This blog is devoted to remembrances and essays on general topics, including literature and writing. It has evolved over time, and some older posts on this site might reflect a different perspective and purpose.

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Friday, April 27, 2012

Politicians Without a Prayer


                  There’s an election coming up in June for county supervisor in my district, and one of the candidates has been decorating the area with signs bearing the slogan “He Really Needs a Day Job.”
                  I’d give that a ten for creativity and a zero for effectiveness. But then I’m guessing this guy doesn’t really expect to win anyway.
                  It called to mind, though, fond memories of other candidates for local office who valiantly put themselves out before the voting public when they had no prayer of winning. Some of them made a point or two and managed to influence the political discussion, while others were simply in over their head. All of them made local politics more interesting.
                  There was one retired fellow, for instance, who ran for several local offices back in the 1980s. His idea of a campaign was to put up a sign in front of his house and hope for the best. Come election night, he always invited the press to a victory party with cigars and champagne. There was never any victory, and no one showed up for the party.
                  In the early 80s, when politics were getting more interesting in Watsonville, where I worked for the newspaper, a woman ran for the City Council on a program of promoting a sense of community. The specifics were to be filled in later, but there was no mistaking the commitment to community, a word that appeared at least once in every sentence she spoke.
                  I was city editor at the time, and the paper had just made the conversion from typewriters to computers. Our city hall reporter, Ken McLaughlin, used the new technology to turn in a campaign profile on her that consisted solely of the word “community,” repeated a thousand times. He turned in the real story after I yelled at him, but it wasn’t as interesting. Community lady finished last at the polls.
                  Meeting with more electoral success was the hippie candidate for sheriff back in 1974. The University of California campus here was less than ten years old at the time, but already its political influence was being felt, and the county was in the midst of transitioning from a bastion of conservative Republicanism to the exemplar of liberalism it is today.
                  Joe was a long-haired, bearded fellow with no law enforcement experience at all. The race for sheriff was expected to be a tough fight between the incumbent and one of his top deputies, but Joe made it a lot more interesting. He ran on a platform of drastically cutting back enforcement of the drug laws, strictly enforcing environmental and anti-pollution laws, and aggressively investigating crimes of violence against women.
                  No one took Joe seriously at first, but he stood enough apart that his candidacy gathered momentum. He finished third, with about 20 percent of the vote, and the sheriff and his deputy began courting his support for the runoff election. I even voted for Joe, figuring I could choose between the other two later.
                  Two weeks after his impressive showing in the June primary, Joe’s political career came to an abrupt end. Making the law-enforcement rounds as the Saturday reporter, I showed up at the sheriff’s office to find the deputies all abuzz. In the wee hours of that morning they had arrested Joe as he purposefully walked down a state highway, naked as the day he was born. Pharmaceuticals were believed to have triggered the stroll, but having no pockets to put them in, Joe never faced a possession charge.
                  At least no intern was involved, and I never heard what his next day job was.
                 

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Going Crazy Over Gas Prices


            One of my early assignments as a young reporter was the gasoline beat. A year after I went to work for the newspaper, prices began rising because of the Arab oil embargo, and in early 1974 there were a few weeks when supplies were so scarce there were block-long lines at gas stations. There was widespread fear that  prices could go up to a dollar a gallon. Those were the days.
            It’s been more than 30 years since we had to wait in line to buy gas, and today’s higher prices, adjusted for inflation, are not much more than we paid 40 years ago. But gasoline prices still exert a powerful, and irrational hold on the American imagination.
            To put it another way, people are crazy when it comes to matters that affect their ability to drive. They take the worst traffic experience they’ve ever had on a stretch of road and turn it into the commonplace. They cancel a two thousand dollar driving vacation because the increase in gas prices would have driven up the cost by thirty dollars. They are susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories about how gas would be a dollar a gallon if the oil companies weren’t manipulating the prices.
            And I am being charitable here. If you look at the things people believe about traffic and gas prices, you would be hard pressed to argue that man is a rational animal.
            The delusionary behavior begins with things that are matters of demonstrable fact. I actually keep records of such things and can attest that the price of gas at the station closest to my home on March 30 was slightly less than 8 percent above a year ago. Yet I’ve seen several quotes from news stories and several letters to the editor claiming that prices have doubled in the last year. How does 8 percent go to 100 percent in someone’s mind? I don’t get it.
            Another thing I’ve learned is that the price of gas is volatile. What goes up comes down, and vice versa, always settling, in the end, somewhere around the inflation-adjusted mean. Since March 30 the price of gas at that local station has dropped 13 cents a gallon and is now lower than a year ago.
            Let’s not forget what happened in 2008. That summer the price of gas topped $4.60 a gallon where we live, the highest price yet. By December of that same year, following the economic collapse, the price briefly dipped under two dollars a gallon before reverting to a more normal three dollars-plus the following spring and summer. The oil-company-conspiracy theorists were noticeably quiet during that period.
            Politicians are quick to use rising gas prices against incumbents, particularly the sitting president. It’s a mug’s game for two reasons. The first is that presidents and their policies have next to nothing to do with gas prices, though no one should expect reality to enter into political argument. More importantly, as 2008 taught anyone who was paying attention, gas prices are so fluid that basing a campaign on them is a high-risk proposition. What looks like a good line of attack in March could look beyond stupid in October.
            Last month Linda and I took a short driving vacation for our wedding anniversary, about 700 miles round-trip. The higher cost of gas, compared to last year, drove up the expense by less than the cost of two lattes at the Headlands Coffee House in Fort Bragg on a rainy Thursday afternoon. And you know what: I wasted about as much time worrying about the price of gas as I did about the price of a latte.
           

Friday, April 20, 2012

A Club That Took Me As a Member


            Twenty three years ago this week I joined the Rotary Club of Watsonville. It wasn’t something I wanted to do; it was something I had to do. When I was interviewing to be editor of the newspaper, one of the questions was whether I would join. The owners felt it was an important part of community outreach, and because I wanted the job, I said yes.
            Even after I got the job, I put off joining for several months before finally taking a deep breath and going for it. Once in, I found to my surprise that it wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, I kind of liked it.
            Watsonville had more than a hundred members at the time, many of them guys from the Greatest Generation, who joined in the Fifties and Sixties. The Supreme Court had ruled, just two years earlier, that Rotary had to admit women, and in 1989 the distaff side was represented solely by Charlene Shaffer, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce. Now the female membership is about a third of the total.
            Part of what drew me in to the club was the fellowship and good cheer. Ours has always been a club that laughs a lot, and going to a meeting almost always makes me feel better. In the early years, I got a lot from the older men in the club, nearly all of whom seemed to have aged gracefully and become comfortable in their own skin. Now I’m getting close to the age they were then and feeling as if I’m coming up short.
            Rotarians share the common trait of being successful professionals. The age range in the club goes from about 30 to 90, and over the years the overall membership, though still primarily Anglo, has become considerably more diverse. In 1989, you could make a joke about being the token Democrat in the club, but now we have a respectable number of those as well.
            Rotary is about using fellowship as an avenue for giving service. Our club made a decision around the turn of the century to focus its work on youth, given that Watsonville has a relatively young population. Among the things I’ve volunteered to do through the club are being a “reading buddy” to a student at the middle school the club adopted; coordinating a regional high school speech contest; presenting scholarships at awards ceremonies; and having students shadow me through the day to get a sense of my profession.
            The Rotary experience, if you throw yourself into it, eventually takes you beyond your own community. It’s one of the largest international organizations in the world and has taken a leading role in the amelioration of polio and in the development of water projects in Third World countries. When I became club president, I got to travel to the international convention, held that year in Brisbane, Australia. I’ve been to meetings in England, Bermuda, New York City, the Florida Keys, and many other places.
            When I underwent the new-member briefing, I was told that I should attend our club meeting each week, or, if I couldn’t, do a makeup by visiting another club or participating in a Rotary activity. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I turned out to be wrong. I now have perfect attendance since I joined, and in my year as club president, I believe I racked up 67 unused makeups. Because of my age and years of service, I am now exempt from attending meetings, but will still be going nearly every week. I think I belong.
           

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Prisoner of Expectations


            There is a meeting I attend somewhat regularly that’s held in one of the adjunct rooms of a local church. On opposing walls of that room are two paintings I find myself studying when my attention wanders from the discussion at hand.
            Both paintings are depictions of a rocky, wave-battered coastline, with high cliffs rising dramatically above the water. They look as if they could be Big Sur, which is not far from here, but the scenes could be based on plenty of locations in Northern California, and probably the rest of the world, for that matter. I’m guessing they were donated by a church member who was learning to paint on the weekends, because for all the drama of the competently depicted subject matter, they lack a sense of vision or style.
            That’s not something that could be said of the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, who died recently at the age of 54. Kinkade marketed himself (and he was a great marketer) as “The Painter of Light,” and there was no mistaking his romantic, sentimental paintings for anyone else’s. At the time of his death it was estimated that one in twenty American homes had one of his paintings (or more likely, a print of one of his paintings) on the wall.
            Kinkade was not a great artist in the “serious” sense of the word, and as his sales soared, so did the piling-on by art critics. Following his death, news stories quoted family members as saying he had taken to heavy drinking and was depressed by the critical put-downs and felt misunderstood. My take on it was that he was understood perfectly well, but suffered from the inherent biases of the art world.
            If he had been a sports cartoonist or a commercial painter who did magazine covers and advertisements, he most likely would not have been held to the same standard as a “serious” painter. But because his work was meant to hang on walls and was sold through galleries (some of which he owned), Kinkade was relentlessly judged against artists he couldn’t compete with. If that’s not a recipe for misery, I don’t know what is.
            When Linda and I were in Paris a decade ago, we made the obligatory trip to the Louvre. Walking down a corridor toward the Mona Lisa, we passed painting after painting. Most of them we’d never heard of, and even some of the artists were unfamiliar, but just about every one was so powerful it took your breath away. You didn’t have to be an art history major to grasp that this was the real deal.
            No Kinkade painting is likely to have that kind of effect, but much of his work, pictures of cottages by streams, with smoke curling out of the chimney, captures an idealized sense of bucolic solitude. It’s cozy, not powerful.
            Years ago, when I was president of my Rotary Club, our pianist, Richard Stauff, presented me with an autographed print of Kinkade’s “The Rotary Club Meeting.” It shows various men (they were all men, then) arriving at a restaurant in a white clapboard house, just after a rain had fallen. The cars parked in front are of 1930s vintage, and one, incongruously, has an American flag decal on the rear window. The people, never Kinkade’s forte, aren’t quite right, but the mood is captured, and that took a certain level of talent. It speaks to me at a certain level of my own experience, and I’m willing to respect that accomplishment for what it is — no more, no less.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Going Crazy Over Gas Prices


            One of my early assignments as a young reporter was the gasoline beat. A year after I went to work for the newspaper, prices began rising dramatically owing to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and in early 1974 there were a few weeks when supplies became so scarce people were lining up to fill their tanks. There was widespread fear that gas prices could go up to a dollar a gallon. Those were the days.
            It’s been more than 30 years since we had to wait in line to buy gas, and today’s higher prices, adjusted for inflation, are not much more than we paid 40 years ago. But gasoline prices still exert a powerful, and utterly irrational hold on the American imagination.
            To put it another way, people are crazy when it comes to matters that affect their ability to drive. They take the worst traffic experience they’ve ever had on a stretch of road and turn it, in their minds, into the commonplace. They cancel a two thousand dollar driving vacation because the increase in gas prices would have driven up the cost by thirty dollars. They are susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories about how gas would be a dollar a gallon if the oil companies weren’t manipulating the prices.
            And I am being charitable here. If you look at the things people believe about traffic and gas prices, you would be hard pressed to argue that man is a rational animal.
            The delusionary behavior begins with things that are matters of demonstrable fact. I actually keep records of such things and can vouch for the fact that the price of gas at the station closest to my home on March 30 was slightly less than 8 percent higher than a year ago. Yet I’ve seen several quotes from news stories and several letters to the editor claiming that prices have doubled in the last year. How does 8 percent go to 100 percent in someone’s mind? I don’t get it.
            Another thing I’ve learned over the years is that the price of gas is volatile. What goes up comes down, and vice versa, always settling, in the end, somewhere around the inflation-adjusted mean.
            A particularly dramatic instance occurred in 2008. That summer the price of gas reached the highest point yet, topping $4.60 a gallon where we live. By December of that same year, thanks to the economic collapse, the price briefly dipped under two dollars a gallon before reverting to a more normal three dollars-plus the following spring and summer. The oil-company-conspiracy theorists were noticeably quiet during that period.
            Politicians are quick to use rising gas prices against incumbents, particularly the sitting president. It’s a mug’s game for two reasons. The first is that presidents and their policies have next to nothing to do with gas prices, though no one should expect reality to enter into political argument. More importantly, as 2008 taught anyone who was paying attention, gas prices are so fluid that basing a campaign on them is a high-risk proposition. What looks like a good line of attack in March could look beyond stupid in October.
            Last month Linda and I took a short drive vacation for our wedding anniversary, about 700 miles round-trip. The higher cost of gas, compared to last year, drove up the expense by less than the cost of two lattes at the Headlands Coffee House in Fort Bragg on a rainy Thursday afternoon. And you know what: I wasted about as much time worrying about the price of gas as I did about the price of a latte.
           

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Flip-Flopping in an Ethical Way


            My friend John Bakalian and I were working together on a land-use project a number of years ago, and shortly after it was filed with the city, one of the council members publicly declared an inability to support our project as submitted. John was unconcerned.
            “All they said,” he noted, “was that they couldn’t support the plan as submitted. If they decide later that they want to, all we have to do is change the color of the cover or add a couple of commas. Then they can say it’s a different plan and they support it now.”
            It was a point well taken, and one worth considering in evaluating statements made by any politician. In the popular imagination, flip-flopping (defined as a sudden and complete change in position) is one of the worst political sins — a sign of weakness and lack of character. In actual practice, it’s essential to good politics. The only politicians who never flip-flop are ideologues and those who don’t care for reality and popular opinion. They’re rarely good politicians.
            Ronald Reagan was a master flipper. As governor of California, he once announced that his feet were set in concrete against withholding of state income taxes. He felt people should have to pay all at once so they would see what government cost and feel the pain. When it became obvious that withholding was both more efficient and more popular, he caved and signed the law.
            Reagan could get away with that because he was consistent and forceful in his principles, and withholding was not a defining issue for him. The willingness to surrender and move on (shown again, as president, when he removed U.S. Marines from Lebanon after a deadly attack, despite firm promises they would stay) made him a better and more effective politician. The good ones know how to cut their losses.
            President Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act has offered an excellent case study in good and bad flip-flopping. As a candidate, Obama opposed the idea of a national health insurance program based on individual mandates. As president, he decided that individual mandates had backing in both parties and offered the best chance of attracting wide support for the legislation, so he went with them.
            What he didn’t reckon with was that Republicans, who had been among the biggest supporters of such mandates, would themselves flip-flop on the issue and do it with an utter lack of shame. Republican lawmakers and candidates suddenly went from supporting mandates to declaring them unconstitutional and intrusive. Mitt Romney, who got individual mandates approved at a state level when governor of Massachusetts, has done a lot of squirming trying to claim, wrongly, that his mandate was different from Obama’s.
            (A question for Republicans: If individual mandates are so offensive and coercive, how come no one has challenged them for the three decades or so that they have been in place for buying auto insurance so that all drivers are covered?)
            Obama’s shift in position was the good kind because it reflected reality, willingness to compromise, and a commitment to a larger principle. Universal health care coverage was the goal, and if individual mandates were an imperfect means to the end, they were worth accepting, grudgingly, to reach the goal.
            There’s nothing redeeming in the Republican change in position. Mandates were their policy all along, and Obama’s stealing the idea doesn’t make it any better or worse. Their shock at the coercive element is as insincere as Captain Renault’s, when he discovered gambling, gambling! at Rick’s CafĂ© in Casablanca. Sheer partisan pique.
           
           

Friday, April 6, 2012

The Missing Voices of Reason


            At the time the Constitution was written in 1787, slavery (a word that never appears in that document, by the way) was pervasive not only in our new nation but in many of the other colonies in the Western Hemisphere. It was present not only in the southern states, but to a lesser degree in most of the northern ones. Even so, the more astute of our Founders — Adams, Franklin and Jefferson among them — understood that it was an institution that eventually had to go.
            When Lincoln was elected president, nearly three quarters of a century later, the United States was an outlier. Slavery, at least as an openly practiced institution, was gone just about everywhere else and was confined to America’s southern states. It had clearly been relegated to the wrong side of history, but its practitioners were, with near-unanimity, oblivious to the trend.
            Hiding behind every form of self-deception imaginable, southerners resisted all appeals to reason and aggressively attempted to expand what had generally come to be seen as a morally bankrupt enterprise. Their intransigence led to the bloodiest war in American history, and new scholarship indicates it may have been worse than previously believed, killing three quarters of a million Americans.
            These thoughts were called to mind by a reading, over the past weekend, of Tony Horwitz’ recent book, Midnight Rising, an account of John Brown and his raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia. Horwitz says, rightly I believe, that Harpers Ferry was the real beginning of the Civil War, but it leaves unanswered the question of whether the Civil War, with all its physical, political and emotional carnage, had to happen.
            John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was an act of lunacy by a principled fanatic. Brown thought he could take over the U.S. arsenal, arm the slaves, and launch a large-scale rebellion. Instead he took his small band of followers into a confined area where they were quickly surrounded, then killed or subdued in a day and a half by a force of fewer than a hundred men.
            Brown was a loner of inflexible principle with no serious support outside his group. (A half-dozen affluent northerners gave him money, but later claimed, for the most part, that they didn’t know what he was up to). His penetration of the South never got any farther than a few hundred yards into one of its northernmost areas. Yet southerners, with near unanimity, reacted more vehemently than most Americans did after 9/11, believing that their very society was under fundamental attack.
            Lincoln’s nomination as the Republican candidate cemented their desire to leave the Union if he was elected, even though he repeatedly made clear that he would not touch slavery where it currently existed but would only oppose its expansion into new territories. By the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had moved to the belief that slavery had to go, but when he took office, Southerners could have dealt with him. Had they done so, it is possible that their slaves would still have been in chains into the Twentieth Century.
            The big question raised by all this was where were the voices of reason in the South, and I’ve never seen a good answer. Instead of calming down and trying to work things out, the South allowed its fear for its Way of Life to become a lockstep way of thinking and lead the country into its worst catastrophe. In the end, Southerners did what no abolitionist could have accomplished nearly so soon. They forced their losing issue into becoming a losing battle.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Making Room for the Next Person


            There was a story in the paper the other day that Warren Buffett’s company held its annual meeting and decided against the process of starting on a succession plan. Warren’s only 81, so I guess he figures he has plenty of time.
            It did get me thinking about two things: My cousin Bill, and my early days at the newspaper. Bill, who was about 25 years older than me, worked for the Orange County sheriff’s department for a quarter century and at the end was head of jail operations. But that was never his goal in life. His goal was to spend more time retired than he spent working.
            Having a government job (in law enforcement, no less) he was able to do that. In all his time at the sheriff’s office, he never took a day of sick leave. Not one. The day he became eligible he cashed in 25 years of unused sick leave, filed for retirement and never looked back. He and his wife, Donna, did a lot of traveling in their RV and enjoyed it very much. He died in his sleep just short of his 76th birthday, shortly after achieving his goal.
            When I started work at the newspaper, I figured I’d be there a couple of years and move on. But I liked the town, liked the paper and its culture, and was in love with a local woman who wanted to stay in the area. All that made staying a consideration — but only if there was reasonable prospect of advancement.
            At the time, most companies had mandatory retirement at the age of 65, so I did the math. The editor, Frank F. Orr, was born in 1914 and would have to leave in 1979. Ward Bushee, the managing editor and Frank’s likely successor, was born in February 1923 and would have to leave in early 1988, just before my 38th birthday. That would make me the right age to be editor, and I set about to make myself worthy of the hire.
            Congress repealed mandatory retirement in 1978, and Frank Orr decided to stay on. He made it five more years before dying with his boots on at the age of 70, a casualty of years of smoking Pall Malls (unfiltered!). With his passing, Ward took over for four years, staying one longer than planned to straighten out a few problems he didn’t want to leave to his successor, who turned out to be me.
            Ward was just shy of 66 when he left, and I’m grateful he gave me the chance. He wasn’t yet 70 when I left the paper, owing to changes in the corporate culture, so if he’d worked that long, my time would have passed.
            One of the ominous trends I see in the workplace is the insidious damage to human and corporate capital that is going to be caused by more people working longer — not because they want to, but because they have to. It’s one thing to keep going forever when you’re the boss and can call the shots, but even in those cases people often (more often than they, themselves, realize) stop learning and get stale.
            But how about the employee in the early 60s, who reached his or her top level 15-20 years ago, and has to keep working eight to ten more years? Back in the day, they would have been out with a watch and a cake at 65; now, I fear, more will find themselves fired late in life, needing work, and being unable to get it. Working longer may make Social Security more sustainable, but at what cost in human misery?