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Summer Chronicles #4: Crossing Coronado Ferry

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One of the great pleasures of San Diego in the summer is joining the gaggle of tourists and bike riders for the short trip across the bay from downtown to Coronado.  

Like Allen Ginsberg who, in his poem “A Supermarket in California,” touches on Walt Whitman’s book and feels absurd–but wanders through the aisles dreaming nonetheless—I stand in line with young couples holding hands and whole families grinning and gabbing in the midday sun and muse about that which connects us all without our knowing it.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles # 3: The Utopia of the Next Moment

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What would we do without wishful thinking?  

Not much apparently.  According to some of the most recent science on the way our brains work, the Zen Buddhists and psychoanalysts are up against it.  No matter how much we try to focus on the present, we’ll be pulled away by the Utopia of the next moment.  

So, it appears that we are, depending on how one looks at it all, artists painting the canvass of our imagined future.  Or perhaps, taking a darker view, we are collectively subject to the worst sorts of self-delusion, constantly lying to ourselves about our past and present to create a more attractive future.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles #2: The Wilderness of Silence

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Our noise is everywhere.  Just try to sit for a moment in your house and experience a moment without some kind of artificial noise, whether it be passing traffic, the sound of your neighbor’s television or stereo or the now nearly ever-present buzzing of somebody’s ear buds.  

But let’s say you want to head out beyond the sprawling reach of the homogenous exurban landscape, past even the glow of the Walmart on the edge of Small Town, Anywhere to what is left of the great American wilderness.  

Any peace there?

Apparently not, according to the most recent research on our never-ending din.   [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles #1: When Things Fall Apart

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Things fall apart.  The center did not hold.  At least you could be forgiven for paraphrasing Yeats’s “The Second Coming” as we slide into the heart of summer at a moment when the best really do seem to lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.  

Of course, people have been feeling like it’s the end of the world since the beginning of written human history–there are some nice end of times poems penned by Romans presaging the fall of the Empire and Anglo-Saxon warriors wandering the stark icy waters of their own perceived last days.  

But the Moderns’ melancholic musings seem particularly resonant of late.  One of my favorite apocalyptic howls comes on the first page of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer where the narrator starts by telling the reader, “We are all alone here and we are dead.”   [Read more…]

Are We Witnessing the End of Public Education as We Know It? — Part Two

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By Kelly Mayhew

This is how the privatization story goes: demonize public schools and their teachers, hold charter schools up as excellent alternatives, create corporate charters and charter chains that use management companies to do the daily operations and siphon public tax money for schools into private businesses, employ non-union teachers who you can hire and fire at will. That’s how it works in a nutshell.

Organizations such as the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) in concert with rich philanthropists fuel the flames of parents’ fears about public schools and use the rhetoric of “competition” to justify their actions—that they “help” public schools improve by competing with them.

They also fund efforts to stack school boards with charter school proponents to grease the wheels for more to open.
  [Read more…]

Are We Witnessing the End of Public Education as We Know It? — Part One

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By Jim Miller / Kelly Mayhew

These are dire times for public education. With Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education leading the charge for big budget cuts, charter schools, and a radical privatization agenda, the possibility that free quality public education for all in America could soon be a thing of the past is real.

One would think that such clear and present danger to a cornerstone of our democracy coming from the right would unite Democrats behind the mantle of defending public education.

Sadly, however, that is not the case as even now, in the face of this assault, we see Democrats lining up with the billionaire-funded charter school lobby to wage holy war on teachers’ unions in name of making it easier to get rid of “bad teachers” to save the children.   [Read more…]

The Top 5 Stories Getting Buried by the Trump Carnival

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Trump is a train-wreck, I know.

But while the pathetic carnival that is the White House continues to distract and horrify Americans, some hugely important news is getting lost in the din.

Here are a few of the stories that should be getting equal time but have been drowned out by the drama of the Disaster in Chief.   [Read more…]

Fear and Loathing in America

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A couple of weeks ago I saw Dead and Company open their tour in Las Vegas. The trip was filled with a bit of personal nostalgia for the many other times I came see the Grateful Dead play two or three show runs there before Jerry Garcia died. Of course, all of those trips, taken with friends steeped in the larger history of the band, were full of easy, ironic references to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where he tells the tale of his own savage journey into the Heart of the American Dream.

Back then, when my friends and I stayed in Circus Circus with 6 of us packed into the cheapest room we could find, sleeping on the floor or in the bathtub, someone would always remember the passage where Thompson writes:

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos … but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego.   [Read more…]

Why the San Diego Free Press Matters Now More Than Ever

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This week marks the fifth anniversary of the San Diego Free Press and that’s something to celebrate. I first started writing for the OB Rag and then subsequently became part of the birth of the SD Free Press because I loved the way that those outlets both paid homage to the legacy of San Diego’s countercultural press and continued its legacy into the digital age.

As part a key part of the local New Left and counterculture in the sixties and early seventies, Doug Porter, Frank Gormlie, and others offered a space for radical voices and cultural threads that were not acceptable in the mainstream, commercial media of the time.

In fact, as I document in Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, “while the San Diego Left and counterculture were both quite small compared to their northern counterparts in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, they inspired the wrath of local elites, the police, and right-wing fanatics with alarming regularity. From 1969 to 1972, at least 35 separate incidents of terrorism were committed against the two alternative papers and/or local radicals or countercultural institutions.”   [Read more…]

What’s the Matter with San Diego Labor (Part 3): A Divided Movement Hurts Us All

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South Bay Democrats Show the Way with Resolution in Support of a United Labor Movement

Last week, the first meeting of the newly reorganized San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council was a refreshingly upbeat gathering as the local movement recommitted itself to weathering the storm and reinventing the Labor Council as a far more democratic and activist organization that will do everything it can to engage union members and organize the unorganized.  

One of the most encouraging moments of the night came when Doug Moore of the United Domestic Workers spoke about the pressing need to rebuild real, less transactional relationships with our allies in the community.  This is a very good thing.  

So the news out of the Labor Council is that rank and file democracy is on its way back. The organization that still represents 90,000 of the 120,000 union workers in our region has righted the ship despite the failure of the former top leadership and the ill-advised, deeply destructive behavior of a handful of leaders who acted in a unilateral fashion as they unethically planned to form a rival organization even as they were being paid out of the dues money of all union workers in the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council.     [Read more…]

What’s the Matter with San Diego Labor (Part 2): Rank and Who?

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Last week I outlined why the ill-conceived Mickey Kasparian-driven split in San Diego labor was such a bad idea, citing the recent history of the failed attempt of several national unions to form a break-away organization outside of the AFL-CIO called Change to Win (CTW) that eventually fell apart under its own weight accomplishing not much of note in the long run.

As I observed in that column, CTW cited a bold new organizing strategy as its justification but the split was really more about big egos in leadership and ended up dividing the labor movement while not doing anything to increase organizing or unions’ political power. In fact, the long decline of the American Labor Movement continued unabated on both sides of the split in the midst of much ado about nothing.   [Read more…]

What’s the Matter with Labor in San Diego?

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…there is no great philosophical debate over principle at stake here in San Diego. In fact, principle or coherent strategic thinking has nothing to do with the current state of affairs at all.  

By Jim Miller

In one of my first columns of the year, I made a plea that San Diego labor should not allow itself to be distracted by the trials and tribulations of Labor Council President Mickey Kasparian.   

With everything from a looming anti-labor shift on the Supreme Court and at the National Labor Relations Board, to “right to work” legislation in Congress along with a host of other perils, I argued that the Trump era simply holds too many dangers for labor to get bogged down in the petty drama surrounding one leader…   [Read more…]

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