Category: Under the Perfect Sun

Politics, Poetry, Fiction, and Music and More in the Heart of the City

The 6th annual San Diego City College International Book Fair is this week (October 3^rd to the 8^th), and it offers an impressive line-up of writers, poets, and musicians including:

• Marjorie Cohn, editor of The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse;
• Cris Mazza, author of Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls;
• Zohreh Ghahremani, author of Sky of Red Poppies;
• lê thi diem thúy, author of The Gangster We Are All Looking For;

Paul Krugman recently wrote that:

“lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base . . . And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the ‘common hazards of life’ through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Of course this has been true for quite some time now, …

Editor: This was originally published on Sept 19, 2011, so the intro is somewhat dated. But I’ve picked this tomb up in the last few days to reread it – and it is definitely worth a second look.

Last week on KUSI’s Republican campaign infomercial, Carl DeMaio, Jerry Sanders, Kevin Faulconer, and all the usual suspects lined up to pound home the point that the pension scandal is the root of all things evil in San Diego.

If only we can bust city employees’ pensions, the future will be golden for San Diego’s taxpayers. It is time, they said, as the KUSI lapdogs nodded along, to save the city from the horrors brought them by the public employee unions. Other than the show trial-like atmosphere, this exercise in right-wing demagoguery was nothing new. And it explains little. Back in 2005 in the afterward to the paperback edition of Under the Perfect Sun, I addressed the emerging scandal by putting it in its larger context…

Yesterday we marked the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11 when most Americans watched in horror at the devastation of the terrorist attacks in New York City and elsewhere but were then moved by the heroism of the first responders to the disaster—most of whom were firefighters and cops who risked their lives to help their fellow citizens. They were America’s working class heroes, the pride of the nation.

This led to a wave of appreciation of public servants like them across the country as not just New York’s finest, but public safety workers were honored in the press, at ballgames, and during community events. Here in San Diego, …

We greet this Labor Day with anxiety about the possibility of a double-dip recession, persistently high unemployment that never significantly ebbed after the depths of the 2008 downturn, and austerity budgets at the local, state, and federal levels. While many observers have drawn parallels to the Great Depression, one key difference stands out for American workers: Labor is not on the march.

In a perverse irony, the current economic crisis has been cruel to Labor. Rather than rallying workers to the union cause even though Labor did much to elect him, the Obama Administration has shown tepid support for unions after talking big about the value of Labor in his campaign. Hence the Obama era has been a kind of anti-New Deal period with the administration spending more time attacking teachers’ unions than helping American workers of any stripe in any significant way.

Information Overload and the “Post Idea Age”

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler makes the case that we are living in a “post-idea” age where mundane observations have taken the place of big ideas. We have left behind the Einsteins for entrepreneurs. As he puts it:

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

On Saturday, August 27^th, the Coalition for a Better San Diego is holding an Economic Summit at Horace Mann Middle School from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM.

The goal of this summit is to bring together a wide array of people from labor and the community to share their ideas about what would make San Diego a better place. The themes of this gathering are jobs, prosperity, quality of life, equality, and fairness. Issues set to be discussed will range from job creation, education, and public services to housing, racial equality, and fair taxation—just to name a few.

“Out there in San Diego
Where the Western Breakers Beat
They’re Jailing Men and Women
For Speaking on the Street”

2012 will mark the 100 year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight when workers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) along with allies from the rest of labor and the community at large defied a city ordinance designed to prevent them from standing on a soapbox at the corner of 5^th and E in downtown San Diego and speaking. As I explain in Under the Perfect Sun, street speaking was part of a larger strategy for the IWW:

[W]hen the IWW came to San Diego, they sought to turn “bums” into men by transforming the attitude of the town’s small disposable labor force from individual shame and defeatism to solidarity and class anger. Their method was street speaking…

Every 4^th of July, I make sure to fit in a few minutes to put on one of my favorite Dave Alvin songs, “4^th of July” (which is better known as an X song). It’s a bittersweet tale of two lovers trying to make their way through life. After pulling a holiday shift, a man comes home from work to find his lover crying in the dark and he ponders their fate:

On the lost side of town
In a dark apartment
We gave up trying so long ago.
On the steps I smoke a
Cigarette alone.
The Mexican kids are shooting
Fireworks below.
Hey, baby—it’s the fourth of July.
Whatever happened
I apologize
So dry your tears
And baby—walk outside
It’s the 4^th of July

As the Union-Tribune noted in its article on San Diego Noir: “When it comes to the literary genre known as noir—that dark terrain of desire and desperation, of passion and paranoia—certain cities come immediately to mind. Los Angeles. San Francisco. New York. Not San Diego.” Well, not exactly.

While San Diego does not have as rich a literary and/or filmic history as Los Angeles, it too has some noir in its past. In the 1890s, Thomas and Anna Fitch saw Coronado as a suitable location for testing a doomsday weapon in Better Days: Or, the Millionaire of To-morrow. Then famously, in 1932, Edmund Wilson labeled San Diego the “The Jumping-Off Place” as a result of its nation-leading suicide rate….

A Book Review

In Mike Davis’s seminal discussion of noir in City of Quartz he defines the genre as “a fantastic convergence of American ‘tough-guy’ realism, Weimar expressionism, and existentialized Marxism—all focused on unmasking a ‘bright, guilty place.’” Born in the minds of the “Depression crazed middle classes” of southern California, the “nightmare anti-myth of noir” trafficked in alienation and a distrust of the morality of capitalism.

As the mayor’s race continues to unfold, the election season rite of local Republicans trying to morph themselves into “moderates” palatable to the ever-malleable Democratic electorate in San Diego continues. The most recent example of this is Nathan Fletcher’s announcement that he is coming back from Sacramento to save San Diego.

As reported in the Union Tribune and KPBS Fletcher has a vision:

“When I look at the city I see an amazing potential for the future of San Diego over the next decade and I believe I represent a new generation of leadership that can get us there . . . “