforts to turn the November election into a proxy war between the billionaire boys club and California’s educators failed miserably.  

Now, rather than having to watch the tragic irony of a multimillion-dollar crusade against teachers’ unions standing in for our Governor’s race in California while elsewhere in the red states teachers are turning the tide against decades of austerity budgeting brought to us by the GOP, we can watch a Democrat cruise to victory against the Trump-endorsed Republican.   [Read more…]

A Few Last-Minute Reminders for the Procrastinating Progressive Voter

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If you are part of that dwindling tribe who (like me) still prefer to show up at your polling place to vote in person, here are a few final reminders for the procrastinating progressives out there:

Defeat the Lincoln Club:  There is only one way to foil the plans of the Lincoln Club in the San Diego County Board of Supervisors race and discourage them from spending big money to intervene in San Diego Democratic politics in the future: Don’t Vote for Lori Saldana.  See Doug Porter’s column on this race here.  See my column here.

Just Say No to Antonio: Not that many people are paying close attention to the Governor’s race this time around BUT if you are offended by the Lincoln Club’s effort to buy local elections, then you should be even more disturbed by the huge money the billionaire boys club is pumping into this race in an effort to get their man into the runoff in November.  Frustrate their efforts by just saying no to Antonio Villaraigosa. See my column on this race here.   [Read more…]

Lori Saldaña and the Lincoln Club? Just Say NO

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There’s been a lot of controversy lately about Lori Saldaña’s previously floundering County Board of Supervisors run getting a big money boost in the form of an independent expenditure campaign by the Lincoln Club, and while Doug Porter did a fine job of connecting the dots and explaining why both the Lincoln Club and the Working Families Council would be involved in a dark alliance to attack Nathan Fletcher and promote Saldaña, some folks wandering the barren landscape of social media still don’t seem to grok precisely how troubling these connections are for those inclined to support Saldaña, the self-proclaimed savior of the Democratic Party.

Thus, some history is in order.   [Read more…]

Re-Electing Alicia Munoz & Rick Shea to the San Diego County Board of Education Matters

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These two down-ballot races will help determine the course of San Diego’s public education system for years to come.

Last week, after I wrote about the billionaire boys club behind the California Charter Schools Association pouring millions of dollars into Antonio Villaraigosa’s bid for governor, even more cash flowed into their campaign war chest the very next day.  

As the New York Post reported:

Mike Bloomberg has plopped down $1.5 million to help elect former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as California’s next governor.

Bloomberg wrote the seven-figure check to a PAC called Families & Teachers for Villaraigosa, a big supporter of charter schools.

That’s a big issue for Bloomberg, who championed charter schools as an option for students during his three terms as New York City’s mayor.

  [Read more…]

Antonio Villaraigosa: A Candidate Backed by the Billionaire Boys Club and Trump Megadonors

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Getting bored yet with all the glossy Anthony Villaraigosa commercials touting the utopia that will be California if only the former mayor of Los Angeles rises from the basement in the polls and becomes our next governor?   Just a few weeks ago, Villaraigosa was languishing at 9% in the polls, having fallen behind the no-name Republicans in the race to see who would compete against Gavin Newsom in November. Now the airwaves in the Golden State are awash in all things Antonio all the time.

What gives?  

Well, as in everything political, the answer comes down to money.  In this case, a small group of rich folks want to buy your next governor and are doing everything they can to resuscitate Villaraigosa’s dying campaign.   [Read more…]

‘Last Days in Ocean Beach’ Benefit for San Diego 350: Saturday May 12th at North Park’s Torque Moto Café

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Last week after I sent off my column about why I wrote Last Days in Ocean Beach, a novel about living on the border between dread and wonder in the Anthropocene, the news cycle was full of coincidental but eerie echoes.  A

Los Angeles Times story observed of the recent floods in Kauai, “A Hawaiian island got about 50 inches of rain in 24 hours. Scientists warn it’s a sign of the future,” while the Washington Post reported, “’Fallen off a cliff’: Scientists have never observed so little ice in the Bering Sea in spring.”

And then, flying underneath the radar while the Trump circus dominated the headlines as always, there was this story, also in the Post , “Earth’s atmosphere just crossed another troubling threshold”   [Read more…]

Last Days in Ocean Beach: Living on the Border Between Dread and Wonder

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Last Days in Ocean Beach is an effort to capture the mood of deep unease and uncertainty that permeates our era and informs the thinking of many writers, artists, and intellectuals, even if they are not quite saying it out loud.  It was written before the election of Donald Trump, but it is clear that his election only underlines the chasm between the cartoon reality driving much of our social, cultural, and political discourse and the unrelentingly grim truth that we are killing the world whether many of us want to admit it or not.  

As Bill McKibben put it, “physics doesn’t care about political realities,” like who won the election.  There may be a hegemonic political reality that refuses to recognize where we are, but the reality of physics and scientifically documented mass extinction proceed nonetheless.  Someday soon, we will be unable to deny it. At present, however, many of us, particularly in a place like San Diego where, as the banal tourist slogan puts it, “Happy Happens,” are satisfied to keep having a beach party at the end of the world.  Thus, the strange disconnect between the perpetual marketing of our local “paradise” and the looming threats that may eventually destroy it could not be greater than they are here in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Last Days in Ocean Beach: Reckoning with the Anthropocene

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By Jennifer Cost

I have spent a lot of time in the past thirty years kayaking, hiking, and backpacking in the western United States–in Alaska, the Sierra Nevada, the Lost Coast, the Wind River Range, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Beartooth/Absarokas, the Grand Canyon, the Anza Borrego Desert, and the San Juan part of the Colorado Rockies.

On every backpacking trip for the past twenty years, I have walked through or around larger and larger areas of charred forest, and from most mountaintop views, rust brown swaths of dead conifers cut through the healthier dark green forest of the surrounding mountains.

In the backcountry, I routinely scan the sky for foreboding plumes of smoke, and once a year find myself walking through a smoky haze, wondering if this hike would be my last.  I have always walked out. But for millions more of the world’s species, there is no escape from fire, drought, dying oceans, and epic deluges.   [Read more…]

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